This Book Review Will Beg for a Clever Title

This is a review of A.M. Homes' This Book Will Save Your Life. To address the obvious question first: No. If you’re about to die, investigate the following: penicillin, the Heimlich maneuver, life jackets, airbags, bypass surgery. Or maybe your crisis is of the spiritual variety? If so, Austinist knows a good book for you; it’s called Pull Yourself Together, You Fucking Crybaby.

Richard Novak is a middle-aged, hermetically-sealed stiff. He lives in Los Angeles, estranged from his ex-wife and teenaged son, and devotes all his time to one pursuit, monitoring: his heart rate, his investments, a woman swimming laps who he can see from his window. One day, he is attacked by pain so severe that he believes this is “IT”, “IT” being the big dirt nap, presumably. He goes to the emergency room (where, hilariously, “For the first time in his life, Richard didn’t even feel middle-aged—he felt OLD”), where his pain is dismissed as a weird, inconsequential fluke. Not IT, at least. On the way home from the hospital, too agitated to resume his quietly-miserable life, Richard stops for a donut. And there, friends, everything goes bonkers.

Engage the Expand-O-Tron--is that what we're saying these days? In any case, Engage the Expand-O-Tron to read the rest of the review...

Richard befriends Anhil, the donut guy. He also befriends a movie star, a reclusive genius, and an unhappy housewife. He rescues, with the help of the movie star, a horse who gets trapped in a sinkhole in his yard. He also rescues a kidnapped girl who flashes him an SOS signal from the trunk of the car in which she is trapped. He goes on a silent retreat. His son comes to visit. There are repeated sightings of a saber-toothed tiger around Los Angeles. His house begins to fall into the sinkhole. Fires rage out of control. Richard and his son pay a trip to Disneyworld. (Some events reported out of order.)

There’s an inspirational dimension here, which approaches feel-good, if not life-saving, proportions. Richard’s life is, on the one hand, too fantastic to be instructive. He’s sufficiently loaded that he can brave some of life’s challenges, such as his house falling down, by getting a new one. Beyond that, he apparently catches Tom Sawyer disease (airborne) in the hospital, in which he can’t leave the house without having something picaresque happen to him, like the horse and the hostage. At the same time, his daily life remains, as they say, quotidian: he gets stuck in traffic, says the wrong thing, feels misunderstood. The interplay of the absurd and the mundane gives a pleasingly contrapuntal effect.

It should come as no surprise to fans of A.M. Homes’ previous work that this summery and succinct novel would be good Barton Springs reading. No relief for those in mortal peril, but if, you’re in danger of needing something to read, This Book Can Fill That Gap in Your Life.

*Image (c) Boycott Coke on Flickr*

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