She slung her purse over her shoulder and walked away, her stride made uneven by broken sandal thongs, thin elbows showing through holes in the oversized sweater, her jeans faded and baggy. When she had disappeared into the crowd of Saturday morning shoppers entering the side doors of the mall, the three younger children leaned forward onto the front seat. Dicey sat in front. She was thirteen and she read the maps.
Not technically the novel’s opening paragraph, but close enough. It is the real meat of the first page because it describes, in a remarkably effective understated way, the heart of the conflict. That conflict is the abandonment of group of siblings by their mentally ill mother. The protagonist is Dicey, the eldest of the woman’s offspring. And the novel, in a sentence, is about how a young girl forced to grow up too fast and take on responsibilities she shouldn’t have struggles to keep that family together in the wake of not just a mother who has abandoned them, but really an entire family structure of adults who have woefully underperformed their expected duties.
"I was angry—most of my life…Not anymore—if you can believe that. Just crazy now, and that's an improvement. Not really crazy. Eccentric. But those years, morning to night. All that anger—-you can choke swallowing back anger. And it still sneaks out, in little ways, and everybody knows although nobody says anything. So they left, every one. They couldn't stay here. All of my children, they ran as fast and as far as they could. My Sammy, he died of it, and that was hard. Hard. And your poor momma—they shamed me. And I shamed myself."
Dicey and her siblings have gone their entire life up to the point their mother abandons them without really even knowing they had a grandmother somewhere. And the reverse is true as well. In a novel powered by complex characters, Gram is probably the most complicated as well as—for most modern readers—the most difficult to fully understand. She belongs to a different time in which wives were expected to live up to that most prickly of wedding vows—“to honor and obey” their husbands. She honored the marriage vows by obeying them and it just so happened that this decision runs parallel to obeying her husband if not necessarily abiding by the honor part. Such a fundamentalist approach to ritualistic dogma used to be viewed as a thing of honor in itself, but the consequences of Gram’s life decision on her children and grandchildren certainly call that perception into question.
"It means the patient won't respond to anything. Your mother—well, she doesn't do anything, doesn't speak, doesn't seem to hear what's said to her, won't feed herself, won't move at all, not even to go to the bathroom. When they found out about her family, the doctors tried talking to her about you. No response. No response at all. Nothing. They think she's incurable."
The “it” to which the police officer is referring is the term “catatonic.” This describes the state in which Dicey’s mother is then currently existing in a Massachusetts state-run psychiatric hospital. Or, as it was more commonly known at the time—when one was exercising the utmost in diplomacy—an asylum. Lots of stories have been told about kids suddenly orphaned as a result of either willful or forced abandonment by their lone caretaking parent, but the majority of those tend to lead toward a happy ending that concludes on a note of optimistic reunion. This story does not that follow that template so anyone looking for that sort of happy ending is advised to come to the novel prepared to be disappointed.
Adding fuel to that particular fire is that this information which is conveyed to Dicey about the mental condition and emotional state of her mother is the type of thing that usually comes near the end of the story. In this particular instance, this information comes to Dicey are almost precisely the very midway point of the tale. What that should tell the intuitive reader is that while a happy ending that reunites mother and children is not in the cards, that does not necessarily mean that the ending is going to be tragically downbeat. Although the quotes chosen here may naturally lead one to expect that Homecoming is relentlessly depressing, that would be a significantly off-base misperception.
