Sep 12

Sep 12 May We Be Forgiven

Author: A.M. Homes
Publisher: Viking (original US edition)
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

In this vivid, transfixing new novel, A. M. Homes presents a darkly comic look at twenty-first-century domestic life and the possibility of personal transformation. Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his more successful younger brother, George, acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in the suburbs of New York City. When George’s murderous temper results in a shocking act of violence, both men are hurled into entirely new lives. May We Be Forgiven digs deeply into the near biblical intensity of fraternal relationships, our need to make sense of things, and our craving for connection. It is an unnerving tale of unexpected intimacies and of how one deeply fractured family might begin to put itself back together.

TL;DR Review

May We Be Forgiven is about a man who finds a sense of family after his brother suffers a violent mental break. It was well-written, but not quite my favorite.

For you if: You like slow-burn, character-driven stories about family and shared grief.

Full Review

“What I have learned this year is that the job of parent is to help the child become the person he or she already is.”

I read May We Be Forgiven as part of the #ReadingWomen challenge to get through all the previous winners of the Women’s Prize this year. It was my first book by A.M. Homes. It wasn’t my favorite, but I can see why it’s so appreciated.

The novel is about a man named Harold whose brother, who’s always been angry and prone to outbursts, has a violent mental break with tragic consequences. As a result, Harold moves into his brother’s house and becomes the one responsible for his two preteen kids. The kids spend a lot of their time at their boarding schools, so the book is really about Harold (and them) figuring out who they are in this new world order, managing grief as best they can, and learning how to become an atypical family.

The good things this book has going for it definitely have to do with Homes’s prose, and her x-ray-like vision into human nature. She will tell those squirmy moments like they are, and let you squirm. In fact, she tells the deepest truth about many of the things that make us human, both good and bad. She even describes what we’d today call a #MeToo perpetrator even though this was written long before the general public started paying attention to those experiences of women. And her portrayal of grief is on point.

But this book is also pretty long, and the plot has no real shape. It sort of spirals with absurdity after absurdity that eventually just sort of ends. It almost seems like she really just wanted to end it one year after the novel’s opening, so wrote enough to fill that space, but I think it could have been shorter. I also felt like the kids felt too old for their ages.

There are also pieces of this book that didn’t age well at all. All the references and treatment of China and Chinese people were cringey, and there’s an entire subplot about a village in Africa for which the older child, Nate, is a sort of white (child) savior. It’s actually called Nateville. So that was also very cringey.

All in all, I appreciate the craft of this novel, but it wasn’t my favorite. I’m glad I read it though.