The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Things You Should Know, by A. M. Homesreviewed by Stacey Gottlieb
A. M. Homes. Things You Should Know. HarperCollins, 2002. 213 pp. $23.95.
Many of the characters in A. M. Homes’s latest collection of stories are looking for something, often something they seem unable to name. This wanting can reach spectacular heights, and so it’s no real surprise to find that the resulting tension is what tends to sustain the stories’ narrative tide. This said, even the most ordinary of constructs has the potential to turn foreign or foreboding under Homes’s fictive care. Like a soggy paper left to dry in the sun, the borders of these stories curl, Homes’s characters and their workaday lives left warped. For Homes’s fans, the landscapes of these fictions will be happily familiar: a hyperreal now, a suburban Gothic full of menace, where sprinkler systems and shady lanes offer little relief from the pain and dysfunction in their midst. Familiar too will be the shaky couples unable to connect (with each other or their children or their immigrant help), the sex-addled adolescents, and the aging parents who grow more alien each day. That’s not to say that these stories are merely derivative of ones past. Rather, Things You Should Know possesses a mature polish and, in many places, a disturbing emotional punch that speaks of Homes at the very top of her game. As for the characters, they seek, in essence, a sense of self; a search usually bungled by a desire to belong. When Homes is going strong, these dioramas of angst are works of wonderful simplicity and keen detail, where perspective is always slightly askew. Take, for example, the tightly wound woman who’s “killed” (dropped) a favorite plant: “I can’t bear it. I need to be reminded of beauty,” she moans, until her teenaged daughter soberly clarifies that the thing’s “not dead . . . It’s just upside down.” Such exchanges are Homes’s forte and, in this collection, rarely disappoint.