A.M. Homes’s Days of Awe is a strong short story
collection that scales and unpacks, without judgment, the labyrinth of layers
that influence human behavior in what Homes celebrates as being “in all its
inglorious beauty.” In the path blazed by Grace Paley, her former teacher, Homes
writes the truth according to her characters. Brother on Sunday, the collection’s opening story, embodies Homes’s uncluttered
intelligence to trust that a story can be kept simple and remain complex,
stinging, ambitious and ongoing.
Days of Awe’s precise
details straddle comfort and pain with authenticity. Its meticulous pacing
borrows from a gymnast’s scissoring and soaring routine on a pommel horse. The
non-autobiographical material tunnels into the territory of global
consciousness at a critical point in our history. Homes’s devoted readership
will take pleasure in a few pieces that are legacy tales from her earlier
works, and which provide a continuation and evolution of preexisting
characters. And those new to Homes’s work will appreciate her mastery of the
dynamics of siblings, life partners, friends, strangers and strangeness all of
which are both contrasting and combustible.
Yvonne Conza: The title
story Days of Awe circles around a love affair sparked between former friends
reunited at a genocide conference. What were you going for in this story in the
big and small picture?
A.M. Homes: I am always
trying to tell the story as well as I can, and to be true to my characters.
Grace Paley always said, write the truth according to the character.
I am interested in how
quickly awareness of the Holocaust is fading –how we don’t seem to notice that
there are genocides all over the world and how even in these horrible moments,
people want a sense of connection, they continue to be human, they mate, they
love and when it is all over those who have survived have mixed feelings about
what it means to survive and their duty to those who were lost. To me it’s
heartbreaking and so very real. And then we make judgments about whose story is
most valid, who has the right to tell the tale — and I find that interesting as
well. And now, many Holocaust survivors have died from old age — and I am
conscious of who is left to tell the story — who is left to remind us. My work
is often about taking the collective unconscious and making it collectively
conscious.
……
YC: You have said, in
response to this being called a “powerful” book: “Regarding the power of the
book — it took a long time and is very much tied to other work I’ve done/been
doing, thinking about thinking about the world we live in.” Talk about this
more. It’s a compelling statement that feels right with this book.
A.M.: It’s hard for me
to describe — except to say we are living in interesting times, the pace of our
social, cultural, political world is moving so fast that it is hard to get ones
footing. A writer depends on a kind of terra firma — in order to go off screen
into the imagination — and know that when one comes back to the
surface — things will for the most part be the same. At our current speed of
acceleration — one worries that one might surface another (unfamiliar) world
entirely. My work is drawn from ideas and ‘issues’ I see before us — history,
the forgetting of history, the human cost of war, what one expects of family,
of marriage of oneself… in order to explore these ‘non-fiction’ sometimes
almost philosophical ideas I have to turn inward — which feels difficult when
all one is compelled to do is read/watch the news — as if bearing witness.
….
YC: Do you think a
writer’s past work remains in the DNA of current and future works? If so, which
of your previous books or short stories have influenced you the most in writing
Days of Awe?
A.M.: The short answer
is yes always, as different as each/all of the work is it is part of a
progression that in some ways is invisible to others… for example the character
Henry Hefelfinger in Rockets Round The Moon, is the early (younger) version of
Geordie Harris, in The Chinese Lesson, who is actually an early iteration of
Harold Silver, the main character in May We Be Forgiven. So that’s a very
concrete example and there are literally dozens of those. Going back through
you can see that my interest in human behavior — why people do what they
do — and how it affects them and those around them is at the core as is a kind
of morality which I never can tell if I should ‘advertise’… ie what does it
mean to be a moral writer — and is that a good thing? I’m not passing judgment
on my characters — in fact kind of the opposite — I give them room to expose
themselves, to come to know themselves in ways that before we spend time
together they might not. Here’s the big reveal — and it’s not about me as a
writer — but about an idea that concerns me a lot. People sometimes say, am I
supposed to “like” that character…. The notion of whether or not a character is
likable worries me, it’s a very-very modern and troubling idea #1 was Fyodor
Dostoyevsky’s Raskolnikov likable? Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert? And do
we want the character to be “likeable” so we can “relate” to them — and can we
only see ourselves in a likable person — i.e. we need to be made to feel good
about ourselves and our reflection in literature? This to me opens a whole
world of discussion and perhaps a course I should teach someday called: I Don’t
Like You, I Love You, the problems of Q-Rating Literature.
YC: This collection
represents a faceted diamond in which light and illumination is always
possible, even when there is disruption or loss. Can you speak to this?
A.M.: I like your idea
of faceted diamond where light and illumination is always possible…that’s
lovely. I am always trying to tell the stories of my characters lives, of their
experiences and these are in some ways just slices of the fullness of their
lives and hope to capture the essence of both what we know and what we don’t
know about ourselves, our lives, our histories. And yes, even in disruption and
loss I am looking for light — which doesn’t mean dismissing gravity but light
as illumination — learning, discovery. I want to remain always curious,
engaged, looking and thinking.
YC: In your earlier
books, reviewers often remarked about being shocked or surprised by your
writing about certain topics that were “haunting, terrifying, twisted,
dangerous …” Did you find those descriptors as helpful or too summarizing?
A.M.: Words like
haunting, dangerous come easily — but at the same time they’re not very
specific and perhaps leave too much room for one to simply project into that
word whatever one wants — so I think the more specific one can be in describing
something the better — even if one disagrees with it — at least you can
understand exactly what the person is saying.
I’ve always been
bothered by the idea that that I am writing to shock people — that’s something
applied to my work from the outside. I’m writing to tell stories — to
illustrate the human heart — and if people find it shocking, well, that means
it hit a nerve, but I don’t set out to shock or disturb. What happens in a
career that spans quite a few years is that reviewers go back and they don’t
read the past books — they read the reviews, and they bring those
misconceptions forward and apply them to new material, so it’s hard to escape.
Electric Literature, June 12, 2018.
On her interest in the
differences between the public and private faces people present
I'm definitely, if not
obsessed by that, I think there's a big gap between who we are publicly and how
we present ourselves, and who we are to ourselves and our families. And most
interesting to me over the last ten years is also who we are in our online
lives, that we can have these either avatars, or sort of other personas in our
exchanges, or even the ways there's different tones to our emails. So I am
deeply interested in that split between public and private self.
On the story "National
Caged Bird Show" and writing naturalistic dialogue
I think my understanding of
dialogue really comes from the theater. I grew up in Washington, D.C., going to
plays at Arena Stage all the time. So it was really the work of Edward Albee
and Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller that gave me a sense of dialogue. And in
this case, the thing was, how do you represent these two main characters, plus
what I almost think of as the chorus around them, which is the other people who
are witness to their conversations, and in ways that are cryptic and condensed,
and almost like a Morse code for communication.
I'm always listening, and I
think there's that interesting difference between what you actually hear people
say, and how we account for that on the page or on the stage, and those
compressions that have to happen. I think Edward Albee was just so truly
brilliant at that.
On Albee and writing about the
breaks in tense relationships
I'm interested in those shifts
or fractures in things, and it's interesting because he was a mentor to me, and
he was somebody I knew throughout my life. And Edward, like me, was also
adopted, and we talked a lot about that outsider experience and what that
perspective was, but also shifts in emotional states, and that sense of
ambivalence about relationships. It's very hard, I think, for someone who's
grown up feeling that their existence was some how temporary, or that they
could be given back at some point, to attach easily. So there's a lot about
attachment in the stories, always.
On writing stories about people
and relationships
I think throughout history,
there have always been wonderful stories about couples and families — I mean,
that is the stuff of life. And the nice thing is, they come in what I call
doses. You know, you can read one story, you don't have to read a whole book of
stories at a time. So you read one or two, and then they sit with you for a
while. I think they're a medication. Literally, we're living in such
complicated times that if you can sit down and read a story, or two stories,
depending on what you need, it's food for thought but it's also for the soul
and for the mind, to see life reflected back to you in a way that is both funny
and moving and complex.
A.M. Homes:
Short Stories Are 'Food For The Soul And For The Mind'. Alabama Public Radio, June 13, 2018
Mary
Elizabeth Williams : You said a few years ago
you feel your work is very American. It feels like what it means to have an
American identity is changing so fast right now. What does it mean to be an
American writer, writing about American things right now?
A.M. Homes : Before the election, I
was talking with my agent and my publishers about this book idea that I've been
trying to figure out as a novel that was basically about the downfall of the
American government. When I first talked about it they said, "That's
science fiction, you don't write science fiction." I said, "I feel
like there's something really interesting happening.” Things are happening
around us so fast. What it means to be an American is super important because
there isn't a agreed upon American identity now. There's no agreed upon set of
values or what democracy is, immigration, about who we are to each other. There
isn't a sense of being united as a country. We're not seeing reflected back
that idea that freedom is a basic human value. It's very tricky.
Williams : Seeing how teenagers
have risen to the challenge, have really taken charge of the narrative, is
exciting. It is also terrifying because it is such uncharted waters.
Homes : I think that things like
the teenagers in Florida are really challenging the status quo. It's amazing,
and they're doing it in a different way than the teenagers of the early 1960s
or mid-1960s did. What worries me is that people are forgetting their relationship
to history. If [you] don't know what your history is, it's very hard. The
absence of history is problematic.
I think that the middle
of America, and the people who were coal miners and worked in factories, really
feel lost. And they're lost because our system is not giving them new kinds of
jobs. The perception is that their work has gone to immigrants, which isn't
true. I understand why they could feel America has lost something. It's lost
them. And they want to feel part of America and feel part of their country.
Williams : And it's easier to
conceptualize an idealized past than it is to construct a vision of a future.
Homes : If you look at people
like Martin Luther King, John Kennedy, Obama, they led on dreams. I think we
have gone the way of the tax rebate: “I'll give you $300 for your family if you
vote for me.”
Look at Nixon. Nixon
started the EPA. Nixon was open with relations with China. I think it's
fascinating to look at somebody who we see as a truly complicated president and
then look at where we are now, like “Wow, what are our goals for ourselves as a
country?" They're not clear, and also interestingly, they're not very
inward looking. There's not a lot of, "Why aren't we doing more
infrastructure projects that would employ people? Why don't we have programs
for veterans that would bring them back and give them jobs with other veterans
so they have a sense of community?" There are so many things that we could
be doing that are not difficult to do, but that's not where the lens is. I'm
interested in and fascinated by it. I guess I would love to see some fairly
regular but smart person run for office.
It's also become a money
game. There's so much about how much money can you put into it. Trump
capitalized on free media. Nobody really talks about that, but early on it
looked [like] there were six New York Times crews following him. I asked one of
the editors, “Why are there six crews following him?” He said, "Because he
makes news." That's part of what happened in his over-the-top speeches.
All of a sudden he made news, so he got [an] enormous amount of essentially
free advertising every day. It's a complicated thing.
Williams : When I get very
despairing about everything, I think, "Just because I don’t have the map
doesn’t mean my kids don’t, or it doesn’t mean my kids won’t draw a new
one."
Homes : I have these students
who are so incredibly smart and don't know anything. I say to them, the careers
they’re going to have in 10 years don’t exist right now. Their future, smart as
they are, is going to not be based on facts they can learn and papers they can
write right now, but it will be based on what they can dream for themselves.
They're our leaders for tomorrow. I think if your leaders don’t have an
imagination, they’re not going to be good leaders because they’re going to
follow directions.
How do you teach
somebody to think for themselves or make a decision? I think the two things
that will help a young person are history and economics. I think really,
economics relates to all of it. That’s where everything is coming from at the
moment. And then, what does it really mean to be a leader?
Williams : It’s so devalued in our
culture: Do you communicate? Do you know how to present your ideas? Do you know
how to make a case for you ideas? Do you know how to talk to another person?
I want to ask you one
more thing, because you have one of the most durable careers in literature. For
a fiction writer you’re in a very small pool, and especially as a woman. I’m
wondering, how has the game changed for you? What does it feel like doing it now?
Homes : Part of me honestly
thinks there’s no way it’s been 30 years. That’s crazy. In my mind, that's just
not even a possibility. The other piece that really bothers me is that I came
of age at a time when the literary world was divided and there was no such thing
as a fiction section. There's women's fiction and gay fiction. Everything
became very fragmented. I think in many ways being a woman who writes has
really been kind of difficult actually, because I think of what kinds of books
would be appealing to the young men and women I think I’m writing about. The
truth is that the expectation in America is women writers write about domestic
things. English writers seem to be, for want of a better word, allowed to write
about these large, social and political ideas. Being able to go to Europe and
touring, there are tons of people of very diverse crowds, and that’s kind of
great. Here when I’m talking to people, sometimes I’ll be talking to a guy and
he'’ll say to me, “Oh, I’m here to tell my wife about your books.”
I feel in some ways
there are probably young people who would like my stories and novels, who don’t
even know about them. I’d like to think that maybe in this world we're in right
now where things are changing, that there’s slightly less divide in how books
are marketed and sold and even put on bookshelves. When bookstores divided into
sections, they took black writers out of fiction and women writers out of
fiction. That really meant there was a large section of the book store was just
the white guys section.
Williams : The flip side is, how
can we legitimize writing about the domestic? How can we write about women’s
stories in a way where we're not just shipped off to the literary ghetto?
Homes : Last year a student came
to me and said, "I'm taking a course in 20th century fiction. Is it true
women weren't really writing in the 20th century?" The reading list was
Faulkner and all these books. I said, "Let me make a little list for you.
Here's Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor and all these other women. Give this
back to your professor and tell him, 'Hey, I just found out there were women
writing in the 20th century.'" If it's not brought into this in a
different way, then [the writing] stays separated. And then people have to take
"Women’s Literature," or "Gender in Fiction," which isn’t
the same because then it also becomes self-selecting of young women looking for
place to talk about women’s writing.
I was giving a talk with
another writer and some guy said, “I haven’t read your books, but I have a
question.” I said to him, “I’d be happy to give you a copy of my book,” and he
said, “I don’t read books by women, but I do have a question." He really
didn’t want to hear it. Grace Paley said that women have always done men the
favor of reading their work and men have not returned the favor. Grace was a
feminist, but as importantly, Grace loved men. I think that what she taught me
was that you can be a feminist and advocate for equality and you can also love
men. That’s always been really important because I do love men. I write a lot
about male characters. I also think women’s lives and the roles that women play
and the relationships that women have are equal to the lives men lead.
I love writing so much.
I feel enormously lucky. My books come out around the world, and that also
means to me as an American writer, the stories have resonance in all countries.
They come out in Korea and they come out in Hungarian and Romanian. That, to
me, is secretly my favorite part of it, that they travel.
A.M.
Homes, too, has met this guy at a reading: “I don’t read books by women”.
Salon, June 11, 2018
A.M. Homes: For almost as long as I can
remember, I’ve felt a deep sense of connection to J.D. Salinger’s work. It
starts with the pervasive sense of loss in his books—the way his characters
seem to be trying to bridge the gap between innocence and an awful kind of
knowing, one that involves an awareness of trauma and grief. Part of it, too,
is the way he often breaks from the action to talk directly, informally to the
reader. It’s easy to feel, Oh, he’s talking to me. But there have also been
these eerie points of resonance between Salinger’s books and my own life that
have made me feel a special kinship with his work. (...)
The Atlantic, June 19, 2018
On
Writing Letters to Famous Strangers, essay by A.M. Homes.
As a teenager, I wrote letters to
strangers. I was trying to write my way out of my parent’s house, where I was
psychically trapped. Like an alien seeking contact, I started by doing
research. I went to the Bethesda Library, where they had phone books from all over
the country. I remember being surprised by the number of well-known names one
could find in a New York phone book in the 1976–1978 time period: Art
Garfunkel, Mikhail Baryshnikov—those are just two I recall, but I know there
were dozens. (...)
The Paris Review, June 27, 2018.
If you are interested in other books
by A.M. Homes read this article by Lorraine Berry.
How A. M. Homes Is
Chronicling Modern America: A Primer.
Signature reads, June 4, 2018
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