After

Sparse, measured, breathless pacing. I don't lean toward inviting comparisons often but if you liked "House of Sand and Fog" you will love this tender and heart-wrenching novel, a worthy addition to the slender list of fiction dealing with life in a post 9/11 world.

I was very impressed by the complexity woven into this book's spare prose. Tristram elucidates by image, implication and association, and the cumulative effect is powerful. This tale of a tryst covers just about everything that draws human beings together, or cataclysmically divides them, on any scale from the interpersonal to the international. Sexuality is the perfect metaphor--an occasion for intimacy, tenderness and discovery but also fraught with alienation, aversion, power, cruelty, mistrust of self and other, reinvention of self and other. What redeems one person inspires fear or revulsion in the other. The turn-and-turn-about between the two main characters is mesmerizing.

This book upset me .. it is shocking and strange and emotional .. in a very controlled way that lets the reader open to an emotional freefall without actually having to jump out of an airplane. Wierd analogy, sorry. But an earlier review complained that the author doesn't understand how people facing this kind of tragedy feel. I think the whole point of "After" is to NOT treat this woman who is now labeled "the widow" as a role or a type but instead to let her be intensely individual. This kind of tragedy happens to individuals .. and that means it could happen to any one of us. I think it's an important book .. it makes you think .. and feel.

This book is a refraction of reality and it is eerily prescient of current events and it packs a political punch. A widow who lost her husband in an act of terror finds herself drawn to a Muslim man. The lovers learn a great deal about one another, much more than they expect from the short time they spend together. I would call it a love story only it is deeper than that, and the characters are far more vulnerable and flawed, so that it's impossible not to identify with them. The sex in the story is not so much erotic as it is purgative, almost redemptive, beautifully written and at times so intense that I had to put the book down for a few minutes before picking it up again. The story is told in an elegant way that draws you in and doesn't let you go.

I have just finished reading "After" and find myself feeling much the same way as the first time I saw Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. Tristram does with language what Hitchcook did with film. She cooks up a suspenseful, scary ride that leaves you totally wrung out at the end, and unable to shake the experience you just had. The prose is as good as any "literary" novel but it reads as easily as the latest Michael Crichton thriller. This book is not for those who just want mild entertainment in their reading. The author breaks more than one "taboo" and that's part of the book's power. I am still thinking about it.