Fiction: 'Above and below, a chain of houses climbs the canyon wall: a social chain, an economic chain, a food chain. The goal is to be on top, king of the hill - to win. Each person looks down on the next, thinking they somehow have it better, but there is always someone else either pressing up from below or looking down from above. There is no way to win."
Richard Novak is a rich denizen of a Los Angeles hillside, who makes his money by trading on the stock exchange. He doesn't work much, however - we catch him in the act only once - and this leaves him with vast swathes of time on his hands to indulge in neurotic pursuits. Divorced and living alone, without friends, we meet him as his lonely but luxurious existence is disrupted simultaneously by a mysterious illness and the sudden cracking open of his front garden. The latter event is later diagnosed after a series of amusingly incompetent investigations as the appearance of a sink-hole. In the thin-crusted part of the world where he lives such natural accidents are frequent, and so they are in this book. The tendency of the earth to split open and reveal almost anything can be interpreted as the central metaphor of the novel: Richard's sink-hole and illness precipitate a series of contacts with a wide range of peculiar people, including, finally, his own teenage son. Eventually, the blurb tells us, he becomes reconnected with the human race but this is not something I would necessarily have noticed without blurbal assistance.
A witty, well-written, very clever satire on life in Los Angeles, and by extension all modern life, the novel suffers from its exact portrayal of the superficiality and glibness of that very thing it represents so well. Nobody in the novel seems to have any thoughts at all; only the son who enters the narrative at a late stage, expresses real emotion or passion. As in a fairytale, strange and marvellous things happen, but the characters just experience them and move on, like cartoons which have been flattened by a steam-roller but pop back up seconds later, smiling and making jokes - at least until the end, which is intriguingly ambiguous.
These characters, though flat, are not necessarily unrealistic. In the strangely cardboard world privilege generates, where motley is the height of fashion and where more and more people seem to take Donald Duck as their role model, one encounters their like every day. The coolness, the smartness, the glibness of the zeitgeist could not be better portrayed. But although this is done with consummate skill, and although this is a really entertaining read, it seems more like a film script than a novel. The characters are too thin to be of any lasting interest. Given the obvious sophistication and intelligence of the author this may well be the point, but it makes for unsatisfactory fiction. The problem is, that although modern people in Los Angeles or Dublin affect a pose of brisk cheeriness, we know quite well that under the thin surface ancient emotions bubble and ferment. A M Homes knows this too:
"It is not the wildfires that are going to get you: it's the secret of Malibu - the septic tanks. The hills are filled with leaking septic tanks dumping 'water' into the ground and at some point it's going to give. It's a river of piss and shit that will wash us all away."
At a literal environmental level, this point is well-made, and given the dramatic effect of 9/11 on US writers (eg Jane Smiley's report that after 9/11 she could not continue to write her novel) Homes seems to emphasise that many terrible disasters are natural or caused by environmental abuse.
While she uses the environmental disasters effectively on a literal level, when transferred metaphorically to the novel's characters she fails to delve deep enough into the groundwater. Letting us know it is there, she keeps the reader on the zany chirpy surface of Californian life, allowing only the odd glimpse of the river that will wash us all away. After such a novel one longs, however unfairly, for the slow, murky depths of a 19th-century novel, where people are emotional and have thoughts and feelings which are expressed at length. This most modern of novels has admirable qualities, but most of us will prefer War and Peace.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a short story writer and novelist
This Book Will Change Your Life By A M Homes Granta, 372pp. £10.99