May We Be Forgiven

Description

Winner of the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction—A darkly comic novel of twenty-first-century domestic life by a writer who is always “compelling, devastating, and furiously good” (Zadie Smith)

Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his younger brother, George, a taller, smarter, and more successful high-flying TV executive, acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in the suburbs of New York City. But Harry, a historian and Nixon scholar, also knows George has a murderous temper, and when George loses control the result is an act of violence so shocking that both brothers are hurled into entirely new lives in which they both must seek absolution.

Harry finds himself suddenly playing parent to his brother’s two adolescent children, tumbling down the rabbit hole of Internet sex, dealing with aging parents who move through time like travelers on a fantastic voyage. As Harry builds a twenty-first-century family created by choice rather than biology, we become all the more aware of the ways in which our history, both personal and political, can become our destiny and either compel us to repeat our errors or be the catalyst for change.

May We Be Forgiven is an unnerving, funny tale of unexpected intimacies and of how one deeply fractured family might begin to put itself back together. MAY WE BE FORGIVEN

Winner of the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction

“An entertaining, old-fashioned American story about second chances…A.M. Homes is a writer I’ll pretty much follow anywhere because she’s indeed so smart, it’s scary; yet she’s not without heart…May We Be Forgiven [is] deeply imbued with the kind of It’s A Wonderful Life-type belief in redemption that we Americans will always be suckers for, and rightly so.” —Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air

“Cheever country with a black comedy upgrade…Homes crams a tremendous amount of ambition into May We Be Forgiven, with its dark humor, its careening plot, its sex-strewn suburb and a massive cast of memorable characters…its riskiest content, however, is something different: sentiment.  This is a Tin Man story, in which the zoned-out Harry slowly grows a heart.” —Carolyn Kellogg, The Los Angeles Times

“Darkly funny…the moments shared between this ad hoc family are the novel’s most endearing…Homes’ signature trait is a fearless inclination to torment her characters and render their failures, believing that the reader is sophisticated enough – and forgiving enough – to tag along.”  —Katie Arnold-Ratliff, Time Magazine

“Homes, whose masterful handling of suburban dystopia merits her own adjective, may have just written her midcareer magnum opus with this portrait of a flawed Nixonian bent on some sort of emotional amnesty.” —Christopher Bollen, Interview

“At once tender and uproariously funny…one of the strangest, most miraculous journeys in recent fiction, not unlike a man swimming home to his lonely house, one swimming pool at a time:  it is an act of desperation turned into one of grace.” —John Freeman, The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A big American story with big American themes, the saga of the triumph of a new kind of self-invented nuclear family over cynicism, apathy, loneliness, greed, and technological tyranny…this novel has a strong moral core, neither didactic nor judgmental, that holds out the possibility of redemption through connection.”  –Kate Christensen, Elle

“A.M. Homes has long been one of our most important and original writers of fiction. May We Be Forgiven is her most ambitious as well as her most accessible novel to date; sex and violence invade the routines of suburban domestic life in a way that reminded me of The World According to Garp, although in the end it’s a thoroughly original work of imagination.” –Jay McInerney, New York Times bestselling author of The Good Life

“I started this book in the A.M., finished in the P.M., and couldn’t sleep all night. Ms. Homes just gets better and better.” —Gary Shteyngart, New York Times bestselling author of Our Country Friends

“What if whoever wrote the story of Job had a sense of humor? Nixon is pondered. One character donates her organs.  Another tries to grow a heart.  A seductive minefield of a novel from A.M. Homes.” —John Sayles, author of A Moment in the Sun

“I started reading A.M. Homes twenty years ago. Wild and funny, questioning and true, she is a writer to go travelling with on the journey called life.” —Jeanette Winterson, New York Times bestselling author of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

DAYS OF AWE

“A.M. Homes skillfully circles and tugs at the question of what it means to live in flawed, fragile, hungry human bodies . . . DAYS OF AWE is sliced through with Homes’s dark humor . . . one wants to read passages of a Homes story aloud because they are so fine . . . DAYS OF AWE feels like the part of the day when the sun is about to go down and the light is brighter while the shadows are darker. Everything has a sharp edge, is strikingly beautiful and suddenly also a little menacing.” —Ramona Ausubel, The New York Times Book Review

“Exuberantly transgressive.” —O, the Oprah Magazine

“[Homes] has shown a unique penchant for cracking open the dark heart of human nature — with irreverent wit, devastating empathy and haunting shocks . . . DAYS OF AWE [is] a memorable assortment of new tales about family, love, death, and an unqualified man who somehow stumbles into becoming a populist political candidate.” —Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon

“Homes’s keen ear for speech—surreal as her characters’ conversations often are—lends itself to varying degrees of self-aware misunderstanding, highlighting the complexity of language and the challenges . . . The impossibility of knowing another person completely is one of life’s painful truths, and [this] collection remind us of that—but [it] also shows that there are, at least, tools available to help us try.” —Vanity Fair

“Fascinating . . . I consumed these stories exactly like a spectator of a good fight or a neighbor peering through the hedge, and I felt sharply observed in turn. Homes, with her fierce sharp wit, reveals her characters’ deep flaws. No one gets away with anything and the spectacle is delightful.” —Molly Livingston, The Paris Review Daily

“With dark humor and sharp dialogue, Homes plumbs the depths of everyday American anxieties through stories about unexpected situations.” —Time

“In the title story, a Holocaust survivor taps into a theme of the collection when he describes the way people hold the history of previous generations inside them. ‘We carry it with us, not just in our grandmother’s silver,’ he says, ‘but in our bodies, the cells of our hearts.’” —Wall Street Journal

THE MISTRESS’ DAUGHTER

“A compelling, devastating, and furiously good book written with an honesty few of us would risk.” –Zadie Smith

“Fierce and eloquent.” –The New York Times Book Review

“As startling and riveting as her fiction . . . a lacerating memoir in which the formerly powerless child triumphs with the help of a mighty pen.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“Rich in humanity and humor . . . Homes combines an unfussy candor with a deliciously droll, quirky wit. . . . Her energy and urgency become infectious.” –USA Today

“I fell in love with it from the first page and read compulsively to the end.” –Amy Tan

“As a memoirist, A.M. Homes takes a characteristically fierce and fearless approach. And she has a whopper of a personal story to tell.” –Chicago Tribune
 
THIS BOOK WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE

“Homes’ dark delivery . . . is in full regalia here. . . . Laugh-out loud funny.” –The Boston Globe

“An absolute masterpiece . . . Homes writes ecstatically, and like no one else.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer

“I think this brave story of a lost man’s reconnection with the world could become a generational touchstone, like Catch-22, The Monkey Wrench Gang, or The Catcher in the Rye. . . . And hey, maybe it will save somebody’s life.” –Stephen King

Hilarious . . . Homes writes in the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and has the talent to pull it off.” –San Francisco Chronicle
 
IN A COUNTRY OF MOTHERS

“Homes…has the ability to scare you half to death….[She is] devastating…a very dangerous writer.” —Washington Post Book World

“A commanding narrative…by turns witty and unnerving, and at times almost unbearable in its emotional intensity.” —Wall Street Journal

“Intriguing…captures a world spinning out of control….Homes is at her best evoking the pathos and obsession at the center of relationships between therapist and patient, mother and child, husband and wife. She is also wickedly funny. [This is] a psychologically gripping story.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS

“Enthralling . . . full of subversive humor and truth . . . original and stiletto sharp.”  —The Washington Post

“Wonderfully skewed stories . . . sharp, funny, and playful . . . Homes is confident and consistent in her odd departures from life as we know it, sustaining credibility by getting details right. A fully engaged imagination [is] at work—and play.” —Amy Hempel, The Los Angeles Times

“Alarmingly good . . . It is hard to say exactly who Homes’s predecessors are—Roald Dahl, Rachel Ingalls, and J.D. Salinger all come to mind—but in many ways she is not unlike Cheever.” —The Village Voice

“These stories are remarkable. They are awesomely well-written. In the sense of arousing fear and wonder in the reader they entertain, but what they principally bring us is a sense of recognition . . . Here are all the things that even today, even in our frank outspoken times, we don’t talk about. We think of them punishingly in sleepless nights.” —Ruth Rendell

“An unnerving glimpse through the windows of other people’s lives. A.M. Homes is a provocative and eloquent writer, and her vision of the way we live now is anything but safe.” —Meg Wolitzer

THE UNFOLDING

Forthcoming September 22

“From her first book onward, A.M. Homes has been challenging us to look at fiction, the world, and one other as we haven’t done—because we haven’t had the nerve, the eyes, the dire and dispassionate imagination. Gripping, sad, funny, by turns aching and antic and, as always, exceedingly well-observed and written, The Unfolding opens up another one of her jagged windows, at times indistinguishable from a crack, in the world that is always unfolding, and always vanishing, around us. “ – Michael Chabon, bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Moonglow and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

“A terrific black comedy, written almost entirely in pitch-perfect dialogue, that feels terrifying close to the unfunny truth.” -– Salman Rushdie, New York Times bestselling author of The Golden House and Quichotte

“A dazzling portrait of a family—and a country—in flux. A story about what happens when truths that once seemed self-evident turn out to be neither self-evident nor even true. A.M. Homes has perfectly captured an America as it lurches toward freak-out, and a family as it shreds the lies it’s been living by. The Unfolding is hilarious and shocking and heartbreaking and just a little bit deranged—in other words, it’s a book that feels like what it feels like to be alive right now.” –Nathan Hill, author of The NixA. M. Homes is the author of the memoir The Mistress’s Daughter and the novels This Book Will Save Your Life, Music for Torching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, and Jack, as well as the story collections Days of Awe, The Safety of Objects and Things You Should Know. She lives in New York City.

 

“May we be forgiven,” an incantation, a prayer, the hope that somehow I come out of this alive. Was there ever a time you thought—I am doing this on purpose, I am fucking up and I don’t know why.

 

Do you want my recipe for disaster?

The warning sign: last year, Thanksgiving at their house. Twenty or thirty people were at tables spreading from the dining room into the living room and stopping abruptly at the piano bench. He was at the head of the big table, picking turkey out of his teeth, talking about himself. I kept watching him as I went back and forth carrying plates into the kitchen—the edges of my fingers dipping into unnameable goo—cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, a cold pearl onion, gristle. With every trip back and forth from the dining room to the kitchen, I hated him more. Every sin of our childhood, beginning with his birth, came back. He entered the world eleven months after me, sickly at first, not enough oxygen along the way, and was given far too much attention. And then, despite what I repeatedly tried to tell him about how horrible he was, he acted as though he believed he was a gift of the gods. They named him George. Geo, he liked to be called, like that was something cool, something scientific, mathematical, analytical. Geode, I called him—like a sedimentary rock. His preternatural confidence, his divinely arrogant head dappled with blond threads of hair lifted high drew the attention of others, gave the impression that he knew something. People solicited his opinions, his participation, while I never saw the charm. By the time we were ten and eleven, he was taller than me, broader, stronger. “You sure he’s not the butcher’s boy?” my father would ask jokingly. And no one laughed.

I was bringing in heavy plates and platters, casseroles caked with the debris of dinner, and no one noticed that help was needed—not George, not his two children, not his ridiculous friends, who were in fact in his employ, among them a weather girl and assorted spare anchormen and -women who sat stiff-backed and hair-sprayed like Ken and Barbie, not my Chinese-American wife, Claire, who hated turkey and never failed to remind us that her family used to celebrate with roast duck and sticky rice. George’s wife, Jane, had been at it all day, cooking and cleaning, serving, and now scraping bones and slop into a giant trash bin.

Jane scoured the plates, piling dirty dishes one atop another and dropping the slimy silver into a sink of steamy soapy water. Glancing at me, she brushed her hair away with the back of her hand and smiled. I went back for more.

I looked at their children and imagined them dressed as Pilgrims, in black buckle-shoes, doing Pilgrim children chores, carrying buckets of milk like human oxen. Nathaniel, twelve, and Ashley, eleven, sat like lumps at the table, hunched, or more like curled, as if poured into their chairs, truly spineless, eyes focused on their small screens, the only thing in motion their thumbs—one texting friends no one has ever seen and the other killing digitized terrorists. They were absent children, absent of personality, absent of presence, and, except for holidays, largely absent from the house. They had been sent away to boarding schools at an age others might have deemed too young but which Jane had once confessed was out of a certain kind of necessity—there were allusions to nonspecific learning issues, failure to bloom, and the subtle implication that the unpredictable shifts in George’s mood made living at home less than ideal.

In the background, two televisions loudly competed among themselves for no one’s attention—one featuring football and the other the film Mighty Joe Young.

“I’m a company man, heart and soul,” George says. “The network’s President of Entertainment. I am ever aware, 24/7.”

There is a television in every room; fact is, George can’t bear to be alone, not even in the bathroom.

He also apparently can’t bear to be without constant confirmation of his success. His dozen-plus Emmys have seeped out of his office and are now scattered around the house, along with various other awards and citations rendered in cut crystal, each one celebrating George’s ability to parse popular culture, to deliver us back to ourselves—ever so slightly mockingly, in the format best known as the half-hour sitcom or the news hour.

The turkey platter was in the center of the table. I reached over my wife’s shoulder and lifted—the tray was heavy and wobbled. I willed myself to stay strong and was able to carry out the mission while balancing a casserole of Brussels sprouts and bacon in the crook of my other arm.

The turkey, an “heirloom bird,” whatever that means, had been rubbed, relaxed, herbed into submission, into thinking it wasn’t so bad to be decapitated, to be stuffed up the ass with breadcrumbs and cranberries in some annual rite. The bird had been raised with a goal in mind, an actual date when his number would come up.

I stood in their kitchen picking at the carcass while Jane did the dishes, bright-blue gloves on, up to her elbows in suds. My fingers were deep in the bird, the hollow body still warm, the best bits of stuffing packed in. I dug with my fingers and brought stuffing to my lips. She looked at me—my mouth moist, greasy, my fingers curled into what would have been the turkey’s g-spot if they had such things—lifted her hands out of the water and came towards me, to plant one on me. Not friendly. The kiss was serious, wet, and full of desire. It was terrifying and unexpected. She did it, then snapped off her gloves and walked out of the room. I was holding the counter, gripping it with greasy fingers. Hard.

Dessert was served. Jane asked if anyone wanted coffee and went back into the kitchen. I followed her like a dog, wanting more.

She ignored me.

“Are you ignoring me?” I asked.

She said nothing and then handed me the coffee. “Could you let me have a little pleasure, a little something that’s just for myself?” She paused. “Cream and sugar?”

From Thanksgiving through Christmas and on into the new year, all I thought of was George fucking Jane. George on top of her, or, for a special occasion, George on the bottom, and once, fantastically, George having her from the back—his eyes fixed on the wall-mounted television—the ticker tape of news headlines trickling across the bottom of the screen. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was convinced that, despite his charms, his excess of professional achievement, George wasn’t very good in bed and that all he knew about sex he learned from the pages of a magazine read furtively while shitting. I thought of my brother fucking his wife—constantly. Whenever I saw Jane I was hard. I wore baggy pleated pants and double pairs of jockey shorts to contain my treasonous enthusiasm. The effort created bulk and, I worried, gave me the appearance of having gained weight.

It is almost eight o’clock on an evening towards the end of February when Jane calls. Claire is still at the office; she is always at the office. Another man would think his wife was having an affair; I just think Claire is smart.

“I need your help,” Jane says.

“Don’t worry,” I say, before I even know what the worry is. I imagine her calling me from the kitchen phone, the long curly cord wrapping around her body.

“He’s at the police station.”

I glance at the New York skyline; our building is ugly, postwar white brick, dull, but we’re up high, the windows are broad, and there’s a small terrace where we used to sit and have our morning toast. “Did he do something wrong?”

“Apparently,” she says. “They want me to come get him. Can you? Can you pick your brother up?”

“Don’t worry,” I say, repeating myself.

Within minutes I’m en route from Manhattan to the Westchester hamlet George and Jane call home. I phone Claire from the car; her voice mail picks up. “There’s some kind of problem with George and I’ve got to pick him up and take him home to Jane. I had my dinner—I left some for you in the fridge. Call later.”

A fight. On the way to the police station, that’s what I’m thinking. George has it in him: a kind of atomic reactivity that stays under the surface until something triggers him and he erupts, throwing over a table, smashing his fist through a wall, or…More than once I’ve been the recipient of his frustrations, a baseball hurled at my back, striking me at kidney level and dropping me to my knees, a shove in my grandmother’s kitchen hurling me backwards, through a full-length pane of glass as George blocks me from getting the last of the brownies. I imagine that he went out for a drink after work and got on the wrong side of someone.

Thirty-three minutes later, I park outside the small suburban police station, a white cake box circa 1970. There’s a busty girlie calendar that probably shouldn’t be in a police station, a jar of hard candy, two metal desks that sound like a car crash if you accidentally kick them, which I do, tipping over an empty bottle of diet Dr. Pepper. “I’m the brother of the man you called his wife about,” I announce. “I’m here on behalf of George Silver.”

“You’re the brother?”

“Yes.”

“We called his wife, she’s coming to get him.”

“She called me, I’m here to pick him up.”

“We wanted to take him to the hospital but he wouldn’t go; he kept repeating that he was a dangerous man and we should take him ‘downtown,’ lock him up, and be done with it. Personally, I think the man needs a doctor—you don’t walk away from something like that unscathed.”

“So he got into a fight?”

“Car accident, bad one. Doesn’t appear he was under the influence, passed a breath test and consented to urine, but really he should see a doctor.”

“Was it his fault?”

“He ran a red light, plowed into a minivan, husband was killed on impact, the wife was alive at the scene—in the back seat, next to the surviving boy. Rescue crew used the Jaws of Life to free the wife, upon release she expired.”

“Her legs fell out of the car,” someone calls out from a back office. “The boy is in fair condition. He’ll survive,” the younger cop says. “Your brother’s in the rear, I’ll get him.”

“Is my brother being charged with a crime?”

“Not at the moment. There’ll be a full investigation. Officers noted that he appeared disoriented at the scene. Take him home, get him a doctor and a lawyer—these things can get ugly.”

“He won’t come out,” the younger cop says.

“Tell him we don’t have room for him,” the older one says. “Tell him the real criminals are coming soon and if he doesn’t come out now they’ll plug him up the bung hole in the night.”

George comes out, disheveled. “Why are you here?” he asks me.

“Jane called, and besides, you had the car.”

“She could have taken a taxi.”

“It’s late.”

I lead George through the small parking lot and into the night, feeling compelled to take his arm, to guide him by his elbow—not sure if I’m preventing him from escaping or just steadying him. Either way, George doesn’t pull away, he lets himself be led.

“Where’s Jane?”

“At the house.”

“Does she know?”

I shake my head no.

“It was awful. There was a light.”

“Did you see the light?”

“I think I may have seen it but it was like it didn’t make sense.”

“Like it didn’t apply to you?”

“Like I didn’t know.” He gets into the car. “Where’s Jane?” he asks again.

“At the house,” I repeat. “Buckle your belt.”

Pulling into the driveway, the headlights cut through the house and catch Jane in the kitchen, holding a pot of coffee.

“Are you all right?” she asks when we are inside.

“How could I be,” George says. He empties his pockets onto the kitchen counter. He takes off his shoes, socks, pants, boxers, jacket, shirt, undershirt, and stuffs all of it into the kitchen trash can.

“Would you like some coffee?” Jane asks.

Naked, George stands with his head tilted as if he’s hearing something.

“Coffee?” she asks again, gesturing with the pot.

He doesn’t answer. He walks from the kitchen through the dining room and into the living room, and sits in the dark—naked in a chair.

“Did he get into a fight?” Jane asks.

“Car accident. You’d better call your insurance company and your lawyer. Do you have a lawyer?”

“George, do we have a lawyer?”

“Do I need one?” he asks. “If I do, call Rutkowsky.”

“Something is wrong with him,” Jane says.

“He killed people.”

There is a pause.

She pours George a cup of coffee and brings it into the living room along with a dish towel that she drapes over his genitals like putting a napkin in his lap.

The phone rings.

“Don’t answer it,” George says.

“Hello,” she says.

“I’m sorry, he’s not home right now, may I take a message?” Jane listens. “Yes, I hear you, perfectly clear,” she says and then hangs up. “Do you want a drink?” she asks no one in particular, and then pours one for herself.

“Who was it?” I ask.

“Friend of the family,” she says, and clearly she means the family that was killed.

For a long time he sits in the chair, the dish towel shielding his privates, the cup of coffee daintily on his lap. Beneath him a puddle forms.

“George,” Jane implores when she hears what sounds like water dripping, “you’re having an accident.”

Tessie, the old dog, gets up from her bed, comes over, and sniffs it.

Jane hurries into the kitchen and comes back with a wad of paper towels. “It will eat the finish right off the floor,” she says.

Through it all George looks blank, like the empty husk left by a reptile who has shed his skin. Jane takes the coffee cup from George and hands it to me. She takes the wet kitchen towel from his lap, helps him to stand, and then wipes the back of his legs and his ass with paper towels. “Let me help you upstairs.”

I watch as they climb the steps. I see my brother’s body, slack, his stomach sagging slightly, the bones of his hips, his pelvis, his flat ass—all so white they appear to glow in the dark. As they climb I see below his ass and tucked between his legs his low, pinkish-purple nut sack swaying like an old lion.

I sit on their couch. Where is my wife? Isn’t Claire curious to know what happened? Doesn’t she wonder why I am not home?

The room smells like urine. The wet paper towels are on the floor. Jane doesn’t come back to clean up the pee. I do it and then sit back down on the sofa.

I am staring through the dark at an old wooden tribal mask made with hemp hair and a feather and laced with tribal beads. I’m staring at this unfamiliar face that Nate brought back from a school trip to South Africa, and the mask seems to be staring back as though inhabited, wanting to say something—taunting me with its silence.

I hate this living room. I hate this house. I want to go home.

US

Additional information

Dimensions	1.0500 × 5.4700 × 8.4200 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780147509703
ISBN-10	014750970X
Author	A.M. Homes
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC045000, FIC060000
Subjects	american fiction, short stories, funny books, poverty, us, family life, literary fiction, americana, contemporary fiction, american literature, women writers, funny gifts, novels, humor books, satire, FIC060000, fiction books, books fiction, realistic fiction books, satire fiction, humorous books, Nixon, forgiven, FIC045000, parenting, divorce, marriage, relationships, family, modern, usa, aging, romance, drama, American, Literature, fiction, Friendship, death, families, contemporary, coming of age, brothers, realistic fiction, humor, identity, 21st century