The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Homecoming by Caren GussofEckhard Gerdes
Caren Gussoff. Homecoming. Serpent’s Tail, 2000. 154 pp. Paper: $14.00.
At the thematic core of this complex, intriguing, multilayered work is the notion that observation is possession. What the first-person narrator, Katey, is looking for is an understanding of her murdered junkie sister Reese, a girl who "grew to hate touch, to be looked at at all, but always . . . watched." Clearly, the alignment here is of observation with power: the seer possesses the image. To underscore this, Gussoff pays repeated attention to photography, especially in descriptions of photographs of Reese and Katey (which Katey has stolen). Repetition itself becomes thematically important in the novel, as Katey repeats Reese’s bad habits and overdoses on Valium while searching for her understanding of Reese. Katey loops through her mental tapes in order to get up the nerve to tell her family that Reese is dead. Curiously, saying the words is not what ultimately bothers Katey-it is how she’ll look when she says them, whether she will be seen as sad enough. The sisters’ preference for the visual is juxtaposed with the parental home, where no one really sees anyone clearly: the characters are blurry-eyed with drink or drugs and spend much of the time in separate rooms, yelling back and forth. The mother’s philosophy, though, echoes Katey’s: "If you cannot see, cannot hear, if it is not said, it doesn’t exist." Katey is looking for Reese in order to possess her forever. However, even seeing and identifying Reese’s body for the police cannot allow her this possession. Reese is gone and all Katey finds are shadows (another recurring motif), and "shadows can take on different shapes." This motif is reminiscent of Joyce’s "The Dead," but in this psychologically complex debut novel, a novel more about impression than substance, shadows dwell in a darkened world where they are not so easily noticed. [Eckhard Gerdes]