May We Be Forgiven, American writer A M Homes’s 2012
novel, starts brilliantly. Harry Silver, a Jewish underachieving academic
(there is no cause and effect, here), a Nixon scholar, married to an
American-Chinese woman, who is more successful (that is she earns far more
money than Harry), is having a Thanksgiving dinner with the family of his
younger brother, George. George, of whom Harry is secretly jealous, is a
successful executive in a television company and—it is a job requirement,
really—is an aggressive psychopath who likes to brag. So that’s what George is
doing at the dinner table. Talking about himself while “picking turkey out of
his teeth”. Harry is toing and froing between the kitchen and dining room, as
Claire, his Chinese-American wife, is sitting at the table listening to
George’s self-aggrandizing talk and George’s teenage children are sitting like “lumps” at the table, “as if poured into their chairs”, “truly spineless”,
their “eyes focused on the small screens” in front of them. Its Jane, George’s
wife, who is helping Harry clean up in the kitchen. Then Jane cosies towards
Harry and plants a kiss, “wet, serious and full of desire” on George. Fast
forward a few months. George jumps a red traffic signal and rams into another
car, killing the couple in the car on the spot though their young son survives.
George has what the psychiatrists describe as a breakdown and is wheeled into the
local hospital. Harry is dispatched by Claire to help George and Jane. Harry
takes his job way to seriously and begins comforting Jane in George and Jane’s
marital bed while George is undergoing psychiatric evaluation in the hospital
as his lawyer tries to figure out whether the charges against George can be
mitigated by a diagnosis of psychiatric illness. One evening, much to Harry’s
discomfort, George arrives at the house (it is after all his house), having taken
his discharge against medical advice, and finds Jane and Harry in the master
bedroom without any clothes on and so close that no light can pass between
them. George picks up the heavy bedside lamp and swings in the general
direction of the head of his unfaithful wife; then he swings again. The lamp
makes contact on both occasions and Jane’s head is a squishy mess of broken
chips of bone, hair and grey matter. Now George is in serious trouble, and is
wheeled off to the locked loony bin for the criminally insane. Claire discovers
Harry’s infidelity and gives him the marching orders. The head of the
university where he teaches “Nixon” gives Harry the news that comes as a
surprise only to Harry: no one is interested in learning about Nixon, and Harry
would not be required from the next semester onwards. Not exactly the
circumstances that would put you in the frame of mind to take on the
guardianship of your nephews whose mother's speedy dispatch off to the next
(not necessarily better) world was substantially assisted by your bedroom
callisthenics with her in the moments leading to her death. But that’s what
Harry ends up doing. It is a responsibility for which he is ill-prepared, not
having any children of his own; and, to be sure, he finds himself in
unexpected, not to say tricky, situations, such as advising on telephone his
niece who has started menstruating which “hole” to insert the tampon into (she
has inserted into the wrong “hole”), and organizing his nephew’s bar mitzvah in
a South African village the nephew has “adopted”. Then there is Harry’s mother,
stagnating in a nursing home and losing the last of her marbles to the
inexorable march of dementia. George, the psychopathic killer, has been shifted
from the high secure mental hospital to a scheme that looks more dodgy than the money laundering capers one reads about in the Daily Mail. In the middle of this hectic itinerary, Harry
has to find time to sexually satisfy mentally unstable housewives and random
women he meets in local supermarkets, more horny than a rabbit on Viagra. When
the novel ends, 365 days (and 500 pages) later, Harry is in charge of a whole
gaggle of children (including the hyperactive kid whose parents George killed
before he decided to treat his wife’s head as a golf ball), and a village in
South Africa that seems to subsist nicely for months on the pocket-money
Harry’s nephew sends them by saving on his ice-candies. Does Harry grow up
emotionally and is a better person at the end of the year more topsy turvy than
the helter skelter in the village fun-fair? You certainly hope so.
May We Be Forgiven is a sprawling, frequently
meandering, tale with a large cast of characters. There are several strands to
the plot, some of which—for example, Harry’s expertise on Nixon and his
involvement with the Nixon’s family who has found a stash of manuscripts of
short stories the disgraced former president of America allegedly wrote—sit
uneasily in the bigger story, while some others—such as Harry’s dementing
mother who is having a nookie with a man of advanced years—much to the disgust
of his daughters—probably do not effectively serve their intended purpose,
which, I thought, was to depict Harry’s slow maturation as a person and
re-establishing dwindling family ties, although they are, undoubtedly, funny.
There are a lot of whacky characters in May We Be Forgiven (rather like
Homes’s earlier novel, This Book Will Save Your Life, which
was a great commercial success). As a result, the novel has a surreal, almost
absurd, feel to it. In an interview Homes commented that she believed that we
lived in moment when reality itself was somewhat surreal. What she appears to
have tried in May We Be Forgiven, with considerable, if uneven, consistency, is
capture the oddity and inexplicability of daily life. The narrative pitch is
(deliberately, I think) kept an octave high to arrest the reader’s attention.
The novel seems plot-driven at the beginning, but after that the story becomes
somewhat picaresque; however, such is Homes’s control over the pace of the
narrative that the reader carries on turning the pages, plunging more and more
into Harry’s life which seems increasingly adrift.
What also
raises May We Be Forgiven above the mundane is Homes’s great feel for
dialogue and her black humour. Some
stretches of dialogue are side-splittingly funny; they could easily fit into a
comic sketch. Life, Homes once remarked, can be so painful and disturbing that
if one has to survive it, one has to find humour in it. The novel is not a
satire, but what it manages with appreciable success is to combine the serious
with the comic, and in the process tells the story of the redemption of a cold,
emotionally distant man.
May We Be Forgiven, despite its flaws, is a gloriously
readable, wickedly funny and uplifting read.
