Music for Torching

A M Homes is decidedly not for everyone but I love her gruesome, excessive slices of American surburban life. Everyone behaves terribly and acts like lunatics and you never quite know what will happen next in this novel - at the very start Paul and Elaine burn down their family home for really no reasaon at all, and it somehow spirals even further out of control from there. Its funny but has its moving moments too.

Homes writes despair REALLY well. My dearest Meghan gave this to me almost two years ago, and I couldn't read it for this very reason. Coming back to it now, I can handle it a whole lot better. It's about a relationship gone rotten and how we always think we have it the worst when that's generally not really the case. This book is darkly funny in even the worst moments and a quick read, too--it's mostly dialogue. I loved how, for a 358 page book, the action of the story evolved in maybe a week-and-a-half tops and the events were totally human and utterly surreal at the same time. Excuse me while I recoup....

I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/13270664

A surprisingly good book. If someone had told me of some of the incidents in the book before I read it, I might have passed on it. That's because the incidents are so outrageous that I can imagine a bad comedy full of them and I'm not interested in that. Yet it works, in this case.

It all begins when a disillusioned couple, Paul and Elaine, set their house on fire on the spur of the moment, and find that they are exhilarated. Only a part of it burns, though, and they are left to clean up the mess and tell stories to insurance agents. In a way their transgressions bond them together. Not that they don't still fight and call each other every kind of name, show more and they can hardly be said to be in the fog of love again.

In good comedy is always truth, and always drama as well. Perhaps that's what makes this work so well. And no, we do not watch as the couple finds comfort and stability and a good life. As other reviewers have said, the story pierces right through the American Dream, revealing what so many of us are really about. show less

Suburban ennui gone frantic which seems exaggerated but may not be and surely not an exaggeration of fantasy. It hardly seemed funny to me, but rather sad, pitiable, and almost understandable. Feeling themselves in a prison, they're flailing away with so much energy that there's none left to open the door.

I have read enough A M Homes novels to know how they are likely to go. A lot of frenetic madcappery, and the sort of inhibition shedding that makes you feel quite giddy, but also a tendency to go into lengthy lulls where not a lot happens. This had a lot of lulls, and consequently it was my least favourite by her to date.

The setup here is that middle aged married couple Paul and Elaine are having a sort of joint middle aged crisis so they accidentally on purpose burn their house down (like you do). Except they don't raze it to the ground, it's still there but it needs patching up (cue eccentric insurance agents, builders etc). What I did like was the bit where they were forced to stay with their friends in their perfect house and show more witness the wife's perfect housekeeping. That rang true all the way. What didn't quite ring true is the way nearly burning the house down is the gateway to all sorts of life-changing/life-enriching situations - discovering lesbians in the closet and quasi life coaches on the daily commute. Surely they were already there whether the house got burned down or not?

Just when it seems the book is settling down to the sort of conclusion where everyone has discovered some new meaning in life and hope for the future and wasn't-it-a-good-idea-to-commit-arson etc (I unashamedly speed-read the last hundred or so pages), the author throws all the cards back up in the air with a dramatic grand finale not dissimilar to the device used in "This Book will Save Your Life". It left me puzzled - was everything we read up to that point of no consequence? If I'm honest, I didn't get it. show less

Brilliant writing, I don't think I've ever read a book where I wanted to also the main characters so much!

Great book. Clips along well and has an ending I did NOT see coming! Very thought provoking. I highly recommend this for both its bizarre humor and its depth.