From the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award, the Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Rea Award for the Short Story comes a gorgeously rendered, passionate account of a relationship threatened by secrets, set against the backdrop of national tragedy.
When Natasha, a talented young artist working as a congressional aide, meets Michael Faulk, an Episcopalian priest struggling with his faith, the stars seem to align. Although he is nearly two decades older, they discover in each other the happy yearning and exhilaration of lovers, and within months they are engaged. Shortly before their wedding, while Natasha is vacationing in Jamaica and Faulk is in New York attending the wedding of a family friend, the terrorist attacks of September 11 shatter the tranquility of the nation's summer. Alone in a state of abject terror, cut off from America and convinced that Faulk is dead, Natasha makes an error in judgment that leads to a private trauma of her own on the Caribbean shore. A few days later, she and Faulk are reunited, but the horror of that day and Natasha's inability to speak of it inexorably divide their relationship into "before" and "after." They move to Memphis and begin their new life together, but their marriage quickly descends into repression, anxiety, and suspicion.
In prose that is direct, exact, and lyrical, Richard Bausch plumbs the complexities of public and personal trauma and the courage with which we learn to face them. Above all, Before, During, After is a love story, offering a penetrating and exquisite portrait of intimacy, of spiritual and physical longing, and of the secrets we convince ourselves to keep even as they threaten to destroy us. This is an unforgettable tour de force from one of America's most distinguished storytellers.
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“Intimate. Just as Sue Miller did in her 9/11 novel, The Lake Shore Limited,
Bausch explores the way private tragedy is distorted and subsumed by
national disaster. And as Roxane Gay did in her recent novel, An Untamed State,
he juxtaposes an individual act of sexual violence against the broader
violence of countries…The story effectively recreates the
frustration of dealing with a victim in deep denial—and it’s a harrowing
reminder of how the reverberations of those explosions traveled through
the American psyche. For all the novel’s lovely description of romance
‘before,’ Bausch is even more insightful when he follows the corrosive
effects of anxiety ‘after.’”
—
Washington Post