(courtesy Allen & Unwin Australia)
As a content writer by trade and a reader of 55 years standing or so, I am a huge fan of writing that sings and comes alive, of words fairly dancing off the page and not simply impressing the mind but filling the heart with raw, heartfelt meaning.
It’s a rare to gift to not only write well but to also convey what it is to be human in all its contrary complexity and finding writers so imbued is always a joy.
One writer who clearly knows her way around words and humanity in equal measure is Lorrie Moore, and it finds mostly triumphant expression in I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home which goes to the very heart of what it means to be alive and connected to others by focusing on death and how hard it is to repair connectedness when the imperfect business of living renders it asunder.
If that all sounds grim, it actually isn’t for the most part which bears testament to the author’s ability to talk about some very dark moments without surrendering to an overwhelming sense of loss and lack of connection, though that is always present in this highly imaginative and thoughtful novel.
I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home centres on Finn, a man who is reeling from the breakdown of his on again-off again (emotionally at least) relationship with his long-term girlfriend Lily, and visiting his soon-to-die brother Max in a hospice in New York City.
That was a lot for Max. He breathed deeply except it wasn’t deep. The oxygen tubing was slipping on his philtrum beneath his nostrils, and Finn leaned out to straighten it out. Max had to summon such physical strength for each utterance that Finn thought he might accidentally kill his own brother by not holding up his end of the conversation.
That’s a huge amount of stress for any one person to bear on their shoulders, no matter how strong and resilient they may be, and it’s clear that while Finn is coping well enough, there are numerous cracks appearing in his ability to weather this very intensely emotional and grief-stricken period of his life.
He is also grappling with the fact that he’s been suspended from his job as a history teacher at a private school on entirely dubious grounds after he rejected the unwanted advances of the headmaster’s wife, creating a vulnerability that is the perfect place for some big questions about life to be asked.
And we are talking BIG.
Think life and death, meaning and purpose, how love drives us and can both uplift and ruin us, and how it’s departure, in the form of a say a much-loved brother or the end of a relationship can make going forward a difficult proposition indeed.
The fact that I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home situates these big questions in an entirely surreal setting, where ———- SPOILER ALERT ———- Finn drives a recently suicided and very dead Lily from where’s been buried to a “body farm” where is where she wants her mortal remains, now well and truly in decay, to spend whatever remaining time they have before full dissolution takes place.
It’s a magically real element which could’ve come across as totally loopy, but somehow Moore makes it feel funny, inventively insightful and strangely healing for both Finn and Lily alike.
(courtesy official Lorrie Moore Facebook page)
While I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home does occasionally lose itself in the beautifully written weeds with some exchanges feeling artfully clever more than groundedly human, by and large the novel succeeds in balancing insightfully gorgeous prose with some really intense humanity hard up against the momentously impactful existential blowtorch.
It really delivers a hammer blow of recognition as a result.
If you have ever lost someone you really love, and Finn loses two people at once over the course of I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, then you will find a lot that resonate in this short but impactful story.
There is, of course, the obviously raw and nakedly tearing of the soul grief of losing someone, which is dealt with humour and poignancy in equal measure, but Moore also succeeds, in examining in ways that really make you feel and think deeply, in exploring what it’s like to arrive at the end of someone’s life and have so much dangling threads of unfinished business fraying all around you.
Finn tries to address this chasm between lived experience and hoped-for hopes and dreams with Max but while the two are close, Max is not the sort of person to ruminate too closely on these things, even when death is perilously close to him.
Finn finds more fertile ground (pretty much literally) with Lily on the most bizarre road trip either of them is every likely to take (it is, naturally, the last one on which Lily, now a corpse, will ever embark).
‘What do you see?’
‘A winding road disappearing into haze.’
‘I fear there’s more of that ahead.’
‘I have no plans,’ said Lily.
Their highly unusual conversation, which takes place not only in the car but at very public places like rest stops and petrol stations where people seem to take in their stride Lily’s less-than-healthy appearance, find each other of them bearing their souls with insight and good humour in ways that sometimes lose the emotional impact but which always ring true when it comes to the fact that we never get to the end of life, or someone else’s while we remain living, without feeling the full weight of poor decisions and lived-out flaws.
We long to be perfect but that is we beyond our mortal grasp, and what really sings in the final act of I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is how when we have a chance to look back and talk about what was and what might have been, that it is always such a gift.
Is visiting your dying brother in a hospice and then driving the corpse of your dead girlfriend across country a lot to deal with? It absolutely is, but somehow by the end of I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home Finn has found some accommodation with it all, remarking that all for the finality of things, “Nothing in the world was every truly over” and that maybe life can go on, frayed and uncertain though it may always be.