Antrim has turned, in his nonfiction, toward a reckoning with the complicated grief brought on by the loss of a complicated parent. The seven chapters of "The Afterlife" are dominated by his mother, Louanne, who married and separated from Antrim's father twice and died of lung cancer in 2000. Her alcoholism, her smoking, her emotional volatility, her needy, proud, eccentric temperament — these all add up to a legacy that challenges Antrim's impulses toward clarity, irony and reserve.Read more from The New York Times Book Review
