Merrill Joan Gerber is not only one of our most underrated contemporary writers, she may well be our least pretentious. Her utter lack of pretense is a major source of her raw power as a writer, and it may also be one reason her work has not gained as much attention as it deserves. . . . In her latest novel, a tough little gem called Anna in the Afterlife, Gerber returns to one of her most memorable characters, Anna Goldman, the forceful, discontented mother of the young heroine in An Antique Man, more recently glimpsed in her 80s lying immobile, resentful and furious in a nursing home in the story collection Anna in Chains. Now, after seven years in the chains of her illness, Anna finally dies. The opening whisks us into the world-weary mind-set of its heroine: 'Once her dying got underway, Anna could not really complain about how the process moved along.'