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My Eliot: A Novel
Not yet published
Expected 12 Jan 27A 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
“To have a new Donald Antrim novel enter the world is like having a comet It marks the arrival of an otherworldly sensibility.”—John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead
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 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.”
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-five years, offers something beyond resolution or the knowledge that past even the darkest despair is the promise of transcendence to an existence far stranger and more magnificent than our own.
“To have a new Donald Antrim novel enter the world is like having a comet It marks the arrival of an otherworldly sensibility.”—John Jeremiah Sullivan, author of Pulphead
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 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.”
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-five years, offers something beyond resolution or the knowledge that past even the darkest despair is the promise of transcendence to an existence far stranger and more magnificent than our own.
- GenresFiction
224 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication January 12, 2027
About the author
Donald Antrim
16 books211 followersDonald Antrim is an American novelist. His first novel, Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World, was published in 1993. In 1999 The New Yorker named him as among the twenty best writers under the age of forty.
Antrim is a frequent contributor of fiction to The New Yorker and has written a number of critically acclaimed novels, including The Verificationist and The Hundred Brothers, which was a finalist for the 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award in fiction. He is also the author of The Afterlife, a 2006 memoir about his mother, Louanne Self. He has received grants and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Antrim is the brother of the artist Terry Leness and the son of Harry Antrim, a scholar of T. S. Eliot. Antrim has been associated with the writers David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, and the visual artist Christa Parravani.
He has taught prose fiction at the graduate school of New York University and was the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow for Fiction at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, for spring 2009. Antrim teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University. He lives in Brooklyn.
Antrim is a frequent contributor of fiction to The New Yorker and has written a number of critically acclaimed novels, including The Verificationist and The Hundred Brothers, which was a finalist for the 1998 PEN/Faulkner Award in fiction. He is also the author of The Afterlife, a 2006 memoir about his mother, Louanne Self. He has received grants and awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Antrim is the brother of the artist Terry Leness and the son of Harry Antrim, a scholar of T. S. Eliot. Antrim has been associated with the writers David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, and the visual artist Christa Parravani.
He has taught prose fiction at the graduate school of New York University and was the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow for Fiction at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany, for spring 2009. Antrim teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University. He lives in Brooklyn.
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Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
BOOK REPORT
Received a complimentary copy of My Eliot by Donald Atrim from Random House/NetGalley, for which I am appreciative, in exchange for a fair and honest review. Scroll past the BOOK REPORT section for a cut-and-paste of the DESCRIPTION of it from them if you want to read my thoughts on the book in the context of that summary.
⭐ 1 ⭐
I have no one to blame but myself for spending a couple of hours on this book.
I should’ve put it down after the first 10 minutes of it. The writing style was definitely not my cuppa, and I realized early on that we were going to be in the absurdist/grotesquerie realm that I find off-putting rather than enchanting.
But, I am ridiculously optimistic when it comes to books (and keeping outside plants alive when it’s a scorching 100 degrees in mid September and seems as if no rain will ever fall from the sky again), so I kept going. Mainly because of this one sentence in the description: “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?”
Kristi, Kristi, Kristi. You know better than to keep believing flyleaf copy. KNOW better. Especially when the evidence is right there in front of your eyes.
But no, you just HAD to find out what happened in the end. And then when you got there?
You didn’t.
I suppose this particular Book Report marks me as an uneducated, unsophisticated sort of rube, unable to fully appreciate this author’s full genius.
So be it.
DESCRIPTION
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.
Received a complimentary copy of My Eliot by Donald Atrim from Random House/NetGalley, for which I am appreciative, in exchange for a fair and honest review. Scroll past the BOOK REPORT section for a cut-and-paste of the DESCRIPTION of it from them if you want to read my thoughts on the book in the context of that summary.
⭐ 1 ⭐
I have no one to blame but myself for spending a couple of hours on this book.
I should’ve put it down after the first 10 minutes of it. The writing style was definitely not my cuppa, and I realized early on that we were going to be in the absurdist/grotesquerie realm that I find off-putting rather than enchanting.
But, I am ridiculously optimistic when it comes to books (and keeping outside plants alive when it’s a scorching 100 degrees in mid September and seems as if no rain will ever fall from the sky again), so I kept going. Mainly because of this one sentence in the description: “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?”
Kristi, Kristi, Kristi. You know better than to keep believing flyleaf copy. KNOW better. Especially when the evidence is right there in front of your eyes.
But no, you just HAD to find out what happened in the end. And then when you got there?
You didn’t.
I suppose this particular Book Report marks me as an uneducated, unsophisticated sort of rube, unable to fully appreciate this author’s full genius.
So be it.
DESCRIPTION
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.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This book lost my interest about 1/2 of the way through it. Unfortunately a DNF for me.
Appreciate the ARC from NetGalley and Random House.
Appreciate the ARC from NetGalley and Random House.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I swear I could hear Grace Slick singing “White Rabbit” in the background as I was reading this book. Take Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and mix it with The Big Lebowski, and you have Antrim’s My Eliot. It is a trippy tragedy of a man who suffers from grief, depression, suicidality and lousy parenting.
Donald (not the author) grew up on a hill outside of town in the shadows of his eccentric father – critic/self-taught scholar of TS Eliot, cobbler of drunken women’s shoes (his wife) and owner of You Saw it Here First self-service sawmill; a slightly younger sister plagued with an un-named but fatal lung condition, and a sadistic mother who smoked in her daughter’s presence (and that of her daughter’s oxygen tank), rationed the “air”/oxygen, and drank like a fish. Any wonder he might turn to smoking a parsnip (yes … parsnip).
His wings clipped by the death of his sister during his freshman year of college, Donald returns to help his father care for his drunken mother and the sawmill. In dual timeline form the book covers the 20+ years after his father’s death, when Donald decides that he is going to write a book about his father’s TS Eliot fetish in hopes of understanding the old man better, cobble some shoes for his ex, and finally grow into a man himself. It’s during this time, Donald turns to parsnip huffing, his psychiatrist/veterinarian friend (you’ll howl at the description of the psychiatric ward), conversing with a pink ash tree, a pale green possum named Elliot (Of course!), and lamenting the losses of his life.
I never read an author’s bio or their acknowledgments/statements prior to reading a new book. In this case I wish I had. Antirm is an acclaimed author, and it may have given me a smidgeon of understanding where this story might be headed and the type of insight I might expect to gain. I believe I would have enjoyed it more. In fact, I have never read anything written by Antrim in the past, but this novel was so wacky that I may have to dive into another of his novels. It is fairly short, at 224 pages. It is in turn heartbreaking and disorienting as is the protagonist and should come with a warning “Enter at your own risk!”. 3.5 Stars.
My thanks to @NetGalley, @DavidAntrim and @RandomHouse for the privilege of reading and reviewing this upcoming release. All opinions expressed are my own.
Donald (not the author) grew up on a hill outside of town in the shadows of his eccentric father – critic/self-taught scholar of TS Eliot, cobbler of drunken women’s shoes (his wife) and owner of You Saw it Here First self-service sawmill; a slightly younger sister plagued with an un-named but fatal lung condition, and a sadistic mother who smoked in her daughter’s presence (and that of her daughter’s oxygen tank), rationed the “air”/oxygen, and drank like a fish. Any wonder he might turn to smoking a parsnip (yes … parsnip).
His wings clipped by the death of his sister during his freshman year of college, Donald returns to help his father care for his drunken mother and the sawmill. In dual timeline form the book covers the 20+ years after his father’s death, when Donald decides that he is going to write a book about his father’s TS Eliot fetish in hopes of understanding the old man better, cobble some shoes for his ex, and finally grow into a man himself. It’s during this time, Donald turns to parsnip huffing, his psychiatrist/veterinarian friend (you’ll howl at the description of the psychiatric ward), conversing with a pink ash tree, a pale green possum named Elliot (Of course!), and lamenting the losses of his life.
I never read an author’s bio or their acknowledgments/statements prior to reading a new book. In this case I wish I had. Antirm is an acclaimed author, and it may have given me a smidgeon of understanding where this story might be headed and the type of insight I might expect to gain. I believe I would have enjoyed it more. In fact, I have never read anything written by Antrim in the past, but this novel was so wacky that I may have to dive into another of his novels. It is fairly short, at 224 pages. It is in turn heartbreaking and disorienting as is the protagonist and should come with a warning “Enter at your own risk!”. 3.5 Stars.
My thanks to @NetGalley, @DavidAntrim and @RandomHouse for the privilege of reading and reviewing this upcoming release. All opinions expressed are my own.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
I’ll admit that I had to Google search a little bit before writing this review. When I was in college, some fifty years ago, I read and analyzed T.S. Eliot’s poems, but I never knew much about the author. This is probably true with all the authors who stories I have read over the years. Plus, I have never read any of Donald Antrim’s previous novels and non-fiction.
Donald Antrim’s first novel in more than twenty years arrives with a narrator named Donald Antrim. In the novel, there is his real-life father, H.T. Antrim, a self-taught T.S. Eliot scholar and amateur shoe cobbler. There is his real-life younger sister, Terry, who suffered from a catastrophic childhood illness. There are mental diseases and its accompanying medical interventions. There are instances of alcoholism and betrayal and loneliness. Many of the details of Antrim’s life that include the sadness and true horrors of his reality are cleverly kept mute by the comical, magical, and fantastical nature of the story, but never ignored.
Donald is alone in his childhood home, apparently the last Antrim left, with memories of his sister and his difficult, often cruel parents crowding in on him. Paula, the woman he loves, is driving around town in a sports car with the man she chose instead. Donald decides he will write a sweeping rebuttal of his father’s work regarding Eliot. He constantly smokes a parsnip grown from what may be a cosmic seed and heads into the woods, where the trees glow in many bright colors, an ash tree consults him, and an iridescent green possum named Tom talks back. There is a homemade lumber mill with a great name, a veterinarian who doubles as the local psychiatric provider (and, my oh my, does this vet have some rather strange tools of trade), a nearby witch with her own strange cures and brews, and a bear who is in love with a duck.
The possum, of course, is not random. A famous poet, Ezra Pound, called Eliot “Old Possum,” a nod to Eliot’s talent for misdirection and for hiding what he was doing. The color green carries its own baggage. Eliot reportedly powdered his face green to appear more tortured, while green in his poetry often points toward a natural world that modern life has damaged or cut off. Seen that way, the glowing green possum in My Eliot is both funny and sad. The father spent his life on Eliot, who specialized in not being seen and the son goes into the woods and finds the poet's animal waiting for him, lit up in the color of everything modern life had drained away.
Donald’s grand writing project goes nowhere, his grief does not conveniently disappear, and Paula does not come back simply because he has made her a pair of shoes the way his father once made for his mother. However, despite everything, by the end of the novel, Donald is (literally) a changed person.
As I finished the novel, My Eliot felt like a fairy tale for adults. The novel will probably frustrate many readers looking for a clean plot or a narrator they can fully trust. But if you can follow Donald into the woods and accept that the talking possum matters, My Eliot becomes a strange, moving, and memorable book.
An E-ARC of My Eliot by Donald Antrim was provided by Hogarth & Random House via Madison Dettlinger, through NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
Donald Antrim’s first novel in more than twenty years arrives with a narrator named Donald Antrim. In the novel, there is his real-life father, H.T. Antrim, a self-taught T.S. Eliot scholar and amateur shoe cobbler. There is his real-life younger sister, Terry, who suffered from a catastrophic childhood illness. There are mental diseases and its accompanying medical interventions. There are instances of alcoholism and betrayal and loneliness. Many of the details of Antrim’s life that include the sadness and true horrors of his reality are cleverly kept mute by the comical, magical, and fantastical nature of the story, but never ignored.
Donald is alone in his childhood home, apparently the last Antrim left, with memories of his sister and his difficult, often cruel parents crowding in on him. Paula, the woman he loves, is driving around town in a sports car with the man she chose instead. Donald decides he will write a sweeping rebuttal of his father’s work regarding Eliot. He constantly smokes a parsnip grown from what may be a cosmic seed and heads into the woods, where the trees glow in many bright colors, an ash tree consults him, and an iridescent green possum named Tom talks back. There is a homemade lumber mill with a great name, a veterinarian who doubles as the local psychiatric provider (and, my oh my, does this vet have some rather strange tools of trade), a nearby witch with her own strange cures and brews, and a bear who is in love with a duck.
The possum, of course, is not random. A famous poet, Ezra Pound, called Eliot “Old Possum,” a nod to Eliot’s talent for misdirection and for hiding what he was doing. The color green carries its own baggage. Eliot reportedly powdered his face green to appear more tortured, while green in his poetry often points toward a natural world that modern life has damaged or cut off. Seen that way, the glowing green possum in My Eliot is both funny and sad. The father spent his life on Eliot, who specialized in not being seen and the son goes into the woods and finds the poet's animal waiting for him, lit up in the color of everything modern life had drained away.
Donald’s grand writing project goes nowhere, his grief does not conveniently disappear, and Paula does not come back simply because he has made her a pair of shoes the way his father once made for his mother. However, despite everything, by the end of the novel, Donald is (literally) a changed person.
As I finished the novel, My Eliot felt like a fairy tale for adults. The novel will probably frustrate many readers looking for a clean plot or a narrator they can fully trust. But if you can follow Donald into the woods and accept that the talking possum matters, My Eliot becomes a strange, moving, and memorable book.
An E-ARC of My Eliot by Donald Antrim was provided by Hogarth & Random House via Madison Dettlinger, through NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
I was invited by the publisher to read this ARC (my thanks to NetGalley and Random). This was my first read by this author and I guess his first in over twenty-five years. It was described by one blurb as “A literary fantasia chronicling one man’s quest to understand his father and himself - a comic psychedelic novel.” And that’s how I felt when I started this novel - I had entered a twilight zone of some sorts.
Donald’s father was a T. S. Eliot scholar - self-taught. But this is a novel hiding as a memoir so I admit I was a bit confused at the start. It’s wildly hilarious but I found it difficult to read as it bounces around a bit. The fictional Donald of this book had a father who cobbled shoes to fit his drunken mother making them very high in the hope she’d curtail her drinking when wearing them. His father also ran a self-service saw mill, “You Saw It Here First. The Donald of this book feeling unmoored as the last in his family to be alive decides he needs a project to focus on to take him out of his doldrums - I’m not sure he did but he certainly went down a rabbit hole with his talking to a possum named Tom, for example.
The book is zany and I can tell Antrim is a very good writer, but this one just didn’t resonate with me - as I do enjoy irreverence in writing. However, I can honestly say I got some good laughs as I read.
I would certainly hope readers who have read previous books by this author and like him should definitely put this on their list of future reads.
Donald’s father was a T. S. Eliot scholar - self-taught. But this is a novel hiding as a memoir so I admit I was a bit confused at the start. It’s wildly hilarious but I found it difficult to read as it bounces around a bit. The fictional Donald of this book had a father who cobbled shoes to fit his drunken mother making them very high in the hope she’d curtail her drinking when wearing them. His father also ran a self-service saw mill, “You Saw It Here First. The Donald of this book feeling unmoored as the last in his family to be alive decides he needs a project to focus on to take him out of his doldrums - I’m not sure he did but he certainly went down a rabbit hole with his talking to a possum named Tom, for example.
The book is zany and I can tell Antrim is a very good writer, but this one just didn’t resonate with me - as I do enjoy irreverence in writing. However, I can honestly say I got some good laughs as I read.
I would certainly hope readers who have read previous books by this author and like him should definitely put this on their list of future reads.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
If you are looking for a straightforward novel with a defined, linear plot line, a clear headed narrator and a serious tone, then this is not the book for you.
My Eliot is a meandering story of Donald Antrim (same name of the author) who is a deeply anxious, and at times manic. The writing style is best described as a mix of stream of consciousness and confessional.
At the core of the novel and what Donald starts off with is need to understand and perhaps dismantle his father’s consuming fascination with T.S. Eliot.
Through all of this, Donald tries to come to terms with the loss of his love Paula, who has left him for someone else while he still mourns the death of his sister. The setting is the family home and at times the forest near the home where the narrator, Donald, wanders off in a psychedelic drug induced haze.
Is it weird that he is conversing with forest animals and seeing glowing trees? Perhaps. But it leads us to a magical world filled with colors and weirdness. All of this leads to a comical, but touching look at a man searching for answers about his father and trying to come to terms with his dysfunctional early life.
The incorporation of autobiographical elements in the fiction (the author’s father was a literature professor who studied Eliot) creates a narrative complexity that is both compelling and confusing at times. Nevertheless, I did enjoy My Eliot for its fantastical, magical and imaginative narrative.
If you enjoy a challenging style with a heart-warming tale of man’s journey into discovery, you might just enjoy My Eliot.
My Eliot is a meandering story of Donald Antrim (same name of the author) who is a deeply anxious, and at times manic. The writing style is best described as a mix of stream of consciousness and confessional.
At the core of the novel and what Donald starts off with is need to understand and perhaps dismantle his father’s consuming fascination with T.S. Eliot.
Through all of this, Donald tries to come to terms with the loss of his love Paula, who has left him for someone else while he still mourns the death of his sister. The setting is the family home and at times the forest near the home where the narrator, Donald, wanders off in a psychedelic drug induced haze.
Is it weird that he is conversing with forest animals and seeing glowing trees? Perhaps. But it leads us to a magical world filled with colors and weirdness. All of this leads to a comical, but touching look at a man searching for answers about his father and trying to come to terms with his dysfunctional early life.
The incorporation of autobiographical elements in the fiction (the author’s father was a literature professor who studied Eliot) creates a narrative complexity that is both compelling and confusing at times. Nevertheless, I did enjoy My Eliot for its fantastical, magical and imaginative narrative.
If you enjoy a challenging style with a heart-warming tale of man’s journey into discovery, you might just enjoy My Eliot.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Donald Antrim's "My Eliot" is a book that is hard to define and sometimes even hard to take seriously. On the surface, it is a man's intellectual quest to understand his father's book about T.S. Eliot in order to get closer to him and eventually understand him. It is also a painful memoir about the tragic history of his family, including his ill younger sister and alcoholic mother. On top of the burden of the past, the narrator, named Donald Antrim, is dealing with the loss of his girlfriend, Paula, who has started dating another man. He tries to win her back by making a pair of shoes, just as his father used to do for his mother. This comical endeavor leads him to consult a doctor who is, improbably, a veterinarian, while the narrator somehow becomes addicted to parsnips, which cause hallucinations.
"My Eliot" mixes fact with fiction and comedy with drama, though fiction and comedy carry more weight. Donald Antrim's real father, H.T. Antrim, was an amateur literary critic of T.S. Eliot. However, when he was writing his book, details of Eliot's personal life were not yet widely known. As a result, H.T. Antrim's approach to the modernist poet was itself modernist: self-contained and inward-looking. Donald Antrim's approach, by contrast, is more postmodern, self-reflexive, and playful. At one point, it even becomes the love story of a bear who loves a duck who likes to f**k. It is a whimper, not a bang.
Thank you, Hogarth and Random House, for this book. It was a fun read!
"My Eliot" mixes fact with fiction and comedy with drama, though fiction and comedy carry more weight. Donald Antrim's real father, H.T. Antrim, was an amateur literary critic of T.S. Eliot. However, when he was writing his book, details of Eliot's personal life were not yet widely known. As a result, H.T. Antrim's approach to the modernist poet was itself modernist: self-contained and inward-looking. Donald Antrim's approach, by contrast, is more postmodern, self-reflexive, and playful. At one point, it even becomes the love story of a bear who loves a duck who likes to f**k. It is a whimper, not a bang.
Thank you, Hogarth and Random House, for this book. It was a fun read!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
**★★★☆☆ (3/5) — My Eliot by Donald Antrim**
*My Eliot* follows a man struggling with grief, heartbreak, and a complicated relationship with his late father. Determined to make sense of his past, he sets out to write a book examining everything his father believed in. Instead, he finds himself wandering through a bizarre, almost hallucinatory world filled with strange encounters, talking animals, and memories that blur the line between reality and imagination.
This was certainly an interesting read, although I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it. Antrim's writing is clever, imaginative, and occasionally quite funny, but the story itself felt a little too chaotic for my taste. I appreciate unconventional storytelling, but there's a fine line between wonderfully weird and just plain confusing, and this book crossed it more than once.
Beneath all the absurdity, there are some genuinely thoughtful observations about grief, family relationships, and the difficulty of understanding the people who shaped us. Unfortunately, those moments sometimes got lost in the surreal detours, and I struggled to stay invested in the narrator's journey.
Ultimately, I can appreciate the creativity and literary ambition here without necessarily loving the execution. It's the kind of book I suspect some readers will find brilliant, while others will spend a good portion of it wondering what on earth they're reading. I landed somewhere in the middle.
**Three stars for originality and some beautiful writing, even if the story itself didn't completely work for me.**
*My Eliot* follows a man struggling with grief, heartbreak, and a complicated relationship with his late father. Determined to make sense of his past, he sets out to write a book examining everything his father believed in. Instead, he finds himself wandering through a bizarre, almost hallucinatory world filled with strange encounters, talking animals, and memories that blur the line between reality and imagination.
This was certainly an interesting read, although I'm still not entirely sure what to make of it. Antrim's writing is clever, imaginative, and occasionally quite funny, but the story itself felt a little too chaotic for my taste. I appreciate unconventional storytelling, but there's a fine line between wonderfully weird and just plain confusing, and this book crossed it more than once.
Beneath all the absurdity, there are some genuinely thoughtful observations about grief, family relationships, and the difficulty of understanding the people who shaped us. Unfortunately, those moments sometimes got lost in the surreal detours, and I struggled to stay invested in the narrator's journey.
Ultimately, I can appreciate the creativity and literary ambition here without necessarily loving the execution. It's the kind of book I suspect some readers will find brilliant, while others will spend a good portion of it wondering what on earth they're reading. I landed somewhere in the middle.
**Three stars for originality and some beautiful writing, even if the story itself didn't completely work for me.**
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October 28, 2026PROOF
this was an excellent look at memory and transformation with a lot of stuff that is going to stick with me
this was an excellent look at memory and transformation with a lot of stuff that is going to stick with me
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Typing monkeys might eventually recreate Shakespeare, and AI might plausibly imitate many authors' styles, but Donald Antrim will be one of the last remaining bastions of truly inimitable human creativity. No one else could take as many strange turns as he does here. There's a psychedelic parsnip, a veterinarian doing major psychiatric treatment, a serious treatment of T.S. Eliot, a reborn Eliot in the form of a woodland possum, other talking animals, a flooded basement where shoes are made, a DIY sawmill called You Saw it Here First, a meditation on loss and grief and imperfect parents and love, and so much more. Somehow, as insane as it gets, the writing flows smoothly and wonderfully. I'm so glad Antrim is back with a new novel after twenty years (!). I was sad to be done with it. I should go back and reread him some more...
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
My Eliot by Donald Antrim blew my mind. It’s hard for me to articulate all of the things I’d like to say about this book without it turning into a dissertation, but I’ll try to keep it brief(ish) and spoiler free.
It’s described as ‘A literary fantasia chronicling one man’s quest to understand his father and himself—a comic, psychedelic novel about a man who is 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 a sort of auto-fiction, as Antrim is the main character, and his father, just like his father was in the book, was a T.S. Eliot scholar.
Reading this was what I imagine eating magic mushrooms and then going to a scholarly lecture would be like. Like an intellectualized trip, that included a talking tree and a light green possum named Tom. Its entire premise lives in dichotomy. Between fiction and non-fiction, hyper-academic and minimalistic writing, life and death, memory vs reality, natural vs man-made, sober vs intoxicated and past vs present.
There’s dark themes in this book. Of suicide, substance abuse, illness, childhood death. But there’s also absurdity, levity, and hope. I found them in perfect balance with one another.
I thought his use of T.S. Eliot passages via the lens of his father’s life’s work was such an interesting way to view himself and his life. Sort of like stacking dolls, gazing into (or up at) themselves. So much of being an artist is attempting to discover yourself through art (your own, and others) and trying to understand the smaller and larger history that made us how we are. But I think what artists often find is that the looking and searching can often be as much a source of healing as it is of trauma and frustration.
Looking can be useful, but too much looking can consume and destroy. And for Donald, the more he continues looking, the weirder his reality becomes.
I was so curious while reading this about what was ‘true’ to the author’s life versus what he’d created for this book and was so interested in the choices he made between those two. So much of this story is true, which can be confirmed from his earlier memoirs. But many details are not, like the singular house he grew up in in the story, which is where he still is when the story begins in present day. Apparently, he moved a lot in real life, which helped deepen for me my understanding of his use of the house as symbolism of both entrapment and belonging. Yet another dichotomy he is wrestling with.
Without including spoilers, the largest underlying theme I took from this book is the desire to hold onto things when perhaps, it’s better to let go. A reviewer of his previous memoir, which was focused on his mental illness/suicidal ideation, described the book as offering the view of ‘a disoriented individual trying to stay grounded in reality, to get a grip.’ and, to me, My Eliot explores the idea of losing the grip – often on purpose, via smoking his magical vegetable. When dealing with loss, mental illness, etc, there’s a general sense that we’re so close to ‘losing it’ and need to keep it together, and I feel like this book is his attempt at saying ‘but what if we don’t?’ which I think is really powerful for someone who has spent so much of his life trying to do the opposite.
This idea also applies to T.S. Eliot’s work regarding the job of the poet to ‘act as a linguistic anchor.’
There’s a compulsion of writers to make sense of the world - to harness it in some way, but this can feel like a gargantuan task - it can be all consuming. There’s a massive freedom in just being of the world, in letting it absorb you…of taking your hands off of it and not continuing your attempts to assert control. I find the ending of the book to be a great reflection of this idea, and as someone who has struggled to loosen my grip on so many things in this world, I find the idea mostly scary but also thrilling.
I loved this book and will be thinking about it for a long, long time.
Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for allowing me to read it early!
It’s described as ‘A literary fantasia chronicling one man’s quest to understand his father and himself—a comic, psychedelic novel about a man who is 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 a sort of auto-fiction, as Antrim is the main character, and his father, just like his father was in the book, was a T.S. Eliot scholar.
Reading this was what I imagine eating magic mushrooms and then going to a scholarly lecture would be like. Like an intellectualized trip, that included a talking tree and a light green possum named Tom. Its entire premise lives in dichotomy. Between fiction and non-fiction, hyper-academic and minimalistic writing, life and death, memory vs reality, natural vs man-made, sober vs intoxicated and past vs present.
There’s dark themes in this book. Of suicide, substance abuse, illness, childhood death. But there’s also absurdity, levity, and hope. I found them in perfect balance with one another.
I thought his use of T.S. Eliot passages via the lens of his father’s life’s work was such an interesting way to view himself and his life. Sort of like stacking dolls, gazing into (or up at) themselves. So much of being an artist is attempting to discover yourself through art (your own, and others) and trying to understand the smaller and larger history that made us how we are. But I think what artists often find is that the looking and searching can often be as much a source of healing as it is of trauma and frustration.
Looking can be useful, but too much looking can consume and destroy. And for Donald, the more he continues looking, the weirder his reality becomes.
I was so curious while reading this about what was ‘true’ to the author’s life versus what he’d created for this book and was so interested in the choices he made between those two. So much of this story is true, which can be confirmed from his earlier memoirs. But many details are not, like the singular house he grew up in in the story, which is where he still is when the story begins in present day. Apparently, he moved a lot in real life, which helped deepen for me my understanding of his use of the house as symbolism of both entrapment and belonging. Yet another dichotomy he is wrestling with.
Without including spoilers, the largest underlying theme I took from this book is the desire to hold onto things when perhaps, it’s better to let go. A reviewer of his previous memoir, which was focused on his mental illness/suicidal ideation, described the book as offering the view of ‘a disoriented individual trying to stay grounded in reality, to get a grip.’ and, to me, My Eliot explores the idea of losing the grip – often on purpose, via smoking his magical vegetable. When dealing with loss, mental illness, etc, there’s a general sense that we’re so close to ‘losing it’ and need to keep it together, and I feel like this book is his attempt at saying ‘but what if we don’t?’ which I think is really powerful for someone who has spent so much of his life trying to do the opposite.
This idea also applies to T.S. Eliot’s work regarding the job of the poet to ‘act as a linguistic anchor.’
There’s a compulsion of writers to make sense of the world - to harness it in some way, but this can feel like a gargantuan task - it can be all consuming. There’s a massive freedom in just being of the world, in letting it absorb you…of taking your hands off of it and not continuing your attempts to assert control. I find the ending of the book to be a great reflection of this idea, and as someone who has struggled to loosen my grip on so many things in this world, I find the idea mostly scary but also thrilling.
I loved this book and will be thinking about it for a long, long time.
Thank you to Random House and NetGalley for allowing me to read it early!
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thanks to Random House (Madison Dettlinger) and NetGalley for the egalley of My Eliot.
I never know quite how to read a novel like My Eliot because of the self-referential nature of the writing. When characters have the same names and relations to one another as they do in real life, the significance of that fact can't help but color the way I read those characters. I've read the Wikipedia article on Donald Antrim, the writer, so I know facts, and some of these facts appear in My Eliot, but what do those facts mean in the novel? Do they matter or are they just meaningless coincidences? It's like an echo or resonance of something from outside the novel that adds another dimension to the characters, that gives them a bit more backstory even if it has nothing to do with the actions of the novel itself. It creates this interesting tension between what one is reading in the fictional world and what one knows in the real world.
Or maybe it's just me.
Regardless, I enjoyed My Eliot very much. The novel is surreal, fantastical, magical, comical, and weird stuff happens all the time. Yet there is still a very human, emotional core at the center that never gets lost. This would be the story of Donald, who in his sixties decides it is time to get his life in order, and his often humorous attempts to do so drive the action of the story. His journey of self-discovery brings pathos to a novel that could easily have chosen a purely absurd tone. It is Donald's transformation, his growth, his deeper understanding of his life that balances out all the fairy tale like weirdness of the novel and gives the novel heart.
Perhaps it is as an adult fairy tale that I would recommend My Eliot. Like fairy tales, the novel is playful and imaginative, psychedelic and symbolic, creating a world where it is perfectly reasonable to find a possum named Tom. And like fairy tales, My Eliot seems to have some indirect lesson to be learned about life, about what we need to let go of and what we need to hold on to so we can live happily ever after.
I never know quite how to read a novel like My Eliot because of the self-referential nature of the writing. When characters have the same names and relations to one another as they do in real life, the significance of that fact can't help but color the way I read those characters. I've read the Wikipedia article on Donald Antrim, the writer, so I know facts, and some of these facts appear in My Eliot, but what do those facts mean in the novel? Do they matter or are they just meaningless coincidences? It's like an echo or resonance of something from outside the novel that adds another dimension to the characters, that gives them a bit more backstory even if it has nothing to do with the actions of the novel itself. It creates this interesting tension between what one is reading in the fictional world and what one knows in the real world.
Or maybe it's just me.
Regardless, I enjoyed My Eliot very much. The novel is surreal, fantastical, magical, comical, and weird stuff happens all the time. Yet there is still a very human, emotional core at the center that never gets lost. This would be the story of Donald, who in his sixties decides it is time to get his life in order, and his often humorous attempts to do so drive the action of the story. His journey of self-discovery brings pathos to a novel that could easily have chosen a purely absurd tone. It is Donald's transformation, his growth, his deeper understanding of his life that balances out all the fairy tale like weirdness of the novel and gives the novel heart.
Perhaps it is as an adult fairy tale that I would recommend My Eliot. Like fairy tales, the novel is playful and imaginative, psychedelic and symbolic, creating a world where it is perfectly reasonable to find a possum named Tom. And like fairy tales, My Eliot seems to have some indirect lesson to be learned about life, about what we need to let go of and what we need to hold on to so we can live happily ever after.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
At the risk of being trite, yeah, every unhappy family has its own special flavor of unhappiness, and the Antrims in My Eliot are no exception. Theirs is soaked in high-proof liquor and cigarette smoke and liberally sprinkled with sawdust and Eliot quotations, with an undertone of oxygen bottle hissing. But for the narrator, skilfully rendering all these textures in heavy-hitting prose, this is history - we meet Donald living in his woodsy cabin when he's the only living Antrim left. He staggers under the burdens of his traumatic past and uneasy present, including a romantic, but tense relationship with Paula, for reasons of expediency he submits to "tender mercies" of the local veterinarian (homebrew electroshocks and screwdriver lobotomy a specialty), his nearest neighbor is a practicing witch (he calls her a necromancer, I blame substandard American education) - you get the drift. Luckily, Donald gets a surprise find from the witch's incinerator, a parsnip grown from a cosmic seed, no less, and after that it's a free for all, with old man wrassling, duck charming, deep conversations with Duke the dog, and deeper ones with an ash tree. All leading to bearification and inner peace.
In other words, I had a blast and a half, and didn't even need to toke up on that parsnip. Didn't know I needed this book in this autumn, but I got it, read it, and am thoroughly glad.
In other words, I had a blast and a half, and didn't even need to toke up on that parsnip. Didn't know I needed this book in this autumn, but I got it, read it, and am thoroughly glad.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
On psychedelic parsnips, talking possums, and daddy issues.
Read if you like weird, delightful, not totally clear fiction memoir sort of that also dives into TS Eliot biography. Stay away otherwise.
My Eliot can be seen in a few ways a weird and delightful memoir kind of as well as a helluva drug trip as well as a specific sort of way to break down a father son relationship through hallucinatory story telling that verges into anthropomorphism as a way to cope with unreality. Or something. It’s a fun hangover from a 90s writer who isn’t read as much but should be.
The main subject of father-son really begins with him mimicking him. The mimicry of his father, from the way he declared love and built shoes for love to the alcoholic vices he casually ignores makes the story sadder because of the silliness of Donald’s adventures. But it shines a light on the seriousness of the issue through that, he captures heartbreak in this way very well.
The idea that nature and trees and the animals he interacts with as manifestations both of his grief for losing his father sister and mother in ways he couldn’t control is heartbreaking.
The need for the father figure and the need to understand the object of the father’s fascination in the possum TS Eliot is altogether a sad reflection of the state of man right now. His need for emulation and half attempts at following in his father’s footsteps are slightly devastating and outright pathetic. And I think that’s intended.
The suicide mentions seem like an obvious foreshadowing but will death be the outcome? No not dying but a death and then rebirth into his bear form
A short aside here - Is the doctor/vet a callback to Bulgakov and the heart of a dog? Man becomes beast in the circumstances? Is the circumstances grief? Probably not but maybe not totally not not.
There seems to be an idea of raging against and becoming the father, of idealizing and revolting, but where it all leads to seems to be of love. This story is weird and colorful and delightful. There’s few other like it, Lanny by Max Porter, Chouette by Claire Oshtesky come to mind but this blends into its own thing. I wonder if my own enjoyment is due to being a dude and loving the male 90s writer wackiness with sardonic tendencies and wild imagery.
Thanks for the ARC next galley
Read if you like weird, delightful, not totally clear fiction memoir sort of that also dives into TS Eliot biography. Stay away otherwise.
My Eliot can be seen in a few ways a weird and delightful memoir kind of as well as a helluva drug trip as well as a specific sort of way to break down a father son relationship through hallucinatory story telling that verges into anthropomorphism as a way to cope with unreality. Or something. It’s a fun hangover from a 90s writer who isn’t read as much but should be.
The main subject of father-son really begins with him mimicking him. The mimicry of his father, from the way he declared love and built shoes for love to the alcoholic vices he casually ignores makes the story sadder because of the silliness of Donald’s adventures. But it shines a light on the seriousness of the issue through that, he captures heartbreak in this way very well.
The idea that nature and trees and the animals he interacts with as manifestations both of his grief for losing his father sister and mother in ways he couldn’t control is heartbreaking.
The need for the father figure and the need to understand the object of the father’s fascination in the possum TS Eliot is altogether a sad reflection of the state of man right now. His need for emulation and half attempts at following in his father’s footsteps are slightly devastating and outright pathetic. And I think that’s intended.
The suicide mentions seem like an obvious foreshadowing but will death be the outcome? No not dying but a death and then rebirth into his bear form
A short aside here - Is the doctor/vet a callback to Bulgakov and the heart of a dog? Man becomes beast in the circumstances? Is the circumstances grief? Probably not but maybe not totally not not.
There seems to be an idea of raging against and becoming the father, of idealizing and revolting, but where it all leads to seems to be of love. This story is weird and colorful and delightful. There’s few other like it, Lanny by Max Porter, Chouette by Claire Oshtesky come to mind but this blends into its own thing. I wonder if my own enjoyment is due to being a dude and loving the male 90s writer wackiness with sardonic tendencies and wild imagery.
Thanks for the ARC next galley
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This surrealistic book will be loved and admired by some and totally underappreciated by others. I fall somewhere between those two poles. The narrator delves into his relationship with his parents, his deceased sister, his ex-girlfriend and a deranged veterinarian who was his psychiatrist. Other characters include a witch, a talking dog, and T.S. Eliot transformed into a green possum named Tom. One wonders how much of this novel was autobiographical. This narrator shares the same name as the author. His father, in real life and in the book, was H.T. Antrim, a literature professor and a scholar of Eliot.
This was a stream-of-conscious novel that had some noteworthy moments, but at other times I questioned if the writer was indulging in hallucinatory drugs. The book is full of symbolism, but it probably will not be recognized by one who does not know either Antrim or Eliot. Readers who enjoy psychedelic fantasy interspersed with humor will enjoy this novel.
My thanks to NetGalley and Random House for an advanced copy of this book. My opinions are my own.
This was a stream-of-conscious novel that had some noteworthy moments, but at other times I questioned if the writer was indulging in hallucinatory drugs. The book is full of symbolism, but it probably will not be recognized by one who does not know either Antrim or Eliot. Readers who enjoy psychedelic fantasy interspersed with humor will enjoy this novel.
My thanks to NetGalley and Random House for an advanced copy of this book. My opinions are my own.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
My Eliot
By Donald Antrim
If you asked me what this book is about, I would be hard pressed to give an answer. The narrator is flying off in many directions at once. He obviously has relationship issues with everyone in his family and his girlfriend, who has left him for another man. His main obsession however seems to be with his father, somewhat of an autodidact who wrote a treatise on T. S. Eliot. Thus the narrator decides that critiquing his father's work may give him insight into who his father was.
But the narrator very quickly goes off the rails and into the realm of chaos. Drugs, talking animals, a veterinarian/psychiatrist, psychedelic walks in the woods – all contribute to the confusion. And the narrator's long convoluted run-on sentences (whether done purposely to add to the confusion or the author's true writing style) don't help.
While I could appreciate – indeed, even admire – the writing skill, I did not really appreciate the book as a story.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for this ARC.
By Donald Antrim
If you asked me what this book is about, I would be hard pressed to give an answer. The narrator is flying off in many directions at once. He obviously has relationship issues with everyone in his family and his girlfriend, who has left him for another man. His main obsession however seems to be with his father, somewhat of an autodidact who wrote a treatise on T. S. Eliot. Thus the narrator decides that critiquing his father's work may give him insight into who his father was.
But the narrator very quickly goes off the rails and into the realm of chaos. Drugs, talking animals, a veterinarian/psychiatrist, psychedelic walks in the woods – all contribute to the confusion. And the narrator's long convoluted run-on sentences (whether done purposely to add to the confusion or the author's true writing style) don't help.
While I could appreciate – indeed, even admire – the writing skill, I did not really appreciate the book as a story.
Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for this ARC.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This book is strange in the best possible way. My Eliot is haunting, heartbreaking, funny, surreal, and completely unlike anything I’ve read lately. It’s about grief, family, complicated parents, and trying to understand the people who shaped you while also trying to understand yourself.
I loved how Donald Antrim blurs the line between reality and fantasy. The ghost of T.S. Eliot, the enchanted woods, the possum, the strange encounters—it all feels bizarre, but somehow it works. Beneath all of that weirdness is something deeply human about loss, anger, love, and the things we carry from our families.
This isn’t an easy, straightforward read, but that’s exactly what made it memorable for me. Weird, beautiful, unsettling, and unexpectedly emotional.
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the advanced copy.
I loved how Donald Antrim blurs the line between reality and fantasy. The ghost of T.S. Eliot, the enchanted woods, the possum, the strange encounters—it all feels bizarre, but somehow it works. Beneath all of that weirdness is something deeply human about loss, anger, love, and the things we carry from our families.
This isn’t an easy, straightforward read, but that’s exactly what made it memorable for me. Weird, beautiful, unsettling, and unexpectedly emotional.
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the advanced copy.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
I hesitated to add a review because I did not finish this book. I decided I would anyway because I did try and I did read the first third of it. I found nothing in it to draw me in. The main character was boring, the story was boring and the only thing that caught my interest was him hallucinating after inhaling the smoke from a genetically modified parsnip. That was funny. However, where it took him really was not and it is almost impossible to explain anyone's acid trip and have it draw interest. No frame of reference for most people. I shall not state whether or not I would have one.
I did read some other reviews and this book hit with them and bowled them over so I shall just end with saying it wasn't my cup of tea and let it go at that. May it sell well.
I do want to thank Random House and NetGalley for this ARC. I always appreciate it.
I did read some other reviews and this book hit with them and bowled them over so I shall just end with saying it wasn't my cup of tea and let it go at that. May it sell well.
I do want to thank Random House and NetGalley for this ARC. I always appreciate it.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the advance e-book of *My Eliot* in exchange for my honest review.
Unfortunately, this one did not work for me. There were a few moments that made me smile, but I struggled to understand what the story was working toward. Without that sense of direction, I found it difficult to stay engaged.
My biggest hurdle was connecting with the main character. I wanted to become invested in his perspective and experiences, but that connection never developed, which made it harder to care about the storyline. The occasional moments of humor were welcome, but they were not enough to keep me reading. Ultimately, I decided to put this one down rather than push through. Since I did not finish, I cannot speak to where the story eventually leads or whether its larger purpose becomes clearer. Based on what I read, though, it simply was not a match for me.
Unfortunately, this one did not work for me. There were a few moments that made me smile, but I struggled to understand what the story was working toward. Without that sense of direction, I found it difficult to stay engaged.
My biggest hurdle was connecting with the main character. I wanted to become invested in his perspective and experiences, but that connection never developed, which made it harder to care about the storyline. The occasional moments of humor were welcome, but they were not enough to keep me reading. Ultimately, I decided to put this one down rather than push through. Since I did not finish, I cannot speak to where the story eventually leads or whether its larger purpose becomes clearer. Based on what I read, though, it simply was not a match for me.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Thanks to Netgalley and Random House for the ebook. A fantastical comedic novel about an older novelist, named Donald Antrim, who tries to come to terms with his father, a man who owned a do-it-yourself sawmill, made shoes for his wife and wrote a lengthy piece about the poems of TS Eliot. All this brings up memories of his drinking mother and ailing sister. This would be enough for most person to deal with, but Donald just lost his long term girlfriend to to a German archaeologist and has started smoking an experimental drug from the local witch where people and tress change colors and he can talk to his new pet dog and a wise ash tree. It silly and sad and a very fun read.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
2.75 stars, rounded up to 3 stars. I just didn't get it. Nothing appealed to me, and nothing grabbed me and made me want to read this. Sure, the author has a way with words, but it felt more like he was wanting to show his command of the language than create a legible story. The whole daily psychedelic trips and the Dr. Doolittle-style talks with the animals just didn't work for me, but I can certainly see where those things might appeal to others.
Will I read more from the author? Probably not.
I received a complimentary copy of the novel from the publisher and NetGalley, and my review is being left freely.
Will I read more from the author? Probably not.
I received a complimentary copy of the novel from the publisher and NetGalley, and my review is being left freely.
September 29, 2026
**Thanks to the publisher for an advanced digital copy of this text in exchange for an honest review.
I was hoping for a scholarly memoir about TS Eliot’s work. What I got was the most bizarre novel I can ever remember, including multi-colored animals and muddled musings of the author’s childhood (or maybe things he made up? I have no clue). Maybe if *I* had been smoking the oft mentioned parsnip, I would have enjoyed it more. As is, it was absolutely not my cup of tea and does not make me want to seek out any more of his novels.
I was hoping for a scholarly memoir about TS Eliot’s work. What I got was the most bizarre novel I can ever remember, including multi-colored animals and muddled musings of the author’s childhood (or maybe things he made up? I have no clue). Maybe if *I* had been smoking the oft mentioned parsnip, I would have enjoyed it more. As is, it was absolutely not my cup of tea and does not make me want to seek out any more of his novels.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Well this was interesting. I like his previous novel, not so much this one. It’s rambling, little to make you care about the characters (who could be so interesting if fleshed out) , and a less than satisfying conclusion. Would not completely recommend, but as a short read it’s interesting only for its style and ability to make you wonder where it’s headed.
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the preview.
Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the preview.
October 5, 2026
Stunning. Not even remotely what I thought it would be. I’m so glad I marched through what I assumed would be dense (pretentious ?) T.S Eliot analysis, to then enter a world so rich, wild, and surprising. And I don’t take issue with including praise for a particular artist in a fictional work, it was more the fact that I struggled to see where things were headed, and considered not continuing.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
Unfortunately, I just don’t think this was the book for me. The pacing was odd, and while I had a few moments that the dialogue made me smile a bit, I really don’t quite understand what the point is/was/will be and it made it difficult for me to connect with the book. I did end up DNFing this one, which is pretty rare for me.
Review of advance copy received from NetGalley
This was so absurd that it verge into inaccessible. I am not familiar with TS Eliot's work, so perhaps readers who are will enjoy the book more. This one just didn't work for me.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.
Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.
September 15, 2026
I was not the right audience for this book. Other people may love it, but I found the writing style difficult and confusing. The cover intrigued me, and that's why I read it.
November 4, 2026
some of the best, funniest dialogue i’ve ever read. donald antrim has a new fan for life in me.
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