What does good living look like? With his marriage and career in meltdown, a man tries to get back to nature in this thought-provoking fable
T
here has never been a better time than now for Man, the protagonist of Helen of Nowhere, to be a neo-transcendentalist. As a university professor, the lessons he imparts involve encouraging his students to remove themselves from the politics of the city and “the tools of human construction” to pursue the purity of nature. In doing so, Man muses, they might invoke an “innate ability to engage in simply being” outside arbitrary institutions of knowledge, such as the university.
Man is a good person, or so we hear. He is observant, he listens. And of course, “I [love] women,” he tells us. “I’d worked hard for women my entire life.” But “the fact was that war had been declared against me [by] … a faction of women … They were hysterical … and maybe evil, words I could only bring myself to whisper … for I knew the politics behind their deployment.”
Despite his inducements to kindness, fun and joy, Man is let go from work: his views are no longer compatible with the university’s. Later still, Wife, his spouse and also a professor at the university, leaves him. This might be because they met when he was her teacher and have since outgrown a dynamic where she is subordinate. Or because he speaks casually of hitting her during sex and of hitting her dog. Or simply because she is no longer as beautiful as she was when she was young (not that Man believes telling women they’re beautiful “is good for them”). It’s difficult for him to say – all the same, he is depleted of self and purpose, and it’s clear a return to Nature is needed.
