Afterwards

Rating:
Summary: WHY DON'T YOU DIE?
Review: Hal Costigan seemed to have it all, he was a candidate for Congress, smart, with a nice wife and kid. He was friendly and charming and his future seemed boundless. That was before he started an affair with Dolores Lenci. Dolores just happens to be a 17 year old high schooler. After the affair becomes public, Hal kills himself. All of his families and Dolores' dreams come crashing down with him.

His wife Isobel moves out of town, taking their son with her. His brother Cort wonders why the best people seem to have the most tragic end and cannot come to terms with the realities of the world. His sister Naomi, who always took care of her brother, enters into a disastrous marriage. Dolores, the young schoolgirl Hal had an affair with, begins a cycle of dating older men which always end the same as the first. Bad. She loses her uniqueness with the death of Hal.

This book is mainly about the effect of a death of a person who represented all that was best about a family and how the curse of his death continues to bring more harm than his living ever would. The problem is that it goes on and on about it without any of the characters achieving any enlightenment about life. They just continue on in whatever mess they were in before. The book covers years of time after Hal's death in which these almost parasites of him just seem to take up breathing space. It needed a stronger character. When your strongest character is a dead man who never appears in the novel, then you're in trouble. It was like reading 140 pages of a funeral oration. This book was originally published under the title Conference of Victims in 1962 and it was very apt. None of the characters had any life of their own and so become victimized by the loss of the life they led through Hal.

This book was fair but nothing special. I don't know if this was Gina's first book but it felt like it. Since then she has acquired many awards like the Pen/Faulkner and The National Book Critic's Circle Award for a book of short stories. I would not recommend this work.