May We Be Forgiven (2013)
Who wrote it?
Amy Michael Homes, known professionally as A. M. Homes (1961- ; active 1989- ), born Washington, D.C., USA. She was given up for adoption as a child, though she met her biological parents at the age of 31. Raised in Maryland, she initially studied at Sarah Lawrence College in New York before received an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
She initially wrote short stories, with her first novel Jack arriving in 1989, followed soon after by her first collection of stories, The Safety of Objects in 1990.. She has since published seven further novels, including 1996’s controversial The End of Alice, told from the perspective of a convincted child molester, 1999’s Music For Torching, and 2006’s This Book Will Save Your Life. Following her Women’s Prize for May We Be Forgiven, there was a near ten year gap before her next novel, 2022’s The Unfolding.
She has published two further short story collections, and a memoir detailing her experience of meeting her biological parents. She has also writes non-fiction, and for television, including two series of The L Word and her own HBO limited series, The Hamptons.
What's it about?
May We Be Forgiven is told from the perspective of Harry Silver, a professor with a specialism in (and obsession with) Richard Nixon. In the novel’s horrific first chapter, his brother George causes a car accident in which two people die, orphaning their child, and is committed to a mental institution. While George is committed, Harold commences an affair with his wife Jane. George walks out of hospital and finds the pair in bed together, and murders his wife with a bedside lamp.
As Harold navigates life after all this drama, he initially struggles, being divorced and cut off by his wife Claire and served notice from his job. He moves into George and Jane’s old house and takes responsibility for their pets and two children, Nate and Ashley. The novel doesn’t really calm down following its hectic opening, with a wild sequence of events piling up over its 500 pages.
George is moved between experimental treatment facilities, and at one point ends up being implicated in international arms dealing. Harold meets the daughter of Nixon who introduces him to Nixon’s sideline in short stories; has a series of meaningless sexual encounters via dating sites; has a stroke; and is befriended by a vague young woman who leaves her parents in his care as he disappears. George’s children suffer their own personal dramas away at boarding school, before convincing Harold to adopt the orphaned child Ricardo. Towards the end of the novel, with Harold now heading a household featuring multiple generations, the core new ‘family’ decide to hold Nate’s Bar Mitzvah in a village in South Africa he had previously supported following a school visit.
In short, there’s a lot going on here!
What I liked
I read a couple of Homes’ novels before, maybe a decade or so ago. I remember really enjoying Music For Torching, liking This Book Will Save Your Life and then starting another one before realising I’d had enough for now. Nice to finally get around to revisiting!
What I liked back then, and would have loved even more as a teenager, is still very much in evidence here: dark humour, doomed characters sleepwalking their way through life as things (crazy things!) happen to them, overall tone of bleak cynicism, etc.
It’s rather action-packed for an ostensibly literary novel. That first chapter really packs in the drama, and you wonder if it can be sustained for the rest of a long-ish novel. And if we’re talking purely in terms of mad shit happening, it definitely can!
I was just at the point in the book of thinking, hmm, this feels a bit familiar in tone. What’s it reminding me of? Oh, yeah, DeLillo! Of course. Especially having watched the White Noise adaptation recently. When, almost immediately, literally up pops a fictionalized Don DeLillo in the actual book. To be fair to Homes, this is a pretty neat bit of self-awareness.
It’s a book that feels fairly rich, without ever over-explaining itself. I guess the sort of thing I generally enjoy reading, so overall I enjoyed it in general ‘keeping me interested’ terms.
What I didn’t like
It’s verging on the ludicrous at points, if we’re honest. I know that’s kind of the point, and I do enjoy Harold’s fairly impassive (/sedated) response to all the madness around him, but there are a few points that really do stretch credibility. I suppose if George had just been tried and sentenced and stuck in a conventional jail, we’d have little of the fun of the rest of the novel…
For all the clever self-referentiality, it is a bit too in awe of its obvious precedents in the canon of late twentieth century ‘Great American’ literature.
I don’t think this is necessarily Homes’ most extreme or challenging novel in these terms, but there is again a bit of a sense of trying too hard to be controversial / provocative. Exactly what I’d have loved in my younger reading years, but bordering on tiresome in places now I’m getting on a bit.
Almost conversely, the ending is a bit disappointing in Homes’ own terms. Harold has blundered his way into a kind of atonement by being kind to children, animals and old people, he’s taken some advice from a medicine man in Africa (yes really) and… that’s sort of it. It’s all a bit neat and obvious.
Food & drink pairings
A varied cocktail of prescription drugs.
Aunt Lillian’s cookies.
Matzoh ball soup.
Fun facts
Title sponsor Orange withdrew its support for the Prize in 2012, leading to a period of months in which its future looked to be in jeopardy. It was rescued by a collective of ‘private benefactors’, those named including Cherie Blair and Joanne Trollope. It was known simply as the Women’s Prize For Fiction in 2013, though sponsors would return the following year…
What became the first chapter of the novel was published as a short story in Granta Magazine 100th issue in 2007. It was selected by Salman Rushdie for The Best American Short Stories 2008.
Vanquished Foes
Kate Atkinson (Life After Life)
Barbara Kingsolver (Flight Behaviour)
Hilary Mantel (Bring Up The Bodies)
Maria Semple (Where'd You Go, Bernadette)
Zadie Smith (NW)
Another big-name list, which includes the 2012 Booker Winner - though much like with Wolf Hall a few years before, that previous win probably doomed it to fail here.
2013’s Booker winner, in its last year in which only writers of British, Irish and Commonwealth heritage were eligible, was The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton.
Context
In 2013:
Meteor explosion over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk injures over 1000
Park Geun-hye becomes the first woman to become the president of South Korea
Benedict XVI resigns as pope, becoming the first to do so since Gregory XII in 1415
EU bailout of Cyprus
Boston Marathon bombings
Murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby by Islamist terrorists in London
Croatia joins the EU
1,429 are killed in the Ghouta chemical attack during the Syrian Civil War
Nairobi Westgate shopping mall terrorist attacks in Kenya
United States v. Windsor grants federal recognition to same-sex marriage in the United States.
Death of former British PM Margaret Thatcher
Publication of draft EU (Referendum) Bill by UK Conservative party
Andy Murray becomes first British man to win Wimbledon since the 1930s
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch
12 Years a Slave
The Wolf of Wall Street
Gravity
Frozen
Daft Punk, Random Access Memories
David Bowie, The Next Day
Kanye West, Yeezus
Beyoncé, Beyoncé
Life Lessons
I’m kind of unsure to be honest. Don’t sleep with your brother’s wife while he’s incarcerated?
Or, I suppose, if you do (unleashing a trail of chaos in the process), then just let life carry you along and eventually you’ll stumble on some sort of forgiveness.
Score
8
I enjoyed reading it a lot, but it’s just far too silly to give a higher score to.
I also gave 2013 Booker winner The Luminaries an 8, another one which I largely enjoyed in spite of some fairly major reservations.
Ranking to date:
Property (2003) - Valerie Martin - 9.5
The Idea of Perfection (2001) - Kate Grenville - 9
Half of a Yellow Sun (2007) - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - 9
The Lacuna (2010) - Barbara Kingsolver - 9
When I Lived in Modern Times (2000) - Linda Grant - 9
Larry’s Party (1998) - Carol Shields - 8.5
Bel Canto (2002) - Ann Patchett - 8.5
Small Island (2004) - Andrea Levy - 8.5
A Crime in the Neighbourhood (1999) - Suzanne Berne - 8.5
May We Be Forgiven (2013) - A. M. Homes - 8
The Tiger’s Wife (2011) - Téa Obreht - 8
On Beauty (2006) - Zadie Smith - 8
A Spell of Winter (1996) - Helen Dunmore - 8
The Road Home (2008) - Rose Tremain - 7.5
We Need to Talk About Kevin (2005) - Lionel Shriver - 7.5
The Song of Achilles (2012) - Madeline Miller - 7
Home (2009) - Marilynne Robinson - 7
Fugitive Pieces (1997) - Anne Michaels - 6.5
Next up
Onwards again with 2014’s Women’s Prize winner A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing.
