A. M. Homes

Feeling overshadowed by his more-successful younger brother, Harold is shocked by his brother's violent act that irrevocably changes their lives, placing Harold in the role of father figure to his brother's adolescent children and caregiver to his aging parents.

May We be Forgiven

Surprisingly deep. Slapstick and farce, moving, chaotic. Will stay with me for a long time. 

Steve Collins

Irene Alegre

It took me over twenty days of my precious life to finish this book. During those twenty days-and then some-, people would ask me: oh, so what are you reading now? And I would say, 'May we be forgiven, by AM Homes. Not sure I'm going to forgive her.' People found it funny. I meant it as a joke, but I was being serious. I have no regrets though, I'm happy that I read this. I'm glad that, finally, interesting, thought-provoking, not-wow-not-meh-not-ugh books are crawling back to my shelves. Makes my reading life a lot more exciting.

I will not even try to summarize May we be forgiven, it would take me about 1000 words just to recount the main things that happen in this novel. It is one of the most eventful books I've read, ever. In the first five pages (roughly), the main protagonist, Harry, cheats on his wife, Claire, with his brother's wife, Jane. While they are on the early stages of what comes across as an incredibly rushed affair, his brother, George, goes crazy and causes a car accident and kills a family. Then George is put in the hospital (or was it a sanatorium?) while they all wait for the trial, but at some point he escapes and goes back home and finds Harry (so, the main protagonist) in bed with Jane. And then he kills her. And then there are 475 pages left to go. The story includes Harry's several sexual affairs, him taking care of children and pets, him teaching and then losing his teaching job. They also organize a Bar and Bat Mitzvah in Africa, and Harry adopts a third child. Oh, and I forgot about the Men Scouts Camp for irremediable criminals. There's also a lot of rambling about Nixon and there's some incident with a tampon not being inserted properly. No kidding. 

So where does all this leave me, the reader?

During the first 100 pages I was thrilled. May we forgiven is a very dark comedy and I would laugh really hard now and then. I also was excited about the pace, it never got boring. There was always more and more. Then, after 200 pages, I started to become bored with so much craziness. By page 350 I considered quitting, but by then I was already too invested in the story, and I have serious problems when it comes to quitting books anyway. After hitting page 400, and only 80 pages away from the ending, all I could think about was finishing the book and moving on.

I'm glad I don't rate the books I read because if this was some kid's piece of homework I would pass it on to another colleague for them to grade. AM Homes is undeniably a good writer with a wry sense of humour and a fantastic ability to dig into the human soul. I'm aware that most of the things I could criticise about it are probably intentionally that way. However, this doesn't mean we are on the same wavelength. I was really recommending this book to everyone I came across when I first started it; by the time I was done with it, I had changed my mind.

To begin with, there's just too much going on, and it gets to a point when it borders on a strange sort of surrealism. No matter how many horrible things happen to the characters, the effects are minimal. They cry here and there, but I felt there was not enough feeling in their responses. These people -all of them- are numb robots, and I reject the idea that real human beings are that way. And then there's the final sense of redemption, that happy ever after that not even Snowhite and her Prince Charming were able to get. I also didn't understand why so many people hated Harry and placed him and George (a crazy murderer) under the same light? I mean, in my book, sleeping with a married woman and killing her are not exactly the same thing.

I have mixed feelings about May we be forgiven, but that's ok. That's good. That's what keeps both reading and writing experiences alive and going. Keep doing your thing, AM Homes, and I'll do mine. And who knows? We might meet again. Sometime.

http://bookmallows.blogspot.co.uk/201...

Feeling overshadowed by his more successful younger brother, Harold is shocked by his brother's violent act that irrevocably changes their lives, placing Harold in the role of father figure to his brother's adolescent children and caregiver to his aging parents

Emmett

"You know how there will be a report on TV of some woman who kills herself and her kids, and everyone acts like that's so shocking? ... What's shocking, is that it doesn't happen more often. What's shocking is that everyone says they fell in love with their child the minute it was born, what's shocking is that no one is honest about how hard it all is. ... What shocks me is how alone we all are."

A book as hefty as the life it aspires to be. It is a mixed bag of surprising ideas and serendipitous encounters that become much more or which vanish off the page or opens the mind like a crack of light: the cultural identities of Jewish-Americans, the potentiality of different people to be alike or vice versa, the fear of being alone, of having children, of finding oneself in places and identities one might never dreamed of doing or being, sex in other people's houses and department store changing rooms, humour and drama in attempted foster-parenting, in mental meltdowns, in wild eccentricities, in being insulted and loved with and without sensible reason. The human mystery that is Richard Nixon. The bumbling, hapless protagonist who tries to do his best and hopes it will work out, like us. Although arguably there is one beginning and ending to the novel, other small endings and beginnings are scattered throughout the book, and they suggest that there is no real time or moment at which things should really happen in our world, on which the tide begins to take an ostensible turn; rather it is the steady accumulation of discretely unrelated events that form the current of life. It is wild, real yet surreal/fictitious in parts and wholly moving, and very much like life in its oddities and retrospective conclusive-ness. Its trajectory is circumlocutory but ultimately upward, ending on a note of successful transformation mediated by the stepping stones of tiny victories, wretched failures, and baffling situations; it is a symbolic passage of growth and renewal that in its intermittent flights and falls criticises the ease of reducing it to just a narrative of progression. May We Be Forgiven does what novels termed 'contemporary' should do: confronting the matters, truths and social-mental trials of modern life such that these recognisable times are again fresh, readable and illuminating.

Gary Homewood

A pitch black comedy satire set in contemporary metropolitan America, about 2 brothers, murder, insanity, dysfunctional family bonding and all the forms of addiction (medication drugs, internet sex, etc) just beneath the surface of the American dream. Occasionally squalid and often hilarious, you may find yourself caring for the loser protagonist through his misadventures. Multiple interesting narrative threads (Nixon studies, Nixon as a short story writer, Chinese food). Indebted to Wallace with a nod to "White Noise" era Delillo, but contemporary and unique in tone.

Eva Ströberg

Maria

Kylie Frazer

Nicole Vanderbilt

A.M. Homes

Harry is a Richard Nixon scholar who leads a quiet, regular life; his brother George is a high-flying TV producer, with a murderous temper.They have been uneasy rivals since childhood.Then one day George loses control so extravagantly that he precipitates Harry into an entirely new life. In May We Be Forgiven, Homes gives us a darkly comic look at 21st century domestic life - at individual lives spiraling out of control, bound together by family and history.The cast of characters experience adultery, accidents, divorce, and death. But this is also a savage and dizzyingly inventive vision of contemporary America, whose dark heart Homes penetrates like no other writer - the strange jargons of its language, its passive aggressive institutions, its inhabitants' desperate craving for intimacy and their pushing it away with litigation, technology, paranoia. At the novel's heart are the spaces in between, where the modern family comes together to re-form itself. May We Be Forgiven explores contemporary orphans losing and finding themselves anew; and it speaks above all to the power of personal transformation - simultaneously terrifying and inspiring.

May We be Forgiven

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