Helpless [Hardcover]

With a depth of imagery and a remarkable knowledge of human behaviour that is unattainable for most writers, Gowdy presents us with love in various forms - parental, perverse or otherwise - and displays the intensity that can make our most earnest attempts at caring for someone devastating. She clears the darkness and lets us inside places unimaginable, whether we think we want to make the journey or not.

She has clearly done her homework, which would have been extensive and substantial, for this work. Detail and accuracy allow the story to shine. There are no weak characters. All are developed and true, from the primary and secondary to the most minute and even the animals. Her ability to humanize Ron is nothing beyond incredible.

Read this book and bask in Gowdy's achievement.

I love books that take you into someone's heart and mind, and Barbara Gowdy's Helpless does just that, and does it well. She has a genius for creating characters who deviate from the norm, and doing it in such a way that we can understand them, even if we can't help judging them for their worst behaviours. Often, she shows such compassionate insight into human nature that she succeeds in getting us to withhold judgement, too.
I find the characters in Helpless intrinsically interesting, as I often find Gowdy's characters, but it's really her skill that makes them come alive. Her descriptive abilities are subtle and fluid, and her writing style so smooth she makes it look easy. In this book, she never puts a foot wrong, never interrupts our absorption in her fictional world with a wrong word or awkward phrase. That in itself shows brilliance.
Add to that an element of suspense handled in a classy, never cheap-tricks way, and you have a wonderful novel that is both entertaining and educational.

I'm generally a fan of Gowdy's books, having read all of them, even her first, Through the Green Valley, which now seems to be permanently out-of-print. I had the same problem with Helpless as I did with her previous novel, The Romantic. It simply doesn't feel like a whole book. I finished it with a sense of "ok, so where's the rest of it?" She seemed to get frightened of where the plot was going so rushed to end the novel just at the moment when it was beginning to seem believable.

I have a feeling that if she'd waited a few years to allow some distance and to let the ideas in the book stew in her mind for a while she would have produced a much better novel. Her older books have an unblinking honesty that in comparision just make this book feel even more like a cop out. She wanted to explore the idea of pedophilia, morality and the lines society creates and breaks but then she appears to be too afraid of the subject matter to write it honestly. In interviews she's cited examples of people like Lewis Carroll, who might have had a thing for little girls but never actually acted on his feelings, as a way of attempting to explain Ron, but it just doesn't fly: Ron loses his battle the moment he abducts Rachel. If she had written honestly from that point on it would have been pretty horrific. I can understand her reluctance to tackle the subject truthfully, because really how many people are comfortable reading a book full of graphic descriptions of molestation let alone writing one?

In trying to humanize Ron she includes an explanation for the origins of Ron's pedophilia, which borrows rather shamelessly from Lolita (Humbert and his first love as a teenager). Ron's back story seems false somehow too, possibly because if she'd been writing honestly she'd have had to admit that most pedophiles simply don't know why they are the way they are, there is no explanation for it.
The entire effort falls flat because she simply can't find a believable way to explain how Ron miraculously finds the strength to keep his hands off the novel's young heroine.