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May We Be Forgiven A Novel A M Homes Books

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May We Be Forgiven A Novel A M Homes Books

I love stories about dysfunctional families, but if they’re not done well, they can be tiresome and banal. This, of course, is not the case when A.M. Homes is the person crafting the story.

If you like your comedy dark enough that somehow a man bludgeoning his wife to death with a lamp comes across as funny, you’re in for a treat. The hero of the book, Harold Silver, finds himself suddenly responsible for his young niece and nephew following the aforementioned incident. Suddenly, his boring, mundane, unfulfilling life changes drastically as he’s forced into a paternal role, and he undergoes a deep personal transformation.

Since this is Homes’ world, everything is rife for biting satire and dark comedy, with strange characters unlike any you’ve ever encountered. If I even tried to explain more of the plot, it would sound outrageous out of context, but Homes manages to infuse it with so much humor and tenderness that it’s consistently both amusing and touching.

May We Be Forgiven breaks down all of the cultural norms we associate with middle-class nuclear family life and in doing so, offers hope in place of cynicism. It reminds us that despite our best efforts, we will inevitably hurt ourselves and others, but reassures us that we’re never beyond repair.

I admire Homes for her courageous writing. She dares to go to dark places that many other mainstream authors avoid. My only qualm with this novel is that I think it could have been shorter — there were times when it dragged on without the plot really moving forward — but overall it’s another winner from an important contemporary writer.


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May We Be Forgiven A Novel A M Homes Books Reviews

My We Be Forgiven has the capacity to haunt, and that is a point in the book's favor. However, I have many points against and several unanswered questions.

Harold Silver, a mediocre college professor with lumpen students, confronts a family crisis when his brother George kills two people in a car accident. Harold stays in his brother's house to comfort his wife, and ends up in his brother's bed, in his brother's wife. Brother George finds them when he somehow escapes the mental unit where he's been restrained; whereupon George murders his wife by slamming her over the head with a lamp. Harold feels guilty about this.

However, Harold readily moves in to George's house, wears his brother's clothes, assumes custody of his brother's children, and has full access to his brother's money. Therefore, it's not too terrible for Harold when he gets fired from his three-class-a-week "professor" job. He will just finish his 1300-page tome on Richard Nixon, with whom he is obsessed. While working on his manuscript, George next gets distracted with a couple of nutty sex buddies, one of whom abandons her parents into Harold's custody, and through the ensuing hi-jinx he manages personal growth.

Cheryl, the sex buddy who didn't abandon Harold, turns out to be a relative of Julie Nixon Eisenhower, who makes arrangements for Harold to edit some recently discovered short fiction by Richard M. Nixon. Going up the elevator building where he does the editing, Harold encounters, if that is the word, an unidentifiable Nixon imitator who stands behind him and says mean things to him. What is this about? We will have to draw our own conclusions.

Meanwhile, George's kids do OK, and George and Harold's mother finds a new lease on life in the nursing home, so she can fake-marry her boyfriend in a moving ceremony. Harold visits her often, ditto his Aunt Lillian who serves him toll-house cookies out of a battered tin. These cookies, facsimiles thereof actually, figure in a wild adventure when George--the murderer brother, remember--gets transfered to a woodsman-survivor penal experiment and becomes friends with a bad guy terrorist. Harold is forced to help government spooks extract the bad guy. On the way out of the woods the spook who is driving Harold's (or is it George's?) car runs over something (or someone) that leaves the car a bloody wreck; and we will have to draw our own conlusions about that incident as well.

The adventures continue Harold is bonding with the children and *adopting* the child of the 2 people George killed in the car accident; then he is flying a bunch of people over to South Africa for a bar mitzvah in 'Nateville," a village that George's 12-year-old son had visited in a Habitat kind of way. All kinds of fireworks ensue, including almost getting kidnapped by some bad guys on their way back to the airport to go home. Nobody gets hurt; Harold takes a medicine man's tea doses, and seemingly feels exorcised of his demons. Whatever they were; you'll draw your own conclusions.

The novel could be described as an upscale version of Anne Tyler's *Saint Maybe* (where the protagonist finds redemption through raising his dead brother's stepchildren) combined with the sensibilities and improbabilities of Jonathan Franzen's *Freedom*. It also reminds me of Laurie Colwin's "Happy All the Time," a morality tale around the notion that if only people would behave and do the tasks set before them, life could be beautiful. In the end of May We Be Forgiven, Harold's family with all the old people (old and new) children (old and new) enjoy a wonderful Thanksgiving with just enough crabbiness to try for versimilitude. In the end, as a reader, I felt not resolved or entertained but manipulated. And as I said, I was also left with questions.

1) Why is story narrated in the first person? I thought Harold might be unreliable narrator but he turned out to be an unreliable unreliable narrator. The author keeps laying down hints that there aren't any tricks, there is no other shoe that is going to drop, that it really is a book about second chances. Yet I couldn't help hoping the whole thing would turn out that actually he, Harold, is the murderer in the mental hospital having a giant fantasy that he is living his brother George's life. No such luck.

2) Why does the story have to "jump the shark" so many times? What is the purpose? Did we have to have so much strain on our disbelief? Why so many twists and turns, some of which I've omitted in the review. Couldn't Homes make her point in a less ridiculous way? It's just plain irritating.

3) Why does money never have to be a problem? I was itching for the money to go poof so the narrator would have to open a boarding house. As it so happens, the people he takes in all have ample means of support (in addition to getting along perfectly).

In conclusion, the novel was a good read, but it got on my nerves. It's just all a little too ridiculous and a little too easy. It feels like pyrotechnics are trying to cover up a lack of real dramatic conflict. But as I said, I am just not sure I get it.

Pat Caplan Andrews June 13, 2013
more than a story, holmes has a vision of what humanity may look like as an alternate to how we relate and interact within the digital age. during a single year from thanksgiving to thanksgiving, a family setting is transformed. a series of tragic events change the lives of silver brothers. harold silver, history professor and writer, specializing in richard nixon, leaves his apartment, his way of life, to act as caretaker of his brother george’s family and household. with harold silver’s adoptive life style come perks, not least the sexual interactions available through online communications—brother george was head of a television network, so money was no object.

the deadpan first person narrative of harold, expectedly apathetic, surprisingly plays out as a bland view of an upper class entitled life, what contemporarily is defined as white privilege. harold wants for nothing, services are available to him without asking, and whatever price or cost is mentioned, harold pays without question. the more money dispensed, the more money appears from situations in which he becomes involved. late in the novel harold ponders the adage, time is money and wonders how he will spend his time.

equating the utilization of time with the spending of money, becomes problematic for whom money is never a scarcity; on one side of scale time and wealth are infinite, and the other side personal time is finite whereas personal wealth can extend beyond a lifetime. the question rephrased becomes how does one live one’s life if money is no object. holmes has turned money into an abstract.

in the world of the people for whom money is no object, services become the equal of finite time. this is pretty much true for people across economic divisions. human interactions in holmes’ vision are held together by services. her conceptualization of service includes services driven by monetary transactions, the serving of thanksgiving meals, serving time as an incarceration phrase, military service, the highest form of political service in the role president of the united states, and public service when nate silver, the twelve-year-old son of george, takes a trip, sponsored by the boarding school attended by him, to what becomes a start-up village in south africa.

the student body of nate’s school boasts one black student and a few asians. the asian-americans in the upscale community, owners of chinese restaurants, serve as racial other. blacks factor in through an african experience as a cultural other instead of a racial other, until a couple of black dolls are brought back to the usa. holmes compares the services the dolls perform in africa are compared to the services performed by them in the usa. in his poem, Gentle Measures, in his book How to be Drawn, the poet terrance hayes wrote, ‘Being a doll is close as a toy can come to slavery.’

forms of service freely given to forms of services for the needy mired in bureaucratic red tape, are explored or suggested. can the pets be considered service animals?

holmes’ reversals of gender roles of sexual initiation are worth mentioning. the male sexual philanderer is replaced by the female user of online sex dating, the sexual dynamic altered from an exercise of power to a provision of service. although the narrator is male, his creator is female and the women who have walk in roles as bit characters are remarkable for their personal voices.

much of what holmes describes is how we live, the rest, perhaps, is how she believes we should live.
I love stories about dysfunctional families, but if they’re not done well, they can be tiresome and banal. This, of course, is not the case when A.M. Homes is the person crafting the story.

If you like your comedy dark enough that somehow a man bludgeoning his wife to death with a lamp comes across as funny, you’re in for a treat. The hero of the book, Harold Silver, finds himself suddenly responsible for his young niece and nephew following the aforementioned incident. Suddenly, his boring, mundane, unfulfilling life changes drastically as he’s forced into a paternal role, and he undergoes a deep personal transformation.

Since this is Homes’ world, everything is rife for biting satire and dark comedy, with strange characters unlike any you’ve ever encountered. If I even tried to explain more of the plot, it would sound outrageous out of context, but Homes manages to infuse it with so much humor and tenderness that it’s consistently both amusing and touching.

May We Be Forgiven breaks down all of the cultural norms we associate with middle-class nuclear family life and in doing so, offers hope in place of cynicism. It reminds us that despite our best efforts, we will inevitably hurt ourselves and others, but reassures us that we’re never beyond repair.

I admire Homes for her courageous writing. She dares to go to dark places that many other mainstream authors avoid. My only qualm with this novel is that I think it could have been shorter — there were times when it dragged on without the plot really moving forward — but overall it’s another winner from an important contemporary writer.