The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Music for Torching by A.M. HomesTrey Strecker
A. M. Homes. Music for Torching. Morrow/Weisbach Books, 1999. 358 pp. $26.00.
A. M. Homes’s new novel unpacks the dysfunctional family life of Paul and Elaine Weiss, the suburban couple who first appeared in her story “Adults Alone.” The action begins when Paul and Elaine deliberately burn down their house after a family barbeque—a spur of the moment attempt to erase the past so that they can put their lost lives back on track. “Like children who have been allowed to stay up late,” Paul and Elaine play a variety of immature, sometimes vindictive, games (think Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) and entertain a bizarre procession of neighbors as they struggle to find some authentic sense of themselves while trying to conform to the normalcy Elaine imagines surrounds them.
Homes succeeds in showing that no one is “normal” when we peer behind their white picket fences, and her novel is both moving and disturbing because she manages to portray the comedy and the tragedy of her characters’ lives with compassion: “None are what they seem, none are what you think, none are what you’d want them to be. They are all both more and less—deeply human.” The novel ends as an emergency with one of their children forces Paul and Elaine to reevaulate their perspective on their lives and to accept responsibility for their actions. My only complaint with Homes’s fine novel is that the story ends rather abruptly. After watching these characters maneuver through the outrageous trivialities of their lives, I desperately wanted to see how they might cope with a real crisis. [Trey Strecker]