Life Propellant
A.M. Homes’ This Book Will Save Your Life Kills Death Dead

We’ve all got a past to be reckoned with, and only the lily-livered wait around for it to floor them.

By John Hood

At first read, Richard Novak would seem like the least likely candidate for sympathy. Rich enough to never have to work again a day in his so-called life, holed-up in a Beverly Hillside mansion and surrounded by a coterie of highly paid handlers, the sullen little solitaire has absolutely nothing to cry about. In fact, the best he might elicit is a boofuckinghoo.

So when the shallow wallow breaks and breaks deep, it’s quite a surprise to be drawn into his wake.

And wake we do, to the brand new day of A.M. Homes’ dawn-fully surprising This Book Will Save Your Life (Viking).

Poor Richard’s new day starts doubled over from the pain of “waiting for his life to begin.” It’s a pain so excruciating it might just be imagined. The pain of all the past at last and at once hitting him where it hurts.

Again with the boofuckinghoo, right? We’ve all got a past to be reckoned with, and only the lily-livered wait around for it to floor them.

But it’s not what knocks you down, it’s how you get your ass back up, and this blissless list of a man is exceptionally no exception. Faced with his own finiteness, Richard gets up, dusts himself off and finds it’s high time he got out and did something.

Less like Richard Price’s dying-to-be-good Samaritan, and more akin to the “nice”ness of Homes’ own Jack, this Dick doesn’t mind going soft. Hell, on occasion he almost becomes the superhero equivalent of a soft touch (think Hoffman’s Heroic Bernie LaPlante with a platinum parachute to swing from). Touching, without being touchy feely; redemptive, without the clichéd coupon cashing; transcendent, without resorting to the banality of haloes, his quest is not so much about the need to give back; it’s about needing to give, period.

Even better it’s about the need to do. “You do for others what you can’t do for yourself,” says the reborn Richard. And after he and his well-done material world fall apart, the undoing becomes a case of Do-Cat-Do.

And then some. I won’t spoil the spill — read the book — but I will say that unlike Homes’ previous litany of unlikelies — the fire-starting couple in Music for Torching, the Barbie-mad mauler of The Safety of Objects’ “A Real Doll,” the you-don’t-wanna-knows who bring The End of Alice, for instance — Life’s likenesses are so damn likeable they actually make you wanna live.

Now that’s transgressive.

Comments? E-mail letters@miamisunpost.com. Hood is online at www.therealjohnhood.com.