By Fanny Howe

Semiotext(e),

282 pages ISBN: 1584350091 $11.95

Reviewed by Kim Jensen

Perhaps the one thing that a reader needs to know about Fanny Howe is that she is, first and foremost, a poet. She’s a poet who happens to write beautiful novels—and not for prosaic reasons, but rather to attach her poetic and theological speculations to a storyline, her ongoing ecstatic and ever tragic storyline.

If you try to read a Howe novel expecting the grandeur of Balzac, the heft and hue of Proust, the sound and the fury of the American male novelists, you’ll be in for a crash. Howe’s writing is more about finesse and craft, perception and quickness. And no matter how hip the world gets, Howe’s novels will always be experimental, because they ask you to think and feel your way through (as in blindfolded).

Howe’s books are edgy, not because they are published by cool, avante-garde presses like Semiotext(e), the Fiction Collective, and Sun & Moon, but because they have steep vertiginous drop off points where you’ll find yourself wondering: Now what?

Imagine that Emily Dickinson has been thrown into the middle of a 60’s race riot in Boston. Imagine a post-Black Panther Dickinson, after an abusive marriage or two, on a mystical reading binge, imbibing the wisdom of the ancients like cheap red wine. Now that comes a bit closer to what you might expect when you pick up a copy of Indivisible.

Indivisible like so many of Howe’s novels is not plot-driven. The events are skewed; the timeline is adventurous and impressionistic; and the novel’s design, like life’s, is not easily discerned. It’s as if the leaves of an autobiography of God’s dreams were thrown into the wind, and recollected—randomly, but maybe not.

If there is a plot it is this: Henny, a working class experimental filmmaker, middle-aged foster mother whose kids have flown the coop, has locked her vicious husband McCool in a closet. Now she must choose between a life of solitude or a life of ongoing marital abuse. The third option is this— to quietly assume the care for a blind boy whose mother, Gemma, is a political prisoner.

While we are put on hold, waiting for Henny’s decision (with McCool bumping around in the closet), the rest of the book comes along with its a pinball-like narrative, furrows of anecdote and image, and the piecemeal recounting of Henny’s disappointing yet vivid past. Little stories come forth from the abyss of memory; and, yes, a novel of weighty proportions forms.

The most important features of Henny’s sad life are 1) her unrequited love for famous journalist Lewis (who won’t marry her because it would tarnish his black-nationalist image); 2) her asymmetrical friendship with Libby (a rich, drug-addicted, new age neophyte who sleeps with McCool); and 3) her loveless marriage to McCool, a charming "Irish" folksinger, fireball of bad karma.

Henny’s existence alongside these bohemian misfits—as well as loads of other eccentric characters—comes across like a lonely shadow projected on a wall of trauma. Issues of race, class, and social injustice figure heavily and in fact ARE the trauma onto which Henny’s personal stories are screened.

The other big theme is Henny’s spiritual intoxication, her frantic desire to understand the un-understandable, to name the un-nameable, otherwise known as God. Countless are her stabs at putting the ineffable into words, each one stunning and original, each one contradicting the next. Howe’s vivid sense of aporia and derangement fuels this wild ride through what is known as Salvation History, the history of revelations. In this novel, unlike her others, we also have reflections on Hinduism, the Upanishads, and especially Ramakrishna, whose universalist path seems to be the one Howe is now on.

Despite the introduction of Indian religions into her work, Howe has not abandoned the powerful theology of liberation that she has developed over the course of many novels such as The Deep North, In the Middle of Nowhere, and Saving History. In her own version of Marxist Catholicism the central question is: How does it feel to be second not first—to be second class, second-in-line, to not be loved, and to never get what you want. To be poor, of course, and frumpy. Another thing she asks: Are the Beatitudes really true? Sure they are comforting thoughts, but will the merciful obtain mercy; will the meek inherit the earth?

Almost all of Howe’s protagonists have this in common: they are beleaguered dropouts, social failures, the working poor—always struggling on the margins of leftist intellectual society. And Henny of Indivisible is paradigmatic; her films go unseen, she never gets Lewis, she’s taken for granted by almost everyone in her life. And then she loses them. Either they disappear behind the curtain of racial divides, or they die.

Death always clings to the edges of Howe’s novels, but this is the only one where it’s not just a topic, but a TONE. It is the death of Libby, Henny’s best friend since childhood, that shakes this novel on end; and all the lunatic ravings of grief come tumbling out into the light of day. It feels like this whole book was written on top of a tomb, as an attempt to decipher the cipher on the other side:

Howe has been heard to say that this will be her last novel; and this time the pronouncement rings true. She has made an obvious point of arraying several elements of closure. For example, she has imported almost a dozen characters from her past novels, and deployed them as minor characters in this one. Hence we learn the fates of some of our favorites, such as Gemma from The Deep North, Tom from Saving History, and Kosta from Famous Questions. Although this technique has a somewhat "deus ex machina" feel to it, it underscores one of the meanings of the title. Howe seems to be saying that all of her works form an indivisible whole. They are all one book really, a serial tragedy.

If you are lucky enough to have read The Deep North, you will note the perfect logic here that Henny, Howe’s last female protagonist (whose own mother was insane) (and whose sole desire is to SEE clearly), will decide to care for Gemma’s blind child. There’s something more than symbolic, almost sublime, about this particular choice. Out of the tremendous sadness that fills this book, Howe somehow projects an aura of safety and repair into the future.

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. It is impossible not to fall in love with her pithy, precise way with words. The waves and waves of delightful images, wickedly clever character sketches, and lyrical descriptions of nature, weather, and the inner landscapes of despair. 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!

Kim Jensen (jensenkim@msn.com) is a writer and editor living in Oakland, CA. She has recently published work in The Boston Book Review, So To Speak, Emergences, Faultline and is a regular contributor to Al Jadid Magazine in Los Angeles.