The After Life is based around a guy named Will Shepherd who’s going through some tough things in his life.
Will, a New York City 19-year-old living with his artsy mother, knows of his biological father but has never met him. His father left him and his mother when he was 9 months old and whom the man barely acknowledges.
The way this book opens is really well written. It’s Will’s application to a prep school for the over privileged. While attending the school, Will meets his half siblings, Liz Kyle, and then gets an invite to a party at their Upper East Side apartment.
Will doesn’t really know what to expect when he gets there. He’s shocked to learn that his dad is a filthy-rich aging hippie addicted to alcohol and cocaine and that his new wife performs Wiccan rituals. This is something that Will didn’t really expect from his father.
The following morning, a hung-over Will is dumfounded when his stepsister informs him of his father’s heart attack and death. After an alcohol-soaked funeral in Florida, he and his half siblings find themselves in a Florida law office watching a DVD. In it, their father not only comically announces, “I’m dead,” but also tells Will he can have $2 million, much less than the twins inherit, if h e can drive the man’s Volvo from Miami to New York City in 48 hours.
As the siblings embark on this bizarre road trip, each one of them works through tricky feelings towards their friends and each other through three alternating points of view which shapes the bulk of this narrative.
Will, his stepsister Liz and her twin brother Kyle take turns revealing their inner angst and doubts about their strange and pathetic extended family. Haphazard writing hampers random stops along the journey of self-discovery until the travelers arrive in Manhattan, only to discover more family secrets.
Daniel Ehrenhaft’s writing about three offbeat, damaged teens manages to be simultaneously funny and tragic.
I know that it’s kind of an usual combination, but he somehow makes it work. Definitely, a good read.