Parenting In Alice Mcdermott's After It

In her 2002 novel After This, Alice McDermott creates a memorable account of an American family in the middle of the twentieth century. McDermott details the life of the Keanes, a working-class, Irish-Catholic family, as Mary and John Keane, along with their four children, navigate the shifting world they live in. With the Keanes, McDermott analyzes exactly what it means to be part of a family and the responsibilities of parenthood. Mary and John raise their children with love for them that weighs like “heavy stones against [their] thumping heart[s],” uncertain about what their children might need from them and how they may provide it (McDermott 41). In this way, After This is an examination of the difficulties of parenting, as John and Mary …show more content…
The two begin dating and eventually marry. Soon after, Mary becomes pregnant with their first child, their “baby grand” (27). The narrative skips forward and the Keanes have three children: Jacob (the eldest), Michael, and Annie, with another on the way. After missing church one day to take a family trip to the beach, a hurricane hits Long Island and the Keanes. In the aftermath of the storm, Mary goes into labor and a neighbor helps deliver their fourth child, Clare. As Clare, and the rest of the children, grow up, the family continues to live with their parish being renovated and John hurting his leg. One year, three weeks before Christmas, Jacob is drafted, causing one family friend to advise John to “shoot him in the foot…before you let him go” (136). While Jacob goes Vietnam (where he eventually is killed), Michael goes upstate to college to learn to become a teacher and spends his free time in a bar, occasionally having sex with strangers. Annie also goes away to college, in England, but she soon drops out to live with a man she met on a bus, “dealing her parents another blow” (251). The final event of the novel has Clare getting married at seventeen after becoming pregnant with her first boyfriend and her parents wondering “how much more [they] can take” …show more content…
Carroll observes that McDermott illustrates “the uncontrollable momentum of life” as the characters attempt to make decisions for their lives that are really “the result of random encounters…not conscious choices” like Mary and John’s meeting, the draft lottery that sends Jacob to his ultimate death in Vietnam, and Annie’s bus ride with a British student (Carroll). Focusing on characterization, Carroll emphasizes the “distance” McDermott creates between the reader and the character to use them as “prototypes” effected by the cultural changes that many Americans faced at the time (Carroll). However, Carroll is critical of how McDermott occasionally closes this distance with the use of “parenthetical statements” that divulge the characters’ inner voices and feelings (Carroll). Suggesting that the “two narrative levels” may expose “McDermott’s…struggle with her narrative,” Carroll remarks that characters appear “subversive” towards the narrator (Carroll). While Carroll takes a bleak view of the character’s actions, attributing John and Mary’s marriage to a desire to not be alone rather than love, she heeds that hope that shines through the end of the novel with Clare’s “quiet confidence” in her pregnancy and plan for the