A Lamb in Wolf's Clothing: Postmodern Realism in A. M. Homes's Music for Torching and This Book Will Save Your Life

Often read but rarely critically discussed, A. M. Homes's fiction creates a by-now familiar postmodern world plagued by solipsism and its resulting social alienation, then solves these problems in a shockingly retro appeal to the moral certitude and narrative closure of realism. Her novels harness the realist aesthetic, via our frustrated readerly expectations of both realist and postmodern literature, for the entirely new end of exposing the narrative conventions that define all literature as literature. This article argues that Homes's fiction deserves critical attention for its unparalleled ability to return to the pleasures of realist meaning-making while maintaining a postmodern attentiveness to the structures of fiction themselves.