After This

Alice McDermott’s masterful novel is a portrait of a working-class American family living through the tumultuous middle decades of the twentieth century. While Michael and Annie Keane taste the alternately intoxicating and bitter fruits of the sexual revolution, their older brother, Jacob, finds himself on the way to Vietnam. Clare, the youngest child, seeks to maintain an almost saintly innocence. As their parents, John and Mary, struggle to uphold the family’s framework, the four siblings are destined to experience the challenges and liberties of the 1960s. With McDermott’s inimitable understanding and grace, “After This” captures the joy, sorrow, anger and love that underpin, and undermine, what it is to be a family.