![]() “I need you to hang in there,” he tells his brother, to whom he still has things to say. When he gets word of an incident involving his ex-girlfriend Lily, a suicidal therapy clown, Finn leaves Max’s deathbed to rush home to the Midwest. A high-school teacher, Finn has been suspended for sneaking maths into his history lessons, although spouting conspiracy theories and refusing the advances of the principal’s wife can’t have helped his cause. In autumn 2016, as Trump ascends to the Oval Office, Finn is visiting his brother, Max, who is dying of cancer in a hospice in the Bronx. But with 200 pages of text, including an epistolary strand, I Am Homeless if This Is Not My Home is far from baggy. “The novel arrives to reader and writer alike baggy, ad hoc, bitter with ambition, already half ruined,” she has written. ![]() Perhaps best known for her short stories – canonised as contemporary classics in 2020, with an Everyman’s Library collected edition – the American author approaches long-form fiction with reservations. ![]() “Jokes are flotation devices on the great sea of sorrowful life,” says one of her characters. “Desolate”? Well, maybe a bit, but always tempered with humour. What’s the opposite of “prolific”? I ask a thesaurus, but Moore is not “barren” or “impotent”. Lorrie Moore’s new novel arrives 14 years after her last, A Gate at the Stairs.
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