Fic­tion

The World After Alice

  • Review
By – July 30, 2024

The mys­tery of this debut novel’s title is solved in the pro­logue, where we learn that only one man saw the girl set down the case before she stepped for­ward, hoist­ed her­self on the bridge’s waist-high guardrail, and jumped.”

Alice’s sui­cide is at the heart of a set of inter­lock­ing sto­ries in which past and present are intri­cate­ly inter­twined. The sto­ries in the present, set six­teen years after Alice’s sui­cide, revolve around the upcom­ing wed­ding of Ben­ji Weil, Alice’s younger broth­er, and Mor­gan Hens­ley, Alice’s best friend.

The gath­er­ing place for the wed­ding is Maine, and the Weils are stay­ing at the home of Benji’s grand­moth­er, Judith, where Benji’s father, Nick, spent his sum­mers. Judith is pre­sent­ed as a kind of crotch­ety, crit­i­cal fig­ure who throws around Yid­dish words like tsuris that seem out of place in the novel.

While Judith’s char­ac­ter could do more to advance the nar­ra­tive, the sto­ries of the oth­er char­ac­ters pro­pel the nov­el in inter­est­ing and unex­pect­ed ways. As the book alter­nates between past and present, it offers read­ers insight into the entan­gle­ments of the Weil fam­i­ly before and after Alice’s suicide.

The World After Alice reads not just as a sto­ry of an unhap­py fam­i­ly in the after­math of tragedy, but also as a kind of mys­tery. We nev­er ful­ly under­stand why Alice took her life; each per­son in her inti­mate cir­cle seems to have only a piece or two of the puz­zle that is — that was — Alice. Each char­ac­ter absorbs the blow of Alice’s sui­cide dif­fer­ent­ly. Lin­nie, her moth­er, is utter­ly dev­as­tat­ed, and her grief con­sumes her for years. Her ex-hus­band, Nick, moves on, hav­ing mar­ried his sec­re­tary fol­low­ing an office affair that turns out to have an unex­pect­ed con­nec­tion to Alice’s suicide.

The secrets these char­ac­ters are car­ry­ing keep the read­er turn­ing pages. Is Alice’s high school phi­los­o­phy teacher, Ezra New­man, that kind of teacher? Was Lin­nie dri­ving Alice to achieve in her musi­cal endeav­ors out of moth­er­ly love, or to com­pen­sate for her own short-cir­cuit­ed career as a dancer? Is Nick’s attrac­tion to Caro, a woman twen­ty years his junior, just an office cliché, or some­thing more mean­ing­ful? And will that union be undone by the secret Nick has been keep­ing from Caro about his fall from grace at work?

One won­ders through­out the book if Ben­ji and Morgan’s wed­ding will take place, or if the anguish, rage, and dis­ap­point­ment felt by those left to live life after Alice will scut­tle what is sup­posed to be a joy­ous event. One also won­ders if and where for­give­ness might seep in, allow­ing the sur­vivors to embrace a future that doesn’t always drag the past along with it.

Nina Mogilnik left a long career in phil­an­thropy, non-prof­it, and gov­ern­ment work to focus on fam­i­ly, on caus­es dear to her, and on her own writ­ing, which she pub­lish­es on Medi­um, at the Blogs of the Times of Israel, and elsewhere. 

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