Helpless (Hardcover)

Sonny Rollins, the tenor saxophone colossus who was recently awarded the Polar Music Prize by the Royal Swedish Academy as “one of the most powerful and personal voices in jazz for more than fifty years,” likes to tell the people who ask him what he thinks about when he plays that “you can’t think and play at the same time.” What Rollins, one of the most dedicated craftsmen on the scene, means is that he practises and practises until he internalises all the elements he needs and then lets the music play him and explicate “in the moment” whatever it dares to do. The result is music that is tightly focussed and casually brilliant, inexorably logical yet unpredictable, remarkably intelligent yet deeply felt. For me, Rollins’s music-especially when he plays a Thelonius Monk tune like “Misterioso”-is the sonic equivalent of Barbara Gowdy’s storytelling in Helpless-disciplined and free, allusive yet dissonant.
Gowdy, who spent years training as a pianist before taking up fiction (and who listens to both Monk and Glenn Gould with equal relish), is forever moving forward, improving her techniques, finding better ways to express her sense of what in the here and now is truly momentous, really worth questioning. When I met with her over lunch at Dooney’s Café in mid-February to discuss her new novel (her sixth) just prior to its publication, Barbara Gowdy told me:

“What I think I’ve been questioning all these years in my writing is, who is it we find worthy, what kind of human being? What are our yardsticks, and how qualified are we to judge? I am unswervingly on the side of giving the individual the benefit of the doubt. I don’t extend that same goodwill to nations or cultures (I’m suspicious of large groups of people claiming like-mindedness) but to individuals I do.”

In Helpless the lives of four adults-Ron, Nancy, Mika, and Celia-intersect through the agency of nine-year-old Rachel, Celia’s daughter. It’s early summer in a recent year and Toronto is in the middle of a heat wave. Celia, a single parent who clerks four days a week “at Tom’s Video, a small, independent store,” and performs “jazz and blues standards at the Casa Hernandez Motel on Lakeshore Boulevard . . . Friday and Saturday evenings,” is too broke to buy an air conditioner but principled enough to resist turning her extraordinarily beautiful mixed-race daughter into a child model. “Little girls are a big deal right now,” she’s told by a photographer-hustler who buys them iced teas in Java Ville and promises “a thousand plus residuals” per session if her daughter is allowed to appear in “certain high-end ads.” “You know you’re beautiful, right?” he asks and Rachel just shrugs. Celia’s response is that nine is a little young to start trading in on looks.
This guy isn’t the only man to have noticed Rachel: She’s being closely watched-stalked, in fact-by someone who isn’t as easily deflected. Ron is an overweight appliance repairman with a drinking problem, who normally reserves his nurturing instincts for his collection of vintage vacuum cleaners. But when he saw Rachel for the first time, “a murky, underwater feeling enveloped him” as soon as her gaze landed on him: “Her skin was light . . . tawny. Her hair, a miraculous chromium yellow, was pulled into a ponytail of tiny spiral curves, like the springs in old ballpoint pens.”
Misinterpreting what he can glean of Rachel’s home life when following her home from school under the guise of walking his girlfriend Nancy’s dog or peering into Celia’s apartment while half-hidden by a dumpster parked in the alleyway behind Parliament Street, Ron contrives to snatch Rachel from right outside her Cabbagetown home in the middle of a city-wide blackout. Ron believes that he is rescuing her from physical, emotional and sexual abuse at the hands of her mother and their landlord, Mika. It’s his explicit intention to keep Rachel safe and out of harm’s way until he and Nancy (who is unable to have a child of her own) can subvert her affections, escape to Florida, and raise her as their own child. The “safe place” Ron has built for Rachel in the basement underneath his appliance shop is a prison cell fit for a would-be princess with mauve-and-white décor, a canopy bed, a menagerie of stuffed animals, a large screen plasma TV, Disney on DVD, a top-of-the-line electronic keyboard, a remarkable doll’s house, art supplies and just about everything any child could want-except there’s no internet connection, no access to a phone, and the windows are frosted and barred.
Beneath a kindly almost avuncular surface that persuades Rachel she will be released as soon as the streets are free of “slave drivers” (as she puts it), Ron is constantly “agitated”-at war with an obsession with prepubescent girls that has troubled him ever since adolescence, when his precocious younger stepsister regularly snuck into his bed at night to play mother to his father. Although Ron “doesn’t want to do harm. He wants to rescue and protect,” he’s too self-deluded to consider the consequences of his act or the shock waves of misery it creates for Celia, Mika, and Nancy once the police launch round-the-clock, door-to-door investigations.
Helpless is as straightforward, immediately accessible, and menacing as a conventional literary thriller, but it defies and eviscerates genre-writing even as it simulates it with tight sentences, jump cuts, and so real a sense of threat that it’ll take more self-restraint than I managed at mid-point not to skip to the end for reassurance that what frightened and disgusted me would not prevail. Gowdy deliberately eschews clever acts of detective work, car chases, SWAT rescues, and makes no attempt to portray Ron as an irredeemable monster-he’s just a sad sack with a sorry past and a stupid sense of his own virtues. To her immense credit, what Gowdy provides instead is a close study of three of the most elusive components of human reasoning: “the system that assesses danger based on fear, the system that assesses contamination based on disgust, and the moral sense.” For these, to quote Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, “it is hard to tell where cognition leaves off and emotion begins.”
Human reasoning, as Pinker and other evolutionary psychologists maintain, and serious novelists have long made it their business to explore, isn’t based on a single, general purpose computer but on multiple operating systems, and each module, stance, faculty, mental organ, or reasoning engine (the terminology isn’t set) is appropriate to only one department of reality. In the face of danger, contamination, and evil, we inevitably find ourselves floundering because, as Pinker says, “understanding in these domains . . . is likely to be uneven, shallow, and contaminated by primitive intuitions.” Gowdy’s artistry is essentially theatrical-musical and dramatic-not psychoanalytical: she wants to make people feel, to give lessons in feeling strange, freakish, repellent, utterly different and overwhelmed by aesthetic and moral choices so that we do not repress, deflect or submerge the emotions that can bring meaning to life, and life to the thresholds of beauty, truth, and goodness.
Barbara Gowdy’s genius in Helpless-and that’s not too strong a word for it-is to portray several kinds of goodness, and to make each of them more interesting than their opposites, something mass culture is always persuading us isn’t true. Like Vladimir Nabokov (though she is unlike him in so many other ways), Gowdy refuses to flatter the idols of the marketplace and provide half-witted banalities in the guise of evil. The world of Helpless is familiar, ordinary, but utterly compelling. Rachel is “as innocent as a flower”-a good, loving child whose trust in others shows us what we must become to be trustworthy.
While we lunched, Barbara Gowdy fretted out loud over the reception Helpless was likely to receive: would reviewers recognise it for what it is and not for what they might want it to be? Happily, some are getting it right, and to date no one has said it better than M.A.C. Farrant in The Vancouver Sun:

“The sleight of hand-the magic-that Gowdy achieves at the end of the novel is . . . astonishing. We realize that it has been love, and nothing but love-Gowdy’s enduring subject-that has been driving this time bomb of a novel, all along. Once again we are rendered helpless before its skewed, though brilliant, face.”

“Misterioso” indeed.
T.F. Rigelhof (Books in Canada)

Love comes up against obsession in Gowdy's seventh novel (following The Romantic), and the results are at times chilling, but not always believable. Single mother Celia works two jobs and is often forced to bring nine-year-old Rachel along to her nighttime gigs at a piano bar. Much to Celia's dismay, men are already drawn to biracial Rachel's exotic beauty, and she reluctantly turns down a lucrative modeling contract for the girl. Yet she's unaware that appliance repairman Ron Clarkson has an unhealthy fascination with Rachel that's escalating. Convinced that Celia is not a worthy parent for Rachel, Ron abducts the girl, soon involving his needy girlfriend, Nancy, and igniting an extensive investigation. Although set in Toronto's urban Cabbagetown neighborhood, the atmosphere feels smalltown insular and relies a bit too much on coincidental acquaintances to feel like a city setting. The kidnap plot is, for Gowdy, surprisingly conventional, but frequent glimpses into the childhoods of Ron, Nancy and Celia add depth, revealing the characters' motivations and inviting contemplation of what constitutes appropriate love toward a child. Ron remains too warped to be remotely sympathetic; more compelling are Nancy's conflicted loyalties and Celia's occasional brutal reflections on the sometimes greedy, possessive love between parent and child—a love not unlike obsession. (Apr.)
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