When We Were All Still Alive

The death of a lawyer's wife causes him to look back--and forward--in McWalter's novel. Conrad Burrell meets and falls in love with Sarah Bergman while she's still married. He's long divorced from his first wife, Megan, though he maintains a friendly relationship with her and her second husband, due in part to the fact that they raised his daughter, Madeleine, who's now an adult. After Sarah's marriage ends, she and Conrad marry, and it's a comfortable, mature relationship that doesn't cause much stress for either of them. Death is never far away, however; it comes for their parents, their siblings, and their friends' spouses. Conrad can't help but think of what would happen to each of them if the other died first: "Please don't let her be a widow," he thinks, watching Sarah at the funeral of Megan 's second husband. "Let her go first." When Sarah dies in a car accident, Conrad sadly gets his wish--but now he's at a loss for what to do with his own life. McWalter's prose is precise and fluid, weaving characters, settings, and timelines together in a complex tapestry with detailed description: "He met Megan Caldwell during the litigation stint; she had the carrel next to his in the vast law library on the forty-fourth floor, whose windows offered a distracting view of the harbor, Liberty waving her welcome, Staten Island, the distant curvature of the earth." The novel is highly episodic, and as a result, it suffers from a general lack of tension; the reader knows exactly how and when Sarah will meet her end right from the beginning, and due to numerous flashbacks, Conrad's grieving period only makes up the final third of the book. There's something intangible in McWalter's storytelling that keeps the reader enthralled, however, even absent surprises or a clear sense of direction; the novel offers few answers, to be sure, but it presents a depiction of life and loss that feels true, and seems to say that one must find satisfaction in whatever joy one receives. A finely crafted work about the inevitability of aging and loss.

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