Customer Reviews

The Afterlife: A Memoir

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Consisting of seven eloquent autobiographical essays, many featured in The New Yorker, The Afterlife is Antrim's stunning chronicle of his tormented relationship with his mother, a pseudo mystic, parnanoid, often manic alcoholic who believed that she and her son, Donald, were creative avatars in a world of philistines. Antrim describes how inextricably connected he is to his mother even in her death and my favorite episode is how after his mother dies he embarks on a chimerical quest for the Ultimate Bed. He obsesses over "coil counts," pillow tops, top-of-the-line beds that are called "sleep systems." Clearly, the bed becomes a metaphor for his contradictory relationship with his mother. The bed becomes the Womb, the Mother, the Crypt, Death, a New Life. The quest enlivens him but his eventual acquisition of The Bed (costing as much as a small car) results in despair. His anguish reminds me of a Kierkegaard proverb: "Fulfillment is in the wish."

What's amazing about this memoir, is if you were to tell someone that the book focuses on a man's guilt and torment for not being "supportive enough" as his mother faces death, you would have a tough sell. But the writing style, the irony, the layers of absurdity, and the scintillating anecdotage create surprising humor.

I bought this book, never having read anything by Antrim before, in an effort to understand my son's perspective on our relationship. I found it searing and exceptionally well written. The first few chapters seem so odd and quirky to me but even when it gets into more conventional memoir stuff it is completely without self pity or rancour.

As a recovering alcoholic, his description of his mother's descent into the pit of the disease was better than a meeting.

Very intelligent.

Antrim writes the best sentences of any writer now working: balanced, complex, digressive, surprising, dynamic, seemingly self-supporting (that is, existing for their own beauty and born of a unique inspiration that you too would follow if you had his gift for expression), but, as you find when you read on, what you thought were grace notes or jokes or just unforgettable and sheer oddball observations are in fact keenly plotted essentials subtly woven into the plot of the book. The style can sound with grand resonance--his prose is haunted by rhythms of great prose stylists like Thomas de Quincey and writers like Henry Green with an ear for both casual and telling dialogue--but his eye is contemporary and in the darkest of family scenarios both deeply felt and comic. With his great powers of observation he can move through landscapes you couldn't have seen--Florida coastal towns in the seventies, Black Mountain North Carolina in the final years of the past century--and see it so keenly that you can be tricked into thinking you grew up there too: this too is a function of his style, which can arrest your attention at key moments, the way Scorsese can move the camera so you never forget the shot.

The material here is of the darkest you can venture through--the broken legacy of artisty and alcoholism--and Antrim doesn't shy from any of its most painful moments. But for all that, the book is achingly light and filled with love however undeceived --silk out of pain. Read this book. It's one of the few that will speak to the ages of our age.

A charming and peculiar biography about a writer, his alcoholic and artistic mother, and the rest of the family that formed around them. Antrim uses a kind of stream-of-consciousness style much like our own memory works: he flits from remembering his mother's dying to buying an expensive queen-size bed, from his uncle's station wagon stuffed with fishing lures and Playboys to the nature of addiction and recovery. Wonderful and moving writing - experimental without being off-putting, heartfelt while still being intelligent.

Antrim's book is a simple and beautiful memorial to his mother. Difficult and challenging at times when he's relating the insanity behind her alcoholism and dysfunctional home life, but I like the way he delves into certain aspects of his mother's life and personality and comes away with an overall positive and uplifting portrait. A good example of how not to look at the bad side of a difficult childhood and find the glass half full when remembering stories from the past.

I thought, at first, that "The Afterlife" would be one of those memoirs of a dysfunctional childhood that, while dark and deeply disturbing, also provided humorous moments...ala "Running With Scissors". (I think, for some reason, that this impression came from the cover photo of the author's mother...smiling and looking down at the title of the book. But wait, isn't there some adage about a book and its cover...?)

"The Afterlife" dances right up to the humor line but never crosses. This section about his quest for a bed comes the closest:

"I saw the crated bed by the door. I saw the sunlight coming through the windows. I saw myself standing there seeing these things. I was a man whose need for love and sympathy had led him to telephone a Swedish executive in the middle of the morning. Perhaps, at some point, the story of my mother and the bed becomes the story of my mother and father, the story that remains to be told, the story, you could say, of the queen versus the king.

The bed went away. I let it go. R was right. I could get another bed later. I stood in my empty room. In place of the bed was - shame? In place of the bed was a question - a question that is at once too simple and too complicated to answer."

But in every memory, there is too much genuine pain, confusion and love behind the author's words to find these stories funny. The raw emotion, the way Antrim is still questioning every emotion or thought he has/had about his mother, comes through every line, almost every word. His life is still tied up in hers, and in the end of her life. He is still unable to clearly define their relationship. Were they mother and son, or was theirs a more Oedipal relationship, or were they similar artistic souls...or? He is very critical of her at times, being too embarrassed of her to go out in public together, and then will flip to the fiercest kind of protective love.

"And when in the deep of the night my mother came into my room swaying, half conscious and with grey smoke from her cigarette wreathing her face, shattered by bourbon and white wine; and when she raised her hand to strike, and I easily batted her arm back, then stepped forward and quickly steadied her before she tipped..."

and also, "You may learn, too, as a defense against the absurd disappointments caused by fragile and unhappy parents, the crude art of sarcasm."

and later, "I found myself repeatedly subjecting K. to antagonistic appraisals of my mother's cultivation of fantasy. When K. went along with my negative assessments, I turned the tables on her and rushed to my mother's defense."

One of my favorite aspects of the book was Antrim's acknowledgement of the vagaries of time and memory. So many things from our past seem so clear and indisputable...and yet when described to other people, those certainties start to break apart like a fragile web. He is constantly starting into a description of an event...and then second guessing himself...which for me, makes the memory all the more real. The past, tempered by time and by who we are in the present.

I liked, or certainly appreciated this book, but felt at times that it was too raw, too personal for me to be reading. Antrim's thoughts seem so real, so genuine...that I almost felt like I was trespassing in his mind. Any memory involving his mother invoked my pity, and empathy.

The book does, though, give glimpses of other relationships, ones that are easier to read, ones that have the gentle patina of time...not colored by pain.

"Nonetheless I was attracted by my grandfather's patience, by the care he took with this broken house. It wasn't that I suddenly understood the value in a job well done. Far from it. It was that for a moment - a romantic moment destined to resonate and grow in magnitude over the years - I hoped (and this may have been a fantasy that I wanted to have about the man) that my grandfather had something to pass on to me, to teach me."

At the end of the book, it is even clearer than at the beginning, that the author has not resolved his feeling towards his mother in the writing of this book. Far from it - the wellspring of emotion seems even stronger. I hope, for his sake, that further reflection or writing, helps.

"Near her life's close, I lost the fortitude, the ability, the heart to be with my mother. For a time, I referred to her, in thought and in conversation with others, not as my mother but as Louanne....In thinking of her as Louanne, I pretended to an objectivity of perspective that I did not, nor will ever, possess, and, in doing so, I pretended to myself that the coming loss of her would not hurt, and in the absence of suffering I would go forward, a free man."

Going back to old adages...one can only hope that the one about Time and old wounds proves true.

Albeit a sad story of a young man dealing with his alcoholic mother, the book is both interesting and well written . . . when Antrim sticks to the subject. Maybe I missed something, but who cares about his obsessive/compulsive bed buying disorder? I read it over a two day break at the beach.

Honestly, I should have been able to identify with this author. Both parents from Appalachia, with alcholism on both sides of my extended family. I spent some time in Miami as a youngster. And I grew up to be a professor! I thought that I should be able to identify with this character! But alas, that was not the case! Donald Antrim has got the be the most self absorbed person on the face of this earth. This story was painful to get through, not because of the depressing subject matter, but because of the monotony of the pathetic way in which he continued to NOT deal with it. Honestly, we all have our lot in life to deal with. He has obviously decided to continue to follow in the footsteps of those who raised him and NOT face up to the possibilities that life might hold for him. It is a shame. I find his writing mediocre at best. That he has been endowed with numerous awards for writing is beyond me. If this is representative of his best, it just leaves me thinking that surely there are more deserving writers out there.

In this troubled rendering of a tragic past, Antrim struggles to find peace with a life defined by the chaos of alcoholism. His early memories tainted with the unspoken, the author gradually reveals the true nature of his early family life, an alcoholic mother, a father diminished by his spouse's excesses, finally driven to divorce. In true dysfunctional fashion, the divorce is temporary; unable to resist the siren call of their unhealthy relationship, the parents remarry, only to separate again when their untended troubles resurface. For a time, the father visit his family on weekends, but even those deteriorate with Louanne's advancing disease. Antrim's role is family scapegoat, his younger sister the rescuer. Painfully recounting the brief alliances with family members over the ensuing years, at heart Don remains the object of his mother's affection and disdain, pulled into the role of man of the house, but derided for his failures in her drunken rages.

As an artist and writer, the creative Mrs. Antrim exists in a world of her own making, her children dragged through years of false hubris, delusions and paranoia, her health gradually declining. A sickly child, son bonds to mother in mutual illness, boundaries ignored in an advancing codependency that virtually cripples a young man searching for identity. This book is a valiant effort to make peace with the disease that tore apart the Antrim family and poisoned any chances at meaningful relationships. All the hallmarks of the disease are present in the author's recollections, the drunken rants, family fights, ritualized holidays designed to obscure the true extent of family disharmony. Perceptive and intuitive, the hyper-responsible son attempts to care for his failing mother, even after her sobriety and gradual decline after the onset of cancer.

No matter her son's thoughtful recollections, it is impossible to apply logic and empathy to this disease; Louanne Antrim remains a monster, unable, even in sobriety, to heal the breech between herself and her children or to make amends for the past without a willingness to admit the truth. To the end, she remains a grasping child and no amount of rationalization can alter that stark reality. It is only in the final pages that the author lays bare the continued chaos, the family fights, the violence, the constant moving from place to place, the desire to please a parent, to glue back together the fragile pieces of a broken life. In a painful revelation, Antrim admits, "My mother lived her life inviting death." Finally freed from the greedy tentacles of his mother's fatal disease, Antrim attempts peace with a harrowing past, exploring the damage of a wasted life. Fortunately, in the telling begins recovery. Luan Gaines/2007.

I just finished reading...I thought the author was too scattered. He went off in too many directions. I was disappointed. Would like to have had more details instead of his way out there ramblings.