Interview: American writer AM Homes's new novel is about Los Angeles. Eileen Battersby, who was born and raised there, talked to her when she was in Dublin
Her world is very dark and very funny; it is also very real. US writer AM Homes has a vision - to alert the rest of us to the madness we call normality. She does not consider herself as oracle, just a witness who kept on watching while everyone else became too distracted. No doubt about it , there is a savage, cautionary intelligence at work. She wants us to see the dangers. The clues are there. This is the author of Things You Should Know and The Safety of Objects, two collections of short stories that tend to sing with menace yet convey sufficient measures of concern to make it clear Homes, a master of psychological stalemate, does not delight in unsettling her reader - she just wants to make sure we all know that it is pretty strange here on planet earth.
Exactly how strange could the owner of the imagination that penned A Real Doll possibly be? In that story, the narrator admits: "I'm dating Barbie. Three afternoons a week, while my sister is at dance class, I take Barbie away from Ken. I'm practising for the future." It is intense stuff, particularly as Barbie is made of plastic, talks in a high-pitched voice, and does not quite take Ken all that seriously either. There are elements of the pornographic; it is uneasy, as are several of the stories, while Whiz Kids borders on the offensive. AM Homes reads as a cross between a more sophisticated Bret Easton Ellis and a relentless Alice Hoffman.
She might be the kind of person that dresses all in black, wears blue lipstick and has a white face. Peer into the hotel lounge and expect to see an intimidating individual that would be completely unlike the woman who is there. AM Homes looks so open faced, comfortable-shirt-and-jeans-ordinary, it is almost a disappointment. Still, it must be said, it is a relief.
She wants a bottle of water, but then changes her mind. "You're having hot chocolate?" A hint of surprise - after all, it is sticky and close outside. "That sounds like a good idea, I'll have one too." After the surreal stories, narratives in which it seemed at times that Chagall had decided to break out, shrug off romantic fantasy to test an advanced horror genre guaranteed to shock, her new novel, This Book Will Save Your Life, is benign, an Everyman odyssey about one man's struggle to get a life before it's too late. "The title just happened, as when my editor asked me what it was called, I didn't have a name for it, so this just came out and I thought 'that's ok' and used it."
Richard Novak has everything and nothing. Rich, retired, just over 50, he is divorced, barely knows the son he left when he left his wife and lives alone in a house frequented by paid professionals whose job it is to tend to his body - food, health, fitness and laundry - but not his emotions.
It is a book about Los Angeles, an offbeat enclave to which people either flee or simply end up in. Here the American Dream is capable of going far more wrong than elsewhere. Built on a fault line, it has always lived on borrowed time: temporality is the abiding ethos. It's where movies are made, race riots happen and houses slide down off the hills should the rain fall too violently. I know the terrain - I was born and raised there. On hearing this, Homes looks not so surprised as sympathetic. She has evoked LA, which emerges as a central character, with such eerie clarity I guess she is not a native.
"I'm from Washington, DC. I grew up in Chevy Chase, a real suburb. I live in New York now, but I've spent time in LA. I couldn't live there but I can go there. I think LA is more tolerant of eccentrics than New York is." It sounds familiar - LA is a town you might want to make raids on, but living there requires unusual amounts of tolerance, or is it apathy? It could be that her idea of eccentric would conform to most people's idea of card-carrying weirdo, but precise definitions are not that important - it is the distinction which matters.
Homes makes it clear that her family were not typical of their wealthy-ish Washington suburb. "My parents were Marxist, they still are, they had ideals. We couldn't eat iceberg lettuce or grapes because they weren't picked by union workers. We were outsiders, we were different." There is a likeable ordinariness about Homes in person: you don't start an interview - you fall into a conversation. A chance comment late into the meeting acts as a grenade, as will be explained. But first, read on, get some sense of her and her work. She is clever and funny, very American and surprisingly non-intimidating.
"I admire Joan Didion and Don DeLillo." Her work is informed by US life and American points of reference and experience, but the prevailing absurdity of truth, and her understanding of it, confers a curiously European sensibility on her writing. She could as easily be writing new wave German or Russian fiction.
THE VERY FACT she is a writer at all could be seen as an ongoing rebellion. But she already had that: "I wanted to be in The Rolling Stones. I stayed in my room a lot, playing music." An ambassador - "I think he was the German ambassador" - moved into one of the houses nearby. After a while, he asked somebody who was the black man singing: "That was very satisfying." She also rejected her name, Amy, and opted for using her initials. Her youth seems dominated by music, reading, writing ("poetry at first, the usual stuff") and hours of lurking in her room, but there is something else that seethes beneath the surface, not quite outrage. Not a writer given to pathos, she does possess rare genius for articulating the surreal grief of displacement. Why? I begin to find out.
After all, it was Homes who wrote a story called Remedy (From Things You Should Know, 2003), a story which opens the door to the person called AM Homes. The story begins: "It is about wanting and need, wanting and need - a peculiar, desperate kind of need, needing to get what you never got, wanting it still, wanting it all the more, nonetheless. It is about a profound desire for connection. It is about how much we don't know, how much we can't say, what we don't understand. It is about how unfamiliar even the familiar can become."
An unhappy female of 35 drowning in a disastrous relationship and a stressful job wants to go home to her parents. When she phones them, her call is taken by an unhelpful man at the other end who turns out to be a lodger who has moved in with her parents and taken over their lives.
On arrival at the house, "she steps inside, expecting the dog. She has forgotten that the dog is not there anymore, he died about a year ago." Her father offers her the ashes, currently resting "on the shelf over the washing machine". It is a Homes moment. On meeting her, the work makes even more sense. She observes and records; above all, she feels, she endures acutely but with a pleasant rather than haunted demeanour. More philosophical than happy, Homes does appear to have arrived at contentment - and she has a three-year-old daughter with whom she is having fun.
Perhaps this explains why her new novel is different from her previous work - it is softer, though graced by a saving ambivalence. If previously there was an almost wanton directness about her fascination with the prison of the mind as hostage to emotions, this time there is a feeling of brotherhood, a shared terror.
"I'm 44 and a half, I was 44 at Christmas." She seems a lot younger. "You should have seen me five years ago, I looked a lot younger than I was then." She is not being smart; I know what she is saying, its about having become so used to being one of the younger American writers that it seems a bit strange to have suddenly become not so young. It seems only fair to point out that there is a great deal of almost mannered cruelty in the stories which is absent in the novel. Instead, the entire novel is sustained by a quality of having woken up in the nick of time. Richard, the central character, wakes up to his life when he experiences a staggering physical pain so severe he finds himself in an emergency room. Later he goes to see another doctor and describes to him the experience that brought him to the emergency room.
"I was in pain, incredible pain. They took me to the hospital, they thought I was having a heart attack." To the doctor's enquiry, "And how are you feeling now?" Novak replies, "Fine. I feel fine, and then I remember the pain. I'm not sure if I'm remembering the pain or am still in pain." When the doctor asks Novak to describe his life, the extent of his isolation becomes clear. "Up early. On the treadmill, trainer comes to the house, nutritionist a couple of times a week, maybe a massage. I try to stay healthy. I read four newspapers. I never go out." The doctor's examination-cum-psychological assessment continues, "Any trauma or abuse as a child?" Novak answers, "Just my parents - they're Jewish . . . I spoke with my mother this morning, and she thinks I'm a failure because I'm retired."
LATER IN THE narrative, Novak meets up with his estranged son who has travelled from New York with a friend. This comes about through a visit Novak makes to his brother. Tension still fuels their exchanges. "Do you remember cutting off my finger?" asks one brother; the retort is immediate: "I didn't cut off your finger. I had a saw from a children's toolbox, and I asked you to hold something while I cut it. I missed, and a little piece of your finger came off." That little incident informs their relationship. Homes has had her own drama. I had read her fiction but, as I told her, I knew nothing about her life, the emergence of her birth mother when Homes was already 32, settled into her New York existence and a published writer with a cult following.
Her memoir is due out next year, but, before it arrives, there had already been that remarkable article, The Mistress's Daughter, that appeared in the New Yorker in December 2004. Her unnatural natural mother began to stalk her.
The realisation that she was the daughter of a young girl who had had a relationship with an older, married man unnerved Homes. "I had always known I was adopted," but meeting her unnatural natural parents degenerated into a masterclass in humiliation. Her father meets her in hotels or in his car, her mother seems to want to feed off her. When her father says "tell me about your people", Homes reports, "he asks about 'my people' as though I'd been raised by wolves." He later asks her to have a blood test. "Is this what I get as my big reward, the reparation for all the wrongs of the past - a DNA test?"
AM Homes is one of those writers capable of balancing the black and the painful, the funny and the human. Her stories are often surreal but the feelings and sensations are real, however lopsided and offbeat. Neither a martyr, nor a victim, she is a witness who misses very little, and remembers to look, listen and feel.
This Book Could Change Your Life by AM Homes was recently published by Granta (£10.99)