(You can't live all ways.) But Kate Atkinson didn't choose one path for Ursula Todd, and she didn't need to. In real life, people inevitably have to make choices about how to live. And Ursula, while not a world-beater except perhaps in her big Hitler moment, is always human and readable. Maurice, the horrible brother no one can stand, is horrible in every version of this story.

Life after life grind on for Ursula and all the members of her family, who, though their outcomes change, remain roughly the same people throughout the book. Good for her to have given us one we needed it. After all, there really isn't much recent precedent for a major, serious yet playfully experimental novel with a female character at its center.

What impresses me about this flip book of nonstop scenarios - in wartime and peacetime - is not only how absorbing they are, but how brave Atkinson is to have written them. In an alternate reality, Ursula works in wartime intelligence. At one point, Atkinson places Ursula in prewar Germany, where she befriends a young Eva Braun and then, during the war, she's seen working in London on a rescue unit, grimly coping with its everyday shocks and horrors. For in another version she manages to rebuff her would-be attacker, and in yet another version, the moment between her and this same man turns out to be merely lightly amorous. Ursula is raped and impregnated - unless, wait, she isn't raped and impregnated at all. Gamely anticipating the consequences of that action - even if they held the possibility of Twilight Zone cheesiness - I turned the page, only to find that there were no consequences, at least not yet, for the clock had turned back 20 years and the action had moved to another locale.Īnd the dangers abound. In the opening pages, in a German cafe in November 1930, a woman raises a gun and shoots Adolf Hitler. I was disoriented, and I thought maybe the problem was me - maybe I was just dumb. When I started Life After Life, I have to admit, I wasn't sure I wanted to keep going. Atkinson not only invites readers in but also asks them to give up their preconceptions of what a novel should be, and instead accept what a novel can be. What she's done in her masterful new book, Life After Life, is prove that what makes a long piece of fiction succeed might have very little to do with the progression of its story, and more to do with something hard to define and even harder to produce: a fully-realized world. But what about novels? Kate Atkinson seems to believe there can be a beginning, a middle and an end, and then another beginning, plus several more middles.

How?įlannery O'Connor said short stories need to have a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Life After Life Author Kate Atkinson

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