May We Be Forgiven

Harold "Harry" Silver narrates from deep inside two overlapping catastrophes: an affair he has already started with his brother George's wife, Jane, and the chaos George detonates around it, a car crash that leaves two strangers dead and George briefly institutionalized, then a single unmonitored afternoon in which George, finding Harry and Jane together, beats Jane to death with a lamp. Homes delivers all of this in the book's first fifty pages, in flat, almost administrative prose, then spends the next five hundred on the unglamorous labor that follows: school runs, custody hearings, a bar mitzvah, the daily maintenance of raising George and Jane's children, Nate and Ashley, that nothing in the opening chapters prepares a reader to expect as the novel's actual subject.

Harry has spent decades annotating Richard Nixon, a president remembered by history for one act that swallowed an entire career, and Homes lets that project sit as an oblique mirror for Harry's own situation: a man hoping that a longer record might eventually complicate a single defining transgression, his own affair chief among them. The novel's title borrows the language of collective confession from the Yom Kippur liturgy, in which a congregation recites sins in unison regardless of which member actually committed them, and Homes applies that logic literally: forgiveness here is never granted in one scene by one wronged party, it accumulates, unevenly and incompletely, out of everyone in the book absorbing a portion of guilt that isn't strictly theirs.

Homes surrounds the central tragedy with a string of increasingly absurd subplots, a webcam sex scandal at a retirement community, an improvised trip to South Africa, a wandering journey to Cuba, that read as comic excess until it becomes clear they're doing the same work as the main plot: American plenty swallowing chaos whole and calling the result normal life. The suburb itself never has to reckon with what happened in it; it just keeps running errands.

Once Harry moves into George's house, Homes tracks the mechanics of parenting in a level of domestic detail rare in literary fiction about male protagonists, cereal brands, permission slips, a child's grief expressed through video games rather than words. The novel's argument is structural as much as thematic: redemption doesn't arrive as insight, it arrives as thousands of small, repeated, non-dramatic acts of showing up.