News and Events
Donald Antrim in Sophie Kerr Reading Series
February 2001
Introductory remarks by Interim Lit House Director Melora Wolff
Donald Antrim's novels—fiercely imagined first person comic monologues—are delivered by frighteningly earnest guys in the grips of seductive breakdowns. They obsess over rituals of love and community improvement; they theorize about anarchy and varieties of torture and lovelessness; they pull us, squirming, in to their willful, neurotic embrace. After all, they are lovable.
There's Pete, idealistic 3rd grade schoolteacher and student of torture devices of The Inquisition in Elect Mr. Robinson for A Better World; Doug, the much put upon amateur genealogist and shoe fetishist in The Hundred Brothers; and Tom, psycho analyst, pancake lover and out of body voyeur in The Verificationist. They may shock us with their compulsions and crimes, amuse us with their gross errors of judgement, but in the end, floating further and further from the better world they long for, they are—to use one of Antrim's favorite expressions—heartbreakers.
"My narrators are regular guys" Antrim has said, "who want to care about the happiness of others, and in the process, do a lot of damage. The books are constructed of interlocking set pieces," he says, "and the set pieces are defined by particular moments of physical violence and self abasement, a rise and fall of pain and suffering. What could be funnier than that?"
Indeed, his novels' delicate balance between high comedy and aching dirge has earned Antrim a PEN/Faulkner Award nomination for The Hundred Brothers, in 1998, and has challenged critics anxious to convey the power of Antrim's unique vision through conventional comparisons. As a result, Antrim's singular work has been compared to that of Don Delillo, Kurt Vonnegut, Italo Calvino, Eugene Ionesco, Edgar Allen Poe, Shirley Jackson, Edward Gorey, Alfred Hitchcock, Donald Barthelme on laughing gas, Thomas Pynchon on lithium. But his voice always rises above comparison, pitch perfect. He remains perfectly himself—wired, hysterical, lucid and bereft.
Of the effect, critic Sven Birkerts wrote a year ago, "Donald Antrim is beautifully, heroically, flying full throttle against the can-do ethos of these literalist times. His scenes, odd as they are, bring tender and livid dream material out into the light. He is an equalizer. I mean, for all the madness on the daily life side, we have so little countering madness on the side of art. Our writers, good boys and girls, mostly, tell the expected stories. And we need them for that. It was not until I tumbled, perplexed, into Antrim's anxious fever dream that I realized how starved I had been for the other stuff, the literature that seeps into my dreaming centers and slowly turns me around."
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