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As Quentin Crisp used to say, "Don't keep up with the Joneses! Drag them down to your level!" This could be the motto of the suburbanites in A.M. Homes's fourth novel, Music for Torching. Homes has a subtle eye and ear for suburban reality, but beware: she is no mere satirist of what James Joyce called the "muddle crass." Behind each neat, bright lawn, vile lives writhe in darkness. On the surface, Paul and Elaine are conventionally competitive middle-aged, middle-class people with banal yearnings for French doors and a new deck. They have two strapping boys. Their neighbors Pat and George are prodigies of efficient family life. But alone with Elaine, Pat drops the Stepford Wife mask and stages loveless orgies atop the throbbing washer, amid the Downy and Fantastik and Bon Ami. Meanwhile, Paul beds a local wife and a sinister mistress. The nice old man down the street downloads Internet child porn. Local kids join the Boy Scouts and bite off teachers' fingers. It's all about lurid misery and false fronts: a minor character is named Claire Roth, surely alluding to the bitter relationship in Claire Bloom's Leaving a Doll's House and Philip Roth's I Married a Communist.
Paul and Elaine first popped up in Homes's collection The Safety of Objects, as a couple having the happiest night of their lives smoking crack while the kids are away. Their happiest night here is when they tip the barbecue and burn their house halfway down. The story proceeds with a nightmare zombie logic from there, with a funny-scary ironic tone. "Paul notices that the color of her eye shadow is Fiction, and her lipstick is called Sheer Fraud.... 'What happened to the dining-room table, Elaine? Why'd you chop it to pieces?'" he wonders. "The damage was irreparable," his wife replies. Homes describes nice people doing not-so-nice deeds in luminous, precise prose way better than Bret Easton Ellis, as well as Joyce Carol Oates, and occasionally within range of John Updike. But Homes is really the evil spawn of Grace Metalious and Quentin Tarantino. --Tim Appelo --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
A child enters a suburban grammar school with a gun and explosives strapped to his body; a SWAT team moves in; a boy is shot at close range. This creepy and all too familiar scenario appears at a pivotal moment of Homes's latest novel (after The End of Alice), a caustically funny and eerily plausible portrait of a suburban family meltdown. In a nondescript Leave-it-to-Beaveresque Westchester neighborhood, Elaine and Paul find their marriage and their lives at a standstill: Paul commutes to a vaguely sinister corporate job ("how do you make people think fat is good?" asks his boss at one point) and enjoys weekly trysts with a neighbor, while Elaine plays housewife, attends school plays, and shops. Both feel desperately "stuck." In a fit of boredom and frustration, following two nights of cocktail parties and barbeques with the neighbors, the two kick their grill to the ground and partially burn down their house, an event that plunges them into a sordid suburban nightmare. Moving in with what seems the perfect couple, Pat and George, they leave their boys with families they scarcely knowAa decision with perilous consequences. Paul begins popping pills and has an affair with a friend's girlfriend, a psychic known only as "the date," who has a penchant for phone sex and persuades him to get a tattoo on his shaved crotch, while Elaine is seduced by Pat, a Stepford Wife with a penchant for sex toys. Homes unflinchingly documents the disintegration of Elaine and Paul's family, paying explicit attention to the sexual ennui and sadistic impulses roiling beneath the sterile veneers of their lives. The dark underbelly of the average American neighborhood may seem an obvious theme, and Homes's vision of marital dysfunction is long on sardonic humor and short on profundity. But the denoument to which this disquieting tale carefully builds is powerful enough to seem coextensive with the latest, and most distressing, real-life suburban horrors. (May)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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First Sentence
IT IS AFTER MIDNIGHT on one of those Friday nights when the guests have all gone home and the host and hostess are left in their drunkenness to try and put things right again. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
IT IS AFTER MIDNIGHT on one of those Friday nights when the guests have all gone home and the host and hostess are left in their drunkenness to try and put things right again. Read the first page
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
She's done it again!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Music For Torching (Paperback)
I've read both short story books by A.M. Homes and loved them. This is the first novel I've read by her, and I loved it. I couldn't put this book down. I never knew what crazy thing was going to happen next. I could relate to alot of Elaine's feelings regarding her life.
1.0 out of 5 stars
Torch This Book,
By Arch Stanton (Bondurant, WY USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Music For Torching (Paperback)
Wow, what a clunker. Unimaginative and filled with the cliches of modern life in the cul de sac, where all children all sullen, all housewives lead lives of pill-fueled quiet desperation, and all husbands play hide the pickle with soccer moms.I could forgive the hackneyed themes if the writing itself were masterful but it wheezes along with the grace and wit of an upper-level land grant university literary seminar. The best thing about this book is that its memory won't linger with me for any longer than it takes for me to toss it in the dumpster.
3.0 out of 5 stars
Giving Her Another Chance,
By
This review is from: Music For Torching (Paperback)
The first novel I read by her was "The End Of Alice". I read it about seven years ago or so & swore I wouldn't read her again. (In fact, I couldn't even finish the book before I threw it out, considering to burn it!) But alas, my curiosity took over & here again, I am.OK, I could get through this. It wasn't draw-dropping shocking to me as "...Alice", but interesting to say the least. My favorite thing about this book was its vast array of flawed characters. Yes, I was grinning & laughing at times at the hilarity of it all. Probably more because of how this story mocked ordinary, american life. I don't think any of us can read this & not be able to relate to it on some level. I only gave it three stars mostly because of the end. I closed the book feeling down, depressed, & in need of a good scrubbing of my mind. Then again, I surmise this is exactly what Holmes wants to achieve from this book.
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