The short stories of A.M Homes are dangerous, in the same way a pair of binoculars pointed at your neighbors’ living room window in the middle of the night is dangerous. In both cases, the danger is that you might see too much, more than you bargained for and, worse yet, you might not be able to look away. This is the thrill and the threat of voyeurism. Pretense is peeled away like an old skin, as secret habits are exposed and the buck of hypocrisy is stopped cold. As a writer, Homes peers with a combination of curiosity and pathos behind the curtains of suburban life, and her gaze captures the exotic truths that hide behind a masquerade of normalcy in the daily lives of people we think we know. Homes’ fiction straddles the line between revelation and spying — part private eye and part Peeping Tom — carrying with it all the vicarious thrill of seeing the so-called status quo turned inside out and hung up to dry like dirty laundry.
In Homes’ stories, middle-class married couples smoke crack while their kids are away at grandma’s house, and adolescent boys date their sister’s Barbie dolls. People struggle to find meaning in lives full of material wealth but short on something called love. Communication is always a problem, as is any kind of spiritual connection. Homes’ closest literary antecedents are those writers who have also mined the silent desperation of American life — from Sherwood Anderson to Raymond Carver and Mary Gaitskill — though the unflinching nature of her approach makes her work unique. Though often unnerving, Homes’ fiction tells us new things about what makes us tick — or rather, what makes us tic.
“Things You Should Know” is Homes’ latest collection of short fiction, just released in hardcover by Harper Collins. She continues to explore the twilight zone of contemporary life in these new, darkly comic stories, while ever refining her unique and startling style in prose that seems to echo from the furthest psychic recesses of her bent characters. Homes is on a book tour that brings her to our neck of the woods Tuesday, Oct. 1, where she will make a 7:30 booksigning/reading appearance at Village Books, in Bellingham’s Fairhaven District. Call the store for more information at 1-800-392-BOOK, or visit their web site at www.villagebooks.com.
At last, it’s here: the 3rd Annual Port Townsend Film Festival, which sparks like a celluloid collar into full luminescence this Friday and runs in all its stroboscopic glory through Sunday night. I’ve been receiving Chicken Little press releases and posting for this festival since last Thanksgiving (“It’s coming! It’s almost here! It’s just weeks away!”), and now that the seaside cinematic shin-dig is finally upon us, it’s a tad difficult to believe. (Reminds me of the New Yorker cartoon I recently saw that pictured a bearded old man standing on a street corner with a placard reading: “The end is nighish.”) Guess it’s easy to understand the promoters’ peremptory excitement; looks like a pretty good line-up of films and other stuff. More than 40 independent movies (shorts, documentaries, features) from around the world will be screened, including the Australian comedy “The Man Who Sued God” (starring the fabulous Judy Davis) and “The Milk of Human Kindness,” a French drama in which a young mother walks away from her family in a moment of panic. How outre!
The festival also touts a number of interesting special events. Academy Award-winning actress Patricia Neal will be on hand for screenings of her films “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (Friday, outdoors on Taylor Street) and “Hud,” which will show at the Broughton Theatre on Saturday. After the screening, Neal will be interviewed by Robert Osborne, host of the Turner Classic Movies cable channel. Also in attendance will be local film critic Robert Horton to present a mini-profile of French New Wave director Francois Truffaut; they’ll be showing a newly restored print of Truffaut’s 1973 film “Day for Night” as well as a documentary on the director. Osborne will also interview screenwriter Stewart Stern, whose 1968 film “Rachel, Rachel” was Paul Newman’s directorial debut.
Die-hard movie buffs can purchase full festival passes ($175) or individual tickets ($7) by calling (360) 379-1333 or visiting the festival’s Web site at www.ptfilmfest.com. For more information, including times and locations of screenings, go to the web site or call the number listed above. It also might be a good idea to phone ahead for overnight accommodations, since the Keystone/Port Townsend ferry doesn’t run all that late. For ferry schedules, go to www.wsdot.gove/ferries/, or call 1-800-84-FERRY. (It’s a “very ferry thing to do,” you know.)
Book-It Repertory Theatre in Seattle is a company that excels at staging works of literature that typically don’t receive dramatic treatments. For instance, a few years back I saw a production of a series of Chekov short stories that was excellent, if a bit uneven. It’s a fascinating and ambitious project, and they’re most recent production sounds intriguing: an adaptation of writer Pam Houston’s fantastic 1993 short story collection, “Cowboys Are My Weakness,” which runs through Oct. 13. This award-winning show, produced and directed by Myra Platt, strings together four of the collections stories into a coherent commentary on life, love and the modern wild west. For tickets and times, call 206-325-6500 or visit the web site at www.
ticketwindowonline.com.
