[A] quietly revelatory and gently gleaming gem of a book ... 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 ... After Annie is the quietest kind of story about everyone trying to figure out what they had and who they are now.
The subject matter has sadness built right in, of course. Yet very little in the novel makes the sadness feel earned. After Annie, which, like many of Ms. Quindlen’s novels, mines the minutiae of domesticity, comes off as sufficiently clichéd to feel like mourning by the numbers ... Grief is interrogated and reinterrogated with characters making observations that seem inconsistent with their level of sophistication or their manner of engaging with the world.
Quindlen... is good at this sort of domestic drama, elevating material that might seem over-familiar, even maudlin in other hands; the well-drawn characters and sharp observations keep the reader engaged ... Actually, not a lot happens until the novel’s final section, in which, arguably, too much happens.
Though the ending ties everything together a bit too neatly, Quindlen makes the magnitude of her characters’ loss feel palpable to the reader. It’s another acute portrait of family life from a virtuoso of the form.
