I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is mostly the story of a man named Finn who abandons his dying brother, Max, to go on a ghoulish road trip with the unexpectedly reanimated corpse of his ex-girlfriend, Lily. Before her suicide, Lily left Finn for a hazy stranger, Jack, leaving Finn in despair. One of the big problems of this novel is that Finn, whose life is unraveling in so many directions at once and thus seems ripe for our sympathy, is so clearly unlikable. Lorrie Moore shows him repeatedly at his worst, from his solipsistic conversations with Max and Lily to his questionable pedagogy (he forces conspiracy theories on his high school students) to his interactions with strangers, such as this bit of dialogue with a nurse at his brother’s hospice:
“Also, while I have you here. I just want to say. Max has got great insurance. You don’t need to move him along, if you know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t know what you mean,” she lied.
“He’s grandfathered in for that state employee’s clause for Unlimited Hospice. Or something to that effect. No need to hurry him. No cap on the stay. You’ll be paid handsomely for every single day.”
You spend the novel wanting this guy to wake up and develop a little more self-awareness and find closure with Lily; basically you want him to do anything that helps you root for him and that confirms your belief that novels tell stories about how people grow and change and transcend their own limitations.
Moore’s unwillingness to let Finn do these things is deeply frustrating. Instead of growth, she provides a counterpoint: a series of century-old letters written by a woman who runs a boarding house, Libby, to her dead sister, about a handsome and mysterious lodger (Jack). These stories only briefly intersect, as Finn and Lily spend the night at the same boarding house and Finn finds, reads, and steals the collection of letters.
Moore’s refusal to draw deeper connections between these two stories is initially frustrating as well. What are we supposed to do with this unlikable protagonist, this spiraling narrative, these unconnected pieces and parts?
I took a Postmodern American Novel class in college (hereafter referred to as PoMoNo). We read a variety of strange and wonderful books: Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Barth’s Chimera, DeLillo’s White Noise, Moore’s debut novel, Anagrams. But the key to unlocking I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is the best of the bunch, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire.
Pale Fire is mostly told by one Charles Xavier Kinbote, another socially inept academic, hopelessly trapped inside his own head, who, like Finn, stumbles upon a life altering manuscript that he uses to create an escape from the pain of his sad life. Kinbote doesn’t grow or change in Pale Fire. He doesn’t come to terms with his own insanity. He simply uses a piece of art (John Shade’s poem) to craft a new reality, that, in turn, is a piece of art as well. That both men are disturbed is reinforced in the same way in both novels: Kinbote interrupts his own, very academic narrative, to complain: “There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.” Finn finds himself in similar circumstances:
His Airbnb was in an industrialized zone of Chelsea and the city jackhammers had kept him up until two in the morning. They were allowed to blast away all night, as if no one actually lived or slept there. He took large swallows of coffee and tested his sanity every morning the same way he did when not on the road: he took out his laptop and replied to the online Times editorials, and waited to see if his reply was actually posted. In this manner he could tell, roughly, how deranged he was that day.
There’s one final callback to Pale Fire here: just as Kinbote writes his tale as a series of comments to Shade’s poem, Finn measures his own sanity through commentary.
Whether or not you buy this argument about the resonance between Pale Fire and I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, it’s fair to ask: so what? To me, reading Moore’s novel this way, as an act of the protagonist’s creation, bypasses the narrative frustrations. As in Anagrams, Moore, through Finn, works to reshuffle reality1. The seeds of his narrative are in the letters he finds:
The potential love interest of the letters, reimagined as Lily’s new boyfriend, both named Jack.
The author of the letters, Libby, a short step away from Lily, Finn’s ex.
Libby’s audience, her dead sister, sets the stage for Max, Finn’s dying brother.
Phinneus, who makes his appearance in the final letter, a man who drives around the country in the company of a mummified corpse, is of course Finn himself, companion of the ghoulish Lily.
If all the names and congruencies feel a little too neat and tidy, it’s worth noting that it’s actually pretty easy to miss that this is going on: Moore grants us only the briefest of glimpses into Finn’s reading of the letters: “He read with stolid wonder the leather-bound cache of letters he had taken from the Tyler inn.” She spends much more time letting Finn convince us of his strange reality via free indirect discourse:
Well, supposedly every galaxy had a black hole at its center. And when the technology got close you could hear the chirp. Every galaxy had a black hole and every black hole had a chirp, perhaps from the light it had captured forever and ever. The chirp was all that was left. It explained their car ride. It was their chirp.
That the chirp is Finn’s invention makes the novel better, not worse, in my opinion. Perhaps it’s his way of grappling with Lily’s death, one last series of conversations with her as they head to an unknowable destination. Perhaps Finn’s invented her entirely, and this dreamscape is his way of coping with his brother’s death. Or perhaps they’re all invented from Libby’s letters, Max and Lily and the whole situation, to deal with some unknown source of psychic pain. What matters is that he, like Kinbote, brings something hidden to life:
Others did not see his and Lily’s as a mutual love and why would they. There were too many jealous bumps, sudden disappearances, pointed rebukes—no one saw theirs as the passion that it was. It looked like weariness and defeat and sometimes it was, but it was weariness and defeat as attachment. It was passion-at-peace, adoration gone awry and away, then returned, love in the armistice, which one never had without a little war. Finn and Lily’s love was a shared secret—though shared secret was one of those phrases that also meant its opposite.
He concludes by asking: “Were he and Lily not one person split in two?—kind of?” Pale Fire takes place in Zembla, the land of resemblances, but I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home takes place in the land of opposites. The oneness of Finn and Lily represents, in the end, both the oppression of their enmeshment and the freedom of artistic creation.
The title itself is a clue to her method; at one point Finn notices a sign that reads “I Am Not Homeless. This Is My Home.”