{"id":1289,"date":"2014-03-01T13:15:14","date_gmt":"2014-03-01T19:15:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=1289"},"modified":"2014-03-01T13:15:14","modified_gmt":"2014-03-01T19:15:14","slug":"laura-lippman-after-im-gone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/laura-lippman-after-im-gone\/","title":{"rendered":"Laura Lippman: After I’m Gone"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Laura Lippman is truly a master at what she does.\u00a0 Her latest novel, a stand alone, takes a ripped-from-the-headlines story and she puts her own Lippman-esque spin on it.\u00a0 The story concerns one Felix Brewer, a slick operator who decides to vanish rather than face prison time over his many unlawful misdeeds.\u00a0 Lippman\u2019s concern and interest, however, is not so much Felix as the women Felix leaves behind: his beautiful wife, Bambi; his three daughters; and his mistress, Julie.\u00a0 The connecting thread is not only the women, but the cold case officer who is trying to figure out, many years later, who caused the death of Felix\u2019s mistress ten years to the day after his own disappearance.<\/p>\n

\"afterimgone\"<\/a>Lippman\u2019s time scale is an epic one as she veers from Bambi and Felix\u2019s first meeting in 1959, to Felix\u2019s disappearance in 1976, to Julie\u2019s death in 1986, up to 2012 when \u201cSandy\u201d Sanchez is trying to solve the mystery of Julie\u2019s death.\u00a0 The narrative deftly flips from one woman to the other, in different years, giving the reader not only a full picture of the slightly skeezy and disreputable Felix but of the effect his void has left on each woman\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

Bambi, a stone cold beauty, was not prepared to live life other than as someone\u2019s pampered princess, and yet, she has, eking out a living at a dress shop, putting her children though school and getting them Bat Mitvah-ed, and seemingly subsisting on barely any income as Felix seems not to have made provision for her.<\/p>\n

The girls miss their father and resent the mistress who was left a coffee shop free and clear and who went on to greater success.\u00a0 The most interesting aspect of the entire book to me were the sisters.\u00a0 Two are older, a \u201cteam\u201d, and the baby, Michelle, is a spoiled, narcissistic beauty.\u00a0 The oldest sister, Linda, is the practical one, who takes her family and religion seriously; the next daughter, Rachel, is the caretaker of the family; and both sisters are in equal parts obsessed by and worried over Michelle, who seems to sail through life, as her mother did, by virtue of her beauty.\u00a0 None of them ever want to depend on a man the way their mother did, and still does, as she relies heavily on Felix\u2019s lawyer for advice and financial handouts,.<\/p>\n

The inner secrets at the heart of the novel lie coiled between the lines of the story and within the depths of the characters Lippman so vividly portrays, leaving behind not only a portrait of a family but of a certain swath of life in a certain part of Baltimore, from mid-century onward. Bambi\u2019s expectations as a young woman are not her daughters\u2019, and you wonder what the expectations of the girls\u2019 children will be, and how they too will differ from their mothers.\u00a0 While there\u2019s a crime at the heart of the story \u2013 the real story lies in the relationships Lippman seems able to portray almost effortlessly.\u00a0 This is another memorable and compelling read from one of the truly great contemporary American writers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Laura Lippman is truly a master at what she does.\u00a0 Her latest novel, a stand alone, takes a ripped-from-the-headlines story and she puts her own Lippman-esque spin on it.\u00a0 The story concerns one Felix Brewer, a slick operator who decides to vanish rather than face prison time over his many unlawful misdeeds.\u00a0 Lippman\u2019s concern and … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[13],"class_list":["post-1289","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-suspensethriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1289","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1289"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1289\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1291,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1289\/revisions\/1291"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1289"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1289"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1289"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}