Book review: "After This"

"After This." By Alice McDermott. FSG.

I’m always wary of comparing authors to William Faulkner.

It’s not just that anyone who writes long sentences inevitably gets compared to the man, or that anyone who has some Southern Gothic plot that involves race and class must be obviously aping Faulkner, because God knows, race and class would so totally not be anything anyone would have ever written about specifically relating to the South if it weren’t for him.

I just think the comparison is overused. It’s weak, it’s lazy. It’s like comparing anyone who writes about fishing to Hemingway. There are those wannabes out there, but there are also a lot of people who write about fishing as, well, fishing, and not as some test of virility.

Thus, when I say that After This is Faulknerian, you should know that I mean it.

In fact, it’s hard not to see After This as a modern retelling of The Sound and the Fury, substituting Long Island for Yoknapatawpha County, World War II for the Civil War, and Catholicism for the almost religious faith the Compsons have in the South. Because make no mistake, if there is one thing After This is about more than any other, it is about the Catholic faith.

The novel begins as Mary Keane (though she isn’t a Keane quite yet) leaves church in the late 1940s. It ends inside a church, three decades later, as her youngest daughter is about to get married.

Catholicism is the culture of the Keane family and their neighbors, and it is what their children (or two of them, that is) rebel against, the way Quentin and Caddy Compson rebelled against the stifling expectations of a Southern gentlemen and lady.

As the world changed around the Compsons during Southern reconstruction and tore their family apart, so the world changes around the Keanes during the 1950s and ‘60s. What begins as a hopeful love story evolves into a sparse, subtle meditation on faith, family and duty. Although the changes imposed by Vatican II are never directly mentioned, they are clearly as important to the devolution of the family as Vietnam and women’s lib.

McDermott has always been a talented author, but in After This, she takes her skills to a completely new level. She moves back and forth in time, presenting a stream-of-consciousness narrative that moves from Mary Keane to her husband John to their children Jacob, Michael, Annie and Clare.

Lest those who have attempted (and failed) The Sound and the Fury avoid this book for similar reasons, I should note that while Faulknerian, McDermott’s narrative is hardly confusing and actually propels the reader forward at a swift pace. Some moments in time in the book move slowly and are retold — a day at the beach, a party, a dinner. Others pass in just a few words, or none at all — a marriage, a death.

It is not what happens, per se, in After This that matters. It is the evocation of it, the audacity of McDermott to tell such a minuscule, particular story that is yet meant to stand for an entire generation. You, the reader, are what happens “after this,” she seems to be saying.

Ignore all those reviewers who have praised this novel as a statement about the Baby Boom generation and read the book on its own terms as a story about a family, a faith and the dying culture of both.