Music for Torching

A tour de force: A. M. Homes’s unforgettable New Yorker story unfolds into a fiercely entertaining novel of marriage, family, and the American dream.

In a tale that unfolds over the course of one week at the beginning of summer, A. M. Homes lays bare the foundations of marriage and family life at the end of the century–the American Dream gone dry. Flash frozen in the anxious entropy of suburban subdivision, Paul and Elaine (the couple featured in Homes’s acclaimed first collection of stories, The Safety of Objects) have two boys and are obsessed with making things good again. Alone–together–they spin the quiet terrors of family life into a fantastical frenzy that careens out of control: a Stepford-wife neighbor, an ill-conceived plan for a tattoo, a sexy town cop who shows up at all the wrong moments, an allergy-relief cleanup team in space suits, a hoard of contractors and repairmen, a mistress calling on the cell phone, and a hostage situation at the boys’ school. With characters so flawed and outrageous they are entirely believable, Music for Torching is a surreal vision of a most familiar landscape.