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 cant 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, Rollinss music-especially when he plays a Thelonius Monk tune like Misterioso-is the sonic equivalent of Barbara Gowdys 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 Dooneys Café in mid-February to discuss her new novel (her sixth) just prior to its publication, Barbara Gowdy told me:
What I think Ive 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 dont extend that same goodwill to nations or cultures (Im 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, Celias daughter. Its 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 Toms 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, shes 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 youre beautiful, right? he asks and Rachel just shrugs. Celias response is that nine is a little young to start trading in on looks.
This guy isnt the only man to have noticed Rachel: Shes being closely watched-stalked, in fact-by someone who isnt 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 Rachels home life when following her home from school under the guise of walking his girlfriend Nancys dog or peering into Celias 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. Its his explicit intention to keep Rachel safe and out of harms 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 dolls house, art supplies and just about everything any child could want-except theres 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 doesnt want to do harm. He wants to rescue and protect, hes 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 itll 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-hes 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 Pinkers 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, isnt based on a single, general purpose computer but on multiple operating systems, and each module, stance, faculty, mental organ, or reasoning engine (the terminology isnt 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. Gowdys 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 Gowdys genius in Helpless-and thats 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 isnt 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-Gowdys 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)