Overview
A literary fantasia chronicling one man's quest to understand his father and himself—a comic, psychedelic novel from the award-winning author of The Hundred Brothers
Lost in the house he grew up in, haunted by the ghost of his younger sister and his strange, cruel parents, and with the love of his life, Paula, zipping around town in a sportscar with the man she left him for, our narrator, Donald Antrim, is feeling unmoored—bordering on undone. It’s time, he decides, to embark on a project that will allow him to understand his late father and himself, to figure out what went wrong with his relationship, and to maybe pull himself out of his misery: he sets out to write a book on everything that his father, H.T. Antrim, an amateur cobbler and autodidact scholar of T.S. Eliot, stood for, and why it was wrong. “Nothing more nor less,” Donald says, “than a kind of anguished expression of mortification—an ejaculation of rage—at the terrible enormity of the old man.”
That is, if his nightly hallucinatory jaunts through the forest around his house don’t get the better of him. Instead of writing his book, Donald spends his time with the technicolor trees, talking to a possum named Tom, pursuing the phantom of a little boy, and trying to win back his beloved Paula. Because when there’s a magical new drug to be smoked, an enchanted wood, and a witch just down the road, who can focus on trying to describe the beauty and torment of life in words?
Delirious, haunting, moving—and presided over by the ghost of T.S. Eliot—Antrim’s novel, his first in more than twenty years, offers something beyond resolution or escape: the knowledge that past even the darkest despair is the promise of transcendence to an existence far stranger and more magnificent than our own.
Lost in the house he grew up in, haunted by the ghost of his younger sister and his strange, cruel parents, and with the love of his life, Paula, zipping around town in a sportscar with the man she left him for, our narrator, Donald Antrim, is feeling unmoored—bordering on undone. It’s time, he decides, to embark on a project that will allow him to understand his late father and himself, to figure out what went wrong with his relationship, and to maybe pull himself out of his misery: he sets out to write a book on everything that his father, H.T. Antrim, an amateur cobbler and autodidact scholar of T.S. Eliot, stood for, and why it was wrong. “Nothing more nor less,” Donald says, “than a kind of anguished expression of mortification—an ejaculation of rage—at the terrible enormity of the old man.”
That is, if his nightly hallucinatory jaunts through the forest around his house don’t get the better of him. Instead of writing his book, Donald spends his time with the technicolor trees, talking to a possum named Tom, pursuing the phantom of a little boy, and trying to win back his beloved Paula. Because when there’s a magical new drug to be smoked, an enchanted wood, and a witch just down the road, who can focus on trying to describe the beauty and torment of life in words?
Delirious, haunting, moving—and presided over by the ghost of T.S. Eliot—Antrim’s novel, his first in more than twenty years, offers something beyond resolution or escape: the knowledge that past even the darkest despair is the promise of transcendence to an existence far stranger and more magnificent than our own.
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