It is fourteen years since Lorrie Moore’s last novel, A Gate at the Stairs, was published. In the intervening period, the world has shifted. A Gate at the Stairs rested squarely in Great American Novel territory: it was naturalistic and realistic, a state-of-the-nation tale. The zone in which I am Homeless If This is Not My Home is located feels, by contrast, spooky and unreliable, the novel’s night roads, hospices and burial grounds positioned in diametric opposition to the solid and familiar suburbs and campuses of A Gate at the Stairs. I am Homeless If This is Not My Home is a novel that deals in fantasy and the fantastic: hallucination, madness, ghosts, history and hysteria. Rather than aping American novels of the past, it peers into the 21st century and finds it to be a place of chaos, transgression and dissolving identities. It’s rich and vivid and crazy as hell. I loved every sentence.

None of this chaos is visible at first. Moore’s opening move is to construct a pair of stage sets, each of which appears initially to be firmly rooted in reality. Sometime after the American Civil War, the landlady of a boarding house on the ‘zig and zag of