Music for Torching
As Quentin Crisp used to say, "Don't keep up with the Joneses!Drag them down to your level!" This could be the motto of the suburbanites in  A.M. Homes's fourth novel,Music for Torching. Homes has a  subtle eye and ear for suburban reality, but beware: she is no mere satirist of  what James Joyce called the "muddle crass." Behind each neat, bright lawn,  vile lives writhe in darkness. On the surface, Paul and Elaine are conventionally competitive middle-aged, middle-class people with banal yearnings for French doors and a new deck. They have two strapping  boys. Their neighbors Pat and George are prodigies of efficient family life.  But alone with Elaine, Pat drops the Stepford Wife mask and stages loveless orgies atop the throbbing washer, amid the Downy and Fantastik and Bon  Ami. Meanwhile, Paul beds a local wife and a sinister mistress. The nice old  man down the street downloads Internet child porn. Local kids join the Boy Scouts and bite off teachers' fingers. It's all about lurid misery and false fronts: a minor character is named Claire Roth, surely alluding  to the bitter relationship in Claire Bloom'sLeaving a Doll's Houseand Philip Roth'sI Married  a Communist.Paul and Elaine first popped up in Homes's collectionThe Safety  of Objects, as a couple having the happiest night of their  lives smoking crack while the kids are away. Their happiest night here is  when they tip the barbecue and burn their house halfway down. The story  proceeds with a nightmare zombie logic from there, with a funny-scary ironic  tone. "Paul notices that the color of her eye shadow is Fiction, and her lipstick is called Sheer Fraud.... 'What happened to the dining-room  table, Elaine? Why'd you chop it to pieces?'" he wonders. "The damage was irreparable," his wife replies. Homes describes nice people doing  not-so-nice deeds in luminous, precise prose way better thanBret Easton Ellis,  as well asJoyce Carol Oates, and occasionally within range ofJohn Updike. But Homes is really the evil spawn ofGrace  Metaliousand Quentin Tarantino.--Tim Appelo--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.