Reviewed by Jessica Allen
6.28.07

As part of the publicity heralding the publication of The Afterlife: A Memoir in hardcover, Donald Antrim participated in a reading at the 92nd Street Y with his friend Jonathan Franzen, who also had a memoir, The Discomfort Zone, coming out in fall 2006. All night, Antrim played the straight man to Franzen’s giddier self: sternly staring ahead or hugging himself while Franzen threw his suit jacket on the floor and made jokes. But when it came time to answer a question about their friendship, Antrim movingly described the way Franzen has helped him “stay up with” writing—or manage to stay buoyant and hopeful despite the overwhelming challenges of the writer’s life.

Antrim’s prose is almost as solemn as his persona at the 92nd Y. However, The Afterlife is also suffused with dark comedy as he recalls coming of age among alcoholics and adulterers. Antrim describes himself as an anxious child who took long walks and logged long hours in the family pool, using scuba equipment to keep himself weighted to the bottom. (No wonder he needed Franzen’s help later on keeping his spirits afloat).

As an adult, Antrim feels most comfortable shielding his sensitive core with a thick layer of sarcasm. “Suffice it to say that there is no end to the crazy [family] stories,” he explains, “many of which I have already used too many times as opening gambits on dates.”

The stories certainly bear repeating. Antrim’s paternal grandfather and great uncle, best known for their slow driving, once purchased an entire lot of plaster birdbaths and statues, the kind sold to “migrants and retirees with delusions of grandeur.” Together, the brothers then “plowed through the statuary at a remarkably low velocity, destroying every one.” One grandmother went in search of the love of her life, sixty years after they parted and a year after he died. As a teenager, Antrim escaped by visiting a beloved uncle, who traveled with “pieces of the life [they] desired” in his car, including sports equipment, a portable record player, copies of Penthouse, stamps, English Leather cologne, and a .22 pistol. This same uncle also developed an individual nutritional philosophy: eating the same entrée every day for a month, he argued, meant that in a year “he got a balanced diet.” Meanwhile, Antrim’s parents divorced, remarried, and divorced again, constantly moving Antrim and his kid sister from house to house across the South.

Yet even as he writes about the time a family friend became convinced that a painting spied long ago in a Chelsea boarding house was actually a lost Leonardo da Vinci, Antrim is really narrating a much larger story, the one that holds answers and antidotes to his peculiarities, about life with his mother, Louanne, who died of lung cancer in 2000. The effect is simultaneously hilarious and heartbreaking.

Though a skilled costumer, Louanne’s real talent was “operatically suicidal” drinking. She also possessed the “power to force away the people she loved.” One Christmas Eve, Louanne got so drunk she crashed into the tree in the small hours. More regularly, she would stand in the doorway to Antrim’s room to enumerate the ways he had disappointed her. After she sobered up through Alcoholics Anonymous, Louanne asked Antrim to talk about these tough times, then accused him of sabotaging her “serenity.” She eventually opened a store called Peace Goods to sell her creations, such as a kimono whose tassels, patches, ribbons, motifs, and wings take Antrim a full four pages to describe.

The retelling of his stories lets Antrim explore “what it means to feel—or imagine feeling—the silent presence of someone who has died.” In the book’s most moving vignette, Antrim describes trying to buy a deluxe bed shortly after Louanne’s death. But, thousands of dollars later, where he expected to find freedom, he found genuine grief instead; his surprise haunts the book as much as Louanne does. “I feel too much,” he tells the salesman as he returns yet another bed. Antrim has realized that the past is never really past, to paraphrase another southern writer. But, as Antrim’s memoir reveals, he doesn’t necessarily want it to be either.