In ‘A Prize for Every Player’ — one of 12 stories in Days of Awe, a new collection by A.M. Homes (Granta, £14.99) — Tom Sanford, shopping with his family in Mammoth Mart, soliliquises (loudly and nostalgically) about the America he remembers, and finds himself with an audience of shoppers who nominate him as the People’s Candidate for President. Absurd? Not quite so absurd perhaps as in pre-Trump days.
Days of Awe (the title comes from Rosh Hashanah, the ten days of repentance in the Jewish calendar) is Homes’s third collection and her first book since winning the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2013. The stories balance on a narrative tightrope between reality and absurdity, taking the anxieties of the American elite to a satirical extreme. It makes for a thought-provoking read.
Two stories, ‘Hello Everybody’ and ‘She Got Away’, feature a dysfunctional and decadent LA family, obsessed with diet and plastic surgery. (Even the dog has surgery for ‘an unappealing fatty tumour.’) Out for a meal, the family request items of ten calories. Witty and tragic, the stories focus on sisters Cheryl and Abigail — characters Homes has written about in earlier stories.
‘Be yourself,’ Cheryl advises her sister. ‘I’ve no idea how to do that,’ Abigail replies. Ultimately Abigail dies of anorexia. Planning her funeral, Cheryl says: ‘I don’t think she’d like to be in a coffin… She would think a coffin made her look fat.’
These stories are concerned with the public and the private, the physical body and inner self. Dialogue drives them all. In the title story, a war reporter and a novelist meet at a conference on genocide: the reporter is haunted by the deaths he’s seen, the novelist by her fictional reliving of the holocaust.
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