I consider my life’s work all about paying attention

helen of nowhere (makenna goodman, 2025)

Helen of Nowhere (Makenna Goodman, 2025)

It’s come up before and it will come up again but there is a type of novel that I both enjoy and resent. They are always first-person monologues from somebody who is either a writer or an artist and this person is always making delightful observations whilst reflecting on the disappointments of life. The narrator is never somebody who could be called a truly bad person. They can be described in admiring terms as “plotless” books in which “nothing happens.” They usually take place over a brief period of time, like a single day. These novels are reliably good and they tend to be slim volumes one can read in an evening so the level of commitment they demand from me is generally low. Though the narrative voice is distinguished by its essayistic observations the book often feels detached from the world. Whatever irritates me here is not really the books themselves, which are, again, good, but the feeling that I am reading books that adhere to a close formula that only I perceive. It’s like if you lived in a world where everybody acted as if nobody had ever written a book about “solving a mystery” every time Agatha Christie dropped a new one: “Get this, there’s a detective, but the book isn’t narrated by him, but by his less intelligent friend.…”

In any case, the first section of Helen of Nowhere is a monologue from the perspective of a canceled male professor and nature writer and so a couple pages into it I felt pretty sure I knew where I was going. I felt so sure I wrote that whole paragraph above as a note to myself. Actually, I really didn’t know where it was going! This book is very odd. I’ve read it twice now and I still feel like I don’t perceive most of it clearly. I liked it so much I read Goodman’s first novel, The Shame, which is a story about a professor’s wife who also runs a small homestead, wishes she were employed in some more meaningful artistic task, and becomes obsessed with a mom influencer on Instagram. The Shame fits the “type of book” described above a bit better than Helen of Nowhere, but the homestead element adds something. There are not a lot of slim books about being a thwarted creative type that also have the comment “a chicken becomes meat after the plucker and before you cut the feet off.” Helen of Nowhere is also about going off the grid, but it approaches it from the angle of the nostalgic city dweller who wonders if life can be made over in the country in some harder but purer form. It is also about a man who wants to run away because his life is being ruined by women in the city. But everyone in the country is a woman, too.¹

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Helen of Nowhere is divided into six parts, which take the form either of a monologue or a dialogue. You could say these six parts are like a play but I think that would be a little misleading—this book does not feel “like” a play. The first section, “Man,” with the professor, is the most straightforward. Here we have a familiar figure: the disgraced humanist whose disgrace is deserved but who is also somehow just better than his enemies.² He is married to a former student, though he wants us to know it’s not like that, even though he did want to sleep with her when she was a student, too, so it’s kind of like that. Our professor is a bit of chauvinist and a bit in denial about that and you can see both of these qualities in him from the very first paragraph:

I think it’s okay to tell a woman she’s beautiful once a year. 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.

Don’t compliment your wife, it’s bad for her, rationalized in a kind of quasi-feminist but really paternalistic way—this is our hero. This pattern of passive aggression extends throughout their marriage. When his wife was his beautiful student she wrote a paper for his class which he accused her of plagiarizing, as he felt it was too good for her to have written. He can’t make up his mind how serious his accusation really was: “I questioned her. You know, in the spirit of discourse.” It’s obvious, even to him, that he feels hostility and suspicion toward her because he’s attracted to her. At the same time he wants this interaction to be some kind of fair play, some brand of intellectual exchange that doesn’t really involve either of them personally, in which it is important that she display that she knows how to be a good sport.

Anyway, now he has lost his job and his wife is leaving him and replacing him, emotionally speaking, with a dog. So here he is, away from the city (presumably, New York) and looking at a house in the country (presumably, Vermont). The house he’s touring was once the home of an eccentric artist-farmer named Helen, who now lives in assisted living. The next act is a dialogue with the realtor, who turns out to be a kind of disciple of Helen. She offers to channel Helen for him, who has become, over the course of this conversation, not merely the absent owner of the house but some kind of collective consciousness of the house. The professor accepts. Why not?

One of the more interesting features of this book is the degree to which you can’t take any statements at face value. The professor is one of those people who is dishonest in a kind of instinctive, self-protective way, but it’s not just him.³ The realtor, for instance, says over and over that she doesn’t know who the professor is, while it becomes clearer and clearer that she researched him extensively. Still, the great mass of contradictory or self-revealing statements have to do with the professor’s feelings about his wife, who he accuses of pulling away from him even as he describes pulling away from her. They both feel the other person says yes when they mean no, that they pretend to give when they really take. Which of them is the fixed partner and which the shifting one—who has changed, who has the right to change—is one of the disagreements about reality which is undoing their marriage.

It’s tempting to say that Helen of Nowhere “seems to be about… but is really about…” It seems to be about a marriage, but it is really.… It seems to be about the urge to “go back,” but it is really.… Part of what makes this book both elusive and difficult to write about though, at least to me, is that there is no clear unifying idea that this book is “really” about. There are many disparate things, digressive episodes that rhyme with one another, such that you feel as if the moment you’ve located one line it’s superseded by another. “Gender,” for instance, is certainly something the book is “about”: the professor not only experiences himself as persecuted by women but is even encouraged to do so by Helen, who has him imagine all the women who have ruined his life on a bus that gets hit by a car: “The women who ruined your life are in there. They’re all in the bus. And it’s on fire.” Yet there are so many other threads in the book to follow that staying with this one as the real one proves unsatisfying.

For instance, there is also history. In the suspiciously good piece she writes as his student, the professor’s future wife argues that “the birds, the flowers, the trees, the soil—each of these entities had a history that preceded its current state, and each stage of that history was informed by both regeneration and violence, and political and environmental factors.” Later, we learn that Helen only listened to classical radio but would switch off the station if they began to discuss a composer’s historical importance. She focuses on her garden, in which she sees “a web of life, language, history, and tension that…had nothing to do with the life, tension, and history of what had come before.”

Subsequent to both of these moments, the professor reflects on the burden of inheriting china which he cannot use, fears to break, but cannot really get rid of either:

And if I sold it, the china would become an object of undervalued importance, something worthy of anyone. How much could I realistically get for it and what would I use it for, the returns? Something with no history, with nothing attached to it, something whose journey did not have pain etched into it, whose wellbeing had not been attended to in other countries, had not been packed lovingly, had not been an artifact of family, had not made it across an ocean, had not survived for decades in cabinets. Something without honor, something made without pain, or made with a pain that had less to do with survival.

But since he does know the history of the china, he experiences it as a set of “potential catastrophes.” If he breaks the dishes—or if they simply are broken under his custody—then he will represent a failure on the part of his generation to care for the past. Yet he cannot really share with Helen the desire to live entirely in the moment to moment life of the natural world. He wants the past to matter, but only the parts of the past he chooses. In this desire, as with most of his flaws, he is unremarkable.⁴

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Somebody’s gotten to this point and is going: okay, but what makes it weird? Well, he turns into a dog. That’s what makes it weird. But it’s a good outcome because he’s much happier as a dog and his wife likes him more. There you go. Read the book. “Oh, you should have put a spoiler warning on that”—trust me, it doesn’t matter. I think I’m going to read it a third time.

1. I think there are only two other men mentioned in Helen of Nowhere, both long dead, and then a group of nondescript boys whose mothers Helen resents.

2. Friend of Notebook Ian Mond mentions other male characters of this type in his review. But we also have to remember Her.

3. See for instance this description of a colleague the professor dislikes: “I found her prose was good at the sentence level, but her vision was still developing.… She wanted to discuss everything on a structural level.” So which is this woman’s problem—that she’s all details and no vision, or that she only cares about the big picture?

4. As Joanna Russ says in The Female Man, “you only want what everybody wants, things to go your way.”