HELEN OF NOWHERE, inexplicably longlisted for the Booker

HELEN OF NOWHERE
MAKENNA GOODMAN
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the “brilliantly complex” (Jenny Offill) author of The Shame comes an electrifying dive into one man’s fractured psyche as he searches for a new life.

Taking place over the course of one day, Helen of Nowhere introduces an intimate cast: an unnamed man at the end of both his career and marriage, a young realtor showing him an idyllic house in the countryside, and Helen, the mystifying former owner whose spectral presence seems to imbue the house’s every grain of wood. Through stories of the remarkable woman, the man is presented with an alternate way of life. But, as evening fades into black, the specifics of how to live it become more than what he bargained for.

Philosophically adventurous, strange, and fascinating, Helen of Nowhere examines the structures that form our identity, staring the reader down to ask the haunting question: What is the cost of true happiness?

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Well...there hadda be one full-on flop among the Booker reads. I'm delighted to say I did not buy this inexplicably longlisted book; it was vouchsafed me. In a shock twist I *forgot* I got the DRC despite having opened the file, bookmarked a spot with no note as to why, and then checked it out of my branch because...I totally forgot I'd ever received it.

::cue ominous theremin music::

So here's the first bit:

Act I, Man

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.

Someone told me that life is a collection of details you choose to pay attention to. Most of my life has been taken up by my work, but since my work has always been about observing nature, I consider my life’s work all about paying attention. This is what I told my students: The world is to be observed, and observing for its own sake is a life worth living.

The house, for example, was warm, despite its being unfurnished, with simple wooden features and beams containing echo strokes of a handheld chisel. There was a built-in couch with a dark blue fabric cushion, its edges sewn by hand, somehow both right-angled and arched in a crescent shape. Beside it, an ornate cast iron wood stove. The windows were large, single-paned. There was a piece of upright wood in the corner, a gnarled tree or trunk that had been elevated into something sculptural. Besides that, nothing but gleaming, empty space.

I...was not involved, did not care, felt literally nothing.

Ellen, who is one of my longtime LibraryThing friends and with whom I share a lot of literary opinions, said it best: *shrug*

Man, the MC, gives off zero Main Character Energy, which I guess we all know is meant to de-emphasize the phallocentric "Big Dick Energy" it replaced in pop culture. This guy's a cuck, and boring with it which is unforgivable. The clue I was not going to resonate with the read came when I was searching other opinions to see why anyone on the Booker committee noticed this in the first place: It's A Christmas Carol made feminist, built around either archetypes or stereotypes depending on how positive you're feeling about the retelling but not realistic characters. I don't happen to think Dickens did his best work on the Cratchits so no shade cast.

Sound dreary? It was. I'm no fan of Dickens, I'm not hugely impressed by reimaginings as a class of literary endeavor, so the headwinds began to make sense. Maybe if I *loooved* A Christmas Carol...? But instead I have a true cuck Ebenezer, a Present in the too-chatty Realtor, Past in the eponymous Helen of Nowhere, whose stage presence is the most interesting, and Wife as Man's diminished Future. I found nothing compelling in them, I wanted the under-150pp to be over before it was, and most damningly,did not remember I'd read the story at all.

So, on the whole: Glad it wasn't on the shortlist.