The Afterlife

by Donald Antrim

Book Overview

From a fiercely intelligent writer (The New York Times) comes a wry, poignant story of the difficult love between a mother and a son. Antrim comes to terms with--and fails to comes to terms with--the nature of addiction and the broken states of loneliness, shame, and loss that remain beyond his power to fully repair.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374299617
• ISBN13: 9780374299613
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 195 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.6" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Filled with raw emotion

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 m

Poweful

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.

Beautifully written, deeply felt

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.

Metaphors for Mother

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.