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Just when you think the memoir has become the repository for writers' unfinished therapy, along comes a book like The Afterlife. This surprising little book is Donald Antrim's finest work to date, one of the most anguished, beautiful stories about a mother-son relationship in years.
She does not sound like an easy woman. A blackout alcoholic for much of her life, Louanne Antrim could be childish and mean. She once summoned her adult son to North Carolina to celebrate her sobriety. When Antrim tried to express regret for what her drinking had cost them, she barked: "Don't come into my home and attack my serenity."
To make sense of his mother's emotional legacy, Antrim has turned himself into a first-rate memoirist. He moves through the past as if it were a series of rooms. There are the obvious spaces to inspect a Miami-area subdivision house lived in with his father; the last, run-down warren his mother occupied in Black Mountains. Detritus lingers everywhere he looks.
This is not a revenge memoir, though, so it takes pains to show Louanne Antrim's other sides. She was a talented seamstress, and managed even during her most sozzled years to earn a doctorate in fabric design. But her failure as an artist and fashion designer drove her only further into delusions of grandeur that all but occluded her two children. That is, until Antrim became a novelist. Then he was proof of her artistic legacy.
As a novelist, Antrim has made such tangled relationships unbearably light. He is a high-wire juggler, a spoof artist, a sleight-of-hand maestro. The Afterlife is the polar opposite of these fictions. It is a book full of blunt truths best told unadorned. At one point, Antrim is determined to prove his mother had doctored her father's will. Then he asks: "What had led me so deliberately to pursue in my thoughts and in my actions, the idea of my mother as a thief?"
The Afterlife provides plenty of answers to this question. In the end, this is a book about the hard work of helping someone die of how bedside vigils require an abnegation of self in order to say, as Antrim did to his mother, it's OK to "go ahead and die".
The afterlife this book refers to, then, is no great beyond. And the saddest thing, as Antrim so beautifully reveals, is the person one most needs to address is gone.
* John Freeman is president of the US National Book Critics Circle.
* Little, Brown $55
