May 17, 2006
A.M. Homes, This Book Will Save Your Life
Richard Novak, the narrator of This Book Will Save Your Life (Viking), A.M. Homes’s new novel, is a self-aware Chauncey Gardiner/Forrest Gump type, who, after he wakes up one morning with a sinkhole in his yard and a pain that started as a “knotty cramp in his back, a strange tightening from his gut up into his chest,” blunders through Los Angeles in search of the life he worked so assiduously to buffet himself from. In the process, he cobbles together a makeshift family that consists of a philosophically inclined immigrant donut shop owner; a world-famous actor who happens also to be a four-star chef; a Gyrotonics instructor who lost a breast to cancer; a depressed housewife who leaves her family by getting out of the minivan at a stoplight; and a Salingeresque cultural icon living next door in Malibu, among others. It’s implausible, and Homes knows it, so her prose speeds along at an amazing clip (I finished the 372-page book in about four hours), allowing the reader to suspend disbelief and enjoy the immensely entertaining tale. The breakneck pace also limits the insight to be drawn from the text; there were several passages in which it was apparent that Homes was communicating something of emotional significance—or, at least, something quite funny—and the ineluctable forward movement undercut the complexity.
I’m unfamiliar with Homes’s earlier writing, save for a piece included in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, but from all that I’ve read about her, this novel is a tonal, if not a stylistic, departure for the writer. Much of the acidity prevalent in the earlier fiction has been bled from This Book Will Save Your Life, making for a curious hybrid—a novel by a quintessentially New York writer transplanted to sunny Los Angeles. (Homes nonetheless seems good at pinpointing the vanities and pretensions of LA residents. Perhaps this is a New Yorker’s view.) All told, I enjoyed the book, and would like to read another. To those who know her work, which should I read: The Safety of Objects or The End of Alice?
I also plan to see Homes read on June 7 at 192 Books in Chelsea.