Seasons of Sadness
Anna Quindlen’s new novel shows how a family pieces itself back together after monumental loss.
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 leap into the world, as though life were chicken soup and she a delighted noodle.” I’ve remembered this line for 34 years.
In “After Annie,” Quindlen uses these details to help us understand the experience of loss. Husband, daughter, friend — everyone remembers Annie in bits and pieces, and these memories are like the tiles of a mosaic, laid down into a gorgeous, fractured portrait of what they’re missing. As Bill puts it, “All the general things people said, about how the person was a good friend and a good wife and a good mother, were useless, almost insulting in their lack of specificity.”
Their Annie was the person who “was always forcing the kids outside to look up: thumbnail moon, half-moon, new moon, full moon.” Sometimes, when Bill reached into the closet for a shirt, “a sleeve or two from her side would touch his arm, like it was reaching for him, and there would be a faint smell, lemon and hand cream and something else, maybe her shampoo.” Ali remembers the particular way her mother talked her through long division. Annemarie feels her friend sitting in the passenger seat, even now, saying, “Eyes on the road.”
There’s a rotting half-onion in the fridge because Annie cut it and nobody can bear to throw it out.
The very best thing about this book might be the way Quindlen, an anthropologist of domesticity, catalogs the sparklingly random moments that make up human experience. On siblings: “Ali heard someone breathing behind her, and she knew it was her brother because she’d heard him breathing behind her her whole life — in the car, in the line for the matinee at the movies, on the school bus.” On funeral food: “One of the baked zitis is really good and one is kind of eh.” On children: “The bread had those tiny sesame seeds along the crust, and he had watched, dead-eyed, as Benjy insisted on picking them all out, even once there was syrup, so that there was syrup under his fingernails and later lint from his gloves on his fingertips because of it. Then he’d sucked on his fingers and gotten the lint in his mouth, so that all during dinnertime he was picking red fuzz off his tongue.”
The book is more than the collection of minutiae I’m sketching here — secrets and drama only partly related to Annie’s absence. These give the book some shape that maybe the details alone couldn’t have. And if there’s a false note, it may be that the book takes place in the present. There’s something slightly sepia-toned about it: The kids call the adults Mr. and Mrs. and nobody seems to be glued to a screen. That said, they do all repeatedly call Annie’s phone to hear her outgoing message, and I love that detail. Even just typing “outgoing message” made me choke up — I had never thought of those words that way until now.
In the end, “After Annie” is the quietest kind of story about everyone trying to figure out what they had and who they are now. What’s left when the center drops out? What do those spokes add up to with the hub gone? Maybe it’s something that is, against all odds, still rolling forward. □