WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 27 , 2021. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE C3
book world
Literary Calendar
FRIDAY | N OON Roger Luckhurst discusses “Gothic: An Illustrated History” streamed through P&P Live, politics-prose.com/events. Fre e.
‘The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois’
Three gifted narrators deliver
Honoree Fanonne Jeffers’s powerful
debut novel, a work that carves out of a
great slice of American history and
furnishes it with the stories of the
Native Americans, enslaved and free
Blacks and Euro-Americans who make
up a complex bloodline. (A much
appreciated PDF of this family tree is
included with the download.) Prentice
Onayemi reads passages from W.E.B. Du
Bois’s work in deep, resonant tones,
reflecting the epic nature of a novel that
runs from the 18th century into the
present. Karen Chilton takes on the
chapters devoted to the deep past, called
“songs” after Du Bois’s invocation of the
sorrow songs of Black people lost to
history except for their elegies. Chilton’s
sonorous voice carries with it the
perseverance and anguish of the
dispossessed, disenfranchised and
violated. Adenrele Ojo narrates the
sections devoted to Ailey Garfield a
woman whose l ife and point of view
dominate the book; Ojo’s voice evolves
effortlessly along with her character.
This is an exceptional, absolutely
transfixing audio version of a
monumental work. ( HarperAudio,
Unabridged, 29^3 / 4 hours)‘Apples Never Fall’
Like all Liane Moriarty’s novels,
“Apples Never Fall” is something of a
guilty pleasure. Say what you will about
these “light” books, the characters in
them are psychologically shrewd and
very entertaining. In this case, Joy and
Stan Delaney have sold their successful
tennis academy, leaving them with a
dissatisfying retirement. Now Joy has
vanished from their Sydney home
without a word to her husband or their
four adult children. More troubling, she
left behind her phone and the
reverberations of an argument with
Stan. And what of the strange girl with a
bloody eye who came knocking at the
Delaney’s door late at night some
months ago? She stayed for weeks,
cosseted by the couple — but now she
too is nowhere to be found. Clues are
everywhere, but it takes all 18 hours for
them to snap beautifully together.
Australian actor Caroline Lee, a talented
narrator of many of Moriarty’s novels,
delivers this one with her customary
Aussie panache and pronunciation, both
of which stick in your brain long after
you’ve finished listening. (Macmillan,
Unabridged, 18 hours)‘American Republics: A Continental
History of the United St ates,
1783-1850’
Alan Taylor’s superb history shows in
fascinating, disheartening detail that,
before the Civil War, the United States
was united in little beyond its name. The
union’s preservation depended to an
extent on external threats — t he British,
French and Spanish empires — but more
crucially on expansion. More precisely,
Taylor shows, it was maintained by
invasions and expropriations, especially
of the lands of Native peoples, but also
of territory already subjugated by
Europeans. Indeed, as Taylor notes, the
Mexican War of 1846 — 48 prepared
officers to fight the Civil War. The work
makes a highly engaging if devastating
audiobook. Under constant threat of
secession from this or that region, the
country traveled along a path of
carnage, duplicitous treaties, removals
and dispossessions, forging of racist
laws and the relentless spread of White
settlers. Narrator Graham Winton
delivers the saga handsomely in a
comfortably paced, sandy-textured
voice. Further, he is a master of the
difficult art of differentiating quoted
passages from the general narrative
without sounding cloggy. This is a
magnificent, highly corrective history of
this still splintering nation. (Recorded
Books, Unabridged, 143 / 4 hours)
[email protected]Katherine A. Powers reviews audiobooks
every month for The Washington Post.AUDIOBOOKSby Katherine A. Powerseverywhere, but also nowhere.”
U pon entering the hospital, Antrim’s
life was circumscribed by encounters with
therapists and a regime of heavy medica-
tions — “Trazodone, Ativan, Seroquel,
nortriptyline, and chloral hydrate.” On
top of the pain, Antrim experienced deep
shame, desperate loneliness and a fear
that he had lost everything. “One Friday in
April” captures his agitated mind; it is
seldom linear and sequential. It shunts
back and forth in time amid a wide cast of
characters. Although barely more than
130 pages long, the book illuminates far-
flung branches of Antrim’s family tree. He
sketches his maternal grandmother who
subjected his mother to Munchausen syn-BY MICHAEL MEWSHAWOn the April day that gives Donald
Antrim’s book its title, the novelist had to
be coaxed off a fire escape. “I was there to
die,” he writes in a v ivid memoir whose
existence — and subtitle, “A Story of Sui-
cide and Survival” — prove that his goal
was thankfully thwarted. Antrim, a M ac-
Arthur “genius” grant winner whose
books include “Elect Mr. Robinson for a
Better World” and “The Hundred Broth-
ers,” checked himself into a h ospital in
2006 and found enough composure to
write this bracing memoir about his ex-
perience.
“One Friday in April” is a heart-rending
and edifying portrait of the pain of mental
illness. “The word ‘depression’ is inad-
equate,” he writes, citing William Styron,
who made that insight in his 1990 memoir
“Darkness Visible.” Antrim calls his condi-
tion “a disease of the body and the brain”;
he describes his harrowing feeling of be-
ing simultaneously frantic and worn out:
“The pain seemed to come from my skin
and my muscles and my joints and my
bones. But when I touched myself, I
couldn’t find a source. I felt like I hurt
drome by proxy and persuaded compliant
doctors to perform multiple, unnecessary
surgeries. He recalls Uncle Eldridge, a
figure from his earlier memoir, “The Af-
terlife,” who before dying of alcohol poi-
soning pinned the child Donald to a bed.
“The Afterlife” explored Antrim’s com-
plicated relationship with his family, his
mother in pa rticular. That book — and
this one — w ere particularly intriguing to
me, someone who has known the family
for years. Antrim’s father, Harry, was my
dissertation director at the University of
Virginia and remained a friend for 40
years. Harry was married to Louanne,
then he divorced her, remarried her and
divorced her again. The two of them were
heavy drinkers, but while alcohol deep-
ened Harry’s detachment — I have an
indelible image of him dressed in an ascot,
mixing martinis — it exaggerated
Louanne’s theatrical nature to the point
where magnificence blurred into mad-
ness. Eccentric, then altogether addled,
she designed flamboyant clothing that
astonished people in the street and fright-
ened her son. I n “The Afterlife,” Antrim
remarked: “I became my mother’s confi-
dant. In doing so, I became her truehusband, the man both like and unlike
other men. And in becoming these things,
I became sick.” As a sequel, “One Friday in
April” shows just how sick Donald Antrim
became and how his illness was prompted
in part by guilt over what he wrote about
his mother.
Sadly pills never completely worked,
nor did talk therapy. When doctors sug-
gested electroconvulsive treatment,
Antrim recoiled, viewing this as the end of
the line. But then he received a call from
novelist David Foster Wallace who at the
suggestion of a m utual unnamed friend
recommended ECT. (In a s ad irony, Wal-
lace would die by suicide in 2008). Multi-
ple treatments seemed to have stabilized
Antrim. One hopes the effects are lasting.
For Antrim’s life, like his work, is a high-
wire search for perfection. And as poet
Paul Valéry commented, “We cross the
idea of perfection the way a h and, with
impunity, crosses a flame; but you cannot
live inside the flame.”
[email protected]Michael Mewshaw is the author of 22 books.
He is currently finishing a memoir about his
friendship with Graham Greene.ONE DAY IN
APRIL
A Story of
Suicide and
Survival
By Donald
Antrim
W.W. Norton.
144 pp. $25Donald Antrim’s unvarnished portrait of suicidal thinking
banshee, but cannot get comfortable
with being one, am always swinging from
bansheeism to playacting sweetness and
back. The truth is I cannot play nice and
don’t want to, but want to want to, some
days.” With such naked honesty, Watkins
provides a perfect articulation of her
mutinous thoughts, the unresolvable ten-
sion between what she feels and what she
knows is expected of her.
And then she develops cysts that mu-
tate into a row of teeth in her vagina.
Who is this woman?
That quickly becomes an impossibly
complicated question because Watkins
has written a novel about a novelist
named Claire Vaye Watkins. Some of the
most bizarre details here are, in fact,
historically true. Watkins’s father really
was Charles Manson’s right-hand man,
and Claire really did emerge from the
Mojave Desert to publish an acclaimed
short story collection in 2012. As the
narrator says, “I went from being raised
by a pack of coyotes to a fellowship at
Princeton.”
That person who appears at every
bookstore event in the world to ask, “How
much of this story is based on your own
life?” will finally be justified.
But this isn’t just a super-sophisticated
game of autofiction. The unusual method
of “I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness”
— its illicit mingling of fact and fiction —BOOK WORLD FROM C1 serves as a surprisingly effective repre-
sentation of what it’s like, for some wom-
en, to be handed a newborn. “Mother-
hood had cracked me in half,” Watkins
writes. “My self as a mother and my self as
not were two different people, distinct.”
With her usual sardonic wit, she notes
that the solution to her crisis is easy: “If I
stopped breastfeeding and started meds
and kept going to therapy and called my
sister every day and journaled and beed a
lizard at hot yoga four or more nights a
week and took a lover or two, I would be
okay — would survive my child’s first
winter.”
But instead of doing any of those
things, early in the novel, Claire leaves
her husband and baby in Ann Arbor,
Mich., to do a few author events in Reno,
Nev., not far from where she grew up. The
two-day business trip gives her a moment
to reflect on her status as “an overweight
and deeply ambivalent mother, a wun-
derkind burnout rethinking her impres-
sive career, a white trash orphan spend-
ing her bourgeois salary with haste, deep-
ly distracted by various dalliances about
town and a serious so-called ‘emotional
affair.’ ”
This brief trip also plunges her into
memories of her late parents and their
old desert ranch. The novel’s elastic
structure expands to include the story of
her father as a young man, procuring
girls for the Manson clan. And we read
lots of letters that her mother wrote as abright, hopeful teenager. Their experi-
ences — so very different from the narra-
tor’s — fi ll out the spectrum of possibili-
ties, the strange way a life gets redirected
by the interplay of temperament, circum-
stance and fate.
In a m oment of panic, Claire decides
not to fly back to her husband and baby in
Ann Arbor. “I wanted to behave like a
man,” she admits, “a slightly bad one.”
She reconnects with school friends; she
has an affair with a sexy biologist. But if
this is a fantasy, it’s a f antasy compro-
mised by her awareness of how she’s
affecting her husband and baby. “My
problem is I can’t figure out how sorry to
be for the way I’ve been,” she says. “I’m
either a little sorry, very sorry, or not at all
sorry.” More than 60 years after John
Updike’s “Rabbit, Run,” the costs of aban-
donment are still starkly different for
new mothers and new fathers.
It’s no coincidence that much of this
story takes place in the American desert,
a territory that burns away ornament and
affectation. Here, on the terrain where
she began, Claire sloughs off the skin of a
life that doesn’t fit her and begins to
discover one that might. It’s a p ainful
transformation, but utterly captivating to
witness.
[email protected]Ron Charles writes about books for The
Washington Post and hosts
TotallyHipVideoBookReview.com.A new mom decides ‘to behave
like a man, a slightly bad one’
ALLA DREYVITSER/
THE WASHINGTON POST