Donald Antrim

Not what I was expecting having previously read only Elect Mr Robinson for a Better World, but these stories make sense when you realise all seven were published in the New Yorker. With one exception they’re about educated, middle-aged, more or less ridiculous Manhattanites processing their neuroses in public and in private. But if that sounds horrible, Antrim imbues his creations with enough humanity to make you laugh at them, cheer for them, and condole with them. Like the subject of Another Manhattan who lands himself with a $300 florist’s bill he can’t pay on the way to dinner with his wife and the couple they’re having unsatisfactory affairs with, or the buffoonish lawyer navigating an awful book launch party while trying to get over his very-much-ex.

A three- or maybe four-star set of six, if you like that sort of thing. But about that one exception, the title story here. It’s been a long time since I put a book down and just exhaled. Simply one of the best short stories I’ve ever read. Antrim packs so much into twenty pages, mingling the interior world of his character with the chain of events he finds himself swept along with. Driving into the country to throw out his ex’s art, he slides off the road, drives along a creek as a storm starts, is mistaken for a country doctor, visits a dying woman’s bedside, tries to help, while remembering his first sex, his first love, his shock treatment for depression, a luminous trip to Italy. It’s about trauma, death, regret, nostalgia, and bumbling through it all as best you can, and it’s beautiful, its sentences vibrating and shining like filaments in a web — full of incidents and connections that are amazing and somehow entirely real and — holy shit, just read the damn thing!… (more)

This is not one for the downhearted; it's quite depressing and the uplift at the end is more of a "well, maybe, for now." Antrim, a fairly successful writer, begins by describing in detail a night in 2006 spent on the roof of his apartment building, hanging from the fire escape, trying to decide whether or not to let go. This incident leads to a series of hospitalizations, therapy, clinical trials, and, after initial resistance, a course of ECT ("shock treatment"). Ironically, it was a phone call from the celebrated David Foster Wallace--an author that Antrim admired but with whom he had only slight acquaintance--that persuaded him to give ECT a go. Wallace himself committed suicide in 2008. Antrim details his "recovery" (or "recoveries"), each inevitably followed by another setback. Resisting the diagnosis of "depression," he proposes that the inclination towards suicide is a condition in itself, perhaps kicked off by childhood experiences but not subject to the usual treatments for depression. Antrim's parents were both alcoholic, and both were also abusers; his beloved mother took her rage at her husband out on her son. At the time of his suicide attempt, lost in grief but with mixed feeling about her death, he was working on a a memoir of his mother. It's no surprise that Antrim's relationships with women were, for the most part, unsuccessful. Although he appears to be in a goo relationship at the memoir's end, one can't help but wonder for how long.

Antrim's memoir is an honest one, holding nothing back. One Friday in April has been well received and compared to William Styron's Darkness Visible. It's a difficult book to say one "enjoyed" reading, but Antrim's insights were illuminating.… (more)