The End of Alice by A.M. Homes
My rating: 5/5 cats
this is going to be another one of those reviews that will reflect poorly upon me when my enthusiasm for the book is weighed up against the subject matter. so – a warning.
***it is an ungentle book. you can stop reading here if you are not into the rough stuff.***
basically, it is about a man in jail for being humbert humbert with a knife. his lolita was named alice. hence. now, enter a nineteen-year-old girl who is hatching her own plan to consummate her desire for a very young boy. she wants someone to commiserate with about her exploits, and who better to “get” her drive? best pen pals ever.
a.m. homes does not hold back here. and i may sound sexist, but that fact that a woman wrote this book is astonishing to me. not because of the violence or the subject matter – that’s just nouns and verbs. but the level of detail, and the tone when she writes in the voice of the various male characters, there is a pervasive masculine sensibility that sounds completely authentic. (and, yes, those are also nouns and verbs – don’t fight me when you know what i mean)
the book is gross and uncomfortable and is far and away the best thing she has ever written. i wish i liked her other books as much as i like this one. the others were fine, but to me this was a perfect book. music for torching got outta hand at the end there – just silly. but this has just the right mix of tenderness and danger. she tells a difficult story, and she tells it well. and manages to have a very convincing masculine voice throughout. (even though she is a woman whose actual voice sounds so cute like sara vowell’s.)
and of course, the impulse here as a writer of more-literary-than-just-shock-value material would be to humanize the convict and make him all cuddly and sympathetic and make the girl, who is still free and among us, into the real monster. but she doesn’t do that, which is such a relief. she gives some backstory, and some explanation, but it never really humanizes him. he remains a monster, although a more overt monster than the girl, with her ponytail babysitting and tennis lessons. with her dirty smelly young boy who saves his scabs to snack on. i am so thankful that i cannot relate to how these kids are supposed to be sex objects.
it’s true that in lolita she is also a dirty little kid, not the image of a nymphette that has grown up after her. and, if you are not similarly inclined, you should wonder what the attraction would be. it is even more pronounced in this book, when the object is a young boy. she loves him in his distraction, his stinkiness, his boyishness. it is powerfully realized, if still (again – gratefully) unrelatable.
so – yeah, a great book about terrible things. and another reviewer claims this book is bad and that zombie by joyce carol oates is a better treatment of the same subject matter, but that is crazy-talk. zombie is bad. really. bad. don’t do it.
