After This
OVER the course of her five previous novels, Alice McDermott has staked an impressive claim on a subject matter and a turf – Irish-American Catholic families congregated, for the most part, in New York City and its suburbs on Long Island. The Irish have, of course, long been a significant presence in American fiction, appearing well before the mass immigration of the late 19th century (think of "Huckleberry Finn"), and the novels, notably, of William Kennedy attest to the subject's continuing strength. McDermott adds her own luster to this seemingly familiar community through her skill at evoking small, memorable incidents and her willingness to ignore certain narrative conventions.
Most fictional family sagas contain a lot of what could be called plain reporting: answers to the questions (who? what? when? where? why?) that are the basic stuff of journalism. But in her family dramas, McDermott has largely refused to provide a helpful framework of dates, genealogies or factual bac...
Author: McDermott Alice
Genre: Modern prose
Number of pages: 293
Reading time: 4 h. 53 min.
Formats: FB2, EPUB, PDF
