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A. M. Homes Is a Big Fat Liar Dave Weich, Powells.com
Homes's longer work, including her new novel, Music for Torching, shares many of those same qualities. When I heard the premise of the new book I knew I wanted to read it: fed up with their suburban lives, an arguing couple decides against barbecuing dinner and instead uses the lighter fluid to set their house on fire. As the house burns, they take their young children out for steak and ice cream. And that's just the first twenty pages. These are mixed up people she's writing about. Drugged, confused children in middle aged bodies. Unsettlingly recognizable. In her writing we find moments of clarity in the least suspected places. "I think I can't help but write something sort of serious, that's my inclination," she said, "but I also wanted people to laugh along with it. Oh my God, I understand these people. It's funny and it's awful. And they keep reading." Homes teaches at Columbia. She likes Roald Dahl and Don Delillo. She's very funny. Before her reading at Powell's, we talked about her novels and stories and their place within the context of American surrealist fiction. And other things, too, like summer rental houses that are sticky to touch.
Dave: Music for Torching started as a short story, right? A. M. Homes: It started twice as a short story: originally, as "Adults Alone," from The Safety of Objects, with Elaine and Paul; then I really didn't think about them for a long time, until "Music for Torching," the short story. I'd rented a house that was sticky. It was actually tacky to touch it. I was so upset that I had to leave. There went my summer. I was so depressed. I tried to turn it in for a non-sticky house, but the real estate agent kind of screwed me over. So I went home, and I wrote this story. It was, oddly, to impress someone, too, to get someone's attention a bit. I jokingly said, "Oh, here's a short story. It's my New Yorker story." Swagger, swagger. My fingers were completely crossed in prayer. I think I wrote it that summer, which was probably the summer before End of Alice came out, and The New Yorker printed it in the fall, if I remember correctly. Dave: Did you put the story away for a while before it became a novel? Homes: No. I was just working. I had absolutely no intention of turning it into a novel. I actually don't approve of stories turning into novels; I'm completely opposed to it. But I'd finished the story, no one had bought it yet, and I was still sort of writing. I thought, That's fine, it's just a little flem, a clearing of the throat. And all of a sudden I had about sixty pages. So now it was, Oh, this is a little annoying. Is it a novella? What are we talking about here? - they burn down their house on page thirty. At about a hundred, a hundred and thirty pages, I had to start paying attention. Somebody has to be driving the car. If it was going to be a novel, I had to start thinking about how it was going to sustain itself considering what happens in the beginning. But I still am morally opposed to turning stories into novels. Dave: When did you get over that? Homes: I'm still not. The End of Alice had knocked the wind out of me in a lot of ways, just writing it. I think Music for Torching happened in part because there was no other large thing looming. I was finally like, Oh alright, you can be the next novel if you want to. But again, very grudgingly. Dave: I mentioned Alice in Powell's online discussion group, and more people had read it than I ever would have guessed, yet everyone was talking about how it made them so uncomfortable that they sold the book immediately after finishing it. As if they were scared to have it on their shelves or something. Homes: A lot of people have read that book, and I'm more frightened of the ones that tell me, "Oh, I really love that book End of Alice, yeah." I just want to say, "What are you thinking?" Dave: Well, you wrote it. Homes: I know. But it's a profoundly disturbing book. It's a serious book, an upsetting book. And a thought provoking book, I hope. Those are the best-case scenarios. A lot of people thought they somehow had bonded with me on their most secret, twisted perversions, and they hadn't. That book meant a lot to me. Intellectually and artistically, it was the hardest thing I've ever done. Writing fiction, to me, means being inside other people's heads. But this head was so completely unfamiliar and dark. And his language was a language that I didn't speak. I had to learn a new vocabulary. No joking - I was literally out buying Latin dictionaries, studying up. He's also odd because he's smart, but not as smart as he thinks he is. The more he remembers about what he actually did, the crazier he goes. They show him a picture of a dead girl and he sees flowers. By the end, he's completely unraveled. It was hard to create someone who in the course of a book comes so completely undone - because I was also relying on him to tell the story. It was like drunk driving, or driving under the influence of something. Dave: What was it like to write that, emotionally? Homes: It was really, really hard. I remember feeling awful by the end of it. I was depressed and sad. I went into a bookstore to do some research, looking up stabbings and forensic reports, the details of these sorts of things, and I remember standing in the bookstore, literally crying. I once jokingly told someone that every book is like a relationship. They're four or five years long - that's not so bad. They're serious. They demand a lot of attention. But I remember thinking that I wanted to have one with someone who's not so crazy and peculiar and demanding. So I started dating Paul and Elaine. I wanted to write something that was funnier. Alice has a lot humor in it, but it's buried in there. And I wanted to write about marriage and family. I think I can't help but write something sort of serious, that's my inclination, but I also wanted people to laugh along with it. Oh my God, I understand these people. It's funny and it's awful. And they keep reading. Dave: That describes it well. Music For Torching is disturbing, but in a completely different way than End of Alice. It's a lot more entertaining. It's more fun to read. Homes: With Alice, I wanted to write a book where people, at times, would be very drawn into it, seduced by it - then on the very next page want to throw the book across the room because they're so upset that they've been seduced, that they've been had by this guy. Then a minute or two passes and they have to get up and go get it so they can pick it up and read some more. I like that book a lot. I feel, as a writer, that I worked incredibly hard and I did what I wanted to do. A big thing was to not shy away from the material. My responsibility is to not worry about what people are going to think, but to worry about the character and how to most accurately represent him. Dave: It seemed to me the most technically impressive of your stuff. Underneath the story, I found myself thinking, "I can't really believe she's pulling this off." The narrator telling the girl's story and all the ways that's refracting. Homes: It's like a kaleidoscope. You think, What's real here? That's also why her letters are in there: for grounding. And the reality is that she's probably much less interesting than he makes her out to be. Dave: Reading "A Real Doll" [from Homes's short story collection, The Safety of Objects], I got the same feeling. Technically, the story was so impressive. For instance, right at the start, the first two lines are present tense; the rest of the story is past. It's almost as if the story falls, whole, out of a shell. To chronicle a relationship between a boy and a Barbie doll without undermining the seriousness of it - that not only requires an incredible attention to craft but also a remarkable subtlety because, for the story to work, the reader has to accept the premise entirely from the start. And the narrator completely pulls it off. Homes: I was able to do in that story what I feel I did in Alice - the real and the surreal simultaneously existing, neither dominating the other. It was hard to do in a story and harder, really, in a novel, but for me those two have the same platform. Music For Torching and In a Country of Mothers are fairly linear and normal - I don't know if I should use that word - but they're more straightforward. They exist within a very specific time frame. Dave: Jack, also. You were younger, obviously, but the tone of that book is so much different, so much warmer. Homes: I wrote that book as an undergraduate, when I was nineteen, as part of a homework assignment. Now it's in something like its eleventh paperback printing and it's sold all over the world. Sometimes I wish I could write that way again - that well again. I think there's a clarity to it and a purity that there's no way I have now. I know too much. The clunkiness with which that book was written, I still remember. It amazes me that I could speak at that age, much less write a book. It's a very sweet book. It's a nice story. Dave: Exactly: it's a nice book. And you wrote The End of Alice! Homes: I know, exactly. Alice got cancelled in France, cancelled in Switzerland, and banned in parts of England. Jack actually won the highest German Literature prize. People in Belgium read Jack on their school reading lists. It occurred to no one that the author was the same person who wrote The End of Alice and that my interest in children was not a perverted one, but more a protective one. Dave: David Leavitt said of The Safety of Objects - but I think it applies to Alice and Music, too - "The more bizarre things get, the more impressed one is by A.M. Homes's skill as a realist." I read that quote, and I thought, Yes, exactly. What do you think? Homes: Life is incredibly surrealistic. Especially where I live, in New York City, the weirdest things happen every day. So many things are so odd. You just have to be aware of it. Also, it's just part of the American surrealist tradition. I think of John Cheever and stories like "The Swimmer." The character swims across Westchester County, but it's told so realistically that you don't even notice it. I love that stuff. Delillo does it too. The Airborne Toxic Event in White Noise - you go, Yeah, sure. Then it happens in real life five minutes later. It's like Close Encounters, the odd mix of the surreal and the real. Richard Dreyfuss is out there in suburbia playing with his mashed potatoes. Dave: Is this the kind of stuff you read? Homes: I read student homework. Dave: At Columbia? Homes: Right. Dave: What's important to you, as a writer, to teach young writers? Homes: You can talk to people about how they should structure their sentences or how information should unfold, but I think, in writing classes, one of the big things that people don't talk about enough is content. If you want people to come to your story, there has to be a reason. Whether it's the pedophile telling his story in The End of Alice or Paul and Elaine burning down their house in Music for Torching, something has to be going on. It's almost like the question from the Jewish holidays, "Why is this night different from any other night?" Dave: Your characters do act. For instance, when Paul gets the tattoo, he seems to experience practically no transitional thought. Homes: Right. But the funny thing is that they're always in their heads. They're always obsessively thinking. Elaine is thinking about the house. What should we do about the house? Paul thinks about thinking. How fast do people think? Is thinking faster than worrying? But they're not all that aware of consequences. Although he thinks, If I have an affair and I spend the money, Elaine might find out. Not "It's a bad thing." To Paul, it's more of a cash problem than a moral issue. Dave: Maybe it feels like there's so much action because the third person voice that's telling the story isn't very intrusive at all. The events just keep rolling by. Until, there's a point near the end of the novel where the narrator interrupts to make a statement about people and how they live, about loneliness, and the interruption jumps out at the reader because it hasn't been happening for 250 pages. Homes: There's a few of those little ones. Somebody tried to get me to take them out, but I thought, No, I like them, I'm leaving them in. It's true: the narrative, despite being third-person, belongs alternately to Paul and Elaine, and it's told from a peculiar distance that isn't much distance at all. Dave: What authors do you use in class? Homes: It depends a lot on the class and who's in there. I use a lot of the old stand-bys: Carver, Cheever; I use Michael Cunningham's story, "White Angel," that was part of Home at the End of the World. I use a little bit of Grace Paley. Then I have my personal favorites. Russell Edson writes these wacky, I don't know, something like prose poems. Richard Yates wrote Revolutionary Road in 1971, which I really see as a predecessor to Music for Torching. It's one of the first books that took apart suburbia. I like his short stories a lot, too. When you're teaching undergraduates, you find they're often writing about childhood, and one of the challenges is how do you get them to do that without writing for children? Dave: Do your read much children's literature? That's one area where the real often just bleeds into the surreal. Homes: Sometimes. Stuff like Chris Van Allsburg. Jumanji, I love, which is totally wacko. The Little Prince - I love that story. Roald Dahl - is it Solo, the autobiographical story when he was in the R.A.F.? - he was flying his plane through Africa and he decapitated a giraffe. The image is so cool: the giraffe's neck and the blood on the wing of the plane. Dave: I once read an interview you did with Grace Paley. I found a copy of it this morning. How did you come about doing that? Homes: She was my teacher. At Sarah Lawrence, when I was little. Grace taught me a lot. Dave: Your writing is so different, yet obviously you have an immense amount of respect for her. Homes: Absolutely. But I think what she taught me most was the notion of writing the truth according to the character. People always talk about, "How can you write about marriage? How can you write about a boy dating a Barbie doll? You're none of these things."
That's because I'm a fiction writer. I'm a big, fat liar. Grace really talked about figuring out what's accurate for the people you're writing about, not what's accurate for you. You can write what you know for about an hour and a half - then it's over.
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