"The Afterlife": Memories of a mother's madness

"The Afterlife"
by Donald Antrim
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 193 pp., $21

A robe of fantastical design, bedecked with ribbons, lace, angel-shaped tassels, shining stars, metallic birds, a torn heart of green silk, flowers, giraffes, sachets and pendants — coins, seashells, starfish, a lion and horse — lies at the center of Donald Antrim's stunning memoir "The Afterlife."

Called "The Heroine's Journey," the garment is a wearable yet daunting work of art by his mother, Louanne Self Antrim, whose life was defined — and ruined — by addictions to alcohol and cigarettes. It is an expression of her prodigious talent at tailoring, her spirit and beauty, unfettered imagination, mystical yearnings — and her madness.

"The power of my mother's robe is the power that was strongest in her at the end of her life. This was the power to force away the people she loved," he writes.

Antrim, whose fiction ("The Verificationist," "The Hundred Brothers," "Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World") has been excerpted in The New Yorker, is known for his command of the surreal. Here he proves, should it still need proving, that real life can outdo any invented oddness, any dark flights of fancy.

What Antrim writes — baring layer by layer his complex entanglement with his mother, whom he loved greatly, hated passionately, fled and returned to, abandoned and cared for — is shocking and heartbreaking and occasionally quite funny. In so doing, he of course also reveals much about his own flawed self, and it seems he is not holding back anything of consequence.

The memoir opens after Louanne has died of lung cancer and the extreme debilitation brought on by decades of drinking and smoking. Her son finds himself wanting a new bed for his New York apartment, and so begins a comedy of purchases and returns, a parade of mattresses each more luxurious than the last, but none that meets his increasingly impossible standards.

It is not a bed he wants, it is a refuge. And he realizes he is wrestling with a primal fear that within the mattress lies his mother, dragging him down and enveloping him as she did in life. As his obsession with the perfect bed becomes more florid, he tells us his family's history and how he functioned when his father, after an affair, had divorced his mother, only to remarry her and then divorce her again.

"I became my mother's confidant," he explains, to us and to himself. "In doing so, I became her true husband, the man both like and unlike other men. And, in becoming these things, I became sick."

Later, she tells him they are "fundamentally alike in our alienation from the noncreative world. 'We don't need to worry about what other people think, Don,' she might say. And, she might add, 'We don't fit in.' "

Antrim takes us on a roundabout journey to places they lived but never quite fit in — Florida, the Blue Ridge area of Virginia, North Carolina — and introduces other family members, including his sister, his college professor father and his grandparents.

We also meet his Uncle Eldridge, another heavy drinker and a classic case of arrested development who lived with his mom and kept a trunk full of sports equipment and other manly toys in his car. Both a mentor and mystery to his nephew, he at last goes too far in a wrestling match whose import leaves the reader stunned.

But these are minor characters compared to the lost yet ever-alluring Louanne, whose rages and rampages terrify her son even as they bind him to her. His is an astounding ambivalence.

As she lies dying in her parents' old home in North Carolina, he flies to her side, yet even as he takes care of her, he becomes convinced she has hidden her father's final will, the better to cheat him and his sister out of a portion of their inheritance.

Obsession and love, betrayal and forgiveness, all are unflinchingly described. The story is exquisitely told, an heroic, revelatory journey. Antrim's rebuke and tribute to this impossible woman reads like a love letter — and hurts like a bereft child's wail.

Carole Goldberg is books editor

of the Hartford Courant.