Michiko Kakutaniコミュの（44）THIS BOOK WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE

April 14, 2006
'THIS BOOK WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE'
In Los Angeles, a Self-Absorbed Locust Has His Day
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

THIS BOOK WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE
By A. M. Homes
372 pages. Viking. $24.95.



A. M. Homes's dreadful new novel, "This Book Will Save Your Life," reads like a cartoon illustration for a seminar on men and middle age — a pastiche of all that is hokey, hackneyed and New Agey in Robert Bly's "Iron John" and Gail Sheehy's "Understanding Men's Passages."
The novel's hero, Richard Novak, is, in Sheehy-speak, a DOM — that is, a Dominant Male, a world-beater, wunderkind, would-be Master of the Universe. But after a mysterious health scare (pinched nerve? heart attack? psychosomatic meltdown?), he undergoes a full-blown midlife crisis, and in the course of the book, mutates into a bona fide SNAG — Sensitive New Age Guy.
Along the way, he sees a "psychological internist," enrolls in a "Transcending Suffering" workshop (several days spent sitting around on the floor and eating terrible, gas-inducing food) and attends a men's pow-wow, complete with drum-beating and lots of corny macho talk. ("You are an eagle, a tiger walking in the forest. ...")
For years, Richard has led a controlled, antiseptic existence devoid of emotional connection. He has made a bundle as some sort of stock trader and lives in a huge, art-filled house in the hills overlooking Los Angeles. The house is as pristine and chilly as the one owned by the Steve Martin character in "Shopgirl," and Richard's daily routine is equally orderly and ordered. He has a nutritionist, a trainer, a housekeeper and a masseuse, but no friends or relationships. He has only perfunctory contact with his ex-wife and their son, Ben, who live back East.
The medical episode, however, thoroughly rattles Richard's cushy cage. And just to make sure that he — and the reader — understand that Richard is now officially in crisis, Ms. Homes has a huge sinkhole open up in his yard: a paint-by-numbers metaphor for the collapsing mess that is his life.
Once jolted into action, Richard quickly acquires a bevy of new friends, including a desperate housewife who says self-loathing things, like, "I'm nonexistent, I'm like a floor lamp," and a multicultural doughnut shop owner who says heart-warming things, like, "I'm rich because I have my heart in the doughnut shop." Richard also moves to a new house, resolves to work on his relationship with Ben and tries to play good Samaritan to people he doesn't know.
He has decided "he wants to be heroic, larger than life — rescue people from burning buildings, leap over rooftops," but wonders, "how does a middle-aged Joe become anything, much less a superhero?"
In earlier books, Ms. Homes has gravitated toward deliberately sensationalistic material: "The End of Alice" created a pretentious, sick-making portrait of a homicidal pedophile; "Music for Torching" began with a suburban couple setting their house on fire and ended with a SWAT team at a local school; and the stories in "The Safety of Objects" dealt with subjects like a boy who develops sexual feelings for a Barbie doll.
"This Book Will Save Your Life" is free of such willfully perverse material — save for one repellent scene in which Ben talks about raping Richard — but the novel is also devoid of any verve or style the author might have demonstrated in the past. An energetic embrace of dark dysfunction has given way to a phony, leaden-footed rendition of spiritual uplift.
To begin with, the novel is written in flat, listless prose that makes everything the characters say sound like an unalloyed cliché. In fact, many of these people's remarks are so ridiculously platitudinous that it's hard to know whether Ms. Homes is trying to write parody or whether she has simply watched too many bad, made-for-TV movies and self-help talk shows.
Richard — and for that matter, nearly everybody else in Ms. Homes's navel-gazing world — is constantly taking his own emotional temperature and announcing the results.
"I left myself a long time ago," he tells the leader of his Suffering workshop.
"I'm not really any different, and yet nothing is the same," he tells his psychological internist.
"The world as we know it is not all that there is; there is more, something larger than any of us," he says to his ex-wife and son.
Because Ms. Homes does nothing to make Richard's identity crisis remotely palpable or sympathetic, he comes across as a spoiled, middle-aged brat — someone with too much money and time on his hands and way too much interest in his own inner life. Perhaps Ms. Homes is trying to satirize a type of rich, self-absorbed yuppie, but if that's what she's up to, then she does a terrible job of making Richard's plight funny or revealing or indicative of anything larger.
The same might be said of the rest of the characters in this novel. All are L.A. clichés: the mad housewife; the eccentric movie star; the aging writer who was once the spokesman for a generation; the hordes of the lost, the mad and the lonely trying every manner of bizarre therapy and treatment in hope of finding a quick fix for their woes. Ms. Homes does nothing to enliven these familiar types, nor does she do anything to make the reader see the city of Los Angeles anew.
In a blurb on the back of this book, Stephen King writes that "this brave story of a lost man's reconnection with the world could become a generational touchstone, like 'Catch-22,' 'The Monkey Wrench Gang,' or 'The Catcher in the Rye.' " To this reader, the apt comparison is not to a modern literary classic but to a television show starring Montel Williams or Dr. Phil.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/14/books/14book.html?ex=1146024000&en=9750a500371543f7&ei=5070