Stories suggest that solace may be the best we can hope for

“The Emerald Light in the Air: Stories” by Donald Antrim (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 176 pages, $22)

In a certain regard, “The Emerald Light in the Air” is an extension of Antrim’s devastating 2006 memoir, “The Afterlife,” in which the author’s relationship with his mother becomes a lens through which to consider human frailty and dependence.

This becomes apparent from the first story, “An Actor Prepares,” which opens with a typically Antrim-esque digression: a long paragraph, comprising a single sentence, riffing on Lee Strasberg and his advice about when (and when not) to rely on “the Emotion Memory.”

“An Actor Prepares” is something of an antic comedy, not unlike “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” itself. In that sense, it’s of a piece with Antrim’s earlier fiction, which relies on the surrealism of daily life for its effects.

“Solace” opens the emotional terrain. The story of a couple who meet only in other people’s apartments, it becomes a still life of a relationship in stasis, on the cusp of a never-to-be-realized intimacy. “They were children of parents who’d acted grotesquely, some might say violently, toward them, even when they were fairly little,” Antrim notes, “and when, in their early thirties, they’d met and begun sharing confidences, their discovery of this common ground – for that was how she thought of it – seemed to her a great, welcome solace.”

This suggests that solace may be the best we can hope for – an idea Antrim raises again and again.

Depression is a theme, and also suicide, or not suicide so much as the threat, the possibility of it, like another form of solace to be called upon when the living gets to be too much.

And yet, the title story is in its way the most upbeat in the collection, ending on a note of reconciliation, if not quite hope. As the final effort, it suggests an arc or movement: from the surreal to the real.

David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

This story was originally published September 28, 2014 at 8:35 AM with the headline "Stories suggest that solace may be the best we can hope for."