Yet Another Fine Novel

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	• After This: A Novel Alice McDermott Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 35 reviews view larger image
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Yet Another Fine Novel

This is another great novel by Alice McDermott -- she is one of those writers for whom my central wish (and given the quality of her work, an irrational and unreasonable wish)is that we did not have to wait years for their next work.

Yet this novel appears to me to mark a major development in McDermott's work. For it is here that she has introduced a trope, the wind, as a unifying metaphor, not just to emphasize the notion of moments of major change -- the meeting of the husband and wife, the blackout, and even the son's departure to Vietnam is marked by the wind swirling in the alley by the school, but also to tie these events, and these lives together. The wind is in fact with us from the very first sentence: "Leaving the church, she felt the wind rise, felt the pinprick of pebble and grit against her stockings and her cheeks-the slivered shards of mad sunlight in her eyes." I cannot recall such an extensive use such devices in her earlier work. This device is introduced with the utmost skill, artfully unobtrusively. Thus, the reader not only gets the benefit of McDermott's unsentimental yet somehow highly sympathetic descriptions of these "average" lives, a hallmark of her work, but also her development in storytelling.

Moreover, here she uses Joyce-like language (aliteration in sentences describing snow - a tribute to Joyce's The Dead?) of the sort that I don't recall from her previous work.

A wonderful novel.

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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.

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