From here on,the novel becomes a road trip with the distraught Finn rescuing Lily from the graveyard where she’s been buried,and driving them both to her preferred resting place,a body farm. But Lily moves and speaks,so has she really died? Even she doesn’t know:‘“Perhaps I got stuck in the revolving bardo door”.
If this is sounding like a George Saunders novel,it’s worth noting that Moore was briefly concerned about ostensible similarities with Saunders’ Booker Prize-winning novel,Lincoln in the Bardo. But while both authors share a talent for gruesome comedy and an ability to skewer contemporary life with red-hot wit (plus an enviable ability to flout Elmore Leonard’s three-per-book rule regarding exclamation marks) the similarities end there.
Moore’s great talents as a writer include swerving so rapidly between humour and tragedy you feel you need a seatbelt. She is also exquisitely capable of making her readers feel uncomfortable about laughing but unable to stop. Hers is a violent kind of comedy,taking no prisoners. Here Finn reflects on the thoroughly besmirched times:“The whole year was becoming one big f--- you year:politicians to their parties,voters to the candidates,candidates back to the people,Stockholm to novelists,Bob Dylan to Stockholm.”
Not many authors can get away with this,but with Moore it is expected. She wrote,after all,one of the most extraordinary and confronting short stories ever,People Like That Are the Only People Here:Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk (long titles are also a specialty),earning her stripes by exploiting a personal medical crisis.
Stitched through the main story of I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home are epistolary sections set just after the Civil War,where a landlady communicates with her dead sister regarding one of her lodgers,who is under increasing suspicion as the narrative develops;these sections converge,perhaps too expediently,late in the novel.