- You know you were making all these little beeping chortly noises when you were reading this one but then you went quiet and just sort of grunted and ground your teeth. 
 - I do not do that! 
 - Well, what went wrong? 
 - Hmmm (grinds teeth, grunts). 
 - Well did you like it? 
 - That's too hard to answer. 
 - Well did you like some of it? 
 - The first 300 pages were brilliant blast of pure diamond black comedy. 
 - And then? 
 - I think it jumped the shark. 
 - Jumped the what? 
 - The shark. It's an expression. 
 - ? 
 - Meaning that in striving for a sudden left-turn into outrageous satire it found itself being so silly it made you have to re-evaluate all the stuff you'd read up to that point which you'd been thinking was great. 
 - Are you referring to George in the privatised prison with the Israeli agent? 
 - Yes - I thought you hadn't read this? 
 - I haven't , that was just a good guess. 
 - So then I think she clambered back over the shark and got back on track - 
 - That's a horribly clunky metaphor you know - 
 - But then came something which was nearly as bad. 
 - And that was? 
 - Well clearly, AM Homes had gone on holiday to South Africa and had a pretty good time, and she just typed up her "what I did on my holidays" essay and shoved it straight into her novel, 40 pages of it! It was so blatant, she just sprinkled a few of her characters' names in there to pretend it was them doing it. It was like in The Privileges which starts off as another great little novel but then wham, you get a 40 page essay about the Outsider Art market shoved right in the middle. Aren't these things supposed to be done with a certain amount of subtlety? I mean, look at Lolita - that road trip, all those crummy motels, you can tell a lot of Nabokov's own American travelling went into that section, but it's an essential part of Lolita, it's not bolted on. This South African holiday is in here because she went there and thought it would make a cool thing for her characters to do. It's a bit crass. 
 - You don't know that. Anyway, so what if you're right? You can do what you want in a novel these days, look at Bartleby & Co. 
 - That's not a novel, it's an essay everyone politely pretends is a novel. 
 - And you get all these infodumps in Jonathan Franzen. 
 - I call him Jonathan Frankenzen. 
 - It's still not funny and what does that even mean? 
 - But even then that's not the problem. It's not even the problem that the eleven year old girl and 12 year old boy talk like 16 year olds. 
 - Okay, what is the problem? 
 - well, the story begins with a 20 page helterskelter of horror and then takes the next 440 pages to reassemble the ingredients into such an apotheosis of family values, inclusiveness and loving-kindness that might have made even Walt Disney throw up into his lucky bag. By the last page I would not have been surprised if Bambi and Thumper appeared to serenade the family's Thanksgiving dinner with Memories are Made of This. May We Be Forgiven is a story about a family which is smashed to bits by the violence of the father and reassembled in a new way by the father's brother who turns out to be some kind of genius of human relationships. And also a babe magnet, which strained credulity, since he's a middle-aged history prof. 
 - maybe he looks like George Clooney 
 - women fall for him and require immediate sex from him every fifty pages or so 
 - Maybe that's an accurate picture of suburban American life if you're a hot history professor 
 - I mean, when one lady gets gently rebuffed, she immediately suggests a threeway with the prof and his girlfriend as a consolation prize for her! Is that normal? Is that what people do? I don't think so! Of course, I have lived quite a sheltered life. But anyway, these characters, the ones who are left alive after the first 20 pages - they're so cute. Ech! I'm sorry, this makes me sound terrible 
 - No more than usual 
 - but all these well-meaning stereotypes, look at them - it's as if Todd Solenz directed the first half of this novel then Alan Alda got him fired and took over - 
 - Right, so you liked the miserable bit but you didn't like the part where everyone gets better and cheers up. I get it - 
 - the feisty old Chinese couple, the goofy demented but cute old Jewish couple, the cute latino boy, the cute dog, the cute cat who has iddy cutey kittens 
 - You know, it must be hard to be slaving away on a novel for three or four years and then some jackass on the internet gets all mealymouthed and sniffy about it 
 - Jackass? 
 - Comparatively speaking 
 - Oh it's okay, no chance of hurting A M Homes' feelings. I don't think these novelists notice us, we can say what we like. It would be like hammerhead sharks noticing the plankton. 
 - back to sharks now... why hammerhead? 
 - I love hammerhead sharks. 
 - I bet hammerhead sharks eat plankton 
 - Yeah but they don't read what the planckton says about them on Goodreads before they do 
 - Well, what if a - er - starfish read it and told them about it? 
 - A starfish?