May We Be Forgiven

I've read and admired many books by A.M. Homes--The End of Alice was one of the most eye-popping reads I've ever experienced--but her latest, May We Be Forgiven, while having episodes of her weird brilliance, is mostly a disappointment.

Narrated by Harold Silver, it starts at a Thanksgiving and concludes the following turkey day. Silver is an ineffectual history professor who specializes in Nixon. His brother, George, is a big-time TV executive who is a total asshole. At the opening Thanksgiving, Silver flirts with George's wife. Later, George will be involved in an automobile accident that kills a few people. He is hospitalized, and Harold has an affair with the wife. George leaves the hospital, comes home to catch his brother and his wife in bed, and kills her.

This is a powerful opening, with the carnage leavened by Homes' distinctive black humor. But the rest of the book doesn't match it. From there Harold is subjected to all sorts of strange indignties. He gets guardianship of George's two children (and dog and cat). His wife leaves him. He has a stroke. He loses his job. He has casual sex with women he meets on the Internet. He edits previously undiscovered short stories by Nixon. He befriends the son of the couple George killed in the accident. He takes the kids to Colonial Williamsburg. He picks up a woman in an A&P, has an affair, and ends up custodian over her addled parents. The whole thing culminates in George's son having a bar mitzhav in a South African village. It all spins out like one of those "create your own adventure" books.

Some of this is entertaining, but most of it left me wondering, why? At times Homes seems to be delighting in torturing her main character: "A minute after the minder is gone, I accidentally flip a massive clot of rich black dirt into my eye, blinding myself. I paw at my face, trying to clear it. I use my shirt, get up too fast, and step on the trowel, throwing myself off balance. I crash into the barbecue and rebound--mentally writing the headline: Idiot Kills Self in Garden Accident."

Homes seems to be leaving clues throughout the book, the biggest being Harold's obsession with Nixon. He is fascinated by the man, even with all his faults, and recognizing he was a bad man. "Dick Nixon was the American man of the moment, swimming in the bitter supposition that for everyone else things came easily. He was the perfect storm of present, past, and future, of integrity and deceit, of moral superiority and arrogance, of the drug that was and is the American Dream, wanting more, wanting to have what someone else has, wanting to have have it all." Perhaps not uncoincidentally, Harold was the name of Nixon's brother who died as a young man.

While I couldn't put all the pieces together to enjoy the book as a whole, it has its moments. There are some laugh-out-loud lines, such as "I park near the Chinese restaurant. The red neon Chinese letters could spell out anything. For all I know, it says 'Eat Shit and Die' in Mandarin." Then a line will come along and take your breath away, such as: "She starts to cry. 'It's just so terrible,' she says. 'Which part?' I ask. 'Being human.'"

While Harold is redeemed at the end, the book just doesn't hold together, and I grew impatient with it very early, and rode it out to the end out of a sense of obligation rather than enjoyment.