There is a heatwave across Europe, and four siblings have gathered at their family's lake house to seek answers about their father, a famous artist, who recently remarried a much younger woman and decamped to Italy to finish his long-awaited masterpiece. Now he is dead. And there is no sign of his final painting. As the siblings try to piece together what happened, they spend the summer in a state of lawlessness: living under the same roof for the first time in decades, forced to confront the buried wounds they incurred as his children, and waiting for answers. Though they have always been close, the things they learn that summer—about themselves and their father—will drive them apart before they can truly understand his legacy. Meanwhile, their stepmother's enigmatic presence looms over the house. Is she the force that will finally destroy the family for good?
Joyce doesn’t hang about. She mentions undertakers and the police in the second sentence, so we know someone is going to die. However, her gift at evoking a sense of place and her obvious delight in nature make the glorious scene-setting a delicious distraction ... Some of Joyce’s favourite motifs are here: the cold or absent mother, the tension between a father and son, grief and its friend guilt, and the power of pilgrimage. However, there’s a new heft and grandeur, not only in the sophisticated characters and the fancy Italian real estate, but in the hidden darkness that can exist in a family ... There are big ideas in The Homemade God that are brought to life by a cast of complex, intelligent adults ... These are difficult, wealthy, loving and funny people with whom it’s a privilege to spend a murderously hot Italian summer. Rachel Joyce is firing on all cylinders with The Homemade God and I can’t think of a better holiday read.
Moves between being a page-turning mystery and an astute study of family dynamics, and readers who like a book to pick a lane and stay in it may find this frustrating. But Joyce is a thoughtful writer, and the narrative gear-changes echo the novel’s concerns: the gap between image and reality, the difference between who we are believed to be—by ourselves and others—and who we really are ... This is what Joyce does best: untangle family ties. She reveals how a family is built on a fragile collective agreement about what that family is: an ongoing collusion ... Joyce is also exceptionally good at blending the big stuff of life with the small, showing how losing a parent is a surreal mix of gut-wrenching horror and banal admin, interspersed with hysteria and binge-drinking ... The close focus on the siblings can sometimes mean their respective partners and other secondary characters are less clearly seen, but this is a minor quibble in an otherwise sharp, absorbing and emotionally intelligent novel.
Joyce thoughtfully mines the depths of both human frailty and resilience while playing with the passage of time and the pangs of memory ... A perceptive writer, Joyce’s wit and wordplay are fully deployed, too, creating characters that entertain as they evolve. The Kemps laugh and cry, fight and scream together, for better or worse.
