Thursday, June 01, 2006

Time Out Chicago; Book Review; Afterlife

Review by: Gretchen Kalwinski

This is not your typical memoir: Each of Antrim’s stylistically unconventional essays, originally published in The New Yorker, revolves around an image or object that spurs memories of his dysfunctional family: a landscape painting, an expensive bed on which Antrim is unable to sleep because he’s convinced it’s “alive with my mother…pulling me down into the bed to die with her.”

His alcoholic mother, Louanne, was both anchor and burden to her family, forever drawing them to her and pushing them away, even to the extent of twice marrying and divorcing Antrim’s father. The book is lush with the details of how alcoholism and other dysfunctions (e.g., depression, affairs) leave their imprint on families. “Grandiose hopes and dreams” were, Antrim writes, “the story of my alcoholic family.”

As Antrim self-deprecatingly examines how the past affects his present, the scenes with Louanne’s blackouts, guilt trips and assertions of her artistic merit (as an avant-garde seamstress) emerge as the most engaging, even while the spine chills at her misguided “image of herself as a heroine on a journey.” Antrim’s storytelling skills are undeniable: He ripples outward from themes into darkly humorous insights on kin, work and addiction, always returning to his premise with heavier baggage.

The patchwork chronology provides no distinct time line as a guide, and the order of events is perplexing; readers are obliged to piece together the puzzle of Antrim’s life themselves. Yet what the chapters lack in narrative momentum, they make up in thoughtful, cynical, deeply felt revelations. —GK