There are few writers who have the ability to cause hysteria when new work is announced: the likes of Donna Tartt, Sally Rooney, the late Cormac McCarthy come to mind.
Undoubtedly the announcement of Lorrie Moore's first novel in fourteen years,There are few writers who have the ability to cause hysteria when new work is announced: the likes of Donna Tartt, Sally Rooney, the late Cormac McCarthy come to mind. I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, roused this level of excitement. Her last novel A Gate at the Stairs was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and I had great hopes. I Am Homeless... is a meditation on death, grieving, and the afterlife, though this book is sure to divide readers.
In I am Homeless, the protagonist Finn’s brother lies dying in a hospital bed in New York. All the while, he takes a road trip with the animated corpse of his dead girlfriend. Yes, really. This is a book as strange as it is unsettling. It has a laser focus on death, grief, and completely losing the thread of reality. Most people have experienced seeing the face of a long-passed loved one in a crowd; this is a familiar yearning for a reconnection, another moment to say the things we wished we could have.
While these sentiments resonate deeply, the novel takes a turn into the macabre. I am Homeless is the Great American Road trip novel fused with visceral horror, with a fixation on the disintegration of flesh. Once Finn finds out his ex-girlfriend has died by suicide, he visits her burial site. Lily appears there, stood above her grave, dirt in her hand, with possibly mushrooms growing from her eyes. This leads to the pair of them in a car, driving across State to inter Lily’s body where she wished to be: an FBI body farm. This bodily disintegration is laboured throughout the novel to the point of sheer tedium. From the skin on Lily’s hand slipping off like a glove to her neck appearing 'sheer as a rice wrap’ before appearing like ‘darkening cellophane’.
In other reviews of this novel, the book’s humour is lauded: where is it? The humour in I am Homeless is akin to when somebody tells the same joke and it gets less and less amusing with each repetition. When Finn drives towards the FBI body farm there is a ‘Dead End’ sign, and if you didn’t get it first time, Lily repeats it. Then a page later, as Finn walks about from the body farm, he says: ‘You’re dead to me’. Finn asks Lily in the car if she is ‘ghosting’ him. And it goes on. Once you notice this attempt at lightness, it’ll have you groaning, looking at the top of the page wondering ‘how much more?’ I wondered closer to the end: might this have been better as a short story? After all, Moore’s sharpest writing can be found amongst her short story collections: Self-Help, Bark and Birds of America.
I feel really disappointed by this novel. In the early pages there are brilliant critiques on capitalism. It begins as a real ‘state of the nation’ novel, where New York City streets are ‘coils of concrete ramps … a mad nest for some giant bird in a horror movie.’ Skyscrapers tower over the literally homeless with the metaphorically homeless. Finn logs on to the Times website leaving comments to test his own sanity. If the post is published, he uses it as a barometer for ‘how deranged he was that day’. And it’s these experiences of walking in downtown New York that he synthesizes into anecdotes to tell his dying brother in hospital; absorbing the everyday and bringing it into the ward with him. All the while, as Finn makes his way across the country, his brother holds on. By the time Finn returns, his brother has died. This, to me, is where the strengths of this book lie. Perhaps I am Homeless would have been brilliant if it was distilled into a sharp short story.
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is published by Faber
