Summary
Finn is a high school teacher, suspended from his job in the Midwest, who comes to a hospice in the Bronx to sit with his older brother Max, who is dying. While he is there he learns that his ex girlfriend Lily, a therapy clown who left him for another man, has killed herself. He drives home to the Midwest, goes to the green cemetery where she has already been buried, and finds Lily there: dead, in the early stages of decomposition, and talking. She asks him to drive her to a body farm in Tennessee, where forensic researchers study corpses, and the middle of the book is that road trip, the two of them bickering in the car about love, death and what went wrong, stopping at motels, Finn asking whether she is ghosting him.
Cut into the road trip are letters written in 1871 by a woman who keeps a boarding house, addressed to her dead sister and concerned mostly with a handsome lodger, letters Finn finds in a bed and breakfast along the way. Lorrie Moore lets the two strands answer each other, a Reconstruction era ghost story and a present day one, and does not force them to meet. The novel is short, about two hundred pages, and it is very much a Lorrie Moore book, full of puns and jokes, some of which land and some of which, as Publishers Weekly noted, do not. Kirkus admired its "extraordinarily lovely descriptions of the hues and aromas of a decomposing body" and concluded, "It doesn't get more elegiac than this."
It is not a book for readers who need to know exactly what is happening. Constance Grady in Vox wrote, "This is a strange and beautiful book, and when you try to catch it in your hands, it dissolves." Parul Sehgal in the New Yorker saw "a writer knifing forward, slicing open a new terrain." Readers who loved Birds of America will recognize the voice at once; readers new to Moore might start there and come back to this stranger, sadder book about refusing to let the dead go.
Historical Context & Significance
I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for 2023, presented on March 21, 2024 at the New School in New York. Fiction committee chair David Varno called it "a heartbreaking and hilarious ghost story about a man who considers what it means to be human in a world infected by, as Moore puts it, 'voluntary insanity.'" The finalists were Teju Cole's Tremor, Daniel Mason's North Woods, Marie NDiaye's Vengeance Is Mine, translated by Jordan Stump, and Justin Torres's Blackouts. Moore had been an NBCC fiction finalist once before, for Birds of America in 1998.
Born in Glens Falls, New York, in 1957, Moore taught at the University of Wisconsin for thirty years before moving to Vanderbilt in 2013, and this was her first novel in fourteen years, published by Knopf in June 2023. Parul Sehgal's New Yorker review suggested one might say of Moore what she once said of Updike, that she is our greatest writer without a great novel, before arguing this one broke new ground. The NBCC's vote settled the argument in the book's favor.
Where to get it
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