Reviewed by Pedro Ponce
2.26.07

Theorists of the novel are fond of structural analogies to describe the art of fiction. Henry James thought of fiction as a house. Mikhail Bakhtin eschewed such homespun metaphors in favor of the chronotope, the illusory yet real impression of time and place experienced in the novel. (If you’ve ever confused your own life with a novel you’re reading, that’s the chronotope talking.) Poets, on the other hand—even formalist practitioners of the sonnet and villanelle—wrestle more closely with language itself. They are stylistic tight-rope walkers, using sound, syllable, rhyme, and diction to create paths over the abyss; they proceed without even the tenuous net of narrative structure. When a poet turns to fiction, the result can be unsettling but ultimately bracing for the discerning reader.

Poet Fanny Howe’s Radical Love collects five novels centered on characters driven to the emotional and political extremes suggested by the collection’s title. Nod takes its title from the children’s poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. The connotation resonates ironically with the story, which tracks an American family’s disintegration in pre-World War II Ireland. G, the protagonist of The Deep North, is caught between her family’s ill-gotten affluence and the social upheaval of Boston in the 1960’s. An idealistic couple in Famous Questions promises to “sustain the strengths of female history, which include anonymity, community, nurturance, subversion, and resistance.” But in putting this idealism to practice—the couple adopts an alluring hippie drifter named Echo—they ultimately risk their commitment to each other. In Saving History, Felicity Dumas tries to escape an abusive husband, while Indivisible takes the form of a letter to God, written by a woman who claims to have “locked my husband in a closet one fine winter morning.”

For all the liberties she takes with narrative conventions, Howe still manages to grab readers looking for vivid characterization and page-turning plots. Famous Questions has the compelling pace of a psychological thriller as Echo insinuates herself further and further between Roisin and her husband Kosta. Kosta’s terminally ill mother is at once an emotional touchstone and an oddly reassuring source of comic relief from the unraveling marriage. “I think tragedy always brings the divine into the head,” she muses. “I wonder why. Not that this is tragedy. Much worse I should be bludgeoned by a mad man. Right?”

At the same time, Howe reveals her poetic side in the textures of her narrative. She can evoke a character’s inner life with the vivid compression of verse; describing the sick mother’s state of mind in Famous Questions, Howe writes, “Everywhere Ma went now, so did the shovel, the skeleton, the stone, and the worm, since she announced her cancer. Grim images seemed to follow her on her rounds from room to room, cleaning.” Cloda, one of the two sister protagonists in Nod, describes her mother’s “Picasso-esque face—one that seemed to include a profile even as it stared directly into your eyes. So much—too much—seemed to be contained in her mobile features that she sensed that there were always two of her.”

Time and point of view are similarly subject to sudden compressions and dilations. In the 1952 that begins The Deep North, G “had returned from summer camp, brown from sun, her black hair streaked gold and still in her camp clothes, she smelled of pine and oil.” But within a few pages, it is “[m]any years later” and G is having a panic attack on a train: “She had a pair of seats to herself and she rocked uneasily with the motion of the train. Her hands were folded on her lap, her left still wearing the garnet engagement ring and gold band of her early marriage.” Point of view goes in and out of focus on central characters, at times appropriating the objective omniscience of a history text. Howe digs deep—perhaps too deep for some readers—in developing Roisin’s backstory in Famous Questions; she begins by describing the historical circumstances that would eventually bring Roisin’s parents (an American soldier and a Korean woman) together: “On a Sunday in June of 1950 the North Korean Communist artillery crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea. The United Nations was given the power to restore peace, and Truman ordered the United States to give air and sea support to a Korean government headed by Syngman Rhee.”

While such techniques may strike readers as metafictional indulgences, they are really the marks of a writer generous with her characters and, consequently, with her readers. For Howe, the personal has global implications, while the global is personal. This dynamic, the author is careful to point out, is not nearly as warm and fuzzy as it sounds. Musing on the circumstances that bring Roisin’s parent’s together, the narrator observes, “It was almost as if these small personal events were atomic particles attached to a system so powerful it was indivisible from each of its parts, and these events involved no natural choice or will by the participants.” Howe’s complex, provocative fictions are ultimately more truthful to the experiences they portray. Faced with the entanglements of intimacy and the inertia of the status quo, love becomes the most radical act of all.