After You'd Gone

 

After You'd Gone by Maggie O'Farrell

Fiction

2000

Finished on January 16, 2025

Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

The stunning, groundbreaking debut novel of wrenching love and grief from the New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait and National Book Circle Award Winner Hamnet.

Alice Raikes takes a train from London to Scotland to visit her family, but when she gets there she witnesses something so shocking that she insists on returning to London immediately. A few hours later, Alice is lying in a coma after an accident that may or may not have been a suicide attempt. Alice's family gathers at her bedside and as they wait, argue, and remember, long-buried tensions emerge. The more they talk, the more they seem to conceal. Alice, meanwhile, slides between varying levels of consciousness, recalling her past and a love affair that recently ended. A riveting story that skips through time and interweaves multiple points of view, After You'd Gone is a novel of stunning psychological depth, marking the debut of a major literary talent.

Maggie O'Farrell landed on my radar in 2020 with her popular new novel, Hamnet, which I read a couple of years later (waiting for the hype to die down). I enjoyed it so well, I went on to read one of her earlier novels (The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox), which I loved just as much as Hamnet. My mom also enjoyed these books and wound up buying all of O'Farrell's backlist, which are now in my stacks to read one by one over the course of the year. 

I started off with the author's debut novel, After You'd Gone. This reading experience was frustrating in that O'Farrell bounces back and forth between time periods, as well as points of view. I was very confused, jotting down names and traits, trying to sort out what was happening and to whom. The novel's focus is centered on three generations of women: Elspeth, Ann, and Alice. A jumble of events told from their individual perspectives makes for a dizzying read. (On one occasion, the events in Alice's life are told in third person. It then abruptly jumps to first person, and I had no idea if it was still Alice's thoughts or Ann's.) And yet, something about the writing kept me turning the pages, patiently waiting for the moment in which everything came together. And I was not disappointed, but rather rewarded with a marvelous, complex, suspenseful, albeit nonlinear story. As soon as I'd finished, I flipped to the beginning and re-read the prologue, which made so much more sense than it did when I began the book.

Looking back at my review on The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, I'm surprised to see that I had similar thoughts about O'Farrell's writing style as I did with After You'd Gone. 

I was not expecting to love this book as much as I did, especially after the first half-dozen pages, which I needed to reread from the first paragraph; I was terribly confused. But I fell in love with O'Farrell's nonlinear structure, which includes multiple points of view, as well as jumps in the timeline. It was not until I was well into the narrative that it all started to fall into place, but there remained a few twists and turns, as well as some continued confusion, and an ambiguous finale. The author does an amazing job teasing out the details, allowing small glimpses into the history of the Lennox family.

I had wrongly assumed that the narrative confusion was merely that of the work of an unpolished author's debut novel. And yet, several novels later, that nonlinear, multi-POV writing is evidence of her unique style. It will be interesting to see if I note the same in The Distance Between, which will be my February read in my personal "A Year of Maggie O'Farrell" reading challenge.

Part mystery, part love story, After You'd Gone is literary fiction at its finest. This is one to read and discuss with others, and I know I'll read it a second time! Highly recommend.