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There has never been a better time than now for Man, the protagonist of Helen of Nowhere, to be a neo-transcendentalist. As a university professor, the lessons he imparts involve encouraging his students to remove themselves from the politics of the city and “the tools of human construction” to pursue the purity of nature. In doing so, Man muses, they might invoke an “innate ability to engage in simply being” outside arbitrary institutions of knowledge, such as the university.
Man is a good person, or so we hear. He is observant, he listens. And of course, “I [love] women,” he tells us. “I’d worked hard for women my entire life.” But “the fact was that war had been declared against me [by] … a faction of women … They were hysterical … and maybe evil, words I could only bring myself to whisper … for I knew the politics behind their deployment.”
Despite his inducements to kindness, fun and joy, Man is let go from work: his views are no longer compatible with the university’s. Later still, Wife, his spouse and also a professor at the university, leaves him. This might be because they met when he was her teacher and have since outgrown a dynamic where she is subordinate. Or because he speaks casually of hitting her during sex and of hitting her dog. Or simply because she is no longer as beautiful as she was when she was young (not that Man believes telling women they’re beautiful “is good for them”). It’s difficult for him to say – all the same, he is depleted of self and purpose, and it’s clear a return to Nature is needed.
Man views a house in the countryside owned by Helen, about whose bucolic way of living he is taught by Realtor. Although she is now in a care home, Helen used to farm her land self-sufficiently. In doing so, she became attuned to a world of “natural” rather than human-made systems: “[t]here’s contentment outside of all that,” explains Realtor, now the dominant narrative voice. She can see the appeal this kind of ahistoricity or asociality might hold for Man. Still, she says, Man needs to restructure his ego and “come to terms with love” to truly heal. Helen could help. Man, somewhat aroused, agrees. At which point Helen’s spirit enters Realtor to discuss with him where his work and marriage went wrong. Reality dismantles.
Despite how fabular Helen of Nowhere seems in its progression, these kinds of narratorial shifts between Man, Realtor, Helen and ultimately Wife are dexterously, meticulously performed. They help enact a carefully negotiated dialectic: doing v taking, buying v selling, the individual v community, man v nature, dominance v support, masculine v feminine. Beyond its more obvious themes of misogyny and supplanted power, Goodman’s writing also asks worthwhile questions of us all. How much of living is predicated on a reliance on – if not exploitation of – others? To what extent is this bearable? How far does it delegitimise individual pleasure? What should “good” living look like? Where does the knowledge such a pursuit requires come from? Can it be, at once, wholly ethical and personally pleasurable? Each answer, naturally, depends on the privileges afforded a person.
“I think a lot about fires, floods, the end of the world, don’t you?” chirps Realtor during the house tour. In a sense, so does the entire novel – to scale. And Goodman is wonderfully fastidious at avoiding neat moral binaries when analysing such daily catastrophes. “To do the work of being awake,” her novel points out, “one has to live in a dual space.” So naturally, although Man points out (not incorrectly) that empirical and structuralist thinking hamper free, individual thought, those are the very tools with which his female colleagues are liberating themselves. When Man desires community, he is driven to leave a city full of people. But he does so in pursuit of a rural existence that decades of teaching transcendentalism in the city have left him ill-equipped for. Hence, when he imagines a “simple” existence, more in tune with nature, his easiest option is to seek out the country house of a rich woman with a “life like the inside of a golden egg”.
“It was either a shrewd, self-aware intelligence I had achieved that kept me in synch with the darkness of life, or a kind of illogical, misanthropic paranoia … which held me back from happiness,” Man reflects in a semi-hallucinatory state towards the end of the novel. The extent to which his fate is a highly ironic comeuppance or a beautiful kind of salvation very much depends on the reader’s own sensibilities. At a mere 152 pages long, Goodman’s book is a perfect fairytale for our times.
