May We Be Forgiven
by A. M. Homes
Summary
Harold Silver is a mild Nixon scholar, teaching a course nobody takes, married to a woman who barely notices him, and standing in the kitchen at Thanksgiving watching his younger brother George, a monstrous television executive, dominate the room. Within weeks the family has been demolished. George runs a red light and kills two people; Harold, comforting George's wife Jane, ends up in her bed; George walks out of the hospital, finds them, and kills Jane with a lamp. And Harold, the careful spectator of other people's history, inherits the wreckage: two children at boarding school, a dog, a suburban house, and a life that was never his.
What follows, over the year from that Thanksgiving to the next, is a picaresque of American damage that Homes plays as deadpan black comedy: internet hookups arranged by bored suburban wives, a stroke, a lawsuit, George in a progression of experimental institutions, the children's schools invoicing grief by the term. Slowly, and against every instinct of satire, the book turns constructive. Harold assembles a family out of spare parts, the niece and nephew, an old man he meets in a deli, the children of a woman he wronged, a bar mitzvah relocated to a South African village, and the title's plea starts to look less ironic with each chapter.
Around four hundred and eighty pages, episodic and relentless.
Best for readers who like their redemption arcs run through a wood chipper first, and who suspect the sitcom family and the Greek tragedy are the same genre at different volumes.
Historical Context & Significance
May We Be Forgiven won the Women's Prize in 2013, the first year it carried that name after the Orange sponsorship ended, and it was a characteristically nervy choice: the reviews had been openly split, the Guardian finding it uneven but funny, the New York Times calling the satire dated, the Independent relishing its black humour. The judges backed the energy, and the book's defenders have grown with time.
The opening chapter had a prior life: published as a story in Granta in 2007, it was picked by Salman Rushdie for Best American Short Stories, and the novel keeps that first chapter's velocity for nearly five hundred pages.
A. M. Homes had spent two decades as American fiction's specialist in comfortable lives detonated, from The End of Alice, controversial enough to draw boycott campaigns, to This Book Will Save Your Life, and her memoir The Mistress's Daughter turned the method on her own adoption. This remains her biggest book, and the prize its loudest endorsement.