9 thoughts on “I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Anymore – Mike Sauve”

  2. Up to page 15
    “This narrative is a result of too many hours spent in thrall to Facebook memories,…”
    This starts with a sharp reminder of my long literary interest in Proust’s separate selves, sometimes later as the eventual gestalt self of oneself. I had never thought, before reading this, about the comparison with Facebook memories that I look at every day, as it happens. This, meanwhile, is a sharply-observed account for the male narrator of his downbeat job at the fitness gym Good Feels and, one day, of two female friends from the past who come into the gym in the small hours and ignore him, do not recognise him or pretend not to do so? And their Facebook profiles later when he checks don’t tally … hmmm. Much business with towels he gives out to customers and I am captivated already. And the prose style makes you think like itself. Sort of takes you over or reads itself over your shoulder, as it were.
    “The number of synchronicities I’m experiencing is off the charts.”
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  3. Pages 15 – 20
    “Then it transitions to some kind of party or pub night scenario with all my lost high school friends.”
    Unless I am being even more crazee than the potentially crazee stuff I am reading, I think there is prophetically possible useful or provocative accompaniment here to the Judge Kavanaugh / Dr Ford scenario!
    Lucid dreaming, or time travelling, or drug taking, or Facebook hacking…? One, some or all.
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  4. Pages 20 – 33
    “I groaned, experiencing a full body revulsion only slightly offset by being half drunk.”
    This is very unsettling stuff, in a most brilliant way. Stuff about Sam the ostensible narrator. I am also caught up with the uncanny prophetic-in-hindsight (at least, oblique) link with the real-time gestalt of the Judge Kavanaugh (cf Mark Judge with Dave Reeder) syndrome, here with various extrapolations on the various levels of drunkenness and how to deal with it, and exactly how much to take as an optimal binge. And to obviate memory loss, or encourage it! And to get the optimal sleep. The molestatory dealing with Sheralyn (Sam’s old college friend) as if she is a helpless puppet, a woman who thinks it is a dream (a fact that is harvested by Sam when hacking Facebook). People with aliases? Or doppelgängers as hacked Facebook profiles? Cloned like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from Hamlet? Also I learnt the eponym of this book’s title is a Woody Guthrie song. And I also happen to have long had a Facebook friend called Dave Reeder in real life! Heady material this. Must eke it out. Sauve qui peut.
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  6. Pages 34 – 59
    “Telling someone to relax is not as aggressive as shooting them, but it’s up there.”
    You need to relax, though, when you read this. It’s so up there in itself. Some of the characters say they are not role-playing at all. Worldlines and timelines, not worldliness nor timeliness, have you ever tried to imagine meeting one of your own time-travelling selves come back to meet you or to grab a newspaper to prove he has been here now to deny knowledge of having ever read Joyce? But Proust, I ask? Not that any of that happens here, believe me. I am no plot spoiler who is making false synchronicity claims by virtue of my own time travelling abilities! 049302D8-1FC4-4F99-9617-255360B4FB2AMeantime, this is increasingly nifty stuff, applicable to our crazee times, with observations to die for like (just a few examples just from these pages among many others): “If I get hit by a car, do you just disappear?” — “post-McDonalds fatigue” — alcoholic props like a hand sanitiser (see end quote from this book below) — “…that the girls in my living room were manifestations free of consciousness, nothing but sacks of skin chanced upon in dream.” — “The in uteran safety of freebase cocaine sealed itself around me.” — “Upswings and downswings in perviness must afflict and haunt all pervs,” —
    “‘I remember passing out around midnight at my birthday party,’ I said.
    ‘I didn’t pass out. I made out with her at The Handshake Room.’”
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  7. Pages 59 – 95
    Note that palindrome of page numbers, just noticed.
    Need to get these pages’ own mention of Occam’s Razor to them. A scrimmage of time travelling selves, and even as the Reader reads it and is implicated by one of their friends who rejected them called Reid/Reeder. I ain’t got no home in this book anymore. Indeeder! Proust was never thus. And the sexual paradoxes of onanism and self-gratification start to emerge, a plot and conspiracy, too, to uphold a hometown’s hub of loyalty or nostalgia? That ‘home’ of the title. A plot by dint of kidnap or even inadvertent murder, alongside hair-trigger percentage divergencies of a multiverse’s worldlines and timelines. Not to mention the big “flush-out” method…
    “Sometimes he would pee on the toilet seat for example, which I also do, but one’s own pee is largely inoffensive.”
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  8. 95 – 127
    “It called in mind something John Cheever had written, ‘These are earnest people, mostly old, making an organized response to the mysteriousness of life.’”
    And these different versions of the Proustian self by hilariously unplanned time travel and perhaps unhilarious drug-taking, the big E, Entrance or Exit, giving a new light to religion as well as onanism, or as onanism? “…babes wearing nothing above the waste…” A self-gratification tuned to the numinous, if not the the nemonymous. And each self being shown the error of one’s younger self and roommates, an explanation or self-rationalisation for the great scandals of state today? The state of being ‘in denial’ no longer an option?
    “Things had not ended well with those jerks.”
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  9. Pages 128 to end
    “, but I will not burden the reader with further onomatopoeic interpretation.”
    I cannot cover all that goes on it – it hit me real deep, but I also felt I floated over the top of the last pages, this mix of naive sex and future punishment. This cross-section of all times from the hub of 2016 when, in hindsight, for this reader at least, was the Trump and Brexit confluence of fuck-ups, from which we are still suffering centuries later in my permutated brain, possibly permutated by this very book that knows not what it is writing … Three dots rippling, like someone on a Facebook Messenger, in the guise of its Sauve Qui Peut byline. Strange that 2061 was the culmination of 2016, for Sam, though. “On my worldline, on all the wordlines where Nicole remained flat-chested, it was waifish Bella who was well-endowed, like there was some cosmic balance wherein only one of these roommates could have great tits. There was no way to prove it. I just knew.” That seems to sum it all up, including that ultimate come-uppance for drugging them, doing things I now know I didn’t do, thinks Sam. Characters in a video game? “I was sentenced to five hundred years in the hell they’d designed with me in mind.” The hell they put into my head slot with a USB. And spent much of the rest of my life, that I am still spending, in front of a computer. The book’s deadly last sentence that Dave Reid/Reeder is seen to be typing, typing, typing – according to Facebook, that is. I hope that is not a spoiler. Still, nothing can spoil it. GoTo Home.
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