The gods we build are often made of memory, and almost always homemade.
Rachel Joyce’s The Homemade God opens with a scene of nostalgic sun-drenched serenity and then, with a jolt, plunges into grief. The patriarch of the family — Vic, a larger-than-life, wine-soaked, once-revered British artist, is found dead in the lake beside his villa in northern Italy. His adult children, long scattered and estranged, are called back into the orbit of a man who shaped their lives more by his absence than his presence. They arrive not just to bury him, but to untangle what he’s left behind: a missing will, a suspiciously elusive young fiancée named Bella Mae, and an emotional inheritance as splintered as the family itself.
What unfolds is less a murder mystery and more a psychological excavation. The question is never really “what happened?” but rather, “who did we become while it did?”
Vic’s death sets the stage, but it is his children who carry the novel’s weight. Netta, the razor-sharp lawyer who leads with reason but bleeds quietly beneath it. Susan, the compulsive caregiver whose love is duty disguised as devotion. Iris, the soft-spoken outlier, full of shadows and unspoken truths. And Goose, the almost-forgotten son and reluctant artist, haunted by both legacy and lack of parental validation.
Each sibling returns to the villa with a suitcase full of unprocessed childhoods. Vic, for all his charm and artistic legacy, was a man who painted nude portraits more attentively than he fathered his children. Their mother, long dead, exists only in fragments and speculations. And then there’s Bella Mae, a young woman who appears in their lives like smoke: hard to grasp, harder to trust. Is she grieving, scheming, or simply trying to stay afloat in the wreckage of Vic’s myth?
Joyce writes with the precision of a scalpel and the rhythm of a poet. Her language doesn’t shout; it hums, bruises, murmurs. Scenes unfold in heat-drunk Italy and foggy London, in villas and studios and memory-scapes where time doesn’t flow, it pools. The prose is painterly, but it’s what she leaves unsaid that makes the canvas breathe.
The true genius of The Homemade God lies in its restraint. Joyce resists resolution in favour of reckoning. She understands that families are less about what’s spoken and more about the long silences that stretch between. Trauma in this novel doesn’t announce itself — it whispers through a sideways glance, a missed call, a forgotten birthday. The siblings don’t have confrontations; they orbit one another like emotional moons, pulling tides of guilt, rivalry, and unarticulated love.
And art — oh, the art. This isn’t a book that just includes art as plot; it interrogates it. What does it mean to make something out of chaos? To use creation as a shield, a distraction, or a confession? Vic’s life revolved around his work, but perhaps more tellingly, so did everyone else’s. His art made him a god in the eyes of the public, but at home he remained flawed, afraid, sometimes cruel. A man capable of painting beauty but not of parenting it.
Bella Mae, for her part, is an enigma — sometimes angel, sometimes opportunist, always unknowable. The siblings try to pin her down, to decode her intentions, but like grief itself, she resists interpretation. Perhaps the most uncomfortable truth Joyce suggests is this: sometimes the people we fear are the ones who force us to grow. Not because they’re good, but because they’re unignorable.
The title, The Homemade God, quietly unspools its meaning over the course of the novel. It is not just about Vic, the untouchable artist, adored by critics and abandoned by intimacy. It is about every character, and every reader, who has ever built an idol from longing. We don’t inherit gods. We construct them out of memory, myth, fear, love, and whatever truths we choose to ignore. And when they fail us, as they inevitably do, we’re left not with answers, but with ourselves.
Rachel Joyce delivers a haunting, intricate portrait of a family sculpted by art and absence. The Homemade God is not plot-driven, it’s soul-driven. It’s a novel that stares down generational hurt with unflinching intimacy, that understands how people bend under the weight of love, grief, and legacy.
It asks the reader to sit in the mess, to listen closely not for resolution, but for resonance. Joyce doesn’t give us a clean ending; she gives us an honest one. One that reveals, in the quietest of ways, that perhaps the greatest act of creation isn’t art at all.
It’s survival.
And the gods we survive… are the ones we made ourselves.
The Homemade God was published on 15th April by Penguin Random House.
