The Guardian praised PEN/Malamud Award winner Richard Bausch for having "a devastating concern for detail and domestic complexity, the ability to lay bare the convolutions, eccentricities, dangers and beauties of 'ordinary' people." Bausch (Peace; Thanksgiving Night) displays no less in his 12th novel, Before, During, After.
Natasha is a young congressional aide in Washington, D.C., with a checkered romantic history. A chance meeting at a dinner party in spring 2001 leads to a relationship with Michael Faulk, 16 years her senior and an Episcopal priest undergoing a crisis of faith and calling. They fall in love over the course of the summer and set their wedding for fall. On September 11, Michael is in New York with breakfast plans at Windows on the World in the World Trade Center while Natasha is on vacation in Jamaica. In the ensuing communication blackout, Natasha believes Michael among the dead. Distraught, disoriented and intoxicated, she is raped by a fellow vacationer. She is paralyzed by trauma and shame and cannot share her experience with Michael when they are finally reunited. Michael interprets her withdrawal as a consequence of infidelity. Their relationship slips into one of secrets, suspicion and resentment, until it becomes unendurable.
Michael and Natasha are flawed in their own distinct ways, with quotidian human weaknesses, but Bausch never judges them; he concentrates on their pain and how they might find their way back to one another. His handling of 9/11 as a backdrop is sensitive and deft in this tender novel about the personal consequences of a cataclysmic national event. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer