Sometimes I think that God witnesses events sideways
and doesn't stop because it all goes by so fast, and
God can't believe what God just saw. So it is important
to tell you everything, God.
This odd, transcendent and triumphant
novel published in 2000 completes a quasi-autobiographical,
radically philosophical series of fictions Howe began with First
Marriage, published in 1972. Like Howe, Henny’s
life spans the tempestuous multi-racial world of hipsters
and activists in working class Boston during the 60s and
its subsequent fallout.
On the verge of religious conversion, Henny, the book’s narrator,
locks her husband McCool in a closet so that she might talk better
to God. Then she proceeds to make peace with the dead by telling
their stories. Lewis, Henny’s true love, is a wheelchair-bound
black activist and political journalist whose working-class mother
is jailed when the group’s cache of explosives is found in
her home. Then there’s their wealthy friend Libby, who crosses
the globe in search of enlightenment and spiritual peace. Guiding
these characters on their journey are figures as divergent as Nietzsche
and Bambi, Marx and St. John of the Cross.
As Christopher Martin writes in Rain Taxi, Henny’s
function as a narrator is to hoist the entire structure of the novel
onto her brittle, uneven shoulders and deliver all the embarrassing
facts directly to us, her reader/God—only then do we realize
the full breadth and beauty of the narrative Howe has surreptitiously
constructed all along.
“It is impossible
to mention all that is good in this intricately crafted book.
But the one thing that can never be emphasized enough is Howe’s
exquisite gift of gab. The things Fanny Howe can do with words
are seemingly limitless, and there is immense pleasure to be
had in the reading. In the end, perhaps this very pleasure
is the biggest contradiction of them all. It’s like saying:
Here, take this book in which people die, and in which children
are abandoned, and innocent people are jailed, and in which
God is totally absent and ENJOY it. And the amazing thing is:
we do!”
