Harry Silver is a middle-aged, moderately unhappy Jewish American protagonist, a reluctant family man, and an academic specialising in Richard Nixon. He has a wife he gets on with, just about, and a successful, aggressive younger brother, George. Harry is also, somewhat against his will, conducting an affair with his sister-in-law Jane. When George, after being involved in a road accident, comes home unexpectedly, in best soap-opera style, to find his wife in bed with his brother, he grabs the nearest object, a bedside lamp, and kills his wife.
May We Be Forgiven follows Harry’s attempts, over the next year, not to rebuild his life but build it from scratch. He adopts his brother’s two children, dates a succession of mysterious women and encounters a growing cast of more or less similarly dysfunctional characters. He will discover incredible new facts about Nixon, take improbable journeys, get divorced (with convenient swiftness), be shot (glancingly) and encounter some of fiction’s most amusingly exasperating clerical staff at synagogues, hospitals, care homes and schools. But will he be forgiven? Will he forgive himself?
Like A.M. Homes’s previous novel This Book Will Save Your Life (2006), May We Be Forgiven is an ungainly, very funny, vastly sentimental novel of contemporary American life. That previous novel’s sentiment boiled over into cloying; with hindsight, its cover illustration of dozens of doughnuts – deceptively light, heavy on the bad sugar – was entirely apt. May We Be Forgiven is darker; there is something deeply sinister going on here, largely unspoken, and as the reader starts to note what Harry isn’t saying – is desperate not to say – the mystery starts to unravel.
It’s not just Homes’s sparky, witty dialogue and her love of the surreal setpiece that reminded me of the TV show Arrested Development – the phrase accurately sums up Harry’s mentality.
Key to this, I think, is the novel’s reversal of social norms. The children are astoundingly mature and capable – Harry’s nephew Nate has built a school in South Africa – but the characters get more infantile as they age. Harry’s mother, banished to a care home, has entered a second childhood, impressing the staff by re-learning to crawl, and then to swim.
Harry himself occupies the middle ground. He can be guileless and needy, and at other times surprisingly strong. It’s not just Homes’s sparky, witty dialogue and her love of the surreal setpiece that reminded me of the TV show Arrested Development – the phrase accurately sums up Harry’s mentality. He’s nervous of the “scatological humour” those around him bandy about constantly, and on the few occasions he talks about the facts of life he uses worryingly cutesy terms for body parts and sexual acts (he’s not alone; one woman he’s dating tells Harry she doesn’t mind if he puts his “pointer” in someone else’s “pookie”). But when he has to explain to his niece Ashley about menstruation, or deal with the raising of a third child he adopts, he is capable, parental. In his relationships with women he’s passive and clumsy (he’s definitely seduced by his sister-in-law) and, though for a while I assumed he would turn out to be gay, the “truth” behind his nervousness seems to be something more deeply embedded and unspeakable. We meet every member of his family save his father; when Ashley enquires of her grandmother, “What was Pop-Pop like?” the grandmother barely acknowledges the question, far less answers it. Characters have an eerie sense of bodily incontinence – Harry is not only mistaken by other people for his murderous brother George, but wonders himself if he is George, the murderer. And Nixon, the subject of Harry’s researches, is a stand-in father; the real father, obscured behind American history’s most prominent liar, is something indescribably worse. As the book goes on – and my reading may have been influenced by the fact I was simultaneously reading Darian Leader’s What is Madness?, which proposes a Freudian reading of psychosis linked directly to parental influences – you start to glimpse the father’s monstrous absence. George’s violence, and Harry’s fear that he may resemble George on some fundamental, inescapable level, hint at the horrific, cyclical nature of abuse in the dysfunctional family.
There’s a subplot which reads like the first draft of a George Saunders story, a zany satire on nothing very much, too far-fetched to be a comfortable fit with a book which wants, at the start at least, to tell a more seriously dark story.
This is a big book, and it doesn’t always justify its length. (With the opening episodes of horrific violence out of the way, Harry sits around wondering what to do next. “Finish the book,” he tells himself, referring to his academic text on Nixon, but one reads this as Homes, having delivered a knockout start to a novel, gradually realising she’s going to have to deliver the story that follows.) This is never a dull book – Homes is too funny and unpredictable for that – but it does just keep going. She seems to be trying to replicate the bagginess and randomness of real life, but that’s not really what a novel is or should be. Certain subplots don’t earn their keep: both the story of the local girl who goes missing and is found murdered (George worries, again, that he might be the murderer), and the subplot in which Harry uncovers some short stories by Nixon, tries to sell these to the New Yorker and is warned off by a mysterious stranger, seem like plots which should have been pruned or used to form stories of their own. When we swap suburban America for a brief detour to Durban, to revisit the town Nate built (“Nateville”), I started to fear an “I woke up and it was all a dream” twist. The Durban scenes don’t work as a counterpoint to the US setting; the satire isn’t sharp enough (given vast quantities of charity money, the Nateville inhabitants reject the idea of building a well and instead dream of electric guitars and fast cars). Likewise, when George’s prison is “rebranded” as a conference centre and the prisoners are sent instead to a sort of open-air penitentiary, where George lives like a “woodsman” and ends up conniving with an Israeli arms dealer… well, it reads like a first draft that no editor dared cut. Specifically, it reads like the first draft of a George Saunders story, a zany satire on nothing very much, too far-fetched to be a comfortable fit with a book which wants, at the start at least, to tell a more seriously dark story.
Although those dark undercurrents do persist through all of May We Be Forgiven – the hints at abuse, neglect, the self-perpetuating horrors of dysfunctional families, and not forgetting the two actual murders – it’s a book which begins and ends with a Thanksgiving, the latter so mawkish, with its disparate scraps of family united by good ol’ pumpkin pie and roast turkey, it could double as Tea Party propaganda. Darkness is supplanted by unrealistic cheer. May We Be Forgiven is full of blood and mayhem, but the pain that lingers on finishing it is again the ache you get from consuming too much sugar.
Read more literary criticism by Neil Stewart at saintthefireshow