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Since her debut in 1989, A. M. Homes, author of the forthcoming novel The Unfolding, has been among the boldest and most original voices of her generation, acclaimed for the psychological accuracy and unnerving emotional intensity of her storytelling. Her ability to explore how extraordinary the ordinary can be is at the heart of her touching and funny new novel, her first in six years. This Book Will Save Your Life is a vivid, uplifting, and revealing story about compassion, transformation, and what can happen if you are willing to lose yourself and open up to the world around you.THIS BOOK WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE
“Homes’ dark delivery . . . is in full regalia here. . . . Laugh-out loud funny.” –The Boston Globe
“An absolute masterpiece . . . Homes writes ecstatically, and like no one else.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer
“I think this brave story of a lost man’s reconnection with the world could become a generational touchstone, like Catch-22, The Monkey Wrench Gang, or The Catcher in the Rye. . . . And hey, maybe it will save somebody’s life.” –Stephen King
Hilarious . . . Homes writes in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and has the talent to pull it off.” –San Francisco Chronicle
DAYS OF AWE
“A.M. Homes skillfully circles and tugs at the question of what it means to live in flawed, fragile, hungry human bodies . . . DAYS OF AWE is sliced through with Homes’s dark humor . . . one wants to read passages of a Homes story aloud because they are so fine . . . DAYS OF AWE feels like the part of the day when the sun is about to go down and the light is brighter while the shadows are darker. Everything has a sharp edge, is strikingly beautiful and suddenly also a little menacing.” —Ramona Ausubel, The New York Times Book Review
“Exuberantly transgressive.” —O, the Oprah Magazine
“[Homes] has shown a unique penchant for cracking open the dark heart of human nature — with irreverent wit, devastating empathy and haunting shocks . . . DAYS OF AWE [is] a memorable assortment of new tales about family, love, death, and an unqualified man who somehow stumbles into becoming a populist political candidate.” —Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon
“Homes’s keen ear for speech—surreal as her characters’ conversations often are—lends itself to varying degrees of self-aware misunderstanding, highlighting the complexity of language and the challenges . . . The impossibility of knowing another person completely is one of life’s painful truths, and [this] collection remind us of that—but [it] also shows that there are, at least, tools available to help us try.” —Vanity Fair
“Fascinating . . . I consumed these stories exactly like a spectator of a good fight or a neighbor peering through the hedge, and I felt sharply observed in turn. Homes, with her fierce sharp wit, reveals her characters’ deep flaws. No one gets away with anything and the spectacle is delightful.” —Molly Livingston, The Paris Review Daily
“With dark humor and sharp dialogue, Homes plumbs the depths of everyday American anxieties through stories about unexpected situations.” —Time
“In the title story, a Holocaust survivor taps into a theme of the collection when he describes the way people hold the history of previous generations inside them. ‘We carry it with us, not just in our grandmother’s silver,’ he says, ‘but in our bodies, the cells of our hearts.’” —Wall Street Journal
“Versatile and imaginative, Homes bring her literary daring and prowess . . . to short stories . . . In her third provocative story collection, she displays her command of the viciously realistic and the pointedly surreal, the comic and the tragic. A master of honed dialogue—play-like in their momentum, many of these tales have an Edward Albee aura—Homes is also potently visual and acknowledges artists who inspire her . . . [It] is the searing precision of her language and her profound and thorny concerns that infuse these unpredictable tales with their unnerving power . . . Virtuoso Homes, aligned with Grace Paley, Joy Williams, and Lydia Millet, is fierce, witty, defining, and compassionate. ” — Booklist, Starred Review
“With her signature humor and compassion, A.M. Homes exposes the heart of an uneasy America in her new collection – exploring our attachments to each other through characters who aren’t quite who they hoped to become, though there is no one else they can be.” —Chicago Review of Books
MAY WE BE FORGIVEN
Winner of the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction
“An entertaining, old-fashioned American story about second chances…A.M. Homes is a writer I’ll pretty much follow anywhere because she’s indeed so smart, it’s scary; yet she’s not without heart…May We Be Forgiven [is] deeply imbued with the kind of It’s A Wonderful Life-type belief in redemption that we Americans will always be suckers for, and rightly so.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air
“Cheever country with a black comedy upgrade…Homes crams a tremendous amount of ambition into May We Be Forgiven, with its dark humor, its careening plot, its sex-strewn suburb and a massive cast of memorable characters…its riskiest content, however, is something different: sentiment. This is a Tin Man story, in which the zoned-out Harry slowly grows a heart.” —Carolyn Kellogg, The Los Angeles Times
“Darkly funny…the moments shared between this ad hoc family are the novel’s most endearing…Homes’ signature trait is a fearless inclination to torment her characters and render their failures, believing that the reader is sophisticated enough – and forgiving enough – to tag along.” —Katie Arnold-Ratliff, Time Magazine
“Homes, whose masterful handling of suburban dystopia merits her own adjective, may have just written her midcareer magnum opus with this portrait of a flawed Nixonian bent on some sort of emotional amnesty.” —Christopher Bollen, Interview
“At once tender and uproariously funny…one of the strangest, most miraculous journeys in recent fiction, not unlike a man swimming home to his lonely house, one swimming pool at a time: it is an act of desperation turned into one of grace.” —John Freeman, The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“A big American story with big American themes, the saga of the triumph of a new kind of self-invented nuclear family over cynicism, apathy, loneliness, greed, and technological tyranny…this novel has a strong moral core, neither didactic nor judgmental, that holds out the possibility of redemption through connection.” –Kate Christensen, Elle
“A.M. Homes has long been one of our most important and original writers of fiction. May We Be Forgiven is her most ambitious as well as her most accessible novel to date; sex and violence invade the routines of suburban domestic life in a way that reminded me of The World According to Garp, although in the end it’s a thoroughly original work of imagination.” –Jay McInerney, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Life
“I started this book in the A.M., finished in the P.M., and couldn’t sleep all night. Ms. Homes just gets better and better.” —Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Our Country Friends
“What if whoever wrote the story of Job had a sense of humor? Nixon is pondered. One character donates her organs. Another tries to grow a heart. A seductive minefield of a novel from A.M. Homes.” —John Sayles, author of A Moment in the Sun
“I started reading A.M. Homes twenty years ago. Wild and funny, questioning and true, she is a writer to go travelling with on the journey called life.” —Jeanette Winterson, New York Times bestselling author of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?DAYS OF AWE
“A.M. Homes skillfully circles and tugs at the question of what it means to live in flawed, fragile, hungry human bodies . . . DAYS OF AWE is sliced through with Homes’s dark humor . . . one wants to read passages of a Homes story aloud because they are so fine . . . DAYS OF AWE feels like the part of the day when the sun is about to go down and the light is brighter while the shadows are darker. Everything has a sharp edge, is strikingly beautiful and suddenly also a little menacing.” —Ramona Ausubel, The New York Times Book Review
“Exuberantly transgressive.” —O, the Oprah Magazine
“[Homes] has shown a unique penchant for cracking open the dark heart of human nature — with irreverent wit, devastating empathy and haunting shocks . . . DAYS OF AWE [is] a memorable assortment of new tales about family, love, death, and an unqualified man who somehow stumbles into becoming a populist political candidate.” —Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon
“Homes’s keen ear for speech—surreal as her characters’ conversations often are—lends itself to varying degrees of self-aware misunderstanding, highlighting the complexity of language and the challenges . . . The impossibility of knowing another person completely is one of life’s painful truths, and [this] collection remind us of that—but [it] also shows that there are, at least, tools available to help us try.” —Vanity Fair
“Fascinating . . . I consumed these stories exactly like a spectator of a good fight or a neighbor peering through the hedge, and I felt sharply observed in turn. Homes, with her fierce sharp wit, reveals her characters’ deep flaws. No one gets away with anything and the spectacle is delightful.” —Molly Livingston, The Paris Review Daily
“With dark humor and sharp dialogue, Homes plumbs the depths of everyday American anxieties through stories about unexpected situations.” —Time
“In the title story, a Holocaust survivor taps into a theme of the collection when he describes the way people hold the history of previous generations inside them. ‘We carry it with us, not just in our grandmother’s silver,’ he says, ‘but in our bodies, the cells of our hearts.’” —Wall Street Journal
THE MISTRESS’ DAUGHTER
“A compelling, devastating, and furiously good book written with an honesty few of us would risk.” –Zadie Smith
“Fierce and eloquent.” –The New York Times Book Review
“As startling and riveting as her fiction . . . a lacerating memoir in which the formerly powerless child triumphs with the help of a mighty pen.” –San Francisco Chronicle
“Rich in humanity and humor . . . Homes combines an unfussy candor with a deliciously droll, quirky wit. . . . Her energy and urgency become infectious.” –USA Today
“I fell in love with it from the first page and read compulsively to the end.” –Amy Tan
“As a memoirist, A.M. Homes takes a characteristically fierce and fearless approach. And she has a whopper of a personal story to tell.” –Chicago Tribune
IN A COUNTRY OF MOTHERS
“Homes…has the ability to scare you half to death….[She is] devastating…a very dangerous writer.” —Washington Post Book World
“A commanding narrative…by turns witty and unnerving, and at times almost unbearable in its emotional intensity.” —Wall Street Journal
“Intriguing…captures a world spinning out of control….Homes is at her best evoking the pathos and obsession at the center of relationships between therapist and patient, mother and child, husband and wife. She is also wickedly funny. [This is] a psychologically gripping story.” —San Francisco Chronicle
THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS
“Enthralling . . . full of subversive humor and truth . . . original and stiletto sharp.” —The Washington Post
“Wonderfully skewed stories . . . sharp, funny, and playful . . . Homes is confident and consistent in her odd departures from life as we know it, sustaining credibility by getting details right. A fully engaged imagination [is] at work—and play.” —Amy Hempel, The Los Angeles Times
“Alarmingly good . . . It is hard to say exactly who Homes’s predecessors are—Roald Dahl, Rachel Ingalls, and J.D. Salinger all come to mind—but in many ways she is not unlike Cheever.” —The Village Voice
“These stories are remarkable. They are awesomely well-written. In the sense of arousing fear and wonder in the reader they entertain, but what they principally bring us is a sense of recognition . . . Here are all the things that even today, even in our frank outspoken times, we don’t talk about. We think of them punishingly in sleepless nights.” —Ruth Rendell
“An unnerving glimpse through the windows of other people’s lives. A.M. Homes is a provocative and eloquent writer, and her vision of the way we live now is anything but safe.” —Meg Wolitzer
THE UNFOLDING
Fortchoming September 2022
“From her first book onward, A.M. Homes has been challenging us to look at fiction, the world, and one other as we haven’t done—because we haven’t had the nerve, the eyes, the dire and dispassionate imagination. Gripping, sad, funny, by turns aching and antic and, as always, exceedingly well-observed and written, The Unfolding opens up another one of her jagged windows, at times indistinguishable from a crack, in the world that is always unfolding, and always vanishing, around us. “ – Michael Chabon, bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Moonglow and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
“A terrific black comedy, written almost entirely in pitch-perfect dialogue, that feels terrifying close to the unfunny truth.” – Salman Rushdie, New York Times bestselling author of The Golden House and Quichotte
“A dazzling portrait of a family—and a country—in flux. A story about what happens when truths that once seemed self-evident turn out to be neither self-evident nor even true. A.M. Homes has perfectly captured an America as it lurches toward freak-out, and a family as it shreds the lies it’s been living by. The Unfolding is hilarious and shocking and heartbreaking and just a little bit deranged—in other words, it’s a book that feels like what it feels like to be alive right now.” –Nathan Hill, author of The NixA.M. Homes was born in Washington D.C. graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and the University of Iowa, lives in New York City and teaches at Princeton University. Her work appears in ArtForum, Granta, The Guardian, McSweeney’s, Modern Painters, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Electric Literature, Playboy, and Zoetrope. She works in television, most recently as as Co-Executive Producer of Falling Water and Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes, and is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. She is the recipient of awards including the Guggenheim, NEA, and NYFA fellowships. Her most recent novel, May We Be Forgiven, won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, 2013, and has been optioned for film by Unanimous Entertainment.
INTRODUCTION
Home to Hollywood and Disneyland, Los Angeles may just be the American epitome of the controlled environment: man-made, manicured, synthetic. If the Great American Novel tends to tell of the outsider looking for and grasping at the American Dream, A.M. Homes’s This Book Will Save Your Life inverts such tales in a droll, satirical adventure of personal redemption that turns on the absurd.
Fittingly, when we first meet our protagonist, the fifty-five-year-old Richard Novak, he stands very much on the inside looking out—literally, through the glass window of his perfectly ordered, de Kooning–decorated house on a hill. “These are the things he wanted: controlled, precise, ordered.” An affluent online stock trader, Novak is a self-isolated machine kept in tune by a nutritionist, personal trainer, and housekeeper, his primary social contacts.
It takes an intense attack of engulfing pain—and a brief hospital visit where diagnosis is elusive—for him to discover his self-made exile. “He’d so thoroughly removed himself from the world of dependencies and obligations,” Homes writes, “he wasn’t sure he still existed.” He’s bewildered when a nurse asks if he has a friend he can contact, eventually calling his ex-wife, who, as always, is too busy to talk to him, hospital or no hospital.
Breaking his routine and his nutritionist’s regime, Novak’s first stop upon release is a donut shop whose immigrant purveyor, Anhil, counts his donuts like blessings. Listening to Anhil expound on the perpetual dissatisfaction of Americans always on the go, Novak finally takes the time to smell the coffee.
As he grapples with the haphazard foundations of his personal life, a sinkhole grows ever larger on his lawn, threatening his home and spurring him into action. When a horse ends up mired in the sinkhole, he is quick to act, staging a rescue operation via helicopter, replete with a movie-star neighbor playing the lead. Novak’s heroics persist when he befriends a crying housewife who can’t cope with her thankless family, when he helps free a hostage in a car trunk, and when he saves a drunk from a suicidal swim at a beachside powwow. “I’m trying to be someone new,” he tells Cynthia, the housewife-cum-friend who is also overhauling her own life.
Novak removes his “noise-canceling earphones” that have kept the world at bay, committed to becoming a new man and to interacting with life and whatever it may bring. After unprecedented bouts of crying, his suppressed memories return, of his childhood, of the demise of his marriage to a workaholic wife, of his repeated failures toward his son. As Richard slowly rebuilds his familial connections, and his awakening emotional availability leads to new ones, Los Angeles also seems to be experiencing a metamorphosis, albeit of a different sort, with earthquakes, spontaneous wildfires, sightings of a “saber-toothed cat,” fire ant infestations, and attacking Chihuahuas. This “return of the repressed” sweeps both Richard’s inner and outer worlds into a comedic trajectory brimming with preposterous incidents and quirky characters whose insights and struggles help him regain his perspective and his humanity—and quite possibly save his life.
ABOUT A. M. HOMES
A. M. Homes is the author of Things You Should Know, Music for Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, The Safety of Objects, and Jack, and Los Angeles: People, Places and the Castle on the Hill. Recipient of Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, she is a Vanity Fair contributing editor and publishes inThe New Yorker, Granta, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Artforum, and The New York Times.
A CONVERSATION WITH A. M. HOMES
What inspired you to create Richard Novak?
I was interested in writing about someone who on the surface has it all but below that really has very little. I wanted to see if I could create a character who could come back to life, pull himself together, and become a force for good, not just in his own life but in the lives of those he touches. I’ve become very aware that this is it—the one life we get—and the importance of making it a good life, one in which we take responsibility not just for ourselves but also for those around us. Every man for himself is a greedy, self-absorbed concept (very twentieth-century). We need to get back to what are in some ways more primitive, more successful concepts of family, which include the extended family and a commitment to one’s role and place in their surrounding community.
How is what you’re trying to say in this novel similar or different from your other books?
Each book really is part of an ongoing organic evolution, an extension of my work. I’ve always been interested in ideas about our culture, the morality underneath the way we live: Do we think we are good people, doing the “right” thing? I’ve been interested in the ongoing and endless struggle between a person’s public persona and who they are at home, the idea that we can’t be in public who we are in private. So many of us work to project a kind of streamlined personality with no edges, and yet we all have edges or idiosyncratic ways of thinking and doing things. In every book and story one sees that I am interested in both embracing the traditional—in terms of story form and narrative—and also challenging readers, prompting them, I hope, to think about their lives and how we live and function as a culture. My ideas, shocking though they apparently seem to some, really just come right out of the newspapers. I read culture, how we live, what we do, and perhaps think ahead to where we are going. I am also deeply aware of where we have been and the importance of keeping that in mind when thinking about human behavior. More and more I am interested in history, in writing which weaves history and fiction together.
I’ve always written about families—couples and marriage—and the ways we fail ourselves and each other. And in this new novel, I’m at it once again. Despite how fractured these families may seem, I do believe strongly in family and marriage and very much want to see people learning to communicate and be more successful in their relationships. All relationships are hard work, even “just” owning a dog.
I am truly a writer of fiction, working from my imagination, making up events and characters. At the same time, perhaps more than other books I’ve written, This Book Will Save Your Life is philosophically very much in line with what I try to put forward in my own life. A confession: I am that person who talks to strangers in elevators, who stops crying people on the street and asks if they’re OK, who offers to help an old person home with their groceries. And I find that my offer of help is equally as often accepted as it is rejected.
It is also important to me to write books that are funny—darkly funny. I find daily life to be surrealistic. The split between what we’re able to accomplish in mechanical terms combined with human behavior and a kind of flawed social structure—e.g., an automated voice versus a “live” person, and so on—all tells me a lot about who we (Americans) are as people and who we are becoming. And despite being perpetually hopeful about what we are each capable of, I remain often stunned by what I see.
You are a writer living in New York. What is it about Los Angeles that attracts you to it as a setting for fiction?
I spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, getting to know the city and the people who live there. I knew I wanted to write a book set in L.A., in part because the geography is so dramatic, so otherworldly and in complete contrast to how people describe it. Everyone says they love L.A. because of the weather. But honestly the weather is very strange: they have fires, floods, mudslides, tar pits, and earthquakes, and yet people seem to think the weather is good. Yes, things bloom year-round and the sun comes out more days than not, but there is also a strangeness to the earth there. The land gives in—shifting, erupting, or exploding without warning. L.A. is also a place where the American dream thrives; people flock to L.A. from all over the world to “make it,” to find themselves. The city is the last of the Wild West, tolerating individuality, eccentricity. There are enormously diverse cultures in L.A., but you have to dig into the city in order to find them.
In direct contrast to New York City, where I live, there is very little street life in L.A. It really is a car culture and a culture that one can become very isolated in. In New York, there are a million people on the street, bearing witness that there is someone sharing your experience and you’re never alone. In L.A., you have to work hard to build a community. That interested me and seemed a fitting place for Richard Novak to go after he left his marriage. He fractured off to L.A. and really never came back—until now.
What are you working on now?
Since finishing the novel, I’ve been working on a memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter, a portion of which appeared in The New Yorker in December 2004. It’s the story of my biological parents, who gave me up for adoption and then came looking for me when I was in my early thirties. It is in part a story of what it means to be adopted, but it is also about identity, how all of us—not just adoptees—define and construct our sense of self and our family.
Your novel’s title will surely draw in readers. How did you come up with the title? In what ways do you hope the novel will change people’s lives? Or might it be a wry commentary on self-help books? A nod to the nihilistic funnymen of Britain’s Benrik series (“This Book Will Change Your Life”)? All of the above? None of the above?
Often I have a title before I start to work—but this time, I wasn’t sure. I finished the novel and gave it to my agent who said, I love it, what’s it called. And I blurted out, “This Book Will Save Your Life,” which I hope holds true. It saved Richard Novak’s life—he is far happier and more fulfilled at the end.
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| Subjects | satire, Literature, short stories, california, drugs, funny books, urban, literary fiction, essays, american literature, relationship books, funny gifts, novels, humor books, american fiction, fiction books, books fiction, realistic fiction books, satire fiction, humorous books, FIC060000, fiction psychological, midlife crisis, drama, mental health, psychology, Los Angeles, relationships, family, Sports, modern, music, aging, romance, love, identity, fiction, Friendship, grief, death, fantasy, contemporary, coming of age, FIC019000, humor, 21st century |