Anna Quindlen Is Back, With Four Seasons of Loss and Survival

Credit…Hélène Blanc AFTER ANNIE, by Anna Quindlen Anna Quindlen knows what she’s doing. So there’s really no need to play Sigmund Freud in a book review, stage-whispering about the protagonist of her new novel: “Annie! It’s practically the same as ANNA!” Yes. Yes, it is. And this Annie, by the end of the first chapter, has died on the kitchen floor after an aneurysm, leaving behind a brood of mourners, including her befuddled mensch of a husband, four children as lost as mittens and a precariously recovering best friend. Quindlen, our first lady of motherhood, has written herself out of the center of this quietly revelatory and gently gleaming gem of a book. Maybe it’s a little bit like attending your own funeral — or imagining everything that comes after. What happens in the crushing vacuum of such an absence? As the husband, Bill, sees it, “he’d had a life and a family and it had been a wheel and then the hub of the wheel was gone and it was just a collection of spokes, and a collection of spokes didn’t spin, didn’t take you anywhere.” The novel is organized into a year of sad seasons — beginning and ending with winter — and the perspective shifts among three characters: Bill, a plumber, who is plausibly baffled by everyone’s feelings even as he goes around unclogging things; Ali, the eldest, a bereft 13-year-old who suddenly needs to be making her dad meatloaf sandwiches and mothering everybody; and Annemarie, the friend who has always been, we learn, the Opium perfume to Annie’s Happy, and who is desperately trying not to add a handful of painkillers to the grief she’s swallowing. My favorite thing about Quindlen’s writing has always been her closely observed revelations about family life. This is what has animated much of her celebrated career, not only as a best-selling novelist but as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. I still recall a “Public and Private” column she wrote for The New York Times in 1990 , on the second birthday of her youngest child: “My daughter is ready to […]

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