There's no place like Homes's alienated LA
This Book Will Save Your Life
By A. M. Homes
Viking, 372 pp., $24.95
Despite its in-your-face declarative title, A. M. Homes's novel probably won't save your life, but it might well make you grateful for the one you have. Its feckless protagonist, a 55-year-old divorced financier named Richard Novak, has tasted enough of the American pie to be sated and slightly nauseous -- he's got a little of everything money can buy, which is, of course, nothing much at all. Now he's cooped up in a monstrous house in the canyons of Los Angeles, where he gets on the treadmill each morning and watches an anonymous lap swimmer out one window and an ominous sinkhole out another. Richard's ex-wife in New York is too busy to take his calls, and his teenage son, Ben, holds him in such contempt that Dad can barely make the effort. So life has been stripped down to its most expensive intangibles: A nutritionist caters, bearing Richard's change-your-life meals; his trainer and housekeeper make sure he's still breathing. There's even a Rothko in the house to give us an idea of the affect within those walls. The only thing missing is the plastic electronic bracelet, but then Richard's interior prison has already more than made up for that.
''This Book Will Save Your Life" is a faux-effete novel, steeped in self-conscious misery and American-dream slapstick with a little piece of feel-good redemption at its close. It's Homes, though, so the redemption is more cinematic endgame than happy days; her outlook usually belongs to the torch-the-bridge school of fiction. When the novel opens, Richard is recovering from a spooky encounter with his own angst that has landed him in the emergency room. (When he dials 911, the operator tells him he's part of a pilot program for training crisis counselors, then connects him to a perky trainee who grills him about his favorite movies while he waits for the ambulance.) The doctors find nothing to diagnose beyond weepy panic, but the episode is enough to send Richard careering out of his house toward some semblance of a makeover -- toward blind-side connections with strangers and friends in order to reconstruct a life.
Homes's dark delivery in her fiction over the years of a modern, alienated America -- its hollow suburbs, its fault lines in the culture -- is in full regalia here, and the novel is brimming with black-humor set pieces: the paramedics who call in a Code Orange for wounded celebrities; the self-absorbed driver who hits Richard as a pedestrian and then yells at him for ruining her day. But Richard's misadventures, while picaresque, are little more than gags for Homes's sardonic point of view. Once Richard realizes that his entire world is collapsing -- the sinkhole is as unwieldy a metaphor as it is a phenomenon -- our protagonist embraces everything in his path. He befriends a guy named Anhil who runs a doughnut shop, whose kindness -- manifest in free jelly crullers and almond creams -- is the most human encounter he's had in ages. He collides with a crying woman in the grocery store who's had it with the domestic-goddess game, and soon enough the two become a Bonnie and Clyde on the run from the American dream.
''This Book Will Save Your Life" lives somewhere between black slapstick and overamped cliches about contemporary LA. Sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, its plot ricochets between Richard's farcical quests -- trips to a deprivational spiritual retreat on ''Transcending Suffering," a whirlwind visit to Boston to see his family -- until it settles into a pace of mock odyssey; its characters are occasionally credible enough to bestow the novel with poignance in the midst of its absurdities. When Richard rescues a kidnap victim in a drive-by epiphany on the LA freeway, his 15 minutes of made-for-TV fame open the door to kindnesses from all sorts of strangers. All these events are background training for the crux of the story, which is the arrival of Richard's son from the East Coast. Ben is angry, gay, and steeped in enough adolescent angst to make him nearly unapproachable, but Richard's newfound hope makes him persevere, and their early bond is renewed, then cemented at -- where else? -- Disneyland.
We all know redemption isn't requisite to a novel, but some sort of aesthetic raison d'etre is. I'm not sure why Homes wrote this book: There's nobody in it, no key event or setup, that you care about or want to remember. The absurdist novel walks a fine line between realism and incredulity; it has to be real enough to make you care and far-fetched enough to make its point. The events in ''This Book Will Save Your Life" are preposterous (a woman trapped in a car trunk signaling SOS by Morse code on a brake light), but they're intentionally so, and close enough to the truth to be satire. And because of Homes's trademark deadpan, the dialogue and delivery of the novel are flatly effective. But there's something tired about the premise here, as though the author herself had wearied of the same old send-ups. The best satire has to have a heart beyond its target, and the novel may be searching for this in its half-sincere, maybe-we'll-get-there-someday ending -- not exactly one of hope, but of a second chance. ''It is something, it is more than nothing," in Homes's words, and in a modern world where progress itself is measured in body counts and downhill battles, that must have seemed to the author an acceptable victory.
Gail Caldwell is chief book critic of the Globe. She can be reached at caldwell@globe.com. 
