I try not to write about books I haven't yet finished, but for all its 400+ pages, this is a pretty fast read, and while I'm being completely honest, I haven't followed A.M. Homes career that closely. I'm more familiar with her short stories, although I loved The End of Alice. While The End of Alice was just dark, May We Be Forgiven is darkly comedic. So much happens in the first few hundred pages that it almost moves too fast. In a nutshell, George Silver, the taller, smarter, more successful of a pair of brothers takes out a family in an auto accident, kills his wife, and ends up in an institution. If that's not enough for one novel, his brother, Harry, a Nixon scholar (a nod to DeLillo's White Noise -- the central character was a Hitler scholar), takes over where George's life left off, which includes but is not limited to: internet sex, a health scare of his own, and caring for his incarcerated brothers children and pets. Whew.
If I didn't know better, I would say Homes is thumbing her nose at novelists like Jonathan Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides, two writers whose recent works were epic family drams, but whose critical acclaim remains in tact even when they rarely stray from writing about husbands, wives, and kids. When women write about those things, they're often jettisoned to the chick lit shelf. Even if I'm projecting, just a little, it's a really funny book and it reads like it was a lot of fun to write.
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