How?įlannery O'Connor said short stories need to have a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order. But what about novels? Kate Atkinson seems to believe there can be a beginning, a middle and an end, and then another beginning, plus several more middles. What she's done in her masterful new book, Life After Life, is prove that what makes a long piece of fiction succeed might have very little to do with the progression of its story, and more to do with something hard to define and even harder to produce: a fully-realized world. Atkinson not only invites readers in but also asks them to give up their preconceptions of what a novel should be, and instead accept what a novel can be. When I started Life After Life, I have to admit, I wasn't sure I wanted to keep going. I was disoriented, and I thought maybe the problem was me - maybe I was just dumb. In the opening pages, in a German cafe in November 1930, a woman raises a gun and shoots Adolf Hitler.
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