After This
by Alice McDermott
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006
279 pages

When we first meet Mary in Alice McDermott’s new novel, she is 30, “just out of church (a candle lit every lunch hour, still, although the war was over)” and working as a secretary in a Manhattan office. She lives with her aging father and bachelor brother and has “no husband in sight.” Though tending toward the romantic, she fears that “(her) body (was) not meant for mortal sin or a man’s attention.”

By the end of the novel, we have followed for 30 years, into the 1970s, the lives of Mary, her Irish Catholic husband and war veteran, John Keane, and their four children.

“After This” is McDermott’s sixth novel. Her 1997 book, “Charming Billy,” won the National Book Award for fiction. A film version of her second novel, “That Night,” was released in 1992. She was born in Brooklyn, grew up on Long Island and—of local interest—received a master’s degree from the University of New Hampshire in 1978, where she also was an instructor in the English Department.

Covering the lives of a number of characters over such a long time period in a relatively short novel, “After This” consists of a collection of striking episodes, vivid snapshots, scenes described in a brilliantly concise and elegant style.

In a few sentences, she captures a person’s looks, a sense of place, the feeling and mood of the times.

The wonderful opening descriptions of Mary include her relationships with her difficult, judgmental and long-suffering coworker, Pauline—who becomes a spinster aunt and  lifelong responsibility to the family (Mary, always trying to be good, remembers: “If you love me, Jesus said, feed my lambs” and recalls a nun’s words “it’s easy to love the lovable”)—and Mary’s first encounter with her future husband at the Schrafft’s lunch counter. Then the book skips years ahead.

There is a brief scene of Mary already married and just becoming pregnant with her first child, Jacob. Then the story again jumps ahead in time to Mary with three children, Jacob, Michael and Annie, awaiting the birth of her fourth and last child, Clare.

The lives of the four children and their friends dominate the remainder of the novel, in selected incidents, with much less about the lives and personal evolution of Mary and her husband John, who were such fascinating characters at the beginning of the book.

This episodic organization allows McDermott to tell a multigenerational story concisely. It also allows her to show the impact of historical change and the waning influence of Catholicism during a significant and dramatic period in American life, which included the aftermath of World War II, the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair, and the social reaction and doubt following the Vietnam War.

Mary and John come together in an era when Americans were generally less sophisticated, when middle class women married and stayed home with their children. Couples knew each other less intimately before marriage, gender roles were more rigid and expectations were usually more moderate. Concerns were focused on the next generation; often, this was a primary route to personal satisfaction.

All of Mary and John’s children have gone to Catholic elementary and high schools. We get extended episodes from each of their lives: gentle, sensitive, “too nice,” “unlucky” Jacob doing poorly in college, enlisting in the Army, being sent to fight in Vietnam, suffering the awful consequences of that choice—and the resulting grief that dramatically affects the other members of the family; Michael away at a Catholic college in upstate New York, studying to be an elementary school teacher and exploring life (discovering girls) by hanging out at a Beatnik bar; Annie, literary and ambitious, away for a college term in England, entranced by the lifestyle of an academic couple and where she meets a boy who she decides to live with; and Clare, sweet and loved by everyone, living at home, pregnant in her last year of Catholic high school, about to marry her first and only boyfriend.

As the story moves on to the children’s lives, I missed the promise and interest of the novel’s beginning, especially being able to follow more of Mary Keane’s inner life as the events of the novel unfold. And John, beset by health problems—several times he seems about to die from a heart attack—remains a shadowy, rather undeveloped character, except for his feelings about his children. His love for them “heavy stones against his thumping heart,” he believes that “the only way to temper the outlandishness of a father’s love (is) to weigh it against the facts of your children’s imperfections.”

The influence of a strong Catholic upbringing, even on the younger generation with their doubts and loss of innocence, is one of the major themes in the novel: how old prayers and gospel can spring into the mind unbidden. Michael, lying naked in bed with a woman he has slept with for the first time, thinks “even after you’d disentangled yourself from everything else, the words (from the Rosary) stayed with you: ‘To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve, to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.’”

We see how opportunities unavailable in parents’ limited and restricted lives and their often unconscious longings play out in their children’s lives. John Keane silently observes “all of his children scented with the wider world.” 

The novel comes to no major climax or final resolution. It is an ongoing story of how the lives of those in a single family evolve in time, affected by their backgrounds, the events they experience and the influence of the changing world in which they live. McDermott has a wonderful knack for encapsulating the political in the characters’ personal lives.

The writing is superb. McDermott is a master at capturing scenes with a telling image (“There was a heavy smell of upstate winter in the air—the smell of frozen mud, low clouds, heating oil”); capturing how people look and act (“Even at fifteen, Betty believed her attractiveness came with an obligation to be good”); and capturing the mood of the times and everyday life, how “one moment nudges the other out of the way. It was something to regret. It was something to be grateful for.” But because the individuals are so briefly described, they sometimes feel like characters in a Greek myth. At times I wanted a richer story with more psychological depth in order to better understand how these unique people coped with their difficult and often angst-filled lives.

“After This” is not a cheerful book. Anxiety and problems dominate, tempered with occasional moments of beauty, radiance and grace, demonstrating McDermott’s understanding and compassion for our human condition. There are few times of pure pleasure or humor. But the themes and feelings are universal. Real lives are being described by a very talented writer.