A M Homes - May We Be Forgiven

Don't you love it when you pick up a book, turn to the first page, and know immediately you have found something special? For me, this was one of those books. I was immediately engaged and remained thoroughly engrossed for the rest of the novel.

With May We Be Forgiven, A M Homes has catapulted herself into a top ten position on my favourite authors list. This is a wild, rollicking adventure of a book, tragic but simultaneously hilarious and moving. Jeanette Winterson calls it the great American novel of our time, and it is certainly the best book I've read this year. Which is saying something, as you know.

The book opens on a family Thanksgiving dinner. While his brother George sits at the table, ignorant of the fact that help is needed, Harold ferries plates back and forth to the kitchen to assist George's wife Jane who has prepared all the food. She interrupts him as he picks at the turkey carcass, 'fingers deep in the bird, the hollow body still warm, the best bits of stuffing packed in' to kiss him full on the mouth. It is a kiss that is described as 'serious, wet, and full of desire', and like Helen of Troy's face, it is a kiss that launches a wild ride. The story takes off, galloping through a fatal car accident which leaves behind an orphaned boy, a very brief adulterous relationship, George's mental breakdown and ensuing hospitalisation, and finally a murder.

All in the first 50 odd pages. At which point I quite honestly wondered where Homes could possibly take the story next, what the next 400 odd pages could feasibly hold. But as Salman Rushdie says in his cover quote, this book starts at maximum force - and then it really gets going. The narrative speed does not stop or slow, nor does the story ever become boring. From here we are shuttled through the sometimes dirty, sometimes downright dangerous world of online dating, to the peculiar realm of alternative correctional facilities; from life at a posh American boarding school to village society in rural South Africa; from the world of academia and whispers of forgotten works of fiction by Richard Nixon to attempted car-jackings, inappropriate teacher-student relationships, a missing girl, a wedding in a senior care facility, a stroke, watered down Judaism, lots of Chinese food and the life of modern immigrants to the United States.

Harold is left bereaved, divorced and caring for George's two children, Nate and Ashley. His life has changed irreparably yet he conducts himself with aplomb. In church at the kids' mother's funeral, he brings out some Gummi bears for the kids and finds a mother behind him leaning in to ask 'how do you know about snacks?'. When Ashley calls from school, in tears and upset, Harold finds her mother's Amazon account and orders books to be sent to her. Touching moments like this are what set this book apart, charging it with humour in the midst of horror.

In the middle of the book Harold realises that he has never tried to do anything with his life, to succeed. He has always been satisfied with mediocrity or less: "...it's all coming back like a kind of psychic tidal wave, and there's a bad taste in my mouth, metallic and steely, and I'm feeling how much everyone in my family hated each other, how little we actually cared for or respected anyone but ourselves. I'm feeling how profoundly my family disappointed me and in the end how I retreated, how I became nothing, because that was much less risky than attempting to be something, to be anything in the face of such contempt." He pulls himself out of this mire, and out of the guilt he feels for his part in Jane's death, to create a family around him that is everything his family was not - loving, supportive, close.

Harold's journey is a new-age picaresque of sorts, but without the cynicism David Foster Wallace and John Kennedy Toole lend to the genre. His story is an uplifting tale of self-discovery and redemption, that is simultaneously unsentimental and deeply moving. And Harold himself is a genuinely sympathetic character, someone whose self-doubt is matched only by his warmth and ability to care for other people. He is the most maternal male character I have ever read, naturally taking in both human and animal strays and treating those around him with compassion and empathy.

I laughed outloud so often whilst reading this that Bibliohubby came to refer to it as 'that funny book you're reading'. But my laughter was as often prompted by astonishment as humour. Homes's writing is fresh and unexpected and compelling. I absolutely loved this novel.

Overall Assessment: 5 out of 5. Outstanding. Homes writes beautifully, and her story-telling is top tier. Such an imagination. I now want to go and find everything she's ever written and read it.

Note: This book also won the Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly the Orange Prize) this year, beating works by Zadie Smith, Hilary Mantel and Kate Atkinson. So I am not alone in my stellar assessment of it!

The Art of Linguistic Expression

I was watching a video online the other day, of Jeanette Winterson interviewing A M Homes, in which both authors agreed that people no longer cared about the quality of writing in a book. One of them, I don't remember which, suggested that use of language was never mentioned anymore when a new book was reviewed, and the other nodded vigorously in agreement. Both authors felt that the new generation of readers didn't seek out high-level linguistic expression in books, and they attributed this modern lack of interest in the quality of writing to the internet era - to text-speak and emoticons, to acronyms and abbreviations.

I found the whole thing peculiar, because whilst I acknowledge that there is a generation currently developing into adulthood who communicate largely through informal means, where the rules of grammar are less important than the speed of getting a point across, I haven't seen evidence yet that this has been translated into the world of literature. I read a lot of reviews, and the focus of these seems much the same these days as it always has been. Similarly it seems to me that the use of language is as important as ever in deciding who should win a literary prize.

Of course the existence of new technologies has changed modern literature in some interesting ways - for example, the chapter in Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer Prize winning novel A Visit From the Goon Squad which is written entirely in Powerpoint could not have existed fifteen years ago, and there have been a number of other books (like 'e' by Matt Beaumont, an epistolary novel written entirely as a string of emails between workers in an advertising agency, and Hold the Fries by Nina Schindler, which is told exclusively through letters and text messages) that make a strong feature of new technologies. But in my view a really good book (including the ones mentioned above) is still one which combines beautiful writing with remarkable story. And I truly don't believe that the text-generation will do away with lyricism, or clever use of vocabulary, or spare but stunning prose.

Maybe I am being optimistic. But I think it is far more likely that Homes and Winterson are being unduly pessimistic. Every generation feels the next spells the end of what matters. And inevitably, that next generation simply introduces change to the existing order - not on a grand scale, but
on the same incremental level as the change wrought by the generation before. Change is not a bad thing. Organic beings are defined by constant change. That's what it is to be organic. Change is growth.

And language, like human beings, is in a state of constant flux; it's like a living organism. Those of us living in the English-speaking world are perhaps less aware of this fact than people in some other cultures, because English is the official language in several countries. In some non-English speaking nations formal linguistic change is more obvious. For example, Germany has formalised the process of updating the national language in a way that has a very real influence on spoken German. An official committee meets regularly to discuss whether a new word should be adopted into German from slang, or from another language, due to regular usage, or whether an existing word should be dropped, or even whether a spelling or a grammatical rule or a Germanic oddity has reached its use-by date. When I grew up in Munich the 'Eszett' or 'scharfes S' still existed - a letter that looked like a capital B on a stick, which denoted a sharp 's' sound. Several years ago it was decided that this should be dropped, and now two S's in a row are used instead to create the same sound. The change was announced, and almost immediately it took effect across the nation.

The English language, too, has official committees devoted to guiding the way our language evolves. In the UK, for example, the Queen's English Society fills that position. But generally those of us who reside in the 'colonies' are unaware of the decisions reached by that Society. Certainly I can't remember ever being aware of an 'official' change occurring in the English language from one day to the next. For conversational English, evolution is largely informal - although the introduction into Urban Dictionary and even the eventual adoption by the Oxford English Dictionary of new English words does indicate that such change is eventually accommodated and embedded in a more formal way. As loathe as I am to acknowledge it, even grammatical errors that become common usage due to ignorance can, through persistent use, eventually become accepted parts of the English language. My personal reluctance to accept the use of 'but' at the end of a sentence rather than as it was intended, a conjunction between two parts of a sentence, does not mean that this abomination will not be regarded as a permitted use of the word in due course. And our objection to abbreviated text-speak does not mean that some of it won't ultimately find its way into the English lexicon.

Nevertheless, I truly believe that in literature, beauty and wit are still widely regarded as virtues. The concept or definition of beauty might change from generation to generation, but I think it is unlikely that the next generation will do away with it altogether. Even in hip-hop and rap music, pithy expression and a clever turn of phrase are admired. The fact that language, and the way language is used, has changed with the advent of the internet and the smartphone, with email and Facebook and Twitter, does not mean that readers have suddenly let go of what has always been one of the joys of reading - experiencing the exceptional use of language by one who wields it with unusual skill.

What do you reckon? Does language matter to you when you read? Do you prefer books where the writer has a particularly aesthetic approach to language? Or do you not care how an author expresses herself as long as the plot keeps you reading?