Days of Awe
A.M. Homes
[Granta]
Though the cover of A. M. Homes’ new collection features a Dalí-esque vista, the stories within could not be described as surreal. Nonetheless, they do exude a hazy creepiness, redolent of dreams, or nightmares, recounted. Their setting has shades of Ballard; a world whose residents are mostly surgeons, dentists and butchers, objectifiers by trade, obsessed with bodies and smiles, who occupy a strange and usually voyeuristic space somewhere between distance and intimacy. Others write transgressive novels, or report on war and genocide. All share a crude lust for self-expression that mutates, inexorably, into self-alienation.
Tom, a plastic surgeon and the narrator of the first story, ‘Brother on Sunday’, notes how “he often thinks of himself in the third person.” In ‘Hello Everybody’, Cheryl and Walter muse on how they “renovate” and “redecorate” not their homes, but their bodies and minds. Beholden to surfaces, everything superficial is terrifying to them. Homes’ prose, like the characters she ventriloquizes, seems to dissect rather than describe. Her descriptions are cascades of short, clipped clauses that kaleidoscopically capture detail. She has a particular knack for creepy description: someone’s “rear end” is a “cottage cheese of cellulite’, below which ‘spider veins explode.” It’s Foucault’s ‘medical gaze’, just creepier.
Days of Awe is a collection worthy of an America confronted daily by the grotesquerie of the Trumpian leer.
Words: Luke Warde
