What better ways for a hateful, hate-filled couple to alleviate their middle-aged suburban blues than to set fire to their home, sleep around, get a groin tattoo of snaking ivy during an executive lunch at the behest of the cheating girlfriend of one of the their best friends, cross-dress, curse each other endlessly, and treat their parental responsibilities as an annoying afterthought? Paul and Elaine live ugly lives doing ugly things to each other. They both have affairs with neighborhood wives, passively allow other sexual peccadilloes to happen to them, and then wonder why they are so miserable. Homes (The End of Alice, LJ 12/95) employs flat, stilted dialog to create a whiner's anthem of thoroughly unlikable people. To spice up this go-nowhere tale, she pulls out a headline from real news to create a tragedy of innocence wounded long before the actual bullet is fired. For larger libraries with a Homes fan base.ÄBeth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

A child enters a suburban grammar school with a gun and explosives strapped to his body; a SWAT team moves in; a boy is shot at close range. This creepy and all too familiar scenario appears at a pivotal moment of Homes's latest novel (after The End of Alice), a caustically funny and eerily plausible portrait of a suburban family meltdown. In a nondescript Leave-it-to-Beaveresque Westchester neighborhood, Elaine and Paul find their marriage and their lives at a standstill: Paul commutes to a vaguely sinister corporate job ("how do you make people think fat is good?" asks his boss at one point) and enjoys weekly trysts with a neighbor, while Elaine plays housewife, attends school plays, and shops. Both feel desperately "stuck." In a fit of boredom and frustration, following two nights of cocktail parties and barbeques with the neighbors, the two kick their grill to the ground and partially burn down their house, an event that plunges them into a sordid suburban nightmare. Moving in with what seems the perfect couple, Pat and George, they leave their boys with families they scarcely knowÄa decision with perilous consequences. Paul begins popping pills and has an affair with a friend's girlfriend, a psychic known only as "the date," who has a penchant for phone sex and persuades him to get a tattoo on his shaved crotch, while Elaine is seduced by Pat, a Stepford Wife with a penchant for sex toys. Homes unflinchingly documents the disintegration of Elaine and Paul's family, paying explicit attention to the sexual ennui and sadistic impulses roiling beneath the sterile veneers of their lives. The dark underbelly of the average American neighborhood may seem an obvious theme, and Homes's vision of marital dysfunction is long on sardonic humor and short on profundity. But the denoument to which this disquieting tale carefully builds is powerful enough to seem coextensive with the latest, and most distressing, real-life suburban horrors. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Homes presents a slice of kafkaesque life in an unnamed Westchester County New York suburb. The torching in the title can refer to the small incident of family arson that our characters Elaine and Paul engage in. Thinking to end their problems and move on, Paul sprays lighter fluid on the house and Elaine kicks over the lit barbecue grill. The house is not destroyed, merely damaged, and rather than being free, they have made their trap that much tighter. Torching can also refer to the continuing affairs that Paul has and to the unexpected lesbian encounter that Elaine has with a friend who up to that point has seemed less human and more "Stepford" wife. Neighbors, the police, fellow commuters, bosses, Boy Scouts, and friends all contribute to the book being seen as the very blackest of black comedies, until the very end when the payment for all their sins comes due. And, of course, payment is required in this readable, engaging, and startling novel. Danise Hoover