Helen of Nowhere

Novel · 160 pages · Paperback · Published 2026 by Fitzcarraldo Editions

The listener he loses

A former professor drives to Helen's country house. His wife has left him, and his university has asked him to leave. He sleeps there after the drink given to him during the channelling knocks him into a stupor. The Realtor takes the house off the market.

Makenna Goodman casts Helen of Nowhere as a play in six acts. She names the cast by function. Man and Wife are their marriage; the Realtor is her occupation. Helen alone holds a name. The Realtor and Man narrate most of Helen's house and history. Little of it comes from her. The novel is built almost entirely from people talking themselves into positions. What it offers instead of event is one man's explaining. The explaining substitutes for the injury it excuses.

Man built his career on a wilderness teaching method his critics called a purity test, and pictures his comeback through a book on training falcons instead. He frames the exit as a death and a war declared against him. The detail he supplies undercuts the frame every time. Once his student, Wife later became a professor he could not contain. Man calls the marriage revenge against her brilliance, offered in his own voice as confession. He names his own envy plainly, then retreats to the safer position of the injured party. Self-examination here does not admit fault. It performs the admission and holds the fault at a distance.

The Realtor sells the house on the creed that the ego must get out of its own way. She works Man the same way. She frames his defeat as freedom and his resentment as misunderstood talent. The Realtor then channels Helen in trance. The voice presented as Helen's blesses his retreat. "A beautiful and loving addict, still an addict," she says. The line lands as praise and as diagnosis at once. The praise makes the diagnosis land. The diagnosis makes the praise cheap.

Wife receives a full act, yet approaches her marriage directly for only four lines. She starts again through a fictional male writer whose book is overtaken by a woman's. He disguises envy. He calls it concern for female readers. Through him, Wife identifies the grievance. It governs her husband. The act grants her authorship, but little life independent of him. His interiority fills the novel; hers is compressed into a fiction about male resentment.

Helen receives even less space. It lies beyond other people's accounts. Most of her thinking about solitude comes through the Realtor or through Man's fevered narration. She owns the house and supplies the novel's clearest philosophy, yet seldom controls how either is presented.

Near the end the novel pushes into fever dream, and fluency turns to violence. Helen summons the women. Man believes they ruined him. A car hits a bus head-on. Fire spreads through the wreck, burning them alive. Wife appears at a train window. The fire reaches for her too. He breaks the glass to get to her. It is attachment, not change. He still needs the woman he resents.

The final act turns to the dog Man once struck from a table. He appears, at last, within it, and the novel leaves unresolved whether the transformation is real or another of his dreams. Wife later names the blow as the moment she decided to leave, though years passed before she went. He licks her awake. She tells him to stop biting. He falls asleep to the sound of her writing.

Naming the cast by function is the device that makes Man's self-deception precise. The same device leaves Wife and Helen without heft of their own. That is the trade. It is the reservation the rating rests on. This novel is careful enough about one man's evasions. It should have found a better ending than the oldest shape available for men like him, the cruel one made to crawl.