Is it possible for a man to truly change? Helen of Nowhere, the second novel from the American author Makenna Goodman, dramatises this timeworn question to honest and hilarious effect.
A college professor referred to simply as “Man” – male, 50ish, proud of cultivating a “transformative practice through a curriculum” – has been purportedly forced out of his department by his younger female colleagues: “Women, who were critics, and encouraged others to be critical too.” His wife, who had once been his student, has also abandoned him after years of putting her needs second to his. (“The dog officially took my spot on the bed.”) Cast out of his life in the city, he has driven to the remote countryside to see a house with large windows and a built-in couch. “I yearned for the real thing,” he says. You wonder if he is looking for a second chance or hunting for new stomping grounds.
From the first sentence, Goodman’s novel impresses with its tone of companionable irony. Although the cancelled professor is an object of well-deserved skewering, not least because of his notions about what is “good for women”, there is also something sincere about his Thoreau-like belief in nature as a repository of the divine. The realtor of the house, who moonlights as a psychic, admits to having looked him up online before the visit: “I can imagine that someone like you suffered there.” Realtor, as Goodman names her, pitches the house to Man as an offline idyll, a chance to live out his Walden fantasy. She tells him about the previous owner, Helen, one of those back-to-the soil evangelists who make their own furniture, wake at dawn to milk cows, and think of those who live in cramped apartments in the city as “social weavers”. Before long, Realtor is channeling the spirit of Helen (who is not dead but living in a care home) and counselling him on his marital woes. “But it’s love that you need,” she implores him at one point. And then, confronting him about his wife: “Baby, why don’t you know her?”
What would a process of personal transformation look like for a man who has never had to think of anybody but himself?
What would a process of personal transformation look like for a man who has never had to think of anybody but himself?
The real Helen turns up as a ghost later that night and encourages the professor to lie down on the couch and let go of the women “who ruined your life”. Goodman is at her inventive best when exposing the lies the professor has told himself all along, not just about his relationship – which he thought worked fine so long as it was grounded on “my success, her adoration, my appreciation” – but also his teaching methods, which apparently included both fantasising about his students and sometimes taking them out to a forest and asking them to survive for three days alone in the wild. What would a process of personal transformation look like for a man who has never had to think of anybody but himself? For all its outlandish levity, the novel also attempts a sober inquest into the post-MeToo moment.
The story is structured as a play, replete with six acts, sustained monologues and a dramatis personae, and the presence of redemptive spirits will remind some readers of A Christmas Carol. But the energy of the novel, with its characters’ loopy digressions and riffs on everything from helicopter parenting to the role of pesticides in modern farming, is closest to the work of the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard.
Goodman’s ending is a stroke of genius, a triumph of what Bernhard once referred to as a suffering mind’s “inner landscape”. Without divulging any spoilers, it’s safe to say that you won’t look at your significant other’s pet the same way after finishing the book.
Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions (£12.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £11.69. Delivery charges may apply
Photograph by Marcel ter Bekke/Getty Images
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