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Searching... McMinnville Public Library | McDermott, A. | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Alice McDermott's powerful new novel wittily captures the social, political and spiritual upheavals ofthemid-twentieth century through the story of a family, and the changing world in which they live.
While Michael and Annie Keane taste the alternately intoxicating and bitter first fruits of the sexual revolution, their older, more tentative brother 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
Summary
Written with great detail, Alice McDermott chronicles the lives of John and Mary Keane, an Irish Catholic couple, spanning the years from the end of World War II to the 1970s.
Author Notes
Alice McDermott was born in Brooklyn, New York on June 27, 1953. She received a B.A. from the State University of New York at Oswego in 1975 and an M.A. from the University of New Hampshire in 1978. After graduating college, she got a job reading unsolicited manuscripts for Redbook magazine and did some freelance reading for Esquire. She has taught writing at American University, the University of New Hampshire, and the University of California at San Diego. Currently, she is the Writing Seminars Professor of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Department.
Her short stories and articles have appeared in numerous publications including Ms., Redbook, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, Seventeen, the New York Times and the Washington Post. She has written several novels including A Bigamist's Daughter, At Weddings and Wakes, Child of My Heart, After This, Someone, and The Ninth Hour. That Night was made into a film starring C. Thomas Howell and Juliette Lewis in 1992. She has won several awards including the National Book Award for fiction in 1998 for Charming Billy, a Whiting Writers Award, and the 2008 Corrington Award for Literature.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Plimpton's dark, rich voice and wry wit make her a fine choice for interpreting the stark realism of McDermott's latest character study. Set mostly in the 1960s and ?70s in Catholic Long Island, the novel tests the troubled waters stirred by the sexual revolution and the Vietnam War. The challenge of this kind of narration is that McDermott's characters never speak the depths that are inside them. While they may be thinking about how desperately they love their children or how cruelly life can lash out at the innocent, what they speak are quotidian platitudes about the weather or the passage of time. Plimpton handles such reticence with aplomb, teasing out the underlying meanings of McDermott's carefully constructed tableaux. While Plimpton deals handily with the working-class Brooklyn and Long Island accents that comprise the bulk of the cast of characters, her renderings of the British elites that Annie encounters on her year abroad sound a bit stilted. She is much more at ease with the rough-and-tumble Midlands bloke Annie eventually hooks up with. Overall, this is a strong performance of a subtle and complex piece of writing. Simultaneous release with the FSG hardcover (Reviews, June 19). Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal Review
McDermott uses a series of evolving character sketches and key historical vignettes to form a verbal scrapbook of a middle-class family's lives. John and Mary Keane and their four children reflect the changing times and social mores from within St. Gabriel's parish on Long Island, NY, before and after the Vietnam War. The author creates a realistic family dynamic in often highly descriptive and lyrical prose spun in flashbacks and jumps forward rather than via a purely chronological narrative. Although the narrative is well read and paced by reader Martha Plimpton, the early parts of the novel are not as strong as the later years, though the story deepens as the family takes shape. Recommended.-Joyce Kessel, Villa Maria Coll., Buffalo, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.