Summer Reading

This Book Will Save Your Life

by A.M. Homes

Viking, 372 pp., $24.95

Homing in on America's spiritual crisis – a present day where people are more concerned with voting for American Idol than for their own government, where reality television has filled a gaping personal void with fluffy, marshmallow-flavored nothingness – A.M. Homes' fourth novel has ripped open the jugular of the elite. Not with violence or malice, but with a winding tale of second chances. Protagonist Richard Novak never leaves his house, trades stocks on his treadmill, and wears noise-cancelling headphones so he doesn't have to talk to his housekeeper. Standing in his sprawling L.A. beach house, which is slowly falling into a sinkhole, he has an awakening of sorts: "Each person looks down on the next, thinking they somehow have it better, but there is always someone else either pressing up from below or looking down from above." A sudden explosion of all-encompassing pain sends him to the ER, and after his release, the surreal life starts. He meets a friendly doughnut shop owner named Anhil, who serves as a conduit for the city's detachment. ("They get into the car and they call someone on the cell phone. They are afraid to be alone but they don't see the people around them.") He helps a young girl rescue her horse out of his sinkhole with the help of a movie star neighbor, who just happens to have a helicopter. He discovers a desperate housewife crying in the produce section who's afraid she'll club her children to death. He tries to reconnect with his estranged teenage son; he saves a girl from the trunk of an abductor; he goes to a silent retreat called "Transforming Suffering." All of these events clumsily serve as comedic relief in Homes' landscape, and we're led to believe Richard is a changed man by the end. But his awakening ends with him floating, literally, without much to hold onto.