Tales through dark glasses

The writer A.M. Homes has been compared to Vladimir Nabokov. She has been compared to Samuel Beckett and John Cheever. Her first book, “The Safety of Objects,” is being turned into a movie starring Glenn Close. She has won a Guggenheim Fellowship. Yet the 11 stories that form her latest collection, “Things You Should Know,” provide a perplexing lack of explanation for this very real success.

These are stories of alienation and dysfunction, perennially popular themes. And some of them show early signs of blossoming into stories. In “Remedy,” a 35-year-old-woman, lost in a mediocre relationship, goes home for the weekend only to find that a strange man has moved into her old house and stolen her parents’ affections. In “Georgica,” a young woman on the rebound from a car accident and a canceled wedding wanders the beaches of the Hamptons in search of recently filled condoms that might provide her with a commitment-free form of impregnation.

A couple of stories feature suicidal whiners married to super-competent woman (who nevertheless arm themselves against disappointment by hiding Louisville Sluggers under their nuptial beds).

Yet Homes nurtures her premises with either a bland prose or a self-conscious stylization that suffocates whatever life might be possible. In “The Chinese Lesson,” the Caucasian husband of an Asian American woman tries to connect to the Chinese culture she has so emphatically rejected. When his ailing mother-in-law, Mrs. Ha, comes to live with them, Geordie finds a way to connect. He has a microchip implanted in Mrs. Ha’s back. Armed with a global-positioning screen, he can track his mother-in-law when she goes on walkabout.

Not a bad variation on a Henny Youngman joke. Unfortunately, Homes’ timing is more sledgehammer than borscht belt. “I am walking, holding a small screen,” Geordie’s story begins, “watching the green dot move like the blip of a plane, the blink of a ship’s radar. Searching. I am on the lookout for submarines. I am an air traffic controller trying to keep everything at the right distance. I am lost.”

Then, lest there be any doubt as to the nature of the battle lines --Geordie and Mrs. Ha (the lost ones) vs. Susan (nee Ha) -- Homes silences them with geography and carpentry. “Susan is minimal, flat like Kansas. She is physically non-existent, a plank of wood, planed, smooth. There is nothing to curl around, nothing to hold onto.”

Sometimes the prose masquerades as poetry, as in the opening to “Remedy.” “It is about wanting and need, wanting and need -- a peculiar, desperate kind of need, needing to get what you never got, wanting it still, wanting it more, nonetheless.” Even Kansas has more hills.

This may be the salient feature of the Homes universe: that color and imagination are as unattainable in prose as they are in life. If this universe can be described at all, it must be described impersonally, since all personality is suspect: “There is a girl in the backyard, floating alone on a raft in the water. There is a tremor. The lights in the house flicker, the alarm goes off. In the pool, the water shifts, a small tidal wave sweeps from one end to the other, splashing up onto the concrete,” Homes writes in not one but two stories, “Raft in Water, Floating,” and “The Weather Is Sunny and Bright Outside.”

Now compare a pool described by, say, Homes’ predecessor in suburban commentary, Cheever: “The pool, fed by an artesian well with a high iron content, was a pale shade of green. It was a fine day. In the west there was a massive stand of cumulus cloud so like a city seen from a distance -- from the bow of an approaching ship -- that it might have had a name. Lisbon. Hackensack.” Or a similar scene from a certain book by Nabokov: “ ... then, without warning, a blue sea-wave swelled under my heart and, from a mat in a pool of sun, half-naked, kneeling, turning about on her knees, there was my Riviera love peering at me over dark glasses.”

There are those, evidently, who read something more into Homes, who see Cheever in Homes, the way Humbert saw a Siren in a skin-kneed prepubescent. But sometimes Kansas is only Kansas, and flat fails to rise.