A.M. Homes’ novel Music for Torching is proof that some books must wait for their time. Through neither intention nor fault of the author, the story being told here has become more relevant to American readers with each passing year. And, indeed, the year it was published represents one of those cosmic confluences of fate and talent that can often delay understanding, popularity or relevance. Music For Torching was published on April 21, 1999. Purely by coincidence that year also marks a date which is widely recognized in the 21st century as a turning point for something other than the millennium. (Although, to be technical, the new millennium did not actually start until January 1, 2001).
It was April 20, 1999—the very day before Homes' novel was published—that two disturbed students entered a high school in Columbine, Colorado and (unknown to them, America or the author of Music for Torching) initiated what is universally, unfortunately regarded as the Age of School Shooting Massacres in the United States. Homes was not influenced by this event nor can Music for Torching accurately be termed a novel that is specifically about the issue of school shooting. By the time of the high school massacre in Parkland, Florida nearly twenty years later, however, it might well be impossible to read the novel without reaching some kind of conclusion that this pervasive issue is at least one of the major thematic concerns of the novel. In fact, the events so-described do not occur until the very end of the book (in a chapter widely regarded as the most powerfully composed of the entire novel) and precious little narrative up to that point dwells on foreshadowing the violence to come.
Which is precisely why, of course, the novel can now very much be read as being specifically about the issue of school shootings. Homes wrote a novel about the nightmare of suburban conformity, the unwillingness of parents to grow up and the subtly corrosive implications of narcissism. Initial reviews of the book tended to admire the audacious quality of the narrative and the emotional depth of the sudden violent turn at the end while bemoaning that the connection between the two failed to adequately reconcile for the purpose of creating meaning. Fast forward two decades and not only has the book become more relevant, but against all odds that relevance has served to dismiss reservations about meaning.
Time—not authorial intent or scholarly study—has been the agent of reconciliation. Homes may well have been writing some sort of prophetic novel that sought to obliquely present a rational explanation for how school shootings conducted by students manage to take place without anyone seeming to see it coming, but it seems highly unlikely. Until the final chapter, Music for Torching is aggressively concerned with the dehumanizing effects of suburban conformity by revealing that the fault lies not with our advertising stars, but with ourselves. If suburbia has become a zoo, it is not the zookeepers are torturing the animals, it is because the animals are running the asylum.
That central focus remains intact decades later, but the effect of nearly monthly recreations of the Columbine Effect on various levels of intensity has revealed another effect of such narcissistic blindness to the conditions of relations in suburban communities. Such keenly egocentric self-interest becomes a breeding ground for all manner of social ills developing along the peripheral sight of parents who routinely ignore their children in their pursuit of escaping from the very same zoo they themselves have worked so hard to get into so they can put their success on display.
