Life goes on

In a heroic memoir, Donald Antrim explores his relationship with his late mother -- a troubled alcoholic he couldn't live with, or without.

By Ian Chang

Read more: Books, Memoirs, Alcoholism, Reviews, Book reviews

Aug. 15, 2006 | Donald Antrim describes himself, in his new memoir, "The Afterlife," as "a novelist with literary-level sales and a talent for remorse." False modesty aside (Antrim is a much-lauded author, having been named in 1999 one of "20 Writers for the 21st Century" by the New Yorker), on some level the epithet works. Antrim's three novels to date have all been mad experiments in the laboratory of remorse, for both their protagonists and their author. The eponymous narrator of "Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World" regrets recommending the drawing and quartering of the local mayor. Doug, one of "The Hundred Brothers," has not always been kind to some of the others. And Tom, "The Verificationist," seems to carry with him, as he floats to the ceiling of the local pancake house in the bear hug of a rival, the complicated marital guilt of an Updike hero.

For their creator, the discomfort has seemed more aesthetic than moral. His books are known for their defiance of such realist données as the constraints of human embodiment, the laws of gravity and the unfazable banality of the American suburbs, and in these japes one discerns an uneasiness with the authority implicit in the role of, well, author. He is saddled with a distinctly modern authorial problem, the problem of a culture increasingly afraid that nothing is sacred. How does the self-conscious novelist write literary books, with all their silly promises of truth and transcendence, and not feel a little guilty? For some time, the best inoculation on offer seemed to be irony. But that, too, is subject to skepticism, and nowadays nothing ties a writer in knots like the question of irony: Is it a necessary disclaimer, or a cowardly dodge? Is it corrective in that it keeps us from taking ourselves too seriously, or corrosive in that it prevents us from taking ourselves seriously at all?

Antrim's novels suggest the former: They are often ironic to the point of absurdism, as if only a funhouse mirror can reflect the grotesquery of our cultural features. If there's a complaint in "literary-level sales," there is also refuge: It is the oddness of Antrim's genre that keeps him known but still respectable, validated in the delight of a few discerning readers, but not indicted by the appreciation -- or burdened with the expectations -- of hoi polloi. But as the self-deprecation of that self-description implies, some square little angel on his shoulder still defends the latter; that is, still worries that these mordant jokes do worse than preach to the converted -- they prophesy to the cynical. Happily, the devil wins the skirmishes: The jokes, if sometimes brittle, are true and funny. (Also happily, however, the angel may be winning the war: Each of his three novels has more heart and less bite than its predecessor.)

So what would such a novelist do with that other utterly realist convention, the family-trauma memoir? "The Afterlife," a memoir originally written as a series of essays in the New Yorker, shares some DNA with Antrim's novels: disheveled settings still wearing the tatters of historical grandeur; a cultural and familial atmosphere characterized by extreme, emotionally sublimated violence; a narrator whose moral culpability seems well matched to an endearingly self-flagellatory voice; recursive, elliptical digressions; and perhaps most significantly, a plot consisting of increasingly audacious, increasingly suspect acts of imagination. And yet "The Afterlife" must do what the irony of Antrim's novels has no responsibility to: It must save its protagonist by earthbound means.

The book is primarily about Antrim's mother, Louanne, an alcoholic, dreamer and paranoid, "whose power to drive people away was staggering," he says more than once. Louanne dies in the book's opening chapter, leaving our protagonist in a familiar position -- one might call it "original remorse." "People are fond of saying that the truth will make you free," Antrim writes. "But what happens when the truth is not one simple, brutal thing? I could not imagine life without my mother. And it was true as well that only without her would I feel able to live. I had had enough of Louanne Antrim and was ready for her to be gone. I wanted her dead, and I knew that, in the year of her dying, I would neglect her."

Neglect her he does, with full knowledge of his sin, and this time, the writer cannot resort to flights of wicked fancy. Antrim must deal in reality not only because the material is so personal to him but also because he is after redemption in the old sense of the word, a moral transaction that both absolves the debts of the past and promises solvency in the future. "The Afterlife" can be read as existentialist journey, the story of an artist seeking meaning by sheer force of will, rejecting contemporary clichés yet plagued throughout by the nagging suspicion that his mission has been doomed from the start. Imagine the Sartre play, renamed "No Closure." However well Antrim knows that he needs to write through his mother's death, he also knows that he has little hope of facing it head-on. This knowledge, mind you, doesn't stop him from trying, because what could?

With a task this hard, one can hardly begrudge a postmodern writer a parodic sidestep or two. And in fact, Louanne's death, which we see in the first sentence of the book, is so brilliant with mercy and guilt that Antrim cannot look at it straight. (It doesn't help that, as we learn a few pages later, Antrim himself guided her to her end, with comforting words and syringes of morphine.) Thus the first digression: In the aftermath of her death, we are elaborately told, Antrim is held captive by that late-capitalist paralysis, consumer indecision. He cannot decide on a new bed. He buys beds; he returns beds. He rhapsodizes, in the hyperbolic argot of advertising, on the qualities of the ultimate bed, the Dux bed, a make whose superiority is evident in that they "are manufactured in Sweden, advertised on classical-music radio stations, sold in company-owned stores that look like spas, and never, ever go on sale." He buys one, and smirks: "If you're going to buy a brand-new rest of your life, why go halfway?"

Yet at the same time that Antrim satirizes his own consumerist fantasies, he would have us believe that his ambivalence reflects a real emotional indictment. "Alone at night," he tells us, "I sank into the bed and tried to want it. And the further I sank into it the closer I came to knowing what the bed was. It was the last bed I would ever buy. It was the bed that would deliver me into my fate. It was the bed that would marry me again to my mother, the bed Louanne and I would share ... I sank into the bed, and it was as if I were sinking down into her arms. She was not beside me on the bed, she was inside the bed, and I was inside the bed; and she was pulling me down into the bed to die with her. It was my deathbed."

Antrim's metaphorical use of a mattress is a stretch worthy of Procrustes. The Dux episode, while funny, doesn't quite suit the proportions of his grief. If it's absurd to think that a bed will set you free, then it must be also to think that a bed can imprison you. Yet the intensity of Antrim's need for the connection, and the agility and gusto with which he conducts these mental and emotional contortions, are compelling. When he makes a pun relating his mother and father to the question of whether to go with the queen or the king, it's striking not because the pun seems deep (in fact, it's hollow and flippant), but because there seem to be no straws at which Antrim will not self-consciously grasp in trying to make sense of his pain. If one needs to believe that one can find new life, he asks himself, must one believe that it can come from any quarter -- even from a mattress? Without answering the question, Antrim dignifies it by his struggle.

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