Honor thy mother

LET me admit right off that I know Donald Antrim. Or to be precise, I know his father, Harry, and I knew his mother, Louanne. Although I haven’t seen Antrim more than twice in the last three decades, I’ve followed his literary career with that mixture of perplexity, envy and admiration that many an older writer feels for a young man whose work sets a distinctive course and is enthusiastically received. Though his novels “Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World,” “The Hundred Brothers” and “The Verificationist” are too surreal and whimsical for my taste, Antrim has an original voice and a quirky take on contemporary life.

Several years ago, when he began publishing reminiscences about his family in the New Yorker, his writing veered off in a direction that the enameled surfaces of his fiction in no way led me to expect. This element of unexpectedness not only broke with his earlier work, it also forced me to revise my picture of the past and of my place in that time. At the University of Virginia, Donald’s father was the director of my doctoral dissertation and an examiner for my doctoral orals. More crucially, he encouraged my fiction writing and, along with his wife, served as my surrogate family. That Antrim grew up feeling that his struggle for intellectual and artistic realization put him at odds with his parents provokes astonishment in me but not disbelief. As a parent myself, I’ve come to understand that a father’s place in his son’s life is invariably to be in the wrong.

In synopsis, Antrim’s story may sound unprepossessing, particularly compared with the lurid memoirs of epic addiction, sexual extravagance and criminal high jinks that now dominate talk shows and bestseller lists. Essentially, Antrim circles and recircles a single theme: “My mother and me, my mother in me.” In loosely connected episodes, he recalls how his parents’ marriage fell apart; how his mother sank into alcoholism, regained her sobriety (if not all of her sanity) and died of cancer; and how these events shaped him.

“It had been my impossible and defining task,” Antrim writes, “to be both like and unlike all other men -- more specifically, like and unlike her father and her errant, excommunicated ex-husband, my father.... And in becoming these things, I became sick.”

Not so sick, however, as to lose his gimlet-eyed objectivity and unflinching candor. More remarkably, Antrim never loses his sense of humor. His memories of Louanne’s most obstreperous outbursts manage to couple bleak comedy with pathos, and the picture he presents of himself shimmers with deprecating hilarity.

After his mother’s funeral, he embarks on a manic shopping spree, intent on buying a bed that will provide the best sleep, the best sex and the quickest release from his grief. What he finds instead is a succession of unsatisfactory mattresses, ranging in price from several hundred to $7,000, all of them reminding him of what he’s lost, what he has never had and what he won’t ever get again.

Antrim admits to being a momma’s boy, but he’s not without affection and sympathy for his father. As difficult as it is to have an alcoholic, unstable mother, he acknowledges that it was also hard for Harry. He’s an astute chronicler of what poet Nick Flynn refers to as the “father figurines” that influence a lonely boy’s life. In addition to touching portraits of his paternal and maternal grandfathers, he recounts his relationship with his uncle Eldridge, who was also known as Bob and Sam. As befits a man who answers to three names, Eldridge is a mist of confusions, a self-destructive alcoholic who might strike an adolescent as a romantic rebel, a fellow who presents himself to the world as a playboy and free spirit.

Yet there comes a night when Eldridge shoves Donald into bed and collapses on top of him. Neither the author nor the reader can say for sure whether his uncle is making a sexual overture or just blacking out. In marvelous understatement, Antrim takes stock of the situation and of the “drunk in his underwear” who has him pinned down. He concludes that, as “I felt the dead weight ... my feelings about him and his way of life changed.” That this scene succeeds in being both funny and appalling is a good measure of Antrim’s gifts.

Nothing is sadder and simultaneously more amusing, however, than his tormented attempts to show his mother as she was in all her startling magnificence and exuberant madness. An accomplished clothing designer, Louanne took toward the end of her life to creating ensembles that might have passed as art masterpieces, but which frightened her son -- not to mention passersby -- and made him afraid for her.

One kimono was bedizened with jewels and garlanded with ribbons, feathers, sachets, a cat applique over her heart and insect antennae that stuck up behind her head. When she wore it in public, the kimono had the “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.”

As an evocation of a complicated mother, these passages about Louanne and her kimono of many colors have a vividness and warmth worthy of Charles Dickens. As a depiction of a sometimes troubled, always generous and often funny woman whom I knew well, they are dead accurate and deeply moving. They call to mind an evening when, after a fine dinner and too much to drink, Louanne whispered that she knew I was born to be a writer, and I gulped, “Yes, ma’am.” As “The Afterlife” suggests without surrendering to mawkish sentimentality, the woman who carries us inside her for nine months remains inside us, for good or bad, for the rest of our lives. For Antrim, his role as witness and teller of a tale of death ends up paradoxically enabling his mother to live forever.