“She believed she was no worse and no better than most people and that we’re all equally exceptional and equally doomed.”
When my husband saw me reading this book the other day, he said: I like books with that sort of cover – they seem classy. Which is interesting because the very first thing I put in my notes for this one was how much I usually dislike books with this sort of binding – small, plain and navy blue – “too LITERARY,” I wrote.
This book certainly is literary, but I’m not sure I could say I disliked it. Although I’m not fully sure I could say what it’s about, either. The story follows a tiny cast of mostly-nameless characters (Man, Realtor, Wife) – only the eponymous Helen having a name, although possibly not a body? We seem oddly unsure about this – for a moment in time. The format resembles a stage play made up of a series of monologues, although I suppose not true monologues, as Man keeps interrupting them. We gather that Man is viewing a property following the breakup of his marriage, a property formerly owned by the mystical Helen.
Other than that, I find it difficult to tell you anything with certainty about the story. I feel as if I have been sucked into the dreamlike quality of the story where everything may or may not be how it seems and there’s something very Christmas Carol-esque about it all.
Man receives life advice from Realtor, whose thoughts seem to swirl back on themselves in a villanelle-like poetry. The narrative then descends into something like a séance, as Man contemplates his life choices with guidance from Helen, who may or may not be in an assisted living home. And then, at the final Act – and the whole thing is so dreamy I almost missed it – he… turns into a dog?
As the risk of sounding (even more) pretentious: The absurdly wide margins in this book remind me of an exhibition that I saw at the Ashmolean museum years ago on the use of qi 气 in Chinese traditional painting. Sometimes translated as like a “spirit” or “energy”, the main idea was that these paintings use a lot of blank space around the edges to let the subject breathe, which can give an illusion of power and movement, letting the qi life force flow.
In this book, Helen is the qi moving around the painting, filling in the gaps of everyone else’s consciousness.
“Isn’t it a joke,” says the Realtor, “how you can tell a story and other people hear a different story than the one you told?”
I was recently told that it is not always clear in my reviews whether I liked the book or not. I tend to think it is rather clear when I didn’t like a book; but I also think that part of the job of the reviewer is to sit with the complexities of a story and of one’s reactions to it, without trying to over-simplify them into easy categories. I found this book interesting, puzzling; I found Man tedious and disagreeable, I found Realtor’s racing thoughts intriguing; I am mystified beyond explanation to have reached the end of the book and be unable to say for sure whether the main character turned into a dog or not. But did I “like” it? So, if you could please read the book and tell me, that would be great, thanks 😊
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