I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, by Lorrie Moore (Faber 2023)

Neil's picture
Neil

This is Lorrie Moore's first new novel for over a decade, and therefore something to greatly anticipate. I'm just not sure what to make of it. It's one of the strangest books I've read, and she doesn't make it easy for the reader to unpack what happens in it, what is real and what imagined by the characters. Finn, the main character, gets a phone call that summons him back to a troubled relationship from his past. Lily has taken her own life, and already been buried. He travels to the cemetery at night, and finds her there, apparently dead but alive, talking but decaying. They depart on a road trip, a deeply strange and unsettling journey. Is she a ghost? Did he dig her up? Is anything here real, or a figment of his imagination? It's both a love story, and a ghost story, it's about grief and heartache, both funny and disturbing. I still don't know what to make of it.