A Death in The Family.

THE MEMOIR GENRE HAS TAKEN a beating lately, which is just one reason to celebrate Donald Antrim's stunning new book, "The Afterlife." Antrim, the author of three praised novels, writes principally about his mother here, a terrifying alcoholic who, even when she finally got sober, was hostile, unhinged and convinced she was an artistic visionary. Antrim starts at what would ordinarily be the ending: her death in a dismal little house in North Carolina. Afterward, he returns to his New York writer's life and decides to buy a new bed for his apartment--a fresh start. Tossing and turning one night on a plush new mattress, he imagines his dead mother reaching up from inside it to pull him down, like a skeleton in a horror movie.

Antrim's an elegantly spare writer, who paints harrowing scenes of his broken family (his parents split, remarried each other, divorced again) during his Southern childhood in the '60s and '70s. He doesn't create a conventional narrative but rather conveys the workings of memory--its winding, digressive paths, its shifts from clarity to shadow, its conflicting emotional truths. Once, when his mother was trying to stay sober, they spent some quiet days with his grandparents, and Antrim plaintively writes, "Would it be wrong to remember those as happy times?" No, not wrong, of course. Just heartbreaking.

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): MEMORIES ARE MADE OF THIS: The author

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By Cathleen McGuigan