Books: The Family That Drifts Together

Alice McDermott is one of those writers who take seriously the injunction to write about what you know. The intricately beset realm of Irish Americans in New York City and on Long Island is the world she grew up in. It's that same world she has offered us, newly lighted, examined and even transfigured, in five earlier novels, including Charming Billy, a National Book Award winner in 1998.

In After This (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 279 pages), she is settled in once more among her postwar Catholics, telling the story of John and Mary Keane and their four children, a family saga that spans three decades, from the end of World War II to the 1970s. Vietnam makes its lethal appearance, and abortion becomes an option that even Catholic girls exercise, but don't come to this book looking for the Beatles or J.F.K. McDermott's preoccupations go much deeper than baby-boom artifacts, deeper even than mere history. What is it, she wonders, that holds together the loose fabric of our lives?

John's and Mary's lives go down unintended paths. And when the 1960s hit, the era dances away one by one with their kids. War, pregnancy, aimless adventure and the appeal of doing not much at all shape the Keanes' various fates, although shape may be too strong a word. Through all of this they keep some attachment to their Catholic faith. If nothing else, it bears into the perplexing world two essential ideas, pity and compassion--essential for people making their way through times they will never master, even if they were more masterful types.

This is a daring book. McDermott lets the major events happen offstage. She occasionally flashes forward to dispatch a character to his grave in a sentence or two. Not all her bets pay off, but by the end of this strangely haunting novel, you're convinced that what she knows is something bigger than just New York and Long Island