Monday, February 19, 2007

The Afterlife by Donald Antrim. Farrar Straus Giroux. 193 pages.

In his last novel, the brilliant and brainy dark comedy The Verificationist, Donald Antrim' told the story of Tom, an infantile psychoanalyst who escapes from the pressures of adult life by having an out of body experience during a pancake dinner with his peers. The book was a hilarious, imaginative and rather mad journey through life, desire, ambition, art and finally death; an ornate, flawless Freudian yarn.

Antrim passes through all those way stations in his new book, too, only this time he isn't kidding, or at least not much. The Afterlife is a love-hate memoir of life with and without his mother, Louanne, a frustrated artist who died of cancer in 2000 after a lifetime of alcohol, cigarettes, men and dreams that never quite took off.

In death as in life, Louanne remains for her son an inspiration, terror and burden. Antrim is a droll, Proustian rambler; one memory sparks another, and at times he seems to be looking for tangents where he can step off, empty spaces that he can explore and color in. Along the way, he chews through all the complex unresolved love and hate issues one can have for an obnoxious, beautiful, inspiring selfish and driven mother, and he succeeds about half the time in keeping the book on an even keel.

Ultimately, it becomes an extended session of self-administered psychotherapy that ends the way a lot of such sessions do, with the patient curled up in a fetal ball on the floor, talking mostly to himself -- not a little like Tom.

"I could not imagine life without my mother," he writes. "And it was true as well that only without her would I feel able to live."

As a person, Louanne comes off as a person trapped by her own limitations and delusions, but one best pitied at a distance: "Her power to drive people away was staggering. She behaved spitefully and was divisive in her short-lived relationships with the similarly disenfranchised people who became her friends."

Antrim is very good in describing life with an alcoholic parent, and how reality becomes a liability "in a situation in which reality is inadmissible -- or, rather, in a situation in which people's feelings and hunches, their hungers and appetites, serve as reality."

This also becomes the kind of reality a child learns to accept.

"When you are, as I was -- and as I am -- the anxious child of a volatile, childlike mother, you learn how to appear to accept, as realistic and viable, statements and opinions that are clearly ludicrous."

Louanne's life wasn't a complete disaster. Despite her vices, she is also a well-educated teacher -- with a Ph.D. from Florida State in Home Economics -- and a fashion designer whose bizarre clothes are either ugly as hell or several eons ahead of their times. Antrim, depending on his mood, can see it either way. Visiting Louanne not long before she is diagnosed with cancer, "it crossed my mind that she was a crazy person wearing crazy clothes of her own crazy design, with a crazy person's hairdo atop a head brimming with strange hallucinations in which she conversed with a crew of spirits that included the virgin Mary and Jesus himself."

Or maybe it's the craziness of sheer genius; maybe Louanne's major creation, a "butterfly kimono" with a variety of oddly-placed patches and tableaux, is in fact as deeply personal a portrait as any artist ever made: "The power of my mother's robe is the power that was strongest in her at the end of her life. This was her power to force away the people she loved. There is beauty in the robe, as there was beauty in my mother, who, when young, was lively and playful and striking to look at, and who even in her worst sickness never lost her ability to laugh. But it is likely, for a person newly confronted with her kimono, that the naked innocence it reveals will defy empathy."

The story of a parent's death is, at least in part, a writer's own biography -- a writer whose life is determined not just by who his parents are but by who they were, before we knew them. Antrim captures this much perfectly: "Our parents' lives before we are born take place in a kind of mythic realm, a realm of the imagination, and our mothers' and fathers' power to shape and reinterpret our lives, to tell us who we are, even in our adulthood, requires our understanding that, because they inhabited mythic time, and because their existence has brought about our own, they remain for us immortal and all-seeing, just as they were when we were too young to survive without them."

Louanne had always wanted her son to dedicate a book to her; this book, part tribute and part exorcism, is the result. But if the book gives Antrim closure, it gives the reader something less. There's a limit to how much mileage you can get out of your own suffering, and what begins as a sympathetic, objective and revealing appraisal eventually gives way to the kind of self-absorption and self-pity that shrinks the reading experience rather than enlarges it. The book loses its focus; it becomes less about Louanne than about her neurotic son. What Antrim delivers is as patchy as Louanne's kimono -- a lot of pieces, some marked strange, fascinating or formidable, that don't make up a memorable whole.

Of course, it's worth noting that most of us never really resolve our relationships with parents, especially ones as close and as complicated as the one described here, so it's worth cutting Antrim some slack. Still, you can't help but wish for more, wish he had dug deeper, wish that he had held off delivering this book until the central relationship of his life had yielded up something more revealing.