Review: Days of Awe, by A M Homes

It is, like all of Homes’s fearless work, strangely surreal and unforgettable as she explores the dark, disturbing underbelly of suburban dystopias -- as well as making the reader laugh out loud. I caution against reading on public transport. In literary terms, there really is no place like Homes.

Indeed, we agree when we discuss her trademark, pitch-black sense of humour, if you can’t laugh at the state of the world today, you’ll weep.

Early in the story, we learn that the novelist, who has written a novel about the Holocaust, said yes to the conference “after having made a pact with herself to say no to everything, a move towards getting back to work on a new book.”

A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and winner of the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction for her last novel, May We Be Forgiven, Homes is the author of eight novels, three short story collections and a fiercely frank memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter. At the moment, she’s saying yes to everything despite her desire to work on a new novel. Her fictional novelist “has spent the better part of a year on book tour, travelling the world giving readings, doing interviews, answering questions that felt like interrogations.

“It was as if the journalists thought that by asking often enough and in enough languages, eventually something would fall out, some admission, some other story -- but in fact there was nothing more. She’d put it all in the book.”

No pressure then, thinks this journalist preparing to question the forthright, fast-talking Homes (56), who teaches at Princeton University and lives in New York City, with her daughter, Juliet (15). Raised by left-leaning, Jewish intellectual adoptive parents in the affluent suburbs of Washington D. C., Homes has just embarked on tour, criss-crossing the States as well as Europe. It’s the third time I have interviewed her so I promise I that I do not have ways of making her talk. She thanks me, then gives a disbelieving laugh. “Oh yeah?”

So, what kept her? Her last short story collection came out in 2002 and her first, The Safety of Objects, which was filmed starring Glenn Close, was published in 1990. It’s taken her more than a dozen years to write the 12 stories that make up Days of Awe, in which Cheryl, a 14-year-old we first met in The Safety of Objects returns in two stories as a college sophomore. “She just hasn’t aged like the rest of us,” jokes Homes. Cheryl’s family has had so much plastic surgery they no longer know who they are. Her mother has temporarily blinded herself after attempting to change the colour of her eyes; father walks around holding a mirror so that he can constantly stare at himself; her older sister is a model -- “so thin she actually looks flat” -- who has had so much Botox she can’t smile or frown.

“I felt I wasn’t done with Cheryl, but I don’t sit down to write a collection,” says Homes. “I have ideas for stories and they accrue. It can take many years to write them. Sometimes -- like May We Be Forgiven, which began as a short story that Zadie Smith asked me to write -- they become the genesis of a novel. Of course, life intervenes. I teach; I write for magazines and television. [She scripted the series, The L-Word and, more recently, has written for the US mystery series, Mr Mercedes, based on Stephen King’s novel.] I sit on several boards, including Yaddo -- the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, run by Glaswegian Elaina[correct] Richardson -- and I’m raising my daughter, who is a joy but also a teenager with all that that brings. I never ever seem not to have something to do.

“The story Days of Awe [the title refers to the 10-day period of the Jewish High holiday beginning with Rosh Hashanah and ending with Yom Kippur but also refers to the state of the world now] has been years in the writing but last summer I was alone in Oxford when my daughter was at summer school.

“My very old, very dear friend, Baroness Helena Kennedy, loaned me her house. I just had to finish that story, also another one, The National Cage Bird Show, a modern story about war, set in a chat room, and written in relation to J D Salinger’s For Esme[acute accent on final e] With Love and Squalor. I couldn’t have finished either without Helena’s kindness. Another great friend, Jeanette Winterson, delivered shopping and delicious roast chicken -- I even had the loan of her rickety old bicycle."

While at Oxford, Homes realised that neither story was risky enough. Once she got into dangerous territory, however, she completed the collection. Nevertheless, it’s amazing to discover that she has worked on the stories for so long -- they read as if written yesterday. Surely that is the case with the brilliantly satiric, peculiarly prescient A Prize For Every Player, in which a garrulous father, shopping with his family at the Mammoth Mart, rants about the American politics of his youth versus today. The crowds anoint him the people’s candidate for President.

“No, it’s not a new story. I wrote that eight years ago. I know, it’s really timely. People keep asking, ‘How did you know?’ I knew because even before the election of Trump I was already trying to figure out a novel about the downfall of the American government. My agent, my publishers were saying, ‘That’s science fiction. You don’t write science fiction.’ I felt like there was something really interesting happening -- and it was happening so fast. We are no longer united as a country. We are not seeing reflected back at us the idea that freedom is a basic human value. It’s very tricky. As for Trump, yes indeed, you could not invent him, with his over-the-top speeches.”

in any case, Homes has long been a political animal. At the age of seven, she went door-to-door in Chevy Chase to promote Hubert Humphrey’s presidential bid in 1968.

“Many of my stories are about the past and history, about how you can not move through life carrying all history with you. But, if you leave history behind, like so much of America is doing right now, and just go on without history, then you have no capacity to make informed decisions. That is just so interesting to me."

Homes’s own history is extraordinary. An intensely private woman -- the A stands for Amy and the M, she claims, for Middle -- she is the last author you might expect to write a revelatory memoir, but in The Mistress’s Daughter she tells what happened when her birth mother turned up and when, later, she met her father. It is a story so shocking, so peculiar and emotionally strange that Homes says she had to write it although she never writes autobiographically. “I’m just not that interested in myself.”

Educated at Sarah Lawrence College just north of New York City, she spent two years at the renowned Iowa Writers Workshop in Iowa City and has lived on and off at the Chateau Marmont Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, once home to Greta Garbo, Jim Morrison and John Lennon, particularly while writing her non-fiction book, Los Angeles: People, Places and the Castle on the Hill. Her mentors have ranged from the late Grace Paley, who taught her about “writing the truth according to character,” to the playwright Edward Albee, who died in September, 2016.

“Along with Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill, Edward has been a huge influence. I grew up seeing plays at Arena Stage, in Washington, all the time. I think those great playwrights gave me a sense of dialogue. Also, Edward Albee became a very real person in my life. I was very young when I met him.” She was an artist in residence at the Albee Foundation in Montauk, N. Y., and spent time with him on Long Island, where they both had homes.

“We often talked about being adopted because he was too. We had many conversations about the sense of distance, the dissonance, of being in a family that you are not related to, although my people really were lovely.”

I tell her I met Albee once in New York City. ‘Was he grumpy?” she asks. “No, very charming; we spoke for a while.”

“You were lucky -- he was a great playwright but he sure could be testy. I really miss him.”

Days of Awe, by A M Homes (Granta, £14.99). A M Homes will discuss her work at Golden Hare Books, Edinburgh, on July 12.