After This Book

Times change. People change.

And no matter how we rearrange the furniture around that notion, we can never step aside of the truth. That curl of our hair, the snorting laugh, the gait of our walk, the tall and the small, and the testy temperment. Shaken and stirred, we are who we are.

Alice McDermott sets her story down among the familiar bungalows of twentieth century Long Island. John and Mary Keane met and married before the leaves even had time to turn color. And four children seemed to follow quickly before roots burrowed into that earth. You left the confines of your childhood abode and lit the match under another of your own. Was it to replicate the familiar or was it to escape the mundane?

McDermott introduces us to the Keane children: Jacob, Michael, Annie, and Clare. As their stories unfolded, I almost had the feeling of a pinball effect. Social, political, and spiritual experiences bounced off of them as the ball hit repeatedly reminding us of the signposts of the times. They each seemed to bend in the direction of the social upheavals of the era: birth control, abortions, women's rights, Vietnam, and so on. Was this truly the flow of this storyline or were the characters simply molded to fit the premise?

I was drawn into the superb writing of Alice McDermott through her latest book, The Ninth Hour. I grabbed, Someone, almost immediately with great satisfaction as well. But this one seems to lack the flow and the depth of these aforementioned books. McDermott is known for her detail, but detail seemed to swallow this storyline up. Don't get me wrong. It is still an excellent read. I don't think that I'll be ranking it as high on McDermott reads. Many have rated it much higher. Perhaps it touched a special somewhere within.