The breakthrough story collection that established A. M. Homes as one of the most daring writers of her generationOriginally published in 1990 to wide critical acclaim, this extraordinary first collection of stories by A. M. Homes confronts the real and the surreal on even terms to create a disturbing and sometimes hilarious vision of the American dream. Included here are “Adults Alone,” in which … “Adults Alone,” in which a couple drops their kids off at Grandma’s and gives themselves over to ten days of Nintendo, porn videos, and crack; “A Real Doll,” in which a girl’s blond Barbie doll seduces her teenaged brother; and “Looking for Johnny,” in which a kidnapped boy, having failed to meet his abductor’s expectations, is returned home. These stories, by turns satirical, perverse, unsettling, and utterly believable, expose the dangers of ordinary life even as their characters stay hidden behind the disguises they have so carefully created.
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A. M. Homes is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. This one here is a collection of short stories covering many different lives. There are all sorts of quirky characters involved in odd situation that really aren’t as odd as they seem.
Homes shines a light into the darkest corners of American suburbia, exposing the real goings-on within these outwardly tight-knit neighborhoods. Kids behaving badly, parents behaving worse than the kids. A. M. Homes is as daring an author as can be found today.
This is the second Homes offering I’ve read. I’ve got two more on my Kindle. She simply does not disappoint as a writer. Get this one and see just what can be done within the short story medium.
This 1990 collection contains the story “A Real Doll,” one of the most memorable post-modern stories published in many years. A.M. Homes goes after Barbie in this story, the doll who’s had to take her knocks for distorting the body image of literally millions of American girls for multiple generations and contributing generally to sexism, female objectification and stereotyping. The narrator is the 12-year-old brother of a typical American Barbie-doll owner, his little sister Jennifer. The story is mostly about his secret relationship with Barbie, one he conducts when Jennifer is elsewhere. It’s a post-modern story, meaning it only works if the writer completely flouts the rules of modernism, and changes Barbie from a 10-inch-tall plastic inanimate object into a 10-inch-tall plastic ANIMATE one who can walk and talk and do other things as well. The narrator and Barbie have a pretty graphic, purely physical relationship, complicated by how tiny she is and the fact she is plastic and not anatomically correct. When they take a time-out to talk, Barbie complains about her owner, Jennifer, who has given her push-pin earrings that penetrate deep into her head. Jennifer has also chewed Barbie’s toes off and promised a breast reduction as well. Barbie further confides that her boyfriend Ken has no genitals at all, just a bump, and so is just a friend. One day, just for a laugh, the narrator decides to switch Barbie’s and Ken’s heads. It gives him powerful, confusing feelings and he grabs Ken and leaves Barbie on the dresser and he and Ken start spending a lot of private time together in the bathroom. By the time he has worked through his attractions to both Ken and Barbie — and scrubbed his semen out of Ken’s hollow insides with Jennifer’s toothbrush — Jennifer has taken Barbie to the kitchen, heated a serrated-edged steak knife on an oven burner til red-hot and — well, you should read the story itself — but she basically does what many women who once owned a Barbie have admitted doing: they got even with Barbie for being nothing but the expression of a male fantasy and setting them a standard for female beauty that was always both wrong and impossible.
This is one of my all time favorite short story collections. I reread it regularly.