Review of Helen of Lire by McKenna Goodman – A perfect fairy tale for our times | imaginary

TThere has never been a better time for man, the hero of Helen of Nowhere, to be a new transcendentalist. As a university professor, the lessons he imparts include encouraging his students to turn away from city politics and “the tools of human construction” to pursue the purity of nature. Humans believe that doing so may require “an innate ability to simply engage being“Outside arbitrary institutions of knowledge, such as the university.

Man is a good man, or so we hear. He notices, he listens. And of course “me.” [love] “Women,” he tells us. “I have worked hard for women my whole life.” But “the truth is that war has been declared against me [by] …a faction of women…they were hysterical…and perhaps even vicious, words I could only whisper…because I knew the politics behind their deployment.”

Despite his temptations to kindness, fun, and cheerfulness, man is left out of action: his views are no longer compatible with those of the university. Later, his wife, also a university professor, left him. This may be because they met when he was her teacher and have since gotten over the dynamic where she is a follower. Or because he casually talks about hitting her during sex and hitting her dog. Or simply because she is no longer as beautiful as she was when she was young (men don’t think that telling women they are beautiful is “good for them”). It’s hard for him to say – though, so exhausted by himself and his purpose, it’s clear that a return to nature is needed.

A man views a house in the country owned by Helen, whose real estate agent teaches him about her country way of living. Although she is now in a care home, Helen has been farming her land self-sufficiently. In doing so, she became attuned to the world of “natural” rather than man-made systems: “[t]“There’s satisfaction outside of all that,” explains the realtor, now the dominant narrative voice. She could see the appeal that this kind of ahistoricism or isolationism might have for humans. However, she says, a person needs to restructure the ego and “come to terms with… love“To truly heal. Helen can help.” The man, somewhat aroused, agrees, at which point Helen’s spirit enters the broker to discuss with him where his business and marriage have gone wrong. Reality dissipates.

Despite how fascinating “Helen of Nowhere” is as it progresses, these kinds of narrative shifts between the man and the real estate agent and Helen and the wife at the end are executed with finesse and subtlety. It helps enact a carefully negotiated dialectic: doing versus taking, buying versus selling, individual versus society, man versus nature, domination versus support, masculine versus feminine. Beyond its more obvious themes of misogyny and the displacement of power, Goodman’s writing also poses worthwhile questions for us all. How much of a living depends on relying on others, if not exploiting them? How much can this be tolerated? To what extent does it delegitimize individual pleasure? What He should Does this look like a “good” life? Where does the knowledge required by this pursuit come from? Can it be completely ethical at the same time? and Enjoyable in person? Each answer, of course, depends on the privileges afforded to the person.

“I think a lot about fires and floods and the end of the world, don’t you?” The realtor tweets during the home tour. In a sense, so does the entire novel – on a large scale. Goodman was meticulous in avoiding neat moral binaries when analyzing such everyday catastrophes. Her account notes that “in order to perform the waking function, one must inhabit a double space.” So naturally, although Mann points out (not incorrectly) that empirical and structural thinking hinder free individual thought, those are the same tools by which his female colleagues liberate themselves. When a person desires community, he is driven to leave a city full of people. But he does so in pursuit of a rural existence for which decades of teaching transcendentalism in the city have ill-equipped him. Thus, when he imagines a “simple” existence, more in harmony with nature, the easiest option for him is to look for a country house for a rich woman who has “a life like the inside of a golden egg.”

“It was either a shrewd, self-conscious intelligence I had achieved that made me attuned to the darkness of life, or a kind of irrational, misanthropic paranoia…that kept me from being happy,” Human reflects in a near-hallucinatory state near the end of the novel. The extent to which his fate is a highly ironic punishment or a beautiful kind of redemption depends largely on the reader’s own sensibilities. At just 152 pages, Goodman’s book is a perfect fairy tale for our times.