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| View Larger Image | After This: A Novel
by Alice McDermott
| | List Price: | $24.00 |  | | 4 New starting at: | $5.06 | | 11 Used starting at: | $2.42 | | | | | Sales Rank: | 849108 | | Studio: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | | | Binding: | Hardcover | | Number Of Pages: | 288 | | Publication Date: | September 05, 2006 | | Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
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EDITORIAL REVIEWS |
Product Description
Alice McDermott’s powerful novel is a vivid portrait of an American family in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Witty, compassionate, and wry, it captures the social, political, and spiritual upheavals of those decades through the experiences of a middle-class couple, their four children, and the changing worlds in which they live. While Michael and Annie Keane taste the alternately intoxicating and bitter first fruits of the sexual revolution, their older, more tentative brother, Jacob, lags behind, until he finds himself on the way to Vietnam. Meanwhile, Clare, the youngest child of their aging parents, seeks to maintain an almost saintly innocence. After This, alive with the passions and tragedies of a determining era in our history, portrays the clash of traditional, faith-bound life and modern freedom, while also capturing, with McDermott’s inimitable understanding and grace, the joy, sorrow, anger, and love that underpin, and undermine, what it is to be a family. |
CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 3.5 based on 38 reviews)
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Disappointing 
I must say this book was a disappointment. Maybe it is just the style of the author I did not care for. At times I found the plot
iteresting to keep reading. However, it was hard to follow. The author seems to jump around too much and not stick with a thought.
I have no problem with the plot being a so called "Catholic family". In fact the plot sounded like my type of book. But, the style of writing is not my cup of tea. I doubt I will seek out other books by Alice McDermott.
September 21, 2008 | |
Beautifully written, but doesn't gel 
Alice McDermott is a wonderfully evocative writer, but for me, the story didn't come together in any meaningful way. More like a series of vignettes or short stories. A little tedious, in fact.
September 05, 2008 | |
A flawless examination of the private moments of one family's life 
A collection of vignettes about the Keane family of Long Island, living in the wake of the Vietnam War. In vignette-like chapters, McDermott probes the inner lives of this family. McDermott flawlessly encapsulates an era in the private moments of one family's life.
September 04, 2008 | |
A mighty wind blows through it
I really enjoyed "Charming Billy" and looked forward to this novel, especially after all the glowing reviews in the press. But seriously, that wind started a'blowin' on page one and kept on for the next 80 pages or so. Blowing people and their lives randomly into the unknowable future. In case you didn't get the meaning of the wind, its spelled out on the back cover. The wind finally lets up and turns to rain -right when people start crying (raindrops =tear drops, get it? Ms. McDermott even explains it for you in case you missed it). Somehow what seemed like a promising novel turned into an Iowa Writers Workshop assignment.
Yes, the woman can write but I don't know what happened here. This is really a sub par effort. Maybe charting two generations of an Irish Catholic family on Long Island from the post WW II era through the turbulent 60s and 70s in 280 pages was overly ambitious. The first 100 pages I found relatively uninteresting but I persevered based on her reputation. The middle section was the best but once I realized that she was just going to finish out the novel with set pieces about each child (with their eventual future telescoped parenthetically), my interest waned and disappointment set in. As other reviewers have noted, this really isn't a novel. Its also not a bad effort. More like something from Oprahs book club that will be made into a movie for the Oxygen network. The real problem is the abundance of good writers competing for readers' diminishing free time. After This, Ms. McDermott just dropped down on my priority list.
August 09, 2008 | |
Exquisite writing
This book is a bit like a gorgeous still-life painting. Things happen, but mostly the story doesn't seem to be the important part of the story. The writing is the real joy in this book, the images, the word choice, the delicate, perfect grace that is each sentence. That's what shines for me here. It is sometimes hard to slow down enough to really enjoy this book. It requires a kind of patience and attention to detail that is not common or easy to maintain in modern life. Reading this for me has been a little bit like eating my vegetables. And I love vegetables. It's just hard sometimes to make that initial effort and choice with all the other junk around.
April 06, 2008 | |
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