REDEMPTION? Homes has given up psychological nuance in favor of sit-com gags and TV-movie shockers.
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What happened to A.M. Homes? She used to be ferocious. She used to write with punch and verve and fire. When she wrote about pedophilia (The End of Alice), or suburban orgies (Music for Torching), or a woman who collects the used condoms of teenagers to inseminate herself in the front seat of her car (from Things You Should Know), she was provocative and perverse, and she was able to pull it off, for the most part, without saying, “Hey, look at how fucked up I can be.” She lit a flame that illuminated the darkest, messiest parts of our worlds and our heads. And now this? A book about redemption? Second chances? Homes’s flame seems to have been extinguished.
This Book Will Save Your Life (the title, ironic or not, calls attention to itself the way AHeartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius does, but with less to back it up) traces the midlife crisis of Richard Novak, a rich, divorced Los Angeles trader who’s “so thoroughly removed himself from the world of dependencies and obligations, he wasn’t sure he still existed.” His only human contact is with his staff — housekeeper, nutritionist, and decorator — until he’s rushed to the hospital in excruciating pain. The brush with death wakes him up to life.
From there, Richard goes on a benevolence binge. “He wants to be heroic, larger than life. . . . And he wants people to notice him.” He rescues a horse from the sinkhole that’s swallowing his house. He gets a weepy housewife out of an awful marriage. He saves a girl from being kidnapped. He visits old people. He backs the opening of a doughnut-shop owner’s second store. In the midst of being a hero, in the midst of being noticed, he dabbles in a suite of new-age therapies: gyrotonics, a silent retreat, visits to a “psychological internist.”
It’s a cinematic book. This is LA, after all, and it’s just as vapid, artificial, and apocalyptic (sinkholes, fires, floods) as it should be. The novel is episodic and told in present tense, and you watch the action unfold as it happens, from one situation to the next, not through the reflective lens that past tense allows. The strangers Richard takes into his life are stock characters, bit parts, like the upstairs neighbor who comes down to provide comic relief in so many sit-coms. Anhil, the immigrant shop owner. Nic, the reclusive literary icon. Cynthia, the fed-up homemaker. Much of the dialogue feels scripted, TV-obvious. Every time Richard goes to the doctor, the receptionist quips about parking validation. “You look very nice today. . . . I like your shirt. . . . You’re valid, for one hour.”
It’s when Richard’s estranged gay teenage son, Ben, arrives that Homes returns to more familiar territory. Richard comes home late one evening to find Ben drunk, hysterical, ranting with years of locked-up rage. “I’d like to fuck you,” Ben says to his dad. “What better way of getting to know you?” In her other works, this type of scene would have the impact it should. But because the rest has been told with such detachment, such deadpan remove, it’s too late for us to care.
