I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home

I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is Lorrie Moore’s much anticipated fourth novel and I was so looking forward to reading it. I was not expecting a zombie time tripping story but that’s what I got. Finn, a midwestern high school teacher is visiting his brother, Max, in a hospice in New York. He receives a phone call telling him his ex-girlfriend Lily, a therapy clown, has finally, after many attempts, succeeded in killing herself. Then it gets weird. He finds her rotting corpse in a ‘green cemetery’ and takes her on a road trip to a body farm in Tennessee, where they will donate Lily’s body to forensic science.   It reminds me of George Saunders’ Lincoln In The Bardo, which is set in the bardo—an intermediate space between life and rebirth. It was beloved by others but not by me. Finn and Lily travel across middle America just before the US 2016 election. They trade wisecracks and have nonchalant necrophiliac sex. There is also a civil-war era side-story in the form of an older woman’s letters to her sister. I tried, I really did. I read 70% of the novel, hoping for more, before giving up on the book.