“Isn’t it a joke, how you can tell a story and other people hear a different story than the one you told?”
“Reading became an intellectual pursuit, one of focus instead of escape.”
In many ways, Makenna Goodman’s Helen of Nowhere and Missouri Williams’s Vivisectors are telling the same story – just recast with different characters. Both are “love” stories. Both deal with an overwhelmingly unlikeable unreliable narrator. Both address the role of universities/academics in “saving the world.” Both deal with writers/editors/scholars who have the world’s biggest chip on their respective shoulders. Both tsk tsk the state of reading today. Both show a longing/fondest/desire for nature. And both are just a wee bit mad.
Goodman takes a theatrical approach, structuring her slim little novel like a play. And instead of a young woman grad student, we get the middle-aged male professor who has been left by his wife and fired. Parts of his character reminded me of Coetzee’s Lurie of Disgrace fame, but our leading man isn’t confronting the fragile relationship with his daughter, but that of the memories of his wife, a woman who has decidedly moved on. (Thank heavens. She took far too long after he hit the dog.) A nature writer, he is seeking refuge in the country. Enter the “Realtor,” who is showing him Helen’s house, despite deciding it’s not for sale. Things take a weird but not uninteresting turn when the Realtor channels “Helen” for some paranormal conversation with the Man. Helen does show up with a three-legged dog. It ends in madness, with a man unable to reconcile his own nature and becoming a dog. (Dogs everywhere are offended.)
There are some well done things here, but a book dealing with the fragile masculinity and relevance of a middle-aged white man is going to have to bring something more to table to get my attention. (For the record, Disgrace is one of my favorite novels so it can be done.)
It’s a classic man vs. himself dilemma, but it didn’t work. At least not for me.
A Girl Named Tommi 