The After Life (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The After Life Deborah Stevenson Ehrenhaft, Daniel The After Life. Razorbill, 2006 [272p] Paper ed. ISBN 1-59514-080-8$8.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 9-12 Will Shepherd has not exactly been close to his wealthy father, who left Will's mother shortly after Will's birth, and he's only just met Kyle and Liz, his seventeen-year-old younger half-siblings, whose school Will has recently started attending. He's nonetheless shocked when his father dies of a heart attack (doubtless encouraged by Shepherd Senior's recreational drug use), so he turns up in Miami, relying as usual on regular infusions of drugs and alcohol, for his father's funeral. Mr. Shepherd wills Kyle and Liz each twenty million but Will a paltry two mil, dependent on Will's driving his father's old Volvo back from Miami to New York (Mr. Shepherd had always sneered at Will's inability to drive). Convinced that Will plans to try for a bigger share, Kyle insists that he and Liz fulfill the driving duties and that the trio take the long ride together, but the experience isn't what any of them expect. Ehrenhaft writes with a cool, heedless humor and a matter-of-fact absurdity, making this an enjoyably edgy narrative that mines comedy even from its darkest elements. The strongest portraits are those of Kyle, a "web-based crook" and wheeler-dealer convinced everybody's working an angle, and Will, trying to keep his life from tanking entirely as he struggles to come to terms with the death, possibly by suicide, of his beloved uncle; Liz is less credible, especially in her attraction to Will's shambling character, but the plot gets a lot of entertainment value out of the romantic sparks between the half-sibs (an overexplanatory wrapup conveniently explains that Will and Liz aren't actually blood kin, thus greenlighting their relationship). [End Page 166] The youthfully jaundiced satire on material ranging from preppies (the kids' school is the motherlode) to hippies (Shepherd Senior was a wannabe) combines with genuinely emotional undercurrents to make this an offbeat but compelling literary road trip. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois