THE SAFETY OF OBJECTS: Where the suburban heart is

American cinema and literature have glimpsed close at lives in the suburbs with mixed results – some good (“Little Children”, both movie and novel; Philip Roth’s “American Pastoral”, Raymond Carver’s and John Cheever’s stories, among others) and some not so (“American Beauty”). What most of the works focused on suburbia share is the sarcastic tone – rarely a tender look. It is not A. M. Homes’ crafted collection of short stories “The Safety of Objects” that will change it – and that come as a blessing.

Published in the early 1990s, these stories seem to look to a world and a time far, far away. That was when either computer or cell phones were common equipments in everybody’s lives, and there was some innocence that seemed to be lost in the turn of the century. But she is also able to capture the changing of times. One of her characters dreams of ‘a different kind of life, the kind he’d read about in stories of men outdoors, fishing trips and cabins in the woods’.

In “The Safety of Objects”, Homes is more interested in the bizarre than in the peculiar. But the form how she portrays it never turn her characters into freaks. Here we have a fat girl called Chunky ‘in part after the candy bar’; a boy who dates his little sister’s Barbie doll; a couple who behaves like children when her kids are away; and a kidnapped boy who fails his kidnapper expectations.

The writer’s approach is to find the most human side of each of her characters meaning demystifying their possible freakiness. The boy dating the Barbie doll is ‘practicing for the future’, for instance. This story, called “A Real Doll”, by the way, has already become a classic. Another strange person, so to speak, who looks very realistic in Homes’ pages Jim Train, the title character of a story, whose behavior is so bizarre that completely convincing.

The characters who people “The Safety of Objects” are people unsatisfied with their lives who has neither the chance nor the energy to change their present – they are sort of depressed or, at least, bipolar who can’t move on, who is too deep in their nothingness to move over. Take Frank, the protagonist of “The Bullet Catcher”, for instance, his goings to the mall becomes his biggest pleasure, and when his neighbors enters a competition this is one of the most exciting things in his life.

Homes’ writing is sort a combination of Raymond Carver’s sharp look at suburban life with Mary Gaitskill’s taste for strangeness. However, in “The Safety of Objects”, the writer is able to develop her own style which blends fun with a detailed account of dead-end lives. Moreover, she must be one of the best opening-sentences writer ever. “Elaine takes the boys to Florida and drops them off like they’re dry cleaning”. “I’m hiding in the linen closet writing letter to myself”. “If something horrible happens it won’t be my fault”. And the best one: “I’m dating Barbie” – only four words that express so much about a character.

Chekhov is also an important reference when it comes to “The Safety of Objects”. Homes is not only interested in the daily unglamorous lives of suburbia, but she also knows that when you show a gun in the first act, it will have to be fired until the third one.

As one character puts, he has ‘no desire to be beautiful or good. Somehow I suspect because it did not come naturally, I longed to be bad’. Maybe this how Homes expects her writings to be – not bad as in badly written, but bad as in a discomforting form, in a way that is disturbing as something that makes you think, question the way we live – and this is her best accomplishment.