A. M. Homes "Music for Torching" (Doubleday)
In her 4th novel, Homes explores once again a theme
she knows well: suburban hell. Paul and Elaine are a seemingly happy couple, reasonably well-off, with
2 children and a house. However, they are also bored to death and don't know what to do to relieve the
tedium, as we could see in their first appearance in one of the "Safety of objects" short stories, smoking
crack to forget about their boring everyday. Here, they try to burn the house down, but it is only slightly
singed and this attempt at liberation turns into one more burden as they are now forced to repair everything
while trying to do something with their lives. Elaine has an affair with one of the neighbourhood's housewives,
so does Paul (albeit with a different one). The latter also develops an attraction for women's nightgowns
and bodyshaving and starts a relationship over the phone with one of his friends' date. Throughout the
book, the true self of all the protagonists, who seem perfectly normal middle-class Americans, is revealed
and their masks of perfection crumble to pieces: the brownie-cooking housewives are sex fiends, the beautiful
children psychotic and the successful husbands gun-toting maniacs or just colourless puppets. Homes
knows how to convey the feeling of frustration and estrangement of her despicable yet so human characters,
trapped in desperately monotonous lives. She also has a twisted way of picturing ordinary settings, making
them appear simultaneously grotesque and unsettling, but unlike Stephen King, another amateur of suburban
anguish, fear, anxiety and horror don't come from without, but from within, and the nice suburban-dwellers
are their own bogeymen. This is much more scary and disturbing than hairy werewolves or tommyknockers.
Marie Lecocq
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