A man has driven to the middle of nowhere to visit a house for sale. It has taken him a day to get there from the city; he has been alone all that time. And so he talks. “I think it’s okay to tell a woman she’s beautiful once a year,” he begins.
Any more than that and her life will be about being beautiful, entirely. Anything less and she’ll feel a lack of love and attention. My wife always said I never told her she was beautiful enough. But like I said, I don’t think it’s good for women.
His voice is confident, teacherly, concerned with the cultivation of character. Yet what could be more dangerous than a woman who knows that she is handsome but also that her husband won’t tell her so? The most beautiful woman of Greek myth, Helen of Troy, left Menelaus for Paris—someone who, I’m guessing, was less parsimonious in his compliments.
Makenna Goodman’s new novel Helen of Nowhere has been called “the perfect fairytale for our times,” but an age like ours needs myths more than fairy tales. The outsize failings of the men in power demand a grand reimagining of the consequences of those failings, and Helen of Nowhere offers up, exhilaratingly and naughtily, a myth for the man who needs to be shuffled offstage one way or another. Goodman has said that the novel took shape in her mind after the murder of George Floyd, when she was working at a boarding school in rural Vermont and students were asking to be taught new ideas by new faculty. But what to do with the teachers who had fallen behind the times? Could they change? What would good change even look like? The myth Goodman has chosen to ironize isn’t Greek at all but American: the good life of reading, walking, and thinking in a cabin by a pond; the lure of the fresh start, the virgin soil, nature divine. A man flees the city for the country, like Thoreau. Will he manage to leave his troubles behind him?
The man, who is never named in Helen of Nowhere, taught for a long time at a university in the city. He had formed his department around the “beautiful idea” that “nature is the teacher, not I.” This meant the curriculum involved spending extended time alone in “wild places…no matter the weather or risk,” reading “humble thinkers who spoke lovingly of the earth and the desires of the heart.” The heart is important because of the hope that “our own true nature might reveal itself” when we stare at the stars. “Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit,” Emerson wrote, in a sentence that could disappear into the man’s monologue.
The difficulty came when a generation of women who had been through his program began questioning it: “Who is allowed to feel at home in this so-called nature, they asked, and what are the conditions informing the peace provided those people by the simplicity I espoused?” In this mocking sentence, the man’s teacherliness is rising into pomposity, as if the mere notion of being questioned is more provoking to him than what the answers might reveal. The plain fact is that he has been forced to resign by the very women he taught, who have told him that the department has to evolve.
For Emerson, the sight of the stars every night spoiled us, and we would appreciate them fully if we saw them “one night in a thousand years”; for the man’s students, the leisure, access, and financial freedom one needed to look at the stars were the issue. His critics in the department saw his method as a “purity test, the imposition of ritualized discomfort in nature as a means of cultivating virtue.” (Everyone knows by now that Thoreau’s mother did his laundry while he lived by Walden Pond.) The man’s most brilliant student—and most beautiful, he notes, though he claims to have observed her beauty “objectively”—used a class assignment to demonstrate that the retreat into nature wasn’t about the divine at all but “a projection of the desire to be without politics, which man misinterpreted as being without consciousness.” Instead of the usual essay,
she wrote this in the form of a play and performed all the parts herself as a surprise for me. Her idea was expressed through a reenactment of the funeral of Achilles from the perspective of the flowers growing near his funeral pyre.
It was exquisite.
And I was jealous.
Instead of reflecting on his envy, both of her beauty and of the unanswerable challenge to his ideas, he questioned her play’s originality. “It was the wrong thing to do,” he notes now. “She became a professor.”
It’s no coincidence that Goodman has also given Helen of Nowhere the apparatus of a play. Before the man even speaks, we are provided with a dramatis personae: along with Man, we will meet Realtor, Helen, and Wife. Then we are given a list of acts, which alerts us that we won’t hear from Wife until Act Five; Act Six, we learn, will feature Man and Wife together. Like the assignment by the man’s most brilliant student or the Oedipus trilogy, which was performed in Athens’s outdoor theaters in the fifth century BCE, Helen of Nowhere will end up transforming the man at its center beyond his imagining.
In a play such as David Mamet’s Oleanna (1992), about a conflict between a successful male professor and a struggling female student, the man might be confronted more directly onstage. But Helen of Nowhere owes more to the closet drama, a play meant for reading rather than performing. The structure works to subdue the man’s speech by pushing other characters into the limelight even as he remains onstage, reminding the reader that we know only what these other characters are saying, not what they’re thinking. It’s as if the man believes this were a novel about him and the tragic, misunderstood end to his career, but the novel knows that it is a multivocal drama about the problem of change. Goodman’s prose is clear rather than complex, and carefully calibrated to each of her characters; the book’s form corrals the natural speed of her sentences into act-length shapes that one moves around in one’s head like puzzle pieces. In reading Helen of Nowhere, I had thoughts in the back of my mind that more usually come up in the theater: Who hasn’t yet spoken to whom? How on earth is this going to end?
“War had been declared against me,” the man says. I suppose we would say he was canceled, but his cancellation seems to be about power, not sex. His opponents are not students he has slept with but his followers, who have come by their ideas honestly—from him—and have pushed them further than he dared. He is the casualty of evolution, the shed skin of a snake left translucent in the grass, and he finds his situation enraging:
No true ally would have dared to stoop so low as to question the character of a man so kind, so plant-loving, so mild-mannered as I, suffering so much from being forced into the confines of these women’s newly minted stereotypes of maleness, stereotypes that like all stereotypes sought to simplify, to reduce, reduce, reduce, like the theories of my colleagues, theories that were created to destroy, to dismantle and ridicule, as sheer exercises of power.
That the anger of the man is lively and appealing is never in question: he can speak both the language of Thoreau (“so plant-loving”) and the language of bell hooks (“true ally”), diverting them to his own defense. More sympathetically, he sees himself as a human being, with all his quirks and faults, rather than the caricature he says these women have made of him—though his repetition and short, breathless clauses indicate that he is ranting, fixating, harping on his theme. “I was different,” he concludes, a man “in search of a pure and burbling spring far out in the dark wood.” But it is he who is a burbling spring, unstop-up-able.
His wife was once his student, he tells us, and “marrying her was the greatest revenge against her brilliance.” He meant not to love her but to neutralize her, not to cherish her but to submit to her. The first time they had sex he put himself in the position of her dog: “I would lick her hello, I would lick her awake, I would bathe her, I would shelter her in my tongue’s old house. I would chain myself up to the porch.” He didn’t want to be her equal partner; he wanted to play with their public dynamic in the private space of the bedroom: “I gave her a slap because I liked the sound of her as much as the smell.” They eventually married, and now she has joined his critics and left him. “Surely the days when I was somebody, when I was adored, could not be gone for good,” he thinks. Nature has always been his sanctuary, but the city’s parks now seem “gestures, mere gestures. I yearned for the real thing.”
The man tells us all of this in Act One. When Act Two begins, he enters the house he has come to see, and the realtor’s monologue sounds, at first, like that of anyone who’s ever tried to sell you on something. “I can imagine you were more than happy to go when they asked you to leave,” she says, betraying that she’s googled him, and continues flattering him, alchemizing the bitterness of his story into something glorious. She is so predisposed to him that she could be a figment of his imagination. The house has its own pond, she tells him. Helen, the owner of the house, has gone into assisted living. It turns out that she knows Helen—in fact, she won’t stop mentioning her:
Helen made furniture…. She never had a mirror in the house…. Inside every person is a landscape, Helen would say….
Helen used to say she didn’t give a lick about anything….
Helen was a golden egg who wanted to be plain….
Helen turned to her plot of land and the wisdom of the seasons….
She didn’t read, didn’t go to the movies, didn’t listen to music other than the classical station on public radio….
And when Helen laid face down in the garden and watched what mattered most on the top six inches of it, Helen saw a web of life, language, history, and tension that consumed her completely and had nothing to do with the life, tension, and history of what had come before.
Helen is the perfect woman, a woman not even the man could have imagined, totally in service to nature and absolutely not in need of a man to tell her she’s beautiful. Her beauty is on the inside, but like the mythical Helen she is also a spur to change. Seeing she has a captive audience, the realtor proposes something “outside of what’s normal”: she has discovered that she can channel Helen’s wisdom through her own body, something that could help the man discover what he is really looking for, which she doesn’t think is a house. The man “couldn’t help but find this proposition sexy.” And so the realtor goes out the front door and comes back in at the start of Act Three, Lynchianly carrying logs. She makes a fire and pours them each a drink from a bottle of brown liquid, then settles down to answer his questions.
Goodman has said that in addition to Helen of Troy, she was thinking of Helen Nearing as she was writing. Nearing, along with her husband, Scott, wrote the 1954 back-to-the-land bible Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World. This sui generis book tells the story of the twenty years the couple spent making a patch of land in Vermont into their home and livelihood. They built a stone house “by hand” themselves, keeping to a strict schedule to preserve six months of the year for independent study, and established both an organic kitchen garden and a business selling maple syrup. The book describes not only this work but also their intentional rejection of the capitalist system, which inspired their experiment.
For Goodman, who spent a few years working in publishing in New York City before moving to Vermont and beginning her own homesteading experiment, the Nearings’ project is not a “modern Walden,” as The New York Times once put it, but a checkered legacy that demands the “American tradition of vigor-in-nature” be redefined.* Scott Nearing espoused racist, eugenicist views, and he seems to have chosen isolation in Vermont after being forced out of university posts and leftist political parties alike because of his opinions. The couple used their inheritances (Scott’s from his father, Helen’s from a former suitor) to buy their farm. All American farmland, however virgin, was once in the care of Native Americans, but descendants of the Abenaki who had occupied what is now Vermont remain largely estranged from their own lands. The simple life, the one the man in Goodman’s book is yearning for, the one Goodman lived, the one Thoreau and Emerson wrote about, is not so simple after all.
Is the Helen of Helen of Nowhere less destructive than the Helens she takes after? “You need to swim, baby,” Helen says through the realtor, which at first seems harmless enough. “All you’re thinking about is your failures and your sadness. You need to love.” As the man begins to believe that he is actually speaking to Helen, and that Helen has something to offer him, he goes deeper into his own memories. He recalls the conversation he had with his wife on the day she left him, when she described him as a kite, happy only when he was flying, “abstract and loose.” But now he was tangled in a high tree, “very badly knotted.” She, once an anchor, “was ready to be a kite, too, in fact.”
Goodman’s first novel, The Shame, is propelled by the voice of a writer named Alma who is fleeing country motherhood for the city. Alma is in some ways the reverse of the man in Helen of Nowhere, and in other ways very like him. She is struggling to write from her homestead in Vermont. Her new work imagines an alter ego she calls Celeste, who would peddle
false dreams that simply working on the land, or with your hands, was enough to make your way in the world. I wanted her to claim she was struggling, but to have it be obvious there was no end to her resources, or at least that the end was nowhere in sight.
Alma wants her novel to expose Celeste’s true character, perhaps in a bid to “expose what I feared most about myself.”
Reading interviews on a mothering website, Alma comes across a ceramicist in Brooklyn with an Instagram account depicting her untroubled indulgence: raw clams with cranberry horseradish relish, a play performed in a water tank, green juice at an eco-friendly spa. She thinks she has found a real-life model for Celeste. And so The Shame also begins “nowhere,” with Alma driving down a dark, rural interstate to the somewhere of Celeste’s urban life, while her professor husband, Asa, and their children are asleep at home. On the drive, Alma recalls Asa telling her about a course on fairy tales that he is teaching:
He told me the classical stories we draw from all have roots in the male quest for dominance. And perhaps the reason we are so interested in retelling them is the hope that a newer permutation will somehow make the underlying truth more bearable, that those in power want to use people for their own gain.
You get the sense that Asa would do well at the man’s university. Their conversation makes Alma think of the bedtime stories she tells their children every night: “To me, a good story came from the accrual of details, but in reality, for our kids, the ending was most important.” She’d learned she could get away with a mediocre story if the ending was good, but if the ending was bad, they’d remember the whole story as bad.
When Alma gets to Celeste’s neighborhood, she buys a coffee from a place with cathedral ceilings and a chalkboard menu; she is sold a $195 yellow cardigan made from Hudson Valley angora rabbit wool; she listens to a salesperson dilate on the virtues of “Crème Reine” to a customer with her brown hair tucked glossily into a scarf. And, somewhat magically, Alma realizes she knows that “purposeful and elegant” air. It is Celeste! In real life! Do I say hello, Alma thinks, what do I say, surely she wants to meet me, otherwise why would she have posted all those photos for me—and while Alma hesitates, Celeste buys the cream and leaves the store, attempting to appease her grumpy son in his stroller with a croissant.
Rushing out of the boutique after Celeste, Alma catches her by the entrance to the subway. But she is not prepared for what she sees. Celeste’s son throws his croissant into a puddle, splashing his perfect Instagram mother’s coat with mud. In reply, she picks up the damp, filthy viennoiserie and shoves it in her child’s face. Alma doubts what she has seen: “The Celeste I knew was patient,” something “I had never been.” In another glimpse of the influencer that will never make her grid, Alma watches Celeste bump the stroller down the subway steps as her son wails.
If The Shame were a bedtime story, would Alma’s kids count that as a good ending? The influencer turns out not to be the way she portrayed herself, and the runaway mother returns home while her family is once again asleep. In seeing her alter ego behave so badly, Alma is liberated to know herself better: the predictable revelation of the extremely human influencer is Alma’s cue not to make her own life impossible to live.
In both of Goodman’s novels, the main characters have the education, resources, and opportunity not to be taken in by fairy tales. And yet they—like all of us—are in love with their myths. We rely on them, polish them, cosset them, retell them until they almost destroy us. The layers of irony Goodman uses in her fiction don’t always line up (is it the retelling of a story or its end that is more important?), but the effect, like the afterimage you carry out of the theater, is searing.
When the wife in Helen of Nowhere finally takes to the stage, she explains in a veiled monologue, pushed along by the delicious phrase “Say you were a man,” that she might ultimately care more about writing something memorable than about being a wife. Thus prepared, we are released into the final scene. Man and Wife are at home in the city. The man can’t at first work out “what had changed—for something had.” In bed, “I popped my head out of the covers and licked her face…. She held my face in her two hands and tugged on my ears lovingly.” Sit, she says, and “I did what she said, and I knew it would make her happy.” The man is more than happy—in fact, this is what he has longed for. He has returned to nature. He is living the simple life. He is finally learning to love and serve his wife, and moreover to let her lead. He no longer has to worry about academic hierarchies, buying houses, reading books, or even talking, ever again. He has found the ending he yearned for but couldn’t imagine for himself. It is a mythological story that belongs in Ovid: the man who was put out to pasture and literally turned into a dog.
And yet where does this ending leave us, politically, philosophically? It is no good fate to become a cockroach, a rhinoceros, a frog, a white swan, or really any kind of animal in literature. Perhaps Goodman’s novel is saying that the only way for a disgraced man to be returned to society would be for him to experience being at the bottom of the pile first. (Or is Goodman cheekily saying that perhaps women would be happier sharing their beds with dogs—as Celeste does on Instagram and as the wife will now do—rather than men?) Perhaps we simply cannot yet imagine a man who would be willing to listen to those around him and attempt, however imperfectly, to change the way he loves by willingly engaging in a struggle between two equals.
There is something at odds between the strange, subtle way Goodman circles her questions in much of the book and the impatience with which it ends. What would be a good ending for this man, it seems to ask—what do you think? I almost wished for Helen to appear again (Helen of the ASPCA?), to take the man out of the dog and find out what he can bring back from his simple life to the real world.
English (US) · 