i guess that this is a sort of poke at the noir detective genre, with a host of lesbian characters and relationships. i haven't read a lot of noir but i suspect it would mostly annoy me. i find the depth of relationship so unbelievable and vacuous (which then reflects on the characters), so i had a hard time not rolling my eyes at this main character every time she brought up delores. or charlotte or punkette. theoretically i like the idea here and i like the atmosphere she created of the underbelly of new york in the time. i just didn't care about the people in that environment. or the crime. or why she cared about the people or the crime.

i hate that on the cover, from the new york times book review, it says "A rare, insightful look into the lesbian mind." although maybe schulman would agree (maybe even i agree), since she says in her introduction that it's hard to find lesbian protagonists outside the lgbtq section of stores/libraries. there are a lot of lesbian books out there, and they are more and more often found in every section of a bookstore, but that's a much more recent development. i don't know - in a case where there aren't other books full of lesbian minds to understand, what does it do to a group of people to be viewed this way? i'm curious why it was so lauded by the mainstream at the time...

i know there is value here and i know that schulman is an important queer writer. i would read her again, i just think i might not be her ideal audience.

(also, there are a *lot* of typos in this new edition.) ( )

It's so refreshing to read a piece of fiction that just happens to center the stories *of* lesbians, and not a book that centers the fact of being lesbians in the first place. Which is nearly impossible to find these days. But I digress.

After Delores is a quirky and entertaining story of a woman dealing with the aftermath of her rejection. She doesn't always make the greatest choices, and in the process a series of strange coincidences leads to the conclusion. I didn't love the book, but it was a thoroughly enjoyable read. ( )

Hilarious, unpredictable, sexy novel is a fascinating journey into the storefronts, underground clubs, and back alleys of New York's Lower East Side lesbian subculture

I recently re-read Schulman's After Delores; after having read her more recent novel, The Child, which was finally published almost 10 years after delays caused by the "controversial" nature of the subject matter, which represented a young gay man (hence, "Child") in an incipient relationship with an older gay man. My opinion of After Delores is that it is atmospheric, obsessive, campy, self-ironizing but, more than all else, Schulman's effort to at once comment on the sub-genre of the lesbian detective novel, write a kind of lesbian (parodic-camp) version of D. Hammett, and see what latching these two formal-expressive-stylistic projects onto her tale of the obsession produced by failed romance, rejection, humiliation, and broken narrative lines would produce. I am not sure this is Schulman's most distinguished or interesting project. In fact, it is not. For that, one would do better to read The Child and Empathy. ( )

Plot synopses are not always necessary to a review, but in the case of After Delores one has to try just because one knows it's going to be fun. So here goes--

After getting dumped by Delores, our unnamed heroine runs into a Priscilla Presley look alike who abandons our heroine at a pizza parlor but leaves a gun in her place. With the introduction of the gun comes the inevitably confusing haze following a bad breakup--should you use the gun to kill yourself, kill your girlfriend who just dumped you, kill the wench whom your girlfriend ran off with, or kill some combination of these characters? No sooner can our heroine answer this question when she runs into Punkette, a bright spot in an otherwise dreary world. When Punkette winds up strangled to death, it's up to our heroine to avenge Punkette and figure out what to do about Delores.

This is a novel of tremendous atmosphere. Always thoughtful, at times depressing, often amusing, and if you want you can even call it postmodern. It also goes to show you that catching a killer is sometimes easier than sorting out your feelings toward your ex. ( )