At a loss

With its mix of superb writing and uncut devastation, Donald Antrim’s The Afterlife is poised to give Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking a run for its money. An account of Antrim’s grief following the death of his “operatically suicidal” mother, Louanne, the book, like Didion’s, meditates on the near insanity that accom-panies mourning. Starting with a vivid descrip-tion of Louanne’s death from lung cancer, Antrim revisits key moments from their life together, drawing on recollections of his childhood to evoke a vital familial bond that seems to only strengthen after death.

Memoir isn’t an obvious mode for Antrim. He’s best known as the author of eccentric novels such as The Verificationist, in which a man goes to a restaurant, suffers something akin to a panic attack and has an out-of-body experience that lasts for the majority of the book. “In fiction, there is a certain kind of freedom,” Antrim, 47, says from his home in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “Here, with The Afterlife, there are obvious boundaries determined by aspects of memory.” But the author clearly uses his gifts as a novelist to give The Afterlife its multilayered feel; rather than aiming for a journalistic account, Antrim explores the trickiness of his recollections, allow-ing escalating emotions to color his narrative.

Antrim didn’t set out to write this book, which evolved out of a series of personal essays he wrote for The New Yorker. “I learned as I wrote—about her and the life we had together,” he says. “With each piece, I had a greater respect, admiration and love for her.” This is all the more remarkable because Louanne is not easy to love. A blistering alco-holic, she terrorizes her children and husband—a man she marries and divorces twice. The book prods this unpleasant past, as Antrim looks for glimpses that might bring him closer to understanding his mother’s destructive life.

Each part centers on a totem of sorts—a bed, or rather his unending search for a bed, is the subject of the first piece, and another focuses on his mother’s handmade kimono, which manages to be both frighteningly hideous and lovely at the same time, much like the portrait Antrim creates of his mother.

“It is my way of searching for her after death,” Antrim says. It seems he has found her.  

The Afterlife (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $21) is out May 30.