WHAT COMES AFTER by JoAnne Tompkins

Daniel and Jonah are two key characters in this novel, but they are both dead from the beginning.  Daniel was a handsome, popular, athletic teenager who disappeared.  His body was found days later after his awkward semi-friend, Jonah, killed himself and confessed to Daniel’s murder.  Isaac, Daniel’s divorced, schoolteacher father, is a devout Quaker who was emotionally unavailable to his son.  Lorrie, Jonah’s widowed mother, lives next door and struggles to support herself and her daughter.  The catalyst to a possible truce between Isaac and Lorrie is Evangeline, a pregnant, homeless sixteen-year-old.  Isaac is stubborn and judgmental in his assessments of people, despite evidence that he is completely wrong.  He particularly has a blind spot with regard to his son, who was no saint by any stretch of the imagination.  In fact, Isaac refuses to see the flaws in the novel’s most flawed characters but freezes out those who could use some compassion, with the exception of Evangeline, whom he takes under his protective wing.  As you might expect, grief is a dominant force in this novel, but the prospect of a new life when the spunky Evangeline gives birth provides a source of hope.  Her circumstances have made her rough around the edges but have also forced her to figure out how to survive.  She is the central figure around which everything in the novel revolves, and the ultimate question is whether or not she was a source of strife between the two dead boys.