After This
By Alice McDermott
Farrar, Straus & Giroux

By Tom Deignan

ALICE McDermott’s last novel, Child of my Heart, found the acclaimed Irish American writer straying from the outer-borough/ Long Island turf which won her a National Book Award (for Charming Billy) and a dedicated, if not exactly large, following.

Child of My Heart was not about the seemingly mundane yet profound struggles of the New York Catholic middle class as Charming Billy, as well as That Night and At Weddings and Wakes, were.

Child of my Heart, instead, was something of a portrait of the artist as a young girl. True, much of the novel’s action (though there wasn’t much of it) took place amidst the sand dunes and bleached sun of what seemed a humble Long Island shore town. There were also two well-meaning but confused parents.

But McDermott was hunting for bigger game, with her young female protagonist coming of age, reading books, asking tough questions and eventually falling into a potential love affair with a tortured, alcoholic painter in his 1970s.

Because she is such a gorgeous stylist (indeed her prose is almost painterly) McDermott can’t write a bad book. But Child of

My Heart was tough going at times. Either way, if McDermott had to get a book such as Child of My Heart out of her system to produce her latest, After This, then it was all for the best.

Indeed, After This finds McDermott again exploring the slice of life she knows best. But that’s not to say this is a simple novel. McDermott does not get enough credit for her ambitions. Yes, she is an unparalleled observer of the habits, habitats and mores of the 20th century New York Irish American.

But as she did in Charming Billy, McDermott sends her characters back and forth in time, planting something of a family tree, then allowing the sapling to flourish, introducing us to numerous generations.

The fact that After This features a tree which is ripped from the ground by a vaguely menacing wind which seems to howl throughout this novel, tells us a little something about how the 20th century will treat McDermotts fictional clan.

In this case, McDermott introduces us to the Keane family, forged on a windy, mid-century day in Manhattan when Mary stumbles from church into a diner, and chats briefly with a man in an overcoat.

Mary, pushing 30, has accepted that she will not marry. So she prays.

“She had prayed for if not a better life than this daily, lonely one, a better way to be content with it,” McDermott writes.

Mary does not know, of course, that she has just met her husband.

Four children and several decades follow, and over the course of the novel McDermott offers a vision of life in post-World War II America.

It must be said that there are aspects of this that are distinctly Irish American. There is, first of all, Mary’s devout Catholicism, beliefs which are more or less abandoned by her children.

Mary’s husband John, meanwhile, works for “the phone company,” a stable job which sent thousands of Irish American children from Queens, Brooklyn and Long Island to college.

But McDermott is also interested in the passing of this ethnic American world. The 1960s bring with them new freedoms but also confusing changes. More concretely, there is Vietnam, which will affect the Keanes — and America — deeply.

There are times in After This when it seems McDermott is treading a bit too closely to cliché, leaning to heavily on what could be seen as Irish American or Catholic stereotypes.

But McDermott’s strength is that she treats John, Mary — indeed, most of her characters — with the respect they deserve. Yes, at times they seem misguided, sentimental, downright naive. But are these really mortal sins?

McDermott makes us understand that these are sometimes the only things that can get us through life’s difficulties, which too often for people like the Keanes, always seem to be right around the corner.

The Keane men, in After This, are scarred by war, but it is the smaller problems of dashed hopes and frustrated dreams which make us feel for McDermott’s characters.

John, at one point, seems ashamed to go to the doctor because he feels it would only remind him of how socially superior the man of medicine is.

The Keane children, meanwhile, seem to know that they themselves are more likely to go the phone company route than the doctor’s.

Thus, McDermott is exploring deep questions about history and social class in After This. Suffice it to say the Keanes are not supposed to represent every Irish American family since the 1940s.

Nevertheless, anyone with a family will recognize something joyous as well as painful in McDermott’s excellent new novel.