Music for Torching - Softcover

Homes, A M

Softcover

ISBN 10: 068817762X ISBN 13: 9780688177621

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2000

Synopsis

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About this title

Review:

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' 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 neighbours 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' 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 colour 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 far more adeptly 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

Review:

"Brilliant. . . .I found myself rapt from beginning to end, fascinated by Homes's single-minded talent for provocation."--New York Times Book Review"In this remarkable fourth novel, A.M. Homes delivers a sad/funny, wild-card strewn indictment of the ways our lives don't work at century's close. . . .all the more superb for the depth of its humanity."--Washington Post Book World"A sly, fast-paced and. . .darkly comic novel about a suburban marriage that's going to hell, fast."--Wall Street Journal"Exhilarating. . .a hellbound joyride of a book. Homes torches a whole genteel tradition of suburban fiction--Cheever, Updike--in which some center of stablility persists among the smug, the adulterous, and merely boring. . . .It's liberating to see the dead wood of unearned uplift get the old chop-chop. Rock-and-rollers have known for years that such rage and despair can yeild paradoxical exultation. What's taken writers so long?"--Newsweek"Searing. . .heartbreaking. . .the picture of suburban society is defly presented."--USA Today"Music for Torching has genuine and affecting emotional depth. . . .[Homes] gives conscience and tragic awareness to her characters with remarkable results."--The Boston Globe"It takes a real virtuoso to pull all this together, and Homes, happily, is just that."--Philadelphia Inquirer?Compelling. . .a haunting story of suburban ennui. It's no small achievement that Homes. . .manages to portray these blighted souls as people more to be pitied than loathed.?--People?Music for Torching is a page-turner that keeps us reading just to see what the author will think up next. A. M. Homes's manic study of suburban malaise ends up with some timely insights into the unravelingof the moral underpinnings of our affluent society, but before turning serious it offers a series of outrageously hilarious scenarios, all the more startling because they are utterly believable.?--Richmond Times Dispatch

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 068817762X
• ISBN 13: 9780688177621
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368