This Book Will Save Your Life

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The impossibility of knowing another person completely is one of life’s painful truths, and [this] collection remind us of that—but [it] also shows that there are, at least, tools available to help us try.

This tepid satire about modern America begins with Richard Novak, a wealthy day trader, having a panic attack and being rushed to the hospital with "incredible pain" all over his body: "He lay there realizing how thoroughly he'd removed himself from the world or obligations, how stupidly independent he'd become: he needed no one, knew no one, was not part of anyone's life. This is the start of a sequence of events that make Raiders of the Lost Ark look like a walk through your local library. The promised land of Los Angeles, a surreal city of earthquakes, wildfires, mudslides, and feral Chihuahuas, is also very much a character in This Book Will Save Your Life. Novak’s heroics persist when he befriends a crying housewife who can’t cope with her thankless family, when he helps free a hostage in a car trunk, and when he saves a drunk from a suicidal swim at a beachside powwow. It is equally the story of the myriad of characters that are similarly finding their way and shaping each other’s lives in the process – memorably, Anhil, the jewish doughnut maker, Cynthia the under appreciated house wife, Nic, the somewhat feral novelist, and Richard’s coming of age son Ben.And when he finds an exhausted and unappreciated housewife weeping in the produce section, he packs her off to a luxury hotel. It] is the searing precision of her language and her profound and thorny concerns that infuse these unpredictable tales with their unnerving power . The automatic gate peels back, the front door opens, and there he is in jeans and a white T-shirt, a little rumpled, a little worn—startlingly sexy. Homes’s keen ear for speech—surreal as her characters’ conversations often are—lends itself to varying degrees of self-aware misunderstanding, highlighting the complexity of language and the challenges . Since finishing the novel, I’ve been working on a memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter, a portion of which appeared in The New Yorker in December 2004.

He finds a weeping housewife in the produce section of the supermarket, helps save a horse that has fallen into the sinkhole, daringly rescues a woman from the trunk of her kidnapper's car, and, after the sinkhole claims his house and he has to relocate to a Malibu rental, he befriends a reluctant counterculture icon. M. Homes exposes the heart of an uneasy America in her new collection – exploring our attachments to each other through characters who aren’t quite who they hoped to become, though there is no one else they can be.Homes, whose masterful handling of suburban dystopia merits her own adjective, may have just written her midcareer magnum opus with this portrait of a flawed Nixonian bent on some sort of emotional amnesty. A confession: I am that person who talks to strangers in elevators, who stops crying people on the street and asks if they’re OK, who offers to help an old person home with their groceries. In the title story, a Holocaust survivor taps into a theme of the collection when he describes the way people hold the history of previous generations inside them. He encounters a host of amusing and lovable characters who figure, in varying degrees, to his finding a new way to be. Laurie finally begins to move on, creating a mostly satisfying life for herself, whereas Jack’s inability to be genuine tortures him and turns him into an ever bigger jerk.