The Herald - The Herald Magazine
Meditation on marriage
and history, about how you cannot move through life carrying all history with you. But, if you leave history behind, like so much of America is doing right now, and just go on without history, you have no capacity to make informed decisions. That is just so interesting to me.”
Homes’s own history is extraordinary. An intensely private woman -- the A stands for Amy and the M, she claims, for Middle -- she is the last author you might expect to write a revelatory memoir, but in The Mistress’s Daughter she tells what happened when her birth mother turned up and when, later, she met her father. It is a story so shocking, so peculiar and emotionally strange that Homes says she had to write it although she never writes autobiographically. “I’m just not that interested in myself.”
Educated at Sarah Lawrence College just north of New York City, she spent two years at the renowned Iowa Writers Workshop and has lived on and off at the Chateau Marmont Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, once home to Greta Garbo, Jim Morrison and John Lennon, particularly while writing her non-fiction book Los Angeles: People, Places and the Castle on the Hill. Her mentors have ranged from the late Grace Paley, who taught her about “writing the truth according to character,” to the playwright Edward Albee, who died in 2016.
“Along with Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill, Edward has been a huge influence. I grew up seeing plays at Arena Stage, in Washington, all the time. I think those great playwrights gave me a sense of dialogue. Also, Edward Albee became a very real person in my life. I was very young when I met him.” She was an artist in residence at the Albee Foundation in Montauk, New York, and spent time with him on Long Island, where they both had homes.
“We often talked about being adopted because he was too. We had many conversations about the sense of distance, the dissonance, of being in a family that you are not related to, although my people really were lovely.”
I tell her I met Albee once in New York. “Was he grumpy?” she asks. “No, very charming; we spoke for a while.”
“You were lucky -- he was a great playwright but he sure could be testy. I really miss him.”
Days of Awe, by AM Homes, Granta, £14.99 Fourth Estate, £12.99
EMMA has moved from New York with her husband, an investment banker, to Sao Paolo. “The term among expats for people like me was ‘trailing spouse’,” she informs us. With that dismal phrase, which offers so much potential for fiction, the scene is set. Here she is, newly married, and still in love with her handsome husband but with nothing to do but brood.
Unlike other bored wives, our young and educated narrator is not fulfilled by the boozy lunches, the conspicuous consumption. To pass the increasingly heavy hours while “my husband” is at the bank, she does occasional work as an English tutor, thus gaining access to the home lives of privileged Brazilians, and learning what makes this country tick – to the point of exploding.
At the same time she is learning Portuguese. In this she is helped by her fascination with etymology, the roots of words, and those that derive from them, examples of which punctuate the text. Yet even in this arcane area of expertise she cannot avoid the problem that troubles her marriage. Some words apparently add nothing to the language because “they never produced word children”. It’s no surprise she is drawn to them. Her husband wants a family and she is fairly certain she does not want to bring a child into a world in such turmoil.
Her misgivings are understandable. No amount of wealth can cushion her from the disparity in fortunes in this city. Not long after the couple arrive, they are robbed at knifepoint. Thereafter, Emma is haunted by the youths who stole so brazenly from them – fascinated at what their lives must be like and disappointed at her husband’s lack of courage.
Ian MacKenzie’s second novel begins snappily, thanks to his journalistic brio and invigorating, gossipy tone. Soon, though, the momentum is lost as you realise his technique is to issue statements rather than allow the story to flow. His rejection of conventional indentation means every paragraph reads like a fresh revelation, its significance emphasised above its worth. Clearly MacKenzie shares Beckett’s dislike of paragraphs, to which he refers at one point. He only relinquishes his staccato style when Emma is with Marcos, her husband’s colleague, with whom she appears to be contemplating, or having, an affair. Are we to infer that these occasions are full of feeling rather than thought?
Whatever the reason, the release from the declaratory style is a relief, albeit too brief. Yet this typographical tricksiness is a mere detail compared with the subjects Emma addresses, full-on. Feast Days is a cosseted millennial’s contemplation of capitalism and globalism, of greed and wealth and what it takes to live well, but without guilt. Indeed, the finest aspect of this novel is its evocation of Sao Paolo, of the frisson and sensuousness of the rich person’s life in the midst of most people’s struggle. Less impressively, it indulges in gobbets of traveller info about the history of the city, the country, the places Emma visits, along with digressions on the meaning of words that are not as clever as the author intends.
Above all, though, it is a meditation on marriage, a latter-day version of the 19th-century novel. Keenly attuned as she is to language, Emma finds it taking on new meaning: “I felt something in my skin, even my heart – a feeling between elation and alarm – when I heard myself using these most basic terms, husband and wife, which seemed like things that did not belong to me.”
What ensues is a portrait of a relationship examined as if it were an exercise in emotional etymology. It is slickly done, but unpersuasive. Failing to convey emotion, despite being about nothing else, this is an occasionally confusing and ultimately unsatisfying novel whose central figure has a chilling effect on the whole enterprise. It is not Emma’s lack of maternal instinct that makes her feel distant, but her watchfulness. At no time does she feel fully engaged, not even with her husband. His lack of a name, and the jarring clumsiness of not naming him, reinforces the impression that Emma is alone on the page, enjoying the company of her thoughts far more than of real life.