In fact, from Bret Easton Ellis’s 1991 “American Psycho” to Susanna Moore’s arty 1995 thriller “In the Cut,” what was once the stuff of pulp fiction has become a small literary subgenre. Like Joyce Carol Oates’s serial-killer novel “Zombie” (1995), “The End of Alice” is unmistakably art. But while Oates’s Quentin is an inarticulate loser–and therefore more believable–Homes’s nameless narrator is a debased variant of Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert: a wordy autodidact with a yearning for little girls and a sexual disgust for mature women.
No one who’s read “Lolita” could miss Homes’s tips of the hat: butterflies; a motel; a thunderstorm; tennis; an unwashed, junk-food-eating pubescent girl who takes the sexual initiative; an imprisoned narrator with heart trouble. For Nabokov’s fictional Ramsdale this novel amusingly substitutes the real-life Scarsdale. (Advantage, Ms. Homes.) Her narrator even shows a hint of Humbert’s belated remorse: “It is up to an adult to ignore the attempted flirtations of the young.” But unlike Humbert, who finally admits the damage he’s done, Homes’s narrator represses the memory of his crime until there’s only a page to go. It doesn’t leave much room for the drama and dialectics of self-confrontation. (Advantage, Mr. Nabokov.) Then again, this isn’t a self that either its owner or its creator seems to think worth confronting.
Homes has crafted an elaborately rhetorical voice for her narrator, but ultimately he’s a determinist windup toy: his mother seduced him and painted his lips- with her menstrual blood; therefore he rapes and hacks up a girl having her first period. Such motivation might be true to life, but it’s trite in literature; even the over-the-top violence seems programmed, both to reveal the narrator’s pathology and to make the reader complicit. There’s no reason a serial killer couldn’t be a worthy tragic character-the murderous careerist Macbeth wasn’t such promising material, either–but he’s only a case study if he doesn’t see the key in his back. We’re supposed to believe that deep down the narrator is “a person quite like yourself,” yet when he violently sodomizes a fellow prisoner while singing the national anthem, Homes sacrifices verisimilitude to make a heavy-handed political point. Or something.
But Homes’s worst move is to slight her best character, a disturbed college girl who writes to the narrator and keeps him posted on her seduction of a 12-year-old boy. This story parallels the narrator’s for two thirds of the novel, then largely disappears. The girl is obsessed with the narrator and his crimes because she fears her own worst impulses: “Did I hurt him?” she writes. “Will I do it again? Am I the same as you?” By the end she’s not healed, but she’s changed and learned something. She’s not some tour de force of impersonation, but somebody we seem to know. In “The End of Alice,” the true seducer turns out to be … Nabokov. In sticking with her sub-Humbert Humbert, Homes shortchanges a more original, less contrived story. But without the gore and the hype, would anybody be reading it?
