After This

After This by Alice McDermott. This is the first time I've finished a book-club book before the book club meeting. I haven't finished a novel since the summer. I'm not sure I would have gotten into this one if I didn't "have" to read it for the book club, but I'm really glad I did.

Line by line, it's really perfect. Nothing is out of place, and the fine details pile up to create perfect, painterly scenes. The scope is large -- the book covers about two decades (the 50s and 60s, maybe into the 70s) and the lives of a family of six. McDermott seems absolutely trustworthy about the time period -- all those little details -- so I felt like I learned something. I loved the fluidity of point of view. Each scene was basically from one character's perspective, but McDermott went into the minds of minor characters from time to time, and occasionally we followed one of them out of a room, away from the main characters. I didn't find this distracting at all -- it just strengthened my faith in the storyteller, that she would tell us what we needed to know.

I also liked that McDermott occasionally tells us the future but doesn't give away major plot twists. So in describing one of the sons at ten years old, she mentions that someday he will go to Vietnam, but doesn't say what will happen to him there. Similarly, sometimes she doesn't tell us about major events directly but gives us the details later as the characters remember the events. For example, in one chapter the father is in bed with an injury, and the next chapter takes place weeks or months later. We guess at what happened, but don't get confirmation until later in the book. I thought it was a nice technique -- the author covers so much ground in this book, but the transitions are amazingly seamless. She doesn't force herself to follow a rigid structure -- three sections might take place one after another, and then she might skip years. Children are born and age without any authorial fuss.

I learned a lot that I can apply in my novel. In previous drafts I went back and forth in characters' heads, and then got self-conscious about it when someone said I shouldn't do it. But since I read Virginia Woolf and now this, I feel better about doing whatever the hell I want.

1/28/07