A review of Makenna Goodman’s Helen of Nowhere
With its place on the Booker Prize Shortlist to be announced next week, Makenna Goodman’s novel Helen of Nowhere is all anyone is talking about. Within this brief 150-page reading experience, the reader is guided through a whirlwind of social, philosophical, and ethical issues ranging from cancel-culture and toxic masculinity, to the role of humanity in nature. Both ambitious and ambiguous, Helen of Nowhere flies through its myriad themes – without a moral center to tie them together – before crash landing at a somewhat bewildering ending. “So far, people have had really different interpretations of the ending”, Goodman said in an interview with the Chicago Review of Books, “Some see it as redemptive, some see it as punishing.” Unfortunately for Goodman, some people like clarity. Consequently – despite its Booker longlisting and favourable reviews in The Guardian and The New York Review – Helen of Nowhere has generated its fair share of haters, with a lukewarm three point one three out of five on Goodreads.
I am a firm advocate for open-ended books; I think they incite debate. And so, despite Helen of Nowhere suffering from some traits which I dislike: a philosophising narrator who monologues without much plot, an undescriptive use of language, and a complete lack of characterisation, I think Goodman’s novel is short enough for the reader to dismiss these faults and instead appreciate the thought provoking attitude toward its themes. There being manyfold, the theme I was most taken by was Goodman’s treatment of the ‘pastoral.’
Helen of Nowhere follows the character Man (a fitting title, as he comes across as the everyman of all things toxic and patriarchal), a professor of transcendentalist philosophy, who has been cancelled by the university he works at and rejected by his wife. Man decides to flee the city and the majority of Helen of Nowhere’s action occurs at a house viewing in the country. It is a classic back-to-the-land set up (in the line of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native, John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman, and John Cowper Powys’ Wolf Solent), where a peaceful country life forces the troubled narrator to reflect and change on their disturbed, metropolitan attitude. “I told her it was nice to be in the country, where nature could really express herself.” Man says early on.
Goodman changes the formula. Once we arrive in the country, Man meets Realtor, an “attractive hippy type”, who psychologically interrogates him, forcing Man to accept his misdoings. Instead of bucolic descriptions, the story is structured as a therapy session where human interaction and female nurture – not the natural world – cause the much needed change in Man. In doing so, Goodman seems to reject the pastoral as a foolproof, deus ex machina type, solution to our metropolitan miseries. One cannot just flee their problems and find solace in the trees. Instead, the beauty of the countryside in Helen of Nowhere is how it gives the individual time to think, and thus in thinking, reflect. “You need support, you need nature,” Realtor says to Man.
Goodman’s novel contributes to a long line of writers who have subverted the genre of pastoral literature. Pastoral literature relates to poetry and prose that places humans in idealised natural environments. From early on in the pastoral tradition, writers saw romanticising nature as somewhat utopian: unrealistic and romantic. So, to imbue the pastoral with some realism, writers decided to layer allegory within these non-urban worlds. Thus, nature became a tool to subtly criticise human society. This was defined by critic William Empson as the covert pastoral. For example the roman poet Virgil’s Ecologues may have used the lives of shepherds to subtly represent Italians displaced by the Roman military. Fast forward to the 20th century and we find perhaps the most obvious example of the covert pastoral: George Orwell’s Animal Farm, which critiques communist Russia through feuding farmstock. The natural world in Helen of Nowhere is equally utopian. In the novel, Goodman rejects nature as something commercial that the wealthy Man, or wealthy men, can just buy and find peace in. Instead, nature is an active space where social issues are interrogated and potentially overcome through reflection.
The archetypal example of using nature as a place of reflection is William Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy As You Like It. Action follows a group of quarreling royals who escape into a mystical forest called Arden. Importantly, Shakespeare ends his comedy with the cast – having come to terms with their metropolitan disputes – leaving the forest and returning to reality. Without giving away too much, Goodman does the same thing, structuring the novel as a play with five acts: the middle three are set in the natural world, and are framed by a metropolitan ending and beginning. There are many readings about As You Like It’s setting but the one I like most sees Arden – or more broadly the pastoral – as a sort of fantasy-land which the characters must eventually leave in order to confront their political present. Helen of Nowhere seems to mimic Shakespeare with Man at the end of the novel arriving back into the city having been utterly transformed during his time in nature.
Because Man, in Helen of Nowhere teaches transcendentalism – a 19th century philosophical movement that believed in finding truth and virtue in nature – he is initially convinced that his trip to the country will be salvific. However, Goodman makes it clear that it is not nature itself which can absolve our anxieties, but our treatment of ourselves in nature. Toward the end of the novel the protagonist realises: “It is clear to me now that ‘nature’ and ‘trees’ is more about writing to communicate things to myself that otherwise would have come to harm me if left to fester.” In the novel, the house that Man wants to buy has no mirrors in it. Why? “Inside every person is a landscape,” the Realtor says, “Why look at your reflection in search of the truth?” It is in nature we see a reflection of ourselves, but importantly, not a solution.
Goodman’s treatment of nature reminded me of John Milton’s great poem Paradise Lost. In the epic, Milton reinvents the story of Genesis and the loss of Eden. In the final book, after The Fall, Adam and Eve are reassured by the Archangel Michael to not lose hope. In his final lines Michael asks them, in the absence of a natural / physical paradise, to find a spiritual, internal peace: “To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess / A paradise within thee, happier farr.” For Milton, for Shakespeare, for Goodman, paradise is not found in nature, but in the self; the pastoral is a useful instrument to convey this.
Helen of Nowhere might not blow you away, it also might not warrant a Booker shortlisting; but regardless, it is a breath of fresh air which I think anyone who is experiencing anxieties about their metropolitan lives would enjoy exploring.
