Indivisible

by Fanny Howe

Overview

This odd, transcendent and triumphant novel completes Howe's series of quasi-autobiographical, radically philosophical fictions begun in 1972.

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 fall-out. 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781584350095
Publisher:	Semiotexte/Smart Art
Publication date:	01/02/2001
Series:	Semiotext(e) / Native Agents Series
Pages:	252
Product dimensions:	4.50(w) x 7.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Fanny Howe is the author of several works of fiction (most recently, Economics from Flood Editions) and collections of poems, including One Crossed Out and Gone. She is the winner of the 2000 Lenore Marshall Award for her Selected Poems. Her first collection of essays, The Wedding Dress, was published by UC Press in the Fall of 2003. She lives in Massachusetts but remains Professor Emeritus at UCSD in the Department of Literature.

What People are Saying About This

Sarah Schulman

In hate with her husband and in love with God, Henny decides to have a life that really matters. Fanny Howe likes Catholicism for its contradictions. Like Susan Sontag, each line she writes is the product of a lifetime of thinking that occurs off the page.

From the Publisher

"In hate with her husband and in love with God, Henny decides to have a life that really matters. Fanny Howe likes Catholicism for its contradictions. Like Susan Sontag, each line she writes is the product of a lifetime of thinking that occurs off the page." Sarah Schulman

Editorial Reviews

Experimental poet and novelist Howe tells the story of modern-day martyr Henny, a filmmaker living in a working-class Boston neighborhood and married to McCool, an alcoholic musician whose jealousy and depression lead to tragedy. The couple have never had children of their own; instead, Henny raises a band of foster children and opens her dilapidated home to transients for extra money. But the most significant connections in her life are those she forges with her friends. Libby, whom she has known since childhood, when her mother was Libby's family's maid, is a wealthy but troubled "free spirit" who is strangely loyal to Henny, even as she betrays her by sleeping with McCool (albeit with permission). Lewis, Henny's first love, is a wheelchair-bound black activist and writer. Henny turns to mysticism and philosophy to attempt to make sense of her life--Buddhism, Marxism and Catholicism are just a few of her guiding forces; figures as divergent as Nietzsche and Bambi also serve as touchstones. On a practical level, the novel is sometimes confusing: Henny, though rooted in Boston, bounces among locales without much explanation, and time is anything but linear. Issues of race, class, sex and religion are seized upon and abandoned, and a few peripheral characters are never sufficiently fleshed out. Somehow, though, as viewed through Henny's eyes and embodied in her elliptical, dreamlike films, the strange logic of the novel hangs together "like finding meteor pebbles in the sole of your sneaker." (Jan.) Forecasts: Fans of Howe's poetry should enjoy this one, as should readers who relish the work of such avant-garde gender-benders as Anne Carson. Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Howe's latest (after Saving History, 1993, etc.), another in the Native Agents series ("new American writings in the mostly-female first-person that turns a public ‘I' out onto the world"): here, middle-aged narrator Henny has locked her husband McCool in a closet. She's tired of his drinking and his lies, but there is another, darker reason that only becomes clear later on: Henny is determined to live on a richer spiritual plane that the one she's inhabited up to now. As Henny's story zigs and zags through her past in short elliptical chapters that are more impressionistic than descriptive, she recalls how she met her friend Tom, a would-be monk who's"desireless without being cold and ironic," at a women's prison. Tom was visiting his friend Gemma, the mother of Julio, a blind boy Henny looks after. Henny was visiting Mimi, the mother of Lewis, a foreign correspondent paralyzed by a gunshot and later killed by a hit-and-run driver. Henny also recalls her emotionally fragile mother, who found stability working as a maid for a wealthy couple whose daughter Libby became Henny's best friend. Libby took drugs, slept around, and died young. When Henny confesses to Tom the real reason why she imprisoned McCool, he helps her solve the problem once and for all. At peace with the past, she can continue her spiritual pilgrimage. A badly muddled novel of ideas that goes nowhere at some length.

Kirkus Reviews