Review: This Book Will Save Your Life. A.M. Homes. Penguin 2006.
This book is about Richard, a rich and lonely man who trades online and lives a sterile life with terminal numbness. All is not well until he experiences pain that takes him to the hospital: he cannot describe or localize his pain, nor can he say how long he has been aware of it. He enters life after this medical and spiritual emergency, with the initial step of buying donuts for himself and for a homeless man who enters the shop while he is there.
“Have a nice day,” Richard calls after him, annoyed that the guy didn’t say thank you.
The man turns around. “Have a nice day. I’m homeless. What does that mean? ‘Have a nice day.’ Go fuck yourself.”
Richard rescues a horse at a sinkhole near his house with the involvement of a newly discovered neighbor, a movie star with a helicopter, and finds himself on the news. Richard’s house on a hill, decorated with paintings of value, begins to collapse and he must move out for his safety. He rises from his soul dead existence untouched by human contact, barring functional interactions with a housekeeper, trainer and nutritionist, to become human if not superhuman. He awakens to the suffering of the world around him and begins to relate to every sentient being he encounters, including a crying woman at a grocery store.
The transformation is plausible in part because the novel is set in Los Angeles, where the real meets the unreal, artifice meets art at every intersection. LA is at the heart of the novel, and while I don’t like to think of a place as a character, I have to say that LA functions as one. I could imagine that this book could be set elsewhere and still succeed because of the human truths it contains. Written in present tense, close third person, the point of view shifts at times to capture events or perspectives outside Richard’s realm of experience. These shifts appear when necessary with only slight disruption of the fictive dream.
Lusardi, a fake psychologist- internist from Yale directs him to a meditation retreat, where Richard sits on a cushion, a gift from his neighbor, and listens to Joseph, the teacher, hold forth on “The talk about the dog.” (This was possibly the best page in the book, a perfect metaphor that crashes into pure dissonance.)
It has to be to some degree a play on the words, “dog”/ “God”. It is a talk about joy, about pleasure, about the irritation of the flea, the pleasure of scratching, the lure of the bone, the compulsion to bury it, the tug of the collar, the master’s pull, the freedom to run, to fetch the ball and bring it back to the master. Joseph speaks of the relationship between master and disciple, between student and teacher......
The story of the dog is hopeful, but the story of the master and disciple feels like a manipulation, a head game, something Richard wants none of.
Richard thaws out into a decent man, true to himself, unafraid to take on an agent who sexually assaulted his son, yet vulnerable in the face of his son’s rage. He evolves into a Boddhisatva. Like Forrest Gump, he has close encounters with famous people like Gerald Ford and Bob Dylan, rides around in John Lennon’s Bentley and magically spreads joy and fixes problems. At the seemingly apocalyptic end, he is still afloat on a rectangle of Styrofoam with a cell phone and a dog, connecting wirelessly to his son, still present for him. He also carries in a plastic bag a typescript of a friend’s novel about redemption and transformation.
This is a book that could save a life or, at least, inspire one. If I weren’t so amazed, I’d be envious.
This book is about Richard, a rich and lonely man who trades online and lives a sterile life with terminal numbness. All is not well until he experiences pain that takes him to the hospital: he cannot describe or localize his pain, nor can he say how long he has been aware of it. He enters life after this medical and spiritual emergency, with the initial step of buying donuts for himself and for a homeless man who enters the shop while he is there.
“Have a nice day,” Richard calls after him, annoyed that the guy didn’t say thank you.
The man turns around. “Have a nice day. I’m homeless. What does that mean? ‘Have a nice day.’ Go fuck yourself.”
Richard rescues a horse at a sinkhole near his house with the involvement of a newly discovered neighbor, a movie star with a helicopter, and finds himself on the news. Richard’s house on a hill, decorated with paintings of value, begins to collapse and he must move out for his safety. He rises from his soul dead existence untouched by human contact, barring functional interactions with a housekeeper, trainer and nutritionist, to become human if not superhuman. He awakens to the suffering of the world around him and begins to relate to every sentient being he encounters, including a crying woman at a grocery store.
The transformation is plausible in part because the novel is set in Los Angeles, where the real meets the unreal, artifice meets art at every intersection. LA is at the heart of the novel, and while I don’t like to think of a place as a character, I have to say that LA functions as one. I could imagine that this book could be set elsewhere and still succeed because of the human truths it contains. Written in present tense, close third person, the point of view shifts at times to capture events or perspectives outside Richard’s realm of experience. These shifts appear when necessary with only slight disruption of the fictive dream.
Lusardi, a fake psychologist- internist from Yale directs him to a meditation retreat, where Richard sits on a cushion, a gift from his neighbor, and listens to Joseph, the teacher, hold forth on “The talk about the dog.” (This was possibly the best page in the book, a perfect metaphor that crashes into pure dissonance.)
It has to be to some degree a play on the words, “dog”/ “God”. It is a talk about joy, about pleasure, about the irritation of the flea, the pleasure of scratching, the lure of the bone, the compulsion to bury it, the tug of the collar, the master’s pull, the freedom to run, to fetch the ball and bring it back to the master. Joseph speaks of the relationship between master and disciple, between student and teacher......
The story of the dog is hopeful, but the story of the master and disciple feels like a manipulation, a head game, something Richard wants none of.
Richard thaws out into a decent man, true to himself, unafraid to take on an agent who sexually assaulted his son, yet vulnerable in the face of his son’s rage. He evolves into a Boddhisatva. Like Forrest Gump, he has close encounters with famous people like Gerald Ford and Bob Dylan, rides around in John Lennon’s Bentley and magically spreads joy and fixes problems. At the seemingly apocalyptic end, he is still afloat on a rectangle of Styrofoam with a cell phone and a dog, connecting wirelessly to his son, still present for him. He also carries in a plastic bag a typescript of a friend’s novel about redemption and transformation.
This is a book that could save a life or, at least, inspire one. If I weren’t so amazed, I’d be envious.
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