Halflife

By Anthony Alofsin

Halflife is a fictive memoir, hovering between fiction and biography. Recalling the measure of decay that describes how radioactive isotopes die even as they live, a young man who, in his search for love and meaning, discovers loss and hopelessness as atoms in the same physical universe.From the perspective of age 35, which he assumes is the mid-point in his own life, the narrator reflects on the friends, women, neighbors, places, plants, and animals he has encountered. His journey has taken him to the mountains of New Mexico, the desert of Arizona, the urban heart of San Francisco, a contemplative family island retreat in Rhode Island, the rotting and mysterious Villa Trice in Austin, with a final look back at a childhood in Memphis.This book gives us the exuberance and creativity of youth and love yet it adds with unusual honesty the sense that experience does not simply exist in the present, but carries at the same time the weight of its past and the foreshadowing of its future, that the fullness of life contains many opposite particles.