Book Read: Helpless
Author: Barbara Gowdy
Pages: 306
Distraction level: I was reading another book and got disgusted with it so I threw it across the room and picked up this one instead. I began it last night and finished it this morning. It's a thriller (disguised as a Governor General Award contender) so I automatically felt a breathless sort of compulsion to finish it. Unfortunately, I have to go back and deal with the other book now, on the floor in the corner, its pages akimbo, its spine bent.I've also been busy watching videos like this. Over and over and over.
*Yes, I've used "Nabokovian" as a tag in this entry, and yes, I know it makes me sound like a total asshole. There's a reason I'm using it! The next book that I'm finishing (the one I threw across the room) will need this tag too! Oh....Christ. Anyway.
It's hard out there being a pedophile. That's one of the issues Gowdy explores in Helpless, and as distasteful as that notion sounds, she pulls it off. But for her, the world of the displaced outsider is a familiar theme. In an interview at the back of the book, Gowdy says her obsessions are "attachment, the need for humans to attach themselves to other humans, and how helpless we all are before this need." It all sounds sort of vague and broad until you look at Gowdy's body of work. She's written about an insanely dysfunctional Canadian family with a suicidal matriarch (in Fallen Angels, which remains my favorite of all of her books) and a woman who spends her entire life pining after a distracted waify artist-type (The Romantic) Most famously, Gowdy wrote a story about a woman who is quite literally in love with death in her short story We So Seldom Look Upon Love which later formed the basis of the dreamy and surprisingly lovely movie Kissed (otherwise known as "that Canadian movie about necrophilia.")
Basically Gowdy excels at adding depth and humanity to characters who we might otherwise consider repugnant. Helpless is a novel about mothers and daughters, dads and sons, girl children, kidnapping and repressed pedophilia. And, yeah, it all deals with obsession too. At the forefront is the dilemma raging within Ron, a schlubby vaccum cleaner repairman who considers himself a Humbert Humbert-esque "connoisseur of beauty," particularly when it comes to beautiful young girls. He spies the stunning nine-year-old Rachel walking home from school one day and the wall between his "morality" and his desire comes tumbling down. You might see where this is going---Ron eventually ends up taking Rachel to a room in his basement. In the book's creepiest touch, Ron bedecks it with Barbie dolls, Disney DVDs and a dollhouse in an attempt to recreate the childhood scenario that led him to his love of girl children in the first place. Ron attempts to justify his behaviour to his girlfriend (and to us) by rationalizing that Rachel is growing up in an unfit home with a single mother who plays piano at a bar and works at a video store for a living. Through the third-person subjective, Gowdy then lets the story unfold through the eyes of Ron, his girlfriend, Rachel and her long-suffering mother Celia, who has some mommy/daughter issues of her own to grapple with in addition to coping with Rachel's disappearance.
I was really split by Helpless. On one hand, it's compelling because Gowdy constructs a fast-paced and solid narrative. Her characters are well-written and certainly believable in their reactions to the situation---no doubt in part because Gowdy spent months exhaustively researching cases of missing children in Toronto and speaking with members of the police force about their own experiences.
But I can't entirely say I liked it. And it has to do with Gowdy's attempts to humanize a man who is attracted to pre-pubescent girls. (And it's not because I think it's gross, or upsetting - we should be reading novels like these and talking about them. Gowdy knows there's a line that most of her readers don't want crossed---and well, she doesn't. If you want to be truly horrified by an unredeemable child molester, check out the narrator of A.M. Homes' The End of Alice. Or, you know, don't.)
It is fascinating to see the way Gowdy allows Ron to grapple and justify Rachel's captivity using his own skewed rationality. At the same time, he struggles to minimize the harm caused by a situation that has spiralled out of his control. He's not stupid or blinded by his misplaced affections---he knows this won't end well. He's aberrant, but he's not necessarily a monster. In some ways, this makes his character suffer from a dearth of personality---and there's not a lot of subtlety to Gowdy's portrayal of this supposedly conflicted person. And right up to the book's final, not particularly shocking conclusion, we are reminded that Ron, in some ways, is a fatalistic romantic; not through exposition or his actions, but through explicit statements. I could have used more showing and less telling, to use a well-worn phrase spouted by many of my old journalism profs.
Fuck. I feel like I screwed the pooch with this review, to borrow a well-worn phrase from my grandly and gloriously crass man friend. Okay. Helpless is a challenging book that should make a lot of middle-class people of a certain age angry. Gowdy is the type of author who can approach this subject in an intelligent and graceful way, and in some ways, with the research and such, she's succeeded. But I think she's done better work when it comes to constructing characters who baffle the reader, leaving the book shrouded in a sort of lovely mystery that we're not supposed to fully understand. This could have been her swan song, and instead, it's akin to the sound of a goat yelling like a man---initially it's slap-you-in-the-face jarring, then compelling, eventually tedious and ultimately a bit forgettable.
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