There is a dream near the start of the second act of Makenna Goodman’s new novel, Helen of Nowhere, that I have not been able to shake. A woman describes working as a typist for a powerful man, taking down his speeches all day, so focused on catching the words that she never hears them. Then he starts pausing. And in the pauses she finally listens, and the words are terrible. So she begins changing them. Tiny things. A tense, a pronoun. Small enough that nobody notices, big enough that she can live with herself.
The woman telling this dream is a realtor. Her audience is a man who has spent the whole day in the car in order to view a property. He is not really listening either.
That is the machine at the centre of Helen of Nowhere, and Makenna Goodman spends her 140 pages running it: people talking, people not hearing, and the enormous consequences of the gap.
The Man Is the Joke, and He Never Finds Out
He has no name. The cast list at the front calls him MAN, late fifties, wool vest, and he used to be somebody. He built a university programme around the idea that nature is a teacher and the job of a person is to get out of its way. Then a generation of younger women arrived and asked him whose peace he was describing and who was paying for it, and within a few years he had no department, no reputation and no marriage.
Now he is standing in an empty house in the country looking for the real thing, because, he explains, the green spaces in the city are only gestures.
He narrates the entire first act himself, and I have rarely read a character hand himself over so completely while believing he is mounting a defence. He tells us he loved women. And he tells us he worked hard for women his whole life. And he tells us his wife’s beauty had withered rather than ripened, catches himself, agrees that is unkind, and carries straight on. At one point he mentions, in passing, that he had wished someone would eradicate his critics, and moves to the next paragraph as though he had commented on the weather.
In Helen of Nowhere, Makenna Goodman does not put a thumb on the scale anywhere. She does not have to. Every sentence he offers in mitigation makes it worse, and by about page thirty I was laughing at him and slightly ashamed of how much I was enjoying it.
The Realtor Is the Best Thing Makenna Goodman Has Built Here
She is the reason I kept turning pages. And she talks continuously, in great looping runs that start with the built-in couch and end up somewhere unrecognisable, and she is doing about four things at once: selling a house, flattering a man she has clearly researched online, telling the story of Helen who owned the place, and steadily letting him know that she has his number.
She tells him that everyone who views this house wants it as a bolthole for when the world ends, and that they will let the poppies get choked out. She tells him about a woman she knew who thought of herself as a golden egg who wanted to be plain. And she calls him a sapsucker to his face, explains what sapsuckers do to living trees, and lets it sit.
And she keeps circling back to Helen. Helen who left the city and never went back. Helen who would not have a mirror in the house because she thought mirrors made you forget. And Helen who is now in assisted living and has taken the realtor off her visitor list.
Then, in the third act of Helen of Nowhere, she stops selling the house. She takes it off the market in front of him, and offers him a different service instead, and the price for that one is not money. I am not going to say what it is. The pleasure of this book is not knowing which direction the floor is about to tilt.
Where It Falters
I want to be honest about the middle of Helen of Nowhere, because I nearly put it down.
There is a stretch where the realtor delivers several pages on how chemical companies took over farming after the war. It is not wrong and it is not badly written, but it is an essay in a wig, and it is the one stretch where I felt Makenna Goodman reaching past her characters to talk to me directly. She stops sounding like a woman selling a house and starts sounding like a position paper, and the book, which up to that point had been alive and unpredictable, simply stops for the duration.
The channeling scene later has a related problem. It is written in deliberate wellness-speak, all baby and energy and ego, because that is what the scene is satirising. Understood, agreed, and it is still a long time to spend inside prose that has chosen to be tedious on purpose.
I also think the acts-and-cast-list framing promises a play the book does not really deliver. Almost none of this is dialogue. It is monologue with occasional interruptions, which is a different and older form, and calling it a play sets an expectation the pages do not meet.
The Pond Story Is Worth the Price of Entry
If you read nothing else by Makenna Goodman, read the passage in the fourth act where Helen explains what happened when she let a neighbour’s boy swim in her pond.
She offers it out of neighbourliness. She half hopes the offer will not be taken up, and she is honest with herself about that, which is what makes it devastating. Then the boys come, and keep coming, and she finds herself waiting indoors for the noise to stop so she can have her own water back. She describes the surface of the pond afterwards as feeling tarnished, and notes, drily, that it is a decent example of the commons. And then something happens, and the generosity is turned around and held against her.
It runs a handful of pages, it is completely flat in tone, and it is the most quietly brutal thing I have read all year about what it costs to offer people something you did not really want to give.
How Makenna Goodman Lands It
The fifth act belongs to the wife, and it is written as a hypothetical: say you were a woman, no, start over, say you were a man. She proceeds to dismantle a certain kind of literary male grievance from the inside, in his voice, and it is both an act of revenge and a piece of criticism so sharp that it made me uneasy about a few opinions of my own.
The sixth act I will not describe at all, except to say that Goodman relocates the reader rather than surprising them, and that when I understood what had happened I turned back to the first page immediately. It is the sort of ending that rearranges the furniture in every room you have already walked through.
If You Finish This and Need Something Else
Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett is the closest cousin in texture, all voice and no plot and a woman alone with her own attention. Vladimir by Julia May Jonas covers the disgraced-academic territory from the wife’s side and is far funnier about faculty life. On our own shelves, Goddess Complex by Sanjena Sathian has a similar knack for making the uncanny feel like an ordinary appointment you failed to cancel, and Girl, 1983 by Linn Ullmann circles memory in the same spiralling way. If you want more Makenna Goodman, her first novel is The Shame, from 2020.
Where Makenna Goodman Leaves You
I read Helen of Nowhere in one afternoon, which is how long it takes, and then I did not do anything else for a while.
It is a cold book. Nobody in it is loveable and I do not think Goodman wanted them to be. What it has instead is nerve: the nerve to build a novel out of four people talking, to spend its middle testing your patience on purpose, and to end where it ends. It is the strangest thing on this year’s Booker longlist, and of the thirteen it is the one I would hand to someone first, because it takes an afternoon and it does not leave.
Makenna Goodman has written a small book that behaves like a large one. I still am not certain what Helen is. I suspect that is the point.