From Library Journal
What better ways for a hateful, hate-filled couple to alleviate their middle-aged suburban blues than to set fire to their home, sleep around, get a groin tattoo of snaking ivy during an executive lunch at the behest of the cheating girlfriend of one of the their best friends, cross-dress, curse each other endlessly, and treat their parental responsibilities as an annoying afterthought? Paul and Elaine live ugly lives doing ugly things to each other. They both have affairs with neighborhood wives, passively allow other sexual peccadilloes to happen to them, and then wonder why they are so miserable. Homes (The End of Alice, LJ 12/95) employs flat, stilted dialog to create a whiner's anthem of thoroughly unlikable people. To spice up this go-nowhere tale, she pulls out a headline from real news to create a tragedy of innocence wounded long before the actual bullet is fired. For larger libraries with a Homes fan base.ABeth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Homes presents a slice of kafkaesque life in an unnamed Westchester County New York suburb. The torching in the title can refer to the small incident of family arson that our characters Elaine and Paul engage in. Thinking to end their problems and move on, Paul sprays lighter fluid on the house and Elaine kicks over the lit barbecue grill. The house is not destroyed, merely damaged, and rather than being free, they have made their trap that much tighter. Torching can also refer to the continuing affairs that Paul has and to the unexpected lesbian encounter that Elaine has with a friend who up to that point has seemed less human and more "Stepford" wife. Neighbors, the police, fellow commuters, bosses, Boy Scouts, and friends all contribute to the book being seen as the very blackest of black comedies, until the very end when the payment for all their sins comes due. And, of course, payment is required in this readable, engaging, and startling novel. Danise Hoover
From Kirkus Reviews
Paul and Elaine Weiss have a very bad ten days in this newest by Homes (The End of Alice, 1996, etc.), who takes her penchant for extreme situations and behavior to the suburbs. It begins as a typical Westchester County weekend: a dinner party followed by a barbecue at which everyone drinks too much and reveals their boredom and unhappinessexcept that the Weisses top their neighbors in acting out. Elaine cuts Pauls neck with a knife on Friday; he has phone sex with their divorced buddy Henrys new girlfriend on Saturday; and they join forces on Sunday to set fire to their house, then head for a motel with their sons, sullen teen Daniel and asthmatic nine-year-old Sammy. Homes flings us into the middle of her protagonists messed-up lives, yet for a long time keeps her readers emotionally distant from them. Whether detailing a lesbian encounter on a washing machine or genital tattooing, the narration doesnt bat an eye or hazard an explanation. This trendy flat affect consorts oddly but aptly with the authors rather generic satire of suburban society: though the time is clearly the present, the wives obsess about laundry and meals while the husbands commute to unspecified jobs at anonymous corporations in approved 50s fashion. It seems at first that Homes intends merely to patronize her characters. Then slowly, sneakily, without softening the weirdness and nasty edges of their actions, she entangles us in a sense of complicity with Elaine, Paul, and their equally troubled friends. None are what they seem, none are what you think, none are what youd want them to be, she writes in the books most moving passage. They all are both more and lessdeeply human. Although too heavily foreshadowed, the climax is still shocking, drawing a jagged curtain across a drama with plenty of conflict but no real resolution. Seldom subtle but often effective and almost always deeply creepy. People will be talking about this one. (QPB featured alternate; author tour) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"In Music for Torching, A.M. Homes writes about middle class America with the jittery yet precise machine-gun rhythms of a young Bruce Jay Friedman. But added to this is a ferocious erotic anarchy--a gleeful sexual subversiveness all her own. Music for Torching is a savagely funny read, both unnerving and irresistible." -- Richard Price, NYT bestselling author of Clockers and Freedomland
"Music For Torching is a wondrous, terrifying book that zeroes in and draws out for examination the confusion and violence under the surface of contemporary middle class life. Her insights into social and sexual relationships are breathtaking, and she balances marvelous dialogue with interior reflections in a way that leaves nothing out, yet employs a rare economy of effects. She is certainly among the most important young writers working now and her new book is dazzling." -- Robert Stone, NYT bestselling author of Damascus Gate and Outerbridge Reach
I found myself rapt from beginning to end, fascinated by Homes's single-minded talent for provocation. -- The New York Times Book Review, Gary Krist
From the Back Cover
In Music for Torching, the controversial author of The End of Alice lays bare the foundations of marriage and family life at the end of the century. Flash-frozen in the anxious culture of a suburban subdivision, Paul and Elaine (the couple first featured in Homes's collection of stories The Safety of Objects) have two boys and a beautiful home, yet they find themselves thoroughly inexplicably stuck. Obsessed with "making things good again," they spin the quiet terrors of family life into fantastical frenzy that careens out of control, doing and saying all the things we dare not, throwing into full relief the chasm between our public and private selves. From a strange and hilarious encounter on the floor of the pantry with a Stepford-wife neighbor, to an ill-concieved plan for a tattoo, to a sexy town cop who shows up at every inopportuune moment, to house cleaning team in space suits, to a mistress calling on the cell phone, to a hostage situation at the school, Homes creates characters so outrageously flawed and deeply human that they are entirely believable. With Music For Torching, A.M. Homes brings her unnerving emotional intensity to the heart of America, creating a new and dangerous territory that is distinctly her own.
About the Author
A.M. Homes is the author of the novels The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, and Jack, as well as the short-story collection The Safety of Objects and the artist's book Appendix A. Her fiction has been translated into eight languages, and she is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a National endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her fiction and nonfiction appear in magazines such as The New Yorker and Artforum, among others, and she is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, Mirabella, Bomb, Blind Spot, and Story. She teaches in the writing programs at Columbia University and The New School and lives in New York City.
