Courtesy Viking Press
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Web-Exclusive Book Review
This Book Will Save Your Life
By A. M. Homes (Viking)
Review by Wendy Smith, March 2006
, April 2006
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For years I've been disconcerted by my fondness for A.M. Homes's work. She deals in extreme situations and behavior—a narrator who writes flirtatious letters to a pedophile convicted of murder in The End of Alice; a married couple who set fire to their suburban house in Music for Torching—and her new novel is no exception. It begins with the protagonist, Richard, discovering that not a single member of his family cares when he's hospitalized with mysterious, agonizing pain; it closes with him floating in the Pacific Ocean on the remains of his dining room table as a wildfire sweeps across Los Angeles. I normally dislike this kind of trendy catastrophe mongering, but Homes's fiction always captures my heart and soul. Reading This Book Will Save Your Life, I finally figured out why.
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It's the openness of her characters' emotions and the warmth of Homes's engagement with them, a striking contrast to the superior distance maintained by most authors trafficking in this sort of material. In other hands, Richard would be a creepy freak: a wealthy 55-year-old divorcé who trades stocks via computer, who hasn't left his austerely elegant house in weeks, hasn't seen his teenage son, Ben, in years, makes direct contact with no one except his housekeeper, nutritionist, and personal trainer. Yet Homes quickly reveals Richard's aching loneliness, his desperate recognition that he's let everyone he cares about slip away as he isolated himself in a safe, sterile vacuum. "I'm trying to be something new," he tells the woman he finds weeping in the grocery store. Cynthia, who's fled the husband and children who treat her as nothing more than a provider of food, transportation, and cleaning services, is one of several wonderfully rendered characters who help Richard reconnect with the world and begin his most important journey, toward a new relationship with Ben.
Homes paints with broad brushstrokes: among Richard's other new acquaintances are the wise immigrant owner of a donut shop who says things like, "Americans try on the spiritual life of others like they don't have any of their own," and a screenwriter who hosts an Iron John-style men's powwow. These could be stereotypes, but they are always surprising us as the author unfolds layer after layer of their complex personalities. Her big, bold approach reminds us that clichés are rooted in common truths. The characters are people we know, products of the enormous changes—liberating yet also unsettling—that have transformed America in the past 50 years. But truth is never simple. The bitter, workaholic ex-wife who says, "I have feelings, Richard, I just never have time," by the end of the novel is eating takeout food with him and their son in a blacked-out hotel room during a power failure. "They are together, there for each other as much as they can bear to be," Homes writes. "Though it might not be enough, it is something, it is more than nothing."
The author offers many such moments of chastened, mature wisdom, redeemed from any trace of sentimentality by the nearly equal number of moments in which people act selfishly and hatefully. ("Do I have to wait until the police come?" asks a woman who's hit Richard with her car. "Because I have things to do.") Homes has no illusions about human nature, but she has tremendous compassion for it, and a bedrock faith in our flawed, hesitant efforts to grow and change. Anyone who has ever looked back with regret, who has ever longed to redeem a mistake or reconcile with an estranged loved one, will be moved and perhaps even inspired by the tender, tentative optimism of This Book Will Save Your Life.
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