Harry is a Richard Nixon scholar who leads a quiet, regular life, his brother George is a high-flying TV producer, with a murderous temper. They have been uneasy rivals since childhood. Then one day George s loses control so extravagantly that he precipitates Harry into an entirely new life. In May We Be Forgiven, Homes gives us a darkly comic look at 21st-century domestic life — at individual lives spiraling out of control, bound together by family and history. The cast of characters experience adultery, accidents, divorce, and death. But it is also a savage and dizzyingly inventive satire on contemporary America, whose dark heart Homes penetrates like no other writer — the strange jargons of its language, its passive aggressive institutions, its inhabitants desperate craving for intimacy and their pushing it away with litigation, technology, paranoia. At the novel s heart are the spaces in between, where the modern family comes together to re-form itself.
May We Be Forgiven explores contemporary orphans losing and finding themselves anew, and it speaks above all to the power of personal transformation — simultaneously terrifying and inspiring.
