The World After Alice: A Novel

Twelve years after the suicide of 16-year-old Alice, her family gathers for the wedding of her brother Benji and her best friend Morgan. The World After Alice, written by Lauren Aliza Green, is a slow-moving story about a family broken by grief and divorce.

The World After Alice is heavy with loss and regret and filled with characters who are caught up in their own angst, forgiveness, guilt, and infidelities. There is not one central character. Instead, Nick, Ezra, Linnie, Caro, Morgan, Benji, Avery, Judith, Victor, Rania, Alice, Peter, and others clutter the pages in a way that isn’t always easy to follow, and the transitions between characters and time frames are not always clear.

While there is some good writing here, there is also the sense of an author striving to create an intelligent novel. This feels forced. Worse, the use of obscure words and a bit of pretentious sounding language takes away from the emotional themes that otherwise could have been powerful and evocative.

Here’s one example of something that might have been said differently:

“She was so close, he could smell the hairspray ballasting her coiffure . . .”

What a missed opportunity to give the reader a real whiff of the characters. Instead, we get a sentence that tries too hard and misses the mark.

And another:

“Peter schooled his face into placidity, as if even a single drop of emotion would cause the gaseous material inside him to detonate.”

Along with the use of odd words and overwrought sentences there are places where the dialogue is peppered with crude language that falls flat and appears as an attempt to make the characters sound contemporary and realistic, but instead it casts them and the novel in a lesser light.

The World After Alice is an ambitious first book that may have benefited from some paring down and less focus on crafting a certain style of writing at the expense of a good story and more appealing, genuine characters. If only the entire novel could have been as succinct as the epilogue, and with the same slightly more earthy tone:

“Through the window that gazes onto earth, time assembles around the girl’s absence. If she cared to know how all this would play out, she could approach the shelf of hourglasses, where the grains of sand stream like rain.”