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After This by Alice McDermott |
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FICTION_SAGAS UNITED STATES_SOCIAL LIFE AND CUSTOMS_FICTION | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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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. nbsp; While Michael and Annie Keane taste the alternately intoxicating and bitter first fruits of the sexual revolution, their older, more tentative brother, Jacob,nbsp;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. Praise forChild of My Heart: '[A] wondrous new novel . . .Child of My Heartextends [McDermott’s] artistic triumphs, and we should rejoice.' —Los Angeles Times Book Review nbsp; 'Has something classic about it . . . [Its] craftsmanship and its moral intelligence are as one . . .Immaculate.' —The New York Times Book Review nbsp; 'Richly textured, intricately woven . . . A work not only of, but about, the imagination.' —Margaret Atwood,The New York Review of Books nbsp; Praise forCharming Billy: 'For all her intricate narrative design, it is the depth of feeling in Alice McDermott's fiction—the losses tallied and the steps not taken, as finely calibrated as summer rain—that has brought her such high regard. With her prismatic truths and narrative switchbacks, she captures a world so internal that her characters themselves would hardly be able to express it; it is instead the perfect gesture—the barely noticed frown, the hand silently extended—that delivers the entirety of that hidden realm . . .Charming Billyis a remarkable and beautifully told novel, with overlays of prose and insight that are simply luminescent.' —Gail Caldwell,TheBostonSunday Globe Excerpted fromAfter Thisby Alice McDermott. Copyright ? 2006 by Alice McDermott. Published in September 2006 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. nbsp; I nbsp; 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. She paused, still on the granite steps, touched the brim of her hat and the flying hem of her skirt—felt the wind rush up her cuffs and rattle her sleeves. nbsp; And all before her, the lunch-hour crowd bent under the April sun and into the bitter April wind, jackets flapping and eyes squinting, or else skirts pressed to the backs of legs and jacket hems pressed to bottoms. And trailing them, outrunning them, skittering along the gutter and the sidewalk and the low gray steps of the church, banging into ankles and knees and one another, scraps of paper, newspapers, candy wrappers, what else?—office memos? shopping lists? The paper detritus that she had somewhere read, or had heard it said, trails armies, or was it (she had seen a photograph) the scraps of letters and wrappers and snapshots that blow across battlefields after all but the dead have fled? nbsp; She squinted against the sunlight on taxi hoods and bus windows, heard the rushing now of air and of taxis, wheezing buses, and underneath it all something banging—a loosened street sign, a trapped can, a distant hammer—rhythmic and methodical. The march of time. nbsp; And then George approaching, his hand stuck to his hat and the hat bent into the onslaught. She went down the steps just in front of him, drawn more by forward momentum than by any desire to meet up with, or to avoid, her brother’s latest best pal. nbsp; The cold wind made it difficult to breathe, as if it could snatch your next breath before you had time to swallow it, and she bent her head, too, hand to her hat, submerged in wind and beginning to imagine herself slowly losing ground with each step forward, slowly beginning to stall, and then to sail backward—a quick scramble to regain ground and then another sailing backward. In church she had prayed for contentment. She was thirty, with no husband in sight. A good job, an aging father, a bachelor brother, a few nice friends. At least, she had asked—so humbly, so earnestly, so seriously—let me be content. nbsp; And now a slapstick windstorm fit for Harold Lloyd or Buster Keaton. nbsp; It was either God’s reply or just April again, in the wind tunnel that was midtown Manhattan. The scent of it, the Easter scent of April in the city, all around her, in the cold air itself as well as on the shoulders of the crowd; the smell of sunlight and dirt, something warming at the heart of it all. nbsp; And then she felt his hand on her shoulder and he shouted, “Mary Rose,” which bound him forever to her brother and her father and her life at home since nowhere else did she tolerate the double name. His head was still lowered, his hand still on his hat—he might have been waiting for the right opportunity to doff it—and he peered around at her from under its brim as if from under the rock of another life. nbsp; And she, her hand on the back of her own hat, did the same. nbsp; “Hello, George,” she said. She could feel the crunch of city grit between her back teeth. nbsp; “Some wind,” he said. He had one eye closed against it, the other was watery. nbsp; “You’re telling me,” she said. nbsp; They walked together to the corner and as they stepped off the curb, he suddenly reached up and took her raised elbow—the one that led to the hand she held against her hat—and kept it b Witty, compassionate, and wry, this novel captures the social, political, and spiritual upheavals of the middle decades of the 20th century through the experiences of a middle-class couple, their four children, and the changing worlds in which they live. |
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