My publishers said: ‘You don’t write science fiction’

AM Homes on the reaction to her plan for a novel about the downfall of the US government – before Trump

THE short story that gives the American novelist AM Homes’ new collection its title -- Days of Awe -- centres on a “transgressive novelist” and a war correspondent who have an affair at a summit on genocide that spirals out of control when participants square up to attendants at a nearby gun show. It is, like all of Homes’s fearless work, strangely surreal and unforgettable as she explores the dark, disturbing underbelly of suburban dystopias -- as well as making the reader laugh out loud. I caution against reading on public transport. In literary terms, there really is no place like Homes.

Indeed, we agree when we discuss her trademark, pitch-black sense of humour, if you can’t laugh at the state of the world today, you’ll weep. Early in the story, we learn that the novelist, who has written a novel about the Holocaust, said yes to the conference “after having made a pact with herself to say no to everything, a move towards getting back to work on a new book”.

A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and winner of the 2013 Women’s Prize for Fiction for her last novel, May We be Forgiven, Homes is the author of eight novels, three short story collections and a fiercely frank memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter. At the moment, she’s saying yes to everything despite her desire to work on a new novel. Her fictional novelist “has spent the better part of a year on a book tour, travelling the world giving readings, doing interviews, answering questions that felt like interrogations.

“It was as if the journalists thought that, by asking often enough and in enough languages, eventually something would fall out, some admission, some other story -- but in fact there was nothing more. She’d put it all in the book.”

No pressure then, thinks this journalist preparing to question the forthright, fast-talking Homes, 56, who teaches at Princeton University and lives in New York City with her daughter Juliet, 15. Raised by left-leaning Jewish intellectual adoptive parents in the affluent suburbs of Washington DC, Homes has just embarked on a tour, criss-crossing the States as well as Europe. It’s the third time I have interviewed her so I promise that I do not have ways of making her talk. She thanks me, then gives a disbelieving laugh. “Oh, yeah?”

So, what kept her? Her last short story collection came out in 2002 and her first, The Safety of Objects, which was filmed starring Glenn Close, was published in 1990. It’s taken her more than a dozen years to write the 12 stories that make up Days of Awe, in which Cheryl, a 14-year-old we first met in The Safety of Objects, returns in two stories as a college sophomore. “She just hasn’t aged like the rest of us,” jokes Homes. Cheryl’s family have had so much plastic surgery they no longer know who they are. Her mother has temporarily blinded herself after attempting to change the colour of her eyes; father walks around holding a mirror so he can constantly stare at himself; her older sister is a model -- “so thin she actually looks flat” -- who has had so much Botox she can’t smile or frown. “I felt I wasn’t done with Cheryl, but I don’t sit down to write a collection,” says Homes. “I have ideas for stories and they accrue. It can take many years to write them. Sometimes -like May We be Forgiven, which began as a short story that Zadie Smith asked me to write -- they become the genesis of a novel. Of course, life intervenes.

ITEACH; I write for magazines and television. [She scripted the series The L-Word and, more recently, has written for US mystery series Mr Mercedes.] I sit on several boards, including Yaddo -- the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs run by Glaswegian Elaina Richardson -- and I’m raising my daughter, who is a joy but also a teenager with all that that brings. I never ever seem not to have something to do.

“The story Days of Awe [the title refers to the 10-day period of the Jewish High Holiday beginning with Rosh Hashanah but also refers to the state of the world now] has been years in the writing but last summer I was alone in Oxford when my daughter was at summer school.

“My very old, very dear friend Baroness Helena Kennedy loaned me her house. I just had to finish that story; also another one, The National Cage Bird Show, a modern story about war, set in a chat room, and written in relation to JD Salinger’s For Esme with Love and Squalor. I couldn’t have finished either without Helena’s kindness. Another great friend, Jeanette Winterson, delivered shopping and delicious roast chicken -- I even had the loan of her rickety old bicycle.”

While at Oxford, Homes realised that neither story was risky enough. Once she got into dangerous territory, however, she completed the collection. Nevertheless, it’s amazing to discover she has worked on the stories for so long -- they read as if written yesterday. Surely that is the case with the brilliantly satiric A Prize for Every Player, in which a garrulous father, shopping with his family at the Mammoth Mart, rants about the American politics of his youth versus today? The crowds anoint him the people’s candidate for president.

“No, it’s not a new story. I wrote that eight years ago. I know, it’s really timely. People keep asking, ‘How did you know?’ I knew because even before the election of Trump I was already trying to figure out a novel about the downfall of the American government. My agent, my publishers were saying, ‘That’s science fiction. You don’t write science fiction.’ I felt there was something really interesting happening -- and it was happening so fast. We are no longer united as a country. We are not seeing reflected back at us the idea that freedom is a basic human value. It’s very tricky. As for Trump, yes indeed, you could not invent him, with his over-the-top speeches.”

Homes has long been a political animal. At seven, she went door-to-door in Chevy Chase to promote Hubert Humphrey’s presidential bid in 1968. “Many of my stories are about the past