Makenna Goodman: “Love is about finding a place of true relating”

The author of the Booker-longlisted Helen of Nowhere on the absurd nature of her work and the philosophical questions she was thinking about while writing it

What was the first idea that eventually became Helen of Nowhere?

Author Makenna Goodman (Sam Kelman)

I wanted to write about a woman like Helen, who had lived off the land for a large part of her life, and was looking back on her choices.

Did some events of your own life help you to invent Helen?

I am of the belief that everything, even the entirely fabricated, is based at least in some energetic part on the life of the writer who creates it. How could it not be? It’s filtered through our consciousness.

The title Helen of Nowhere is wonderfully paradoxical. What does “nowhere” mean?

This book is about finding a place, learning to know a place, and being rooted close to the land. Helen is a messenger of sorts, or a guide, from a place that seems grounded but in fact is a conceptual space, a space inside herself as informed by the land. This “nowhere” can be anything. The Man thinks he is looking for one specific place to call home, but it is the nowhere in himself he must attend to. There are many possible meanings, though, which is the fun of it.

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I think so. I think love is about finding a place of true relating, where we can face ourselves and each other with kindness, honesty, and vulnerability.

The book sometimes feels more like a play than a conventional novel. Were you consciously trying to break the reader’s expectations of what a novel should be?

I wanted the reader to have the feeling one does in a theatre when the lights go down, and the stage becomes all that is illuminated. We agree that there is artifice, we can see the ends of the world of the stage, but we suspend our disbelief and succumb to the story for a short period of time, in those wonderful velvet seats. I love the idea that an actor can hold up nothing but empty air, and the entire room is thinking, yes, she is holding a spoon. It is about curating alongside a collective unconscious. We know that certain tools are used to eat, we don’t need the item itself as a reminder. In the same way with literature, we know what a table looks like. I didn’t necessarily want to write a play; the form came much later. I found that I kept editing out all these unnecessarily cluttering sentences and phrasings like “he said” and so forth, but then I still need a structure for the story to make sense. But what makes it a play other than the character list and the title of “Act” instead of chapter? These subtle changes are enough to summon a whole new way of reading, which I think is so interesting. The agreements we make as readers is that a novel is a novel, and a play is a play. We’re talking about stories.

There are moments when the book seems to move from novel into fable, myth, dream and philosophical allegory. Do you think contemporary fiction has become too cautious about crossing those boundaries?

We are in a very commercial moment, in publishing, at least in the US. Which has to do with a lot of things – but I don’t think it means writers are experimenting less. I just think those writers are not spotlit as readily.

Does calling the protagonist “Man” make him more universal — or does it make him more absurd?

Both, with any luck!

Which character surprised you most while you were writing?

When I realised the Realtor had a lot more to offer than just selling a house… that was a fun surprise.

There is something almost Kafkaesque about the novel’s transformation of ordinary circumstances into something bizarre. What does the absurd make possible for you as a novelist?

The absurd allows me to walk the line between real and unreal. It creates a liminal space between dreams and life. Where you can really go there. But I also think absurdity is a bit like a joke, it’s easy to fall flat if one tries too hard.

What philosophical questions were you thinking about most intensely while writing the novel?

I have been reading the zen poetry of Ryokan – now that’s unusually philosophical for its size. I don’t know why philosophy has to be synonymous with big – it seems to me these are simple questions that get asked over and over again since the dawn of time, really. What does it mean to live a good life? How do we love? What is justice? How do we forgive?

The novel is deeply concerned with marriage, but marriage is never treated simply as a private relationship. Do you see marriage in the book as a political institution as much as an emotional one?

I wasn’t really thinking of marriage as a political institution, any more than I was thinking of it as a structure with its own rules and obligations. I was thinking of it as one possible socially accepted framing device to contain and make sense of love, I guess.

The Booker recognition inevitably changes the way a novel is read. Has being longlisted changed your relationship to Helen of Nowhere?

It hasn’t changed my relationship to it exactly, except that more people are reading it, so it brings in more voices that inform my understanding of it. Each interpretation changes my own interpretation. It’s such a joy to collaborate with a generous reader. And a real honour to be read by such an incredible panel of judges.

Which books do you often return to, and which ones accompanied you while you were writing Helen of Nowhere?

I always come back to the Greek myths, old fables, stories that have been told and retold for centuries and since ancient times. I am fascinated by how these stories are carried with us, and how we use them to juxtapose to our own lives as a kind of marker of time and evolution. I think of it as a conversation across time. With each book, I turn back to these stories as a foundation, and ask myself: how am I still learning from this? In this new phase of life, how has my interpretation changed?

Were there some difficult moments for you writing this novel?

Much of the novel is rooted in asking very hard questions, and the act of writing them down and filtering them through a story was trying at times, as it was rooted in facing the questions in real life. But it was also a release.

Mohd. Farhan teaches English at Jamia Millia Islamia, a Central University in New Delhi.