BOOK REVIEW: Suburban disillusionment abounds in Homes’ stories
BOOK REVIEW: Suburban disillusionment abounds in Homes’ stories
Source: U-WIRE
BERKELEY, Calif. — Author A. H. Homes is a narrative snake-charmer. Her stories push us and pull us, attract and repel us; her characters shock our sensibilities with their bizarre actions but mesmerize us with their undeniably appealing vulnerability.
Homes’ first short-story compilation has been made into a film, “The Safety Of Objects,” which opens Friday in the Bay Area. In “Things You Should Know,” Homes continues to prove her skill in magical realism, creating characters that are deviant and improbable yet still deeply engaging.
In “Georgica,” a woman watches a teenage girl and a lifeguard hurriedly have sex on a beach. When the couple leaves, the woman comes out of her hiding place and picks up the condom left behind. She extracts the young man’s semen with a syringe and inseminates herself. As she lies on the sand, she meditates on the child she hopes to bring into the world, a world in which her frantic loneliness has no outlet for expression.
Homes’ characters grapple with truths that affluent suburbia is not equipped to tolerate. The woman in “Georgica” begins her lifeguard-stalking activities after recovering from injuries sustained from a car accident caused by her drunken fiance. In “Rockets Round The Moon,” a young boy watches a family’s perfect lives disintegrate after the father of the family accidentally kills a 13-year-old boy. Homes’ characters struggle to maintain normalcy in a world that, for them, has gone mad.
Modern gizmos and new-age prattle feature prominently in Homes’ stories, not as solutions to the characters’ misery or even as causes, but as ways in which they attempt to find an ever-elusive happiness. In “The Chinese Lesson,” a young father installs a GPS chip in his senile mother-in-law’s neck. The divorced parents of the young boy in “Rockets Round The Moon” try to renew their lives with “doctored brown rice” and “soy-based pseudohamburger.” There is a burning frustration that unhappiness can’t be “fixed” as if it were a domestic annoyance, that there is no modern marvel that will attack and eliminate it.
Homes’ cool, precise narrative voice and her characters’ blunt dialogue make her jabs at suburban smugness particularly effective. Occasionally, however, Homes reveals a penchant for the pointlessly shocking. The terse, lurid story “The Whiz Kids” is nothing but a study in gratuitous sexual perversity.
For all of her bluntness, Homes’ prose moves deftly around the unspoken sorrows that plague her characters. With a tone both vivid and serene she evokes sadness in “Georgica” through smells, sounds, movement. Homes deals with the traumas that fracture the very foundations of our lives, yet she handles these unwieldy topics with unique grace.
(C) 2002 Daily Californian via U-WIRE
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