What are the limits of love and faith? What happens to us when we begin asking ourselves these questions? And what happens when we do not?
In his debut novel, Going Home, English writer Tom Lamont sets off in search of answers to these questions along the contours of a melodrama bolstered by his authorial wit and the depth of his characters.
Téo Erskine has made it to the city out of Enfield, the too-comfortable North London suburb of his upbringing. He returns home for a pub night with his old childhood best friends and, in a sudden turn of events, finds himself the unwitting, if not entirely unwilling, steward of Joel, the young son of Lia, “their group’s one girl.” Lording over this pub night is the swaggering Ben, Téo’s other childhood best friend who never quite matured. Their prickly relationship is clouded by class differences — Ben’s family is loaded — and romantic rivalry over Lia. Thrust suddenly into a provisional fatherhood, Téo must reckon with his own father, Vic, who is stubborn in the face of his own steep and merciless decline in health. On top of it all, Enfield’s synagogue board has taken a chance on a progressive new female rabbi, Cybil, who ushers these men and boys — a fluid distinction — toward resolution.
Lamont writes with an affable style that is wise to varying notions of masculinity. The disarming presence of a young child who is unruly, adorable, and impressionable forces his characters to truly face their identities and roles as men, rather than taking them for granted. “It’s how we men develop. We get hurt and we learn to avoid the hurt the next time,” says Vic when Téo criticizes his approach to Joel’s safety. “And we never mention that hurt again,” Téo retorts; “We tuck it away nice and deep.” Indeed, these men make epic bumps and falls, their mistakes creating family disasters that complicate what could’ve been a simpler, more predictable novel. Instead, we are delivered real, vivid characters in all their messy glory, crafted with such sensitivity that readers will care about them long after closing the book.
Megan Peck Shub is an Emmy-winning producer at Last Week Tonight, the HBO political satire series. Previously she produced Finding Your Roots on PBS. Her work has been published in New York Magazine, The Missouri Review, Salamander, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn, among other publications.
