The white schizophrenics were allowed to ride bikes here. The black schizophrenics huddled under blankets and cardboard on sidewalks against the facades of the skyscrapers. Pieces of paper rolled into jars with scrawled writing facing outward: I am not homeless. This is my home.
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home has an absurdist, ironic tone, and although it appears to deal with all the big questions about life and death and love and loss, it ultimately stresses the unknowability of it all: there is nothing knowable about reality, certainly nothing knowable about history, and as we all stumble towards death, life itself might be a bigger mystery than what comes after. Lorrie Moore’s sentences are delightful, her plot is strange and compelling — much like life itself — and I loved every bit of this short novel. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
Recently suspended from his job as a high school history teacher and suffering an estrangement from the love of his life — a suicidal therapy clown — Finn drives to NYC to be with his dying brother. At first, Finn seems to be the only rational person in a mad, mad world: despite being an admitted conspiracy theorist (in the sense that history is filled with covered up conspiracies), when Finn explains to his brother why he thinks the first moon landing was probably faked or why it is that mystery surrounds various historical assassins, his arguments are sound. But when he embarks on a cross-country roadtrip involving impossible circumstances, it’s unclear whether he might be suffering from wishful thinking, mentally unstable, or moving through the thin places where time and reality aren’t truly fixed. Intermittently, we are shown excerpts from letters (or is it a diary?) written shortly after the Civil War:
These letters/diary were penned in the past by the proprietress of a “high cotton boarding house” poised “on the zig and zig of the Mason-Dixon Line”, and in the modern day, Finn comes upon the same crumbling Queen Anne manse and rents a room for the night. If this is a ghost story, this is where the ghosts come in; if this is a history lesson, this is what the textbooks left out; nothing is as it seems and I won’t spoil anything by talking about it.
Lorrie Moore is eminently quotable, and I culled my highlighting to a few tidbits:
I have a taste for irony and the absurd and I found I Am Homeless If This Is not My Home to be funny and tragic and touching and true. Sometimes, life is just like that.
Good this. Good that. After years of teaching, Finn did not believe in good anything. He believed in Interesting, Serviceable, Dangerous, Providential, Unlucky, Cruel, Mercurial, Funny, Unreal. He believed time was a strange ocean through which we imagined we were swimming rather than understanding we were being randomly tossed.
Recently suspended from his job as a high school history teacher and suffering an estrangement from the love of his life — a suicidal therapy clown — Finn drives to NYC to be with his dying brother. At first, Finn seems to be the only rational person in a mad, mad world: despite being an admitted conspiracy theorist (in the sense that history is filled with covered up conspiracies), when Finn explains to his brother why he thinks the first moon landing was probably faked or why it is that mystery surrounds various historical assassins, his arguments are sound. But when he embarks on a cross-country roadtrip involving impossible circumstances, it’s unclear whether he might be suffering from wishful thinking, mentally unstable, or moving through the thin places where time and reality aren’t truly fixed. Intermittently, we are shown excerpts from letters (or is it a diary?) written shortly after the Civil War:
I find people’s ideas are like their perfume — full of fading then dabbing on again — with no small hint of cidered urine. A good scalawag sticks to the late night cipher of her diary.
These letters/diary were penned in the past by the proprietress of a “high cotton boarding house” poised “on the zig and zig of the Mason-Dixon Line”, and in the modern day, Finn comes upon the same crumbling Queen Anne manse and rents a room for the night. If this is a ghost story, this is where the ghosts come in; if this is a history lesson, this is what the textbooks left out; nothing is as it seems and I won’t spoil anything by talking about it.
Lorrie Moore is eminently quotable, and I culled my highlighting to a few tidbits:
• The hospice gave everyone their own room. Dying was private. But perhaps the mortally ill needed company and should all be together sleeping in the same room. When one person died it was a tragedy. But when two or three people were dying together, it had a chance of becoming comedy. Not a big chance, but some. Half. Less than half probably.
• Sickness detached a person from the world and at the end shrank that world down to the size of a room, the walls of which vibrated and stepped slowly, slowly forward.
• He was like a dog, not seeing colors, chasing his own sepia-colored tail, sepia because it was all in the past, one’s own tail when chasing it, was in the past, but hey that’s where everything he wanted was.
• When he looked at other couples, he did not know how they tolerated each other. They had just grown accustomed, he guessed. They had cooked each other. Each was the frog and each was the heated water. Still, he envied them a tiny bit. Their love in pots.
I have a taste for irony and the absurd and I found I Am Homeless If This Is not My Home to be funny and tragic and touching and true. Sometimes, life is just like that.
