11th May 2008
This Book Will Save Your Life
In A.M. Homes’s novel, This Book Will Save Your Life, middle-aged protagonist Richard Nowak has had what he believes is a brush with death, followed by a mid-life crisis.
This is a story we’ve heard before — in fact, Homes is flirting with some real cliche in the subject matter of her book. But it manages to be completely unexpected, anyway.
Bizarre things happen to Richard Nowak. They will make you laugh.
The characters in This Book… are mostly described without any real reference to their physical form. We understand them, picture them because of their actions and dialogue. We imagine we know someone like each of them.
Richard’s position and circumstance (crossed with his near death experience) allow him to be absurdly helpful to others — strangers, family, his housekeeper — and as a worldly cynic, you wait the entire story for this to backfire on him. People can’t just go around being maniacally generous like that, you think. And his life definitely gets more complicated, but it also gets richer.
The prose is simple and unobtrusive, allowing the incredible plot (and I mean that in a couple of ways) and pitch-perfect dialogue to stand out. My critic was forced into hiding, edged out by the characters that had come to life in my mind.
Can a fable take place in modern day LA, with complex, quirky characters that curse and threaten and fuck? A.M. Homes says yes, and she’s proven it to me with This Book….
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