Helen of Nowhere - Makenna Goodman
Helen of Nowhere is the fifth book on this year's Booker Prize longlist that I've read, and it's easily the strangest reading experience I've had this year. I read it twice within about twelve hours. Once on my Kindle one evening, finishing it off in the morning before immediately getting onto the bus into town to buy a physical copy, after which I read the whole thing again on the way home.
The whole experience reminded me of the first time I read Rachel Cusk's Parade. Not because the books are similar in any obvious way, but because of the specific feeling I was left with. I got to the end of Parade and thought, I loved that, that was really good, please do not ask me to explain a single thing that happened in it. That's exactly where I am with Helen of Nowhere. It's such a strange, singular novel that I feel like I need someone else to sit me down and explain it to me, and even having loved it, I'm not convinced I understood very much of it at all. What I do know is that I love having it rattling around in my head, taking up space, making me turn it over and over. That's a rare and valuable feeling to get from a book.
I don't think I've hated a point-of-view character as viscerally as I hated Man, the narrator here. The only other one that really comes close is Humbert Humbert in Lolita, which happens to be one of my favourite books in the world. HH is a monster, and spending time inside his head as he justifies his own behaviour to himself is deeply unpleasant. Being inside Man's head, especially in the opening chapter, felt much the same. He's not a good person. He's a prick, frankly, and being forced to sit with him for those early pages felt almost punitive. What kept me there, though, is that Makenna Goodman's prose is so strong, so controlled, that I never once considered putting the book down. And the rest of the novel does something really satisfying with that discomfort of the opening chapter, spending the following pages taking Man apart, exposing the gap between the person he is and the person he thinks he is.
I don't really know how to talk about this book properly, so I'm going to keep this shorter than I'd like. I liked it a lot. I'm giving it an 8 out of 10, which puts it in second place on my Booker longlist ranking so far this year, even though I can't articulate why with any real confidence. Maybe once I've read it a third time I'll have found the language for it. Watch this space, I suppose.
(I followed this video up with a second one in which I tried to explain what the book is actually about, so I'll post a write-up of that here for posterity/completion, too.)
I got a question after my last post that I want to try and actually answer - what is Helen of Nowhere about? It's a good question. It's also, I think, a slightly meaningless one. If you're the kind of reader who needs plot to hang onto, you're not going to find much of it here, and I'd say that upfront before you go anywhere near this book. This is exactly the sort of novel people are talking when they talk disparagingly about lit fic. But I'll do my best to actually describe what happens in it, for what that's worth.
Structurally, it's something like a prose poem in six acts. In the first act we're introduced to Man, a professor, a writer, an arsehole. He's the kind of mediocre straight white man of a certain age who is deeply threatened by women he perceives as less talented than him but who are nonetheless as successful, or more successful, than he is. We spend several pages entirely inside his head as he talks about his career, his wife, and what an awful piece of shit he is, more or less without any self-awareness.
In the second act we move, presumably, to the same Man (it's hard to be certain) as he's shown around a house by Realtor. The house belonged to a woman called Helen, who has died, or is in assisted living, or something else entirely; she isn't there, and we never quite find out why. As Man and Realtor talk, she shares stories from Helen's life, stories about the house, and those stories slowly start to warp Man's sense of himself. His past, his failed marriage, his career, the world around him, all of it starts to shift under these anecdotes, and new possibilities start to open up for him that he clearly hadn't considered before.
The acts that follow keep rearranging the furniture. We hear from Wife. We hear from Man and Wife together. We hear from Helen herself. And with every section it gets a little more surreal, a little harder to hold onto. By the final act we're back with Man and Wife, and Man appears to have changed in some fundamental ways. He seems to have developed something like respect, or need, for a woman he'd spent the entire first act dismissing as a former student unworthy of his professional regard. Or maybe he's been turned into a dog. Or maybe he's been in hell the entire time and just didn't realise it. Or maybe Helen is some kind of Circe figure, and she's turned Man into a dog as punishment for being an unimaginable piece of shit. Honestly, I don't know.
That's the true answer, in the end: I have no idea what Helen of Nowhere is about. But it's really good, and it's really worth reading, and I suspect that not knowing is a large part of the point.