This Book Will Save Your Life

This Book Will Save Your Life

Disconnected from the outside world until a health scare and a sink hole in his yard force him to forge new relationships, middle-aged everyman Richard Novak finds his life changed by a doughnut shop owner, a kidnapped woman, a counterculture icon, and others. 40,000 first printing. Let's start with the good news for fans of A. M. Homes ( Music for Torching ; The Safety of Objects ): it's not all bad. A few critics praised Homes's convincing characters, emotional immediacy, deadpan dialogue, and expert skewering of modern L.A. The San Francisco Chronicle even compared Homes to Kurt Vonnegut (and Richard to Billy Pilgrim). Unfortunately, negative reviews prevailed. Critics described the characters, plot, and onerous moral about the prisons of our own making as cartoonish, clichéd, and tired. The Washington Post sums up the sentiment: "If you're as isolated and disconnected as Richard, you'll find the details here surprising and hilarious, but otherwise, it's yesterday's news." Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. *Starred Review* What's a lonely rich guy to do when he is felled by severe and inexplicable pain and a sinkhole threatens to swallow his pricey L.A. home? Let go. Suddenly, control-freak Richard finds himself rescuing people and animals in distress and befriending an ebullient immigrant donut-shop owner, a genuinely desperate housewife, a thoughtful movie star, and a famous, now reclusive counterculture writer. He tries meditation, moves into a Malibu beach house, and tries to be a father to his estranged teenage son, Ben, who loves roller coasters, a predilection indicative of this novel's rocketing energy and wildly careening ups and downs. Homes is always riveting, but this juggernaut hits a higher mark with its aerodynamic prose, finely calibrated humor, and spiky characters, each a master of antic extemporizing and improbable spiritual evolution. Making clever use of the extremes of L.A., both natural (tar pits, mud slides, fires, earthquakes) and man-made (the list is endless), Homes orchestrates a midlife crisis that transforms a money-counting neurotic into an unlikely superhero in a novel of cinematic pizzazz that revitalizes our understanding of love and goodness. Donna Seaman Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved A. M. Homes is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. A. M. Homes is the author of Things You Should Know, Music forTorching, The End of Alice, In a Country of Mothers, The Safety of Objects , and Jack , and Los Angeles: People, Places and the Castle on the Hill . Recipient of Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, she is a Vanity Fair contributing editor and publishes in The New Yorker, Granta, Harper's, McSweeney's, Artforum , and The New York Times . No, it won't. A.M. Homes's This Book Will Save Your Life can't even generate enough energy to save itself. This tepid satire about modern America begins with Richard Novak, a wealthy day trader, having a panic attack and being rushed to the hospital with "incredible pain" all over his body: "He lay there realizing how thoroughly he'd removed himself from the world or obligations, how stupidly independent he'd become: he needed no one, knew no one, was not part of anyone's life. He'd so thoroughly removed himself from the world of dependencies and obligations, he wasn't sure he still existed." That existential crisis could lead to great pathos or great comedy, but over the next 300 pages, Richard meanders through a series of chance encounters, reaching out with new interest and generosity to strangers who never become much more than their costumes. There's the Middle Eastern owner of a donut shop, the housewife crying in the grocery store, the handsome movie star, the reclusive '60s novelist. Richard befriends them all with low-key good cheer and somehow manages to change his life completely with about as much effort as I've expended switching shampoos. He gives away new cars, pays for his maid's hip replacement, sends the weary housewife to a spa. "This is the person he wants to be," Homes writes. "He wants to be able to do this for others, strangers, it doesn't matter who, and he wants to be able to do it for himself." His Good Samaritan impulse also inspires a series of impromptu rescue operations: A horse is trapped in a sinkhole, a hostage is trapped in a trunk, a woman is trapped in a bad marriage. These episodes are mildly amusing (for 15 minutes, he's a national celebrity, a punch line on Letterman), but because Richard is so imperturbable and his success so firmly guaranteed, the scenes never develop any real suspense. The larger problem, though, is the dullness of Homes's satiric edge. She portrays Los Angeles as a city collapsing -- morally and physically -- but it's Apocalypse Lite. Anyone who wants to make fun of bizarre diets, ludicrous luxuries, New Age fads and crippling exercise regimes has to stay ahead of the ever-escalating real-world grotesqueries of modern life.