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's 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 spiralling 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.
***
[Do you want my recipe for disaster?]***
(Granta Books, 11 October 2012, borrowed from my library)
***
This is my first time reading the author.
I thought May We Be Forgiven was excellent. Homes' writing style reminds me a lot of Joyce Carol Oates. This a good thing.
I thoroughly enjoyed the book and got completely lost in it.
This is a fantastic, well-written, deep and complex novel.
The shocking events that change the lives of the characters are handled with grace and dignity. Some of the things the characters go through were almost painful to read, heart-breaking and gut-wrenching.
I loved the title. It sums up the themes of the novel perfectly and is the main reason I lifted it off the shelves in my library.
I loved the way the characters grow and develop over the course of the novel, especially Harry.
May We Be Forgiven is a brilliant novel about how people recover from life-altering events.
