Alice McDermott says that prose is better than filmmaking--for a specific reason. Films give you sight and sound, but prose can give you (additionally) smell, taste, and touch.
In her Pulitzer finalist novel, "After This," McDermott seems to wave her middle finger at Martin Scorsese et al. She includes the word "felt" three times in her opening paragraph. "Felt the wind rise, felt the pinprick of pebble and grit, felt the wind rush up her cuffs."
A windy day in New York City. Paper detritus flies everywhere, and the protagonist thinks of battlefields. Even armies are surrounded by flying candy wrappers, scraps of letters. After everyone has left, torn papers fly around and above and beside the corpses.
This strange thought lets us know that we're (probably) reading a novel about Vietnam; the war hasn't happened to the protagonist yet, but Alice McDermott does know about the war, and she is winking at us. The other extraordinary feature is the syntax; through her rhythms, McDermott reproduces the experience of a sensory assault. "All before her, the lunch hour crowd bent under the April sun and into the bitter April wind, jackets flapping and eyes squinting, or else skirts pressed to the backs of legs and jacket hems pressed to bottoms...." Imagine if she had just written, "The wind was terrible."
McDermott uses both lyricism--"pressed, pressed," "April, April," "felt, felt, felt"--and precision ("office memos, shopping lists, low gray steps of the church"). It's just a mild windstorm--but nothing like this first page exists anywhere else in literary history. Nothing before McDermott's novel.
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