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The End of Alice: A Novel |  | Author: A.M. Homes
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book
List Price: $22.00
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Seller: HPB-Outlet Ohio
Rating:  86 reviews
Sales Rank: 910870
Media: Hardcover
Edition: First Edition
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 5.9 x 1
ISBN: 0684815281
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780684815282
ASIN: 0684815281
Publication Date: March 4, 1996
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
A novel that shines a flashlight under the bed of suburban perversity. A. M. Homes, whom the N.Y. Times Book Review calls "exhilaratingly perverse," lures us into a Nabokovian world where characters both repellent and seductive conduct forays into the dark limits of their obsessions.
Product Description
A riveting account of sexual addiction and murder is set inside the mind of a violent sex offender now in his twenty-third year of confinement, as told to a nineteen-year-old college girl, presently preying on a young boy herself, with whom he corresponds. 30,000 first printing.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 86
 Homes and her little 'project' fail July 30, 2010
Steve
This book reads as though the author thought it would be an interesting 'project' to write about this type of topic.
Clearly she did her homework and research, and the book is well written.
I just had in the back of my mind the question "what would she really know about this".
There is no real credibility to it, it remains a fantasy story.
Of course this is always to some extent true for fiction, but a novel can't be 100% made up.
This is a very ambitious 'project' and Homes just doesn't pull it off.
It completely fails and is one of the most annoying books I've read.
Pretentious, verbose, derivative, "so-what?" fiction March 7, 2010
riprap (Redding, CT USA)
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
A.M. Homes must have one of the most inflated egos of any person alive today, because she's convinced she's topped both "Lolita" and "Alice and Wonderful." Wow, two points, A.M. Just keep believing that.
In fact, she's written one of the worst books of our time, and a perfect example of everything that's wrong with contemporary fiction. (Especially that execrable subtype, "metafiction.")
First, the style. The pretentious, high-falutin' language is a sophomoric imitation of Humbert Humbert that comes out sounding more like his low-brow cousin, Hannibal Lector. Except for the maddening, *incessant* verbosity.
Then we get the narrator's infuriating puns, lame jokes and constant, knee-jerk alliteration. This is a direct quotation, I'm not kidding: "Why couldn't the milkmaid milk the cows? She had no regard for the feelings of udders."
Oh, sorry, I forgot. That's not an unforgivable pun or stupid joke, it's a philosophical exegesis on the inanity of her narrator's despair. A.M. wins again.
The style is overwritten, overblown and so syntactically overcomplicated that Amnesty International should cite Homes for torturing the English language. We actually get a "sentence" that runs on for a solid block of 15 lines, and in the end it isn't even a sentence, because it contains nothing but dependent clauses!
Next there's the premise. The fact that it's overly busy - we've got two, count them, two, pedophiles running around - shows at once this book's profound the lack of artistry.
And the complications go on. For some reason, although the 19-year-old-girl pedophile writes letters to the aging-convict pedophile, we don't get the actual text of the girl's letters, except for a passage or two every now again. No, everything has to be filtered through the tedious, pretentious, ANNOYING voice of the narrator. Which means we get into all sorts of logical gaffes like the fact that the narrator is often using slang that someone his age who'd been in prison for 23 years would never have encountered (e.g., "circle jerk"). At one point, Homes has him note (in one of his direct addresses to the reader, another annoying tic) that he's never heard of "turkey burgers," as if to hint that he's merely regurgitating the letter for us. But this only sounds like the author being defensive (hm, perhaps she had a hint after all that she *hadn't* written a work far better than "Lolita" and "Alice in Wonderland" rolled together), and nevertheless does nothing to explain *why* the author has declined to give us the text of the letters in the first place.
Let's not forget the fact that the premise is 100 percent derivative. Nabokov not only came up with the idea first, he *did* it better. Like Lewis Carroll (whose timeless classic Homes cheapens by associating it with her piece of smallness), Nabokov also had a little something called "originality" and "imagination."
Then there's the character from the back story, who for some odd, writerly reason is named "Ruby Diamond Pearl" (what, we're knocking off Hawthorne now, too?), but is known as "Alice." O-kay-ay ... Whatever you say, A.M. Anyway, this Alice character has two primary problems. (1) Her dialog reads *exactly* like the nameless 19-year-old in her snotty, obnoxious, oppositional, spoiled-rotten moroseness, and (2) she's a fantasy figure right out of a Penthouse Forum letter.
As to the first problem, based on the similarity in the dialog and the coincidence that the 19-year-old girl lives in the same Westchester town (Scarsdale) to which Alice's family is said to be moving, it seems very much as if Homes was originally going for the "surprise ending" that the 19-year-old girl *was* actually a now grown-up Alice, but then realized she couldn't then have her narrator have been in prison for 23 years, but only, like, 7 (which won't make him seem *nearly* as Hannibal-Lector-like scary), and then we wouldn't really have the "end" of Alice, now, would we, oh, dear ...
As to the second problem, we supposedly have a sexually ravenous 12-year-old girl who, upon encountering a 31-year-old man lying innocently naked by a lake after swimming, proceeds to tie him (still naked) to a tree, make cracks about his genitals and leave him tied there. Later she returns, repeatedly insists on having sex with him, and sneaks into his house at night for more sex. She also seems to have had some prior experience, although apparently not with full-scale intercourse (since that would dampen the fantasy, no?). When her grandmother is taken ill, and has to be flown from New Hampshire to Columbia Presbyterian in NYC, the little love couldn't care less, and throws a tantrum rather than be separated from her Humbert. Even after the narrator drives her to NYC, she runs away from her family and hides in the back of the car, just so she can be with the narrator again.
What can the poor narrator do but trot out the 4 favorite excuses of pedophiles: (1) "*She* seduced *me*!"; (2) "She was *no innocent,* if you know what I mean, wink, wink"; (3) "I loved her"; and (4) "if it hadn't been me, it would have been someone else."
This not only perpetuates lies about children and female sexuality in a politically offensive way (and isn't it ironic that while male writers like the New York Times's Nicholas Kristof labor tirelessly in the cause of women's rights abroad, female writers like Homes are doing their best to undermine them with the same tired old canards back home), it's bad writing. The character isn't believable as anything but the narrator's projection onto reality. So are we supposed to interpret the "Alice" the narrator gives us as merely his fantasy version? That the "real" girl had nothing to do with what he tells us? In other words, what we're reading - what we've been *asked* to read - is nothing but the fictional creation of a fictional creation?
Maybe A.M. thinks that's, oooh, really profound, but for the reader it raises the ultimate question: SO WHAT? And WHO CARES? Why are we wasting our time on this mental masturbation!? (For me, it was because I was writing a screenplay about a pedophile ring, and I wanted to know my antecedents. Otherwise, the pretention, verbosity and writer's tics would've stopped me on page 3.)
I mean, let's take this to its logical conclusion. If "Alice" is just the narrator's fantasy (and of course the 19-year-old is just another of his fantasies - that's why she & Alice sound exactly alike), then maybe Alice's murder is also a fantasy. Maybe the narrator's not even in prison. Or the slightest bit dangerous (so much for suspense). Maybe he's not even a pedophile. Maybe he's a middle-aged Sarah Lawrence grad sitting at her computer in New York City making this whole thing up. Maybe ... he's JAMES FREY. And maybe this whole exercise is just really stupid and empty, and why *does* anyone waste their time reading fiction anyway?
Pick up any of Shakespeare's plays to remind yourself, and to put Homes to shame and back in the very small place she deserves.
 Difficult, but worth it. March 1, 2010
Nicole Del Sesto (Northern Cal)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Powerful. Disgusting. Disturbing. Fascinating. Compelling. Unputdownable. Funny? Yes. Shocking. Graphic. GRAPHIC. Unapologetic. Erotic. Brilliantly done.
Wow.
I love dark books, but even I have a line, and I thought that line was pedophilia. I guess I was wrong. I LOVED this book. Homes is an astonishingly good writer, and I just cannot get enough. This book brings you right in and really never lets you go. The narrator was amazingly constructed and as awful as the things he did were, I couldn't help but root for him in the end (for his redemption, of course.) (Incidentally, this book was voted by Henry Sutton of the Guardian as having a top 10 unreliable narrator sharing the list with Holden Caufield, and the incomparable Patrick Bateman.)
There were parts I had to read through my fingers. Times I had to read paragraphs one or two sentences at a time, my stomach recoiling. It's like Homes is saying, look, this is part of life. Deal with it.
I'm in awe of her skill. This is my first favorite of 2010.
I'd love to be able to recommend this book, because it's so well-done. But to be honest, I'd be VERY cautious about who I recommend it too. If you love Chuck Palahnuik and American Psycho, you're probably safe.
An Instant Classic in My Twisted Little Mind January 25, 2010
Delilah Webb (Somerville, MA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
It takes a truly titillating combination of subject matters for me to identify a work as disturbingly sexy, and dark interpersonal drives are what does it for me. The End of Alice was written for people like me, who wish more *good* authors would tackle the intensity of sexual identity and perversion with the literary prowess it deserves. The brilliant dynamic between an incarcerated pedophile murderer and a teenage girl finding her own sexual identity was gripping and impeccably designed.
intensely beautiful August 21, 2009
Hair Like Snow
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Unlike most of the reviewers, I didn't find this book disturbing, disgusting or horrifying at all. No, it was a carefully crafted piece of art that touched many untouched subjects, perversion, death, insanity, and most of all love in ways that they is hardly portrayed. This book goes down to the fundamental elements of the soul and society. My words can't even begin to describe 20% of the true heart-rendering soul of this novel. An innovative take on the subject (an isolated pervert's correspondence with another isolated pervert) and I hope that more people will begin to realize how many more of these honest books are needed.
To clear any confusion, I (and this book) are not advocating pedophilia or crime, I only want to say that everyone has different quirks...and in _The End of Alice_ one is taken to the extreme.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 86
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