After this I want to read more Alice McDermott

The fall issue of the Paris Review has an interesting interview with Alice McDermott, a writer I'd never heard of, this despite the fact that she won the National Book Award for Charming Billy (l998), and her novel That Night (1987) was a finalist for another National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. Her At Weddings and Wakes (1992) was also a Pulitzer finalist.

My ignorance would not, perhaps, surprise McDermott. Reportedly when she won the National Book Award, she settled her class of fiction-writing students by offering a hundred dollars to anyone who could name the previous year's winner. Not one of her M.F.A. fiction students could recall the book or the author. Such, such is fame.

Among the points that I found interesting is McDermott's remark that she always has two novels in progress, "in one stage or another. It's a terrible thing to do, don't do it. It just means it takes me twice as long to get one finished." She also remarks about sentence-making: "As soon as a sentence calls attention to itself, demonstrates how clever the author is, how astute, how talented, I know something's gone wrong." This is one of my complaints about much MFA writing; the sentences seek to dazzle rather than serve the story.

Now introduced to McDermott, I found her 2006 novel After This. It follows the ups and downs of John and Mary Keane, a Catholic working-class couple, from before they are married after WWII to the 1970s. They have four children, move to Long Island, John works, Mary has children and remains friends with a woman she'd known when she worked in an office in New York. During the course of the novel, the  family visits a Long Island beach. Mary and her daughter Annie go to the New York World's Fair. Jacob, the younger son, is drafted into the Army for the Vietnam war, and more, and more. It's a family saga in less than 300 pages.

Ordinarily I don't care for family sagas, so I'm trying to decide why I think I got sucked into After This and to explain why I think it's so excellent and certainly worth your time, especially if you are interested in writing yourself.

Ordinarily, I don't care for constant shifts in point of view, but McDermott does it and it did not bother me, but it added depth and diversity to the novel ( probably her point). She could not have told the story she tells without using multiple points of view, which is another way to say that the novel as it stands feels as if this is the only possible way it could have been told.

McDermott is able to use language to describe the world and the people in it in a way I find masterly. Here's the first paragraph in the book: "Leaving the church, she felt the wind rise, felt the pinprick of pebble and grit against her stockings and her cheeks--the slivered shards of mad sunlight in her eyes She paused, still on the granite steps, touched the brim of her hat and the flying hem of her skirt—and felt the wind rush up her cuffs and rattle her sleeves."

The."pinprick of pebble and grit . . ." The "slivered shards of mad sunlight . . ." The "rush up her cuffs and rattle her sleeves." It's not showy writing, sentences that say "Look at me! Look at me!" but tells us we are reading something special. And she's able to sustain it. Here's another sample paragraph I've taken from a random page toward the back of the book:

"In the vestibule after she left, there was the lingering scent of her perfume, a whiff of mothballs from her fur, and something else—the good wool of her skirt warmed by her hour on the upholstered dining-room chair? Annie, on her way upstairs to read Faulkner, said to herself 'the odor of aging female flesh,' and found some recompense in the phrase for the long, annoying dinner."

After This was a nominee for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, which Cormac McCarthy's The Road won. It had to be a a difficult choice for the committee. Me? I would have gone with the family saga over dystopia almost any day. McDermott's novel closes on a positive—although entirely earned and justified—note. I'm embarrassed it's taken me this long to find her, and I'll now read more of her work.