The Mistress's Daughter: a review
I am at best a tentative fan of A.M. Homes. I was utterly entranced when I encountered The Safety of Objects; Homes has a genius for terse ironic humor that comes through at its best in short pieces like "A Real Doll," her infamous story of Barbie-doll date rape, or "Looking for Johnny," in which a kidnapper rejects the child he steals because it just isn't working out between them. Her prose is simple to the point of brutality, her stories unflinching and yet strangely compassionate. Later short fiction, as in the collection Things You Should Know, continues to fulfill all her early promise.
I love her short fiction so much that I always want to love her longer works as well, and yet they never completely work for me. What is fearless in her short fiction tends to come across as mean-spirited in her longer work. Stories of suburban unhappiness like "Adults Alone," in which two middle-class adults whose children are away for the weekend decide to smoke some crack, are funny and scornful and end in ten pages or fewer. But when the same two characters enjoy a full length novel in Music For Torching, the author's distaste for her characters' way of life seems to impose itself on every page, undercutting any empathy or humor with derision. The reader is given no quarter and no comfort in such a novel. From beginning to end middle America is ripped to shreds, with no space for a deeper humanistic reading. I've long wondered if it was the fault of her subject matter, or just a matter of Homes being less adept in a long form than she is in a short form.
A few years ago a long essay by Homes appeared in the New Yorker, entitled "The Mistresses Daughter." The essay detailed Homes' harrowing encounter with her birth mother and her birth father, both of whom resurfaced in her early thirties. It was amazing. The writing was spot-on Homes at her best, scathing and sad all at once and entirely without sentimentality. Even as she describes the cruelties done to her by her birth father (who makes her take a paternity test in return for "taking her into the family," but who ultimately refuses and refuses to take her into the family), even as she tells the high crazy drama of her unstable mother (who calls her and tells her to commit suicide since she forgot to send a Valentine), the writing never villifies or denies these people. Even when Homes herself denies them, ultimately, her writing does not.
Given how incredible the essay was, I was absolutely excited to see that she'd expanded it into a memoir, entitled, like the essay, The Mistress's Daughter. So I was disappointed to find that Homes remains unable to work with a longer narrative.
Luckily, unlike earlier long works, the memoir does not devolve into cruelty or ironic japery. The first half of the book is basically the passage from the New Yorker reprinted. It remains incredible work. The rest of the book, however, meanders from the boring to the sentimental to the vindictive (though I can hardly blame her for that part; in one chapter she writes a series of deposition-like questions to her father, asking if he ever planned to take her into his family at all, asking what kind of man he was). We go on a long and boring description of her geneological search (a mistake Rick Moody made in The Black Veil--why do all these writers think we give a shit about the hours they log at the public records office? Give us the story part of the story, man!). We end with a rather gooey homage to Homes' grandmother.
And none of these ideas are bad--I think it's as important to hear about a loving relationship with grandma as a terrible relationship with your birth-father--but it feels as if her interest has faded after the initial essay. The writing is self-reflective and self-indulgent, a journal entry. You get lines like: "Whether or not Magdaline, William, and their son, Howard, or Bernhard or Henry are related to me by blood, they are all related by humanity and by the stories the files tell, and it is lunacy!" Blech! Related by humanity? Come on, are you the same writer who wrote about Nancy Reagan flirting with men in chat rooms? Are you the writer who wrote about a woman trying to get pregnant from used condoms?
Homes is an incredible writer, but her forte is certainly in the short brusque narratives where she best mixes humor with humanity. "The Mistresses' Daughter" is fully worth checking out, but all in all the rest of the book is pretty dismissible.
I love her short fiction so much that I always want to love her longer works as well, and yet they never completely work for me. What is fearless in her short fiction tends to come across as mean-spirited in her longer work. Stories of suburban unhappiness like "Adults Alone," in which two middle-class adults whose children are away for the weekend decide to smoke some crack, are funny and scornful and end in ten pages or fewer. But when the same two characters enjoy a full length novel in Music For Torching, the author's distaste for her characters' way of life seems to impose itself on every page, undercutting any empathy or humor with derision. The reader is given no quarter and no comfort in such a novel. From beginning to end middle America is ripped to shreds, with no space for a deeper humanistic reading. I've long wondered if it was the fault of her subject matter, or just a matter of Homes being less adept in a long form than she is in a short form.
A few years ago a long essay by Homes appeared in the New Yorker, entitled "The Mistresses Daughter." The essay detailed Homes' harrowing encounter with her birth mother and her birth father, both of whom resurfaced in her early thirties. It was amazing. The writing was spot-on Homes at her best, scathing and sad all at once and entirely without sentimentality. Even as she describes the cruelties done to her by her birth father (who makes her take a paternity test in return for "taking her into the family," but who ultimately refuses and refuses to take her into the family), even as she tells the high crazy drama of her unstable mother (who calls her and tells her to commit suicide since she forgot to send a Valentine), the writing never villifies or denies these people. Even when Homes herself denies them, ultimately, her writing does not.
Given how incredible the essay was, I was absolutely excited to see that she'd expanded it into a memoir, entitled, like the essay, The Mistress's Daughter. So I was disappointed to find that Homes remains unable to work with a longer narrative.
Luckily, unlike earlier long works, the memoir does not devolve into cruelty or ironic japery. The first half of the book is basically the passage from the New Yorker reprinted. It remains incredible work. The rest of the book, however, meanders from the boring to the sentimental to the vindictive (though I can hardly blame her for that part; in one chapter she writes a series of deposition-like questions to her father, asking if he ever planned to take her into his family at all, asking what kind of man he was). We go on a long and boring description of her geneological search (a mistake Rick Moody made in The Black Veil--why do all these writers think we give a shit about the hours they log at the public records office? Give us the story part of the story, man!). We end with a rather gooey homage to Homes' grandmother.
And none of these ideas are bad--I think it's as important to hear about a loving relationship with grandma as a terrible relationship with your birth-father--but it feels as if her interest has faded after the initial essay. The writing is self-reflective and self-indulgent, a journal entry. You get lines like: "Whether or not Magdaline, William, and their son, Howard, or Bernhard or Henry are related to me by blood, they are all related by humanity and by the stories the files tell, and it is lunacy!" Blech! Related by humanity? Come on, are you the same writer who wrote about Nancy Reagan flirting with men in chat rooms? Are you the writer who wrote about a woman trying to get pregnant from used condoms?
Homes is an incredible writer, but her forte is certainly in the short brusque narratives where she best mixes humor with humanity. "The Mistresses' Daughter" is fully worth checking out, but all in all the rest of the book is pretty dismissible.