strictlypoison's Full Review: A. M. Homes - The Safety of Objects: Stories
In A.M. Homes’ breakthrough short story collection, The Safety of Objects, the reader is expected to make several leaps of imagination. Not to say that these stories are entirely improbable, but more precisely that Homes’ unique narratives here are demanding of a tough skin that allows the unexpected to exist symbiotically with the surreal and the painfully honest with the preconceived notions. What is more important than these leaps is the prose itself, a tight and often comical style that presents the unimaginable in deadpan manner. The book reads very much like other notable contemporary fiction from the likes of Denis Johnson (Jesus’ Son), Amy Hemple (Tumble Home), and even the keen sense of satire and the absurd of Bret Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero, American Psycho, Rules of Attraction, among others).
The Safety of Objects is that rare thing in literature (though its existence is most prominent in literature, the novel format lending itself to this): a work of the intellect that connects with the baser self. The stories in this book are very much about the suburbs and the dwellers in that strange location of America. While it may seem cliché at this point to talk about the sterility of the suburbs (going back to Don DeLillo’s landmark White Noise; and even pre-dating that with The Graduate), Homes here presents a dull and pedestrian community of comfort in which the inhabitants are as disconnected, unloved, unappreciated, and unhappy as could be. It is, for this reason, that The Safety of Objects is not only thrilling to read but also an essential dialogue in the artistic cataloging of America. Homes found, much to my enjoyment, that the sterility and mass-production of the suburbs does little to dull the humanity of characters, which is almost a radical approach to this subject when seen through the eyes of American Beauty viewings.
What Homes has done is to dig deeper beneath the exterior of the suburban myth, neatly excising the innate desire to have an awakening as if from a drugged sleep, and find (much as in Rick Moody’s brilliant novel The Ice Storm) that the suburbs are a setting with character, but still just a setting rather than a character itself. The characters in this series are vibrant beings, expertly crafted in staccato rhythm, beings with a damaged soul and an indescribable sense of dread. Clearly the married yuppies Paul and Elaine, who start the collection in the story Adults Alone, are beside themselves with fear of reality. After dispatching the children to Florida for ten days, this couple smokes crack while trying to relate to each other and asking, as the Talking Heads predicted, “Well…how did I get here?”. Their disconnection, though infused with a shared sense of camaraderie, is typical of what you find in this collection. Paul and Elaine’s story was continued in a follow up novel, Music for Torching.
The story A Real Doll finds a youngster becoming infatuated and eventually consummating an obsession with his sister’s Barbie doll. This kind of skewed storytelling, an inexplicable event made human by the intense emotional empathy Homes shares for her subjects, is the unifying link of much of the collection. By casting her characters in an unbreakable aura of reality, her flights of fancy into the most improbable of situations is winning and effective.
The title of the book itself seems to suggest that the process of existence in the suburbs is the collection of things, inspiring the notion that you begin to feel most comfortable with what you can physically own. Going back to Paul and Elaine, their love is muted and often confrontational, but always in an ownership context. They have found in each other, and throughout this surreal suburb, a way to live without feeling. The actions of many of the characters, particularly the kidnapper Randy (who returns the boy he’s stolen because he doesn’t match up to the “Johnny” he has in his mind), are grounded in the realm of property rights. When you own things, you can look at them and touch them and they could never possibly hurt you. Homes’ deeper message is, it seems to me, that within the comfortable cocoon of the suburbs, people become a collection factory, at times even producing their own objects, like children.
In The Bullet-Catcher, we find businessman Frank intently coveting a prize-giveaway Jeep, part of a radio promotion in one of those “must keep your hands on the car to win it” contests. He sets up camp in the mall, with a pup tent, to watch the contest round the clock. Once again, it is about ownership and the character’s intense need to have something, something that won’t hurt him and will, hopefully, add to his prestige and respect. A more chilling version of this revolves around a paralyzed and comatose young man, Paul, whose younger sister shares his convalescence with her friends, even going so far as to expose his genitals to these teens. But in that tale, the narrator is the young man’s mother. She cares for Paul ceaselessly and thanklessly, but clearly presenting the idea that her ownership of this entire situation is actually causing great pain and consuming her life.
And that is what these stories are trying to say, I think. That ownership of any object does not guarantee harmlessness, rather that objects are inherently dangerous to the identification of a true you somewhere beneath the possessions. Much of this same philosophy was presented in both the film and the book Fight Club, though not nearly as vehemently confrontational as in those. Perhaps that could be taken as a Buddhist view of life, for many of the characters truly do suffer greatly for their desire despite the abundance of objects they own, but it is also a realist view of the choking conformity and de-clawed nature of living in the suburbs. And that, perhaps, could be the most generous praise to give Homes, that she is a realist. It is in working with the surreal and the absurd on a human level, but never sacrificing the honesty of these characters, that you become quickly impressed with both the storyteller and the wordsmith. Homes is quickly making a name for herself as one of the elite of the literary vanguard, truly an inspiration to other female writers both for her success and the audacity with which she has won it. Her stories are our stories, you feel sick and thrilled at once. You laugh when you feel like crying and vice versa. She has, truly, put the America that I know under her lens and recorded perhaps not the truth, but definitely an approximation of the profundity of contemporary life.
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