ON THE POD THIS MONTH

helen of nowhere

MAkenna goodman

Described in review by Jo Hamya as ‘the perfect fairytale for our times’, Helen of Nowhere is the story of Man - an academic dogged by allusions of disgrace and a publicly failed marriage. He seeks to start again and live a ‘good life’ far from the city and is drawn into the wilds to view a house which seems to offer him escape and the return to nature he consistently advocates to his students.

Set out over five acts in a series of Socratic style dialogues Man is first question by Realtor, the estate agent seeking to sell him his dream home and then the eponymous Helen, the house’s former resident, whose ghost dextrously possesses the narrative as all pretence of reality falls away. 

The paradoxes which exist at the heart of ethical living are laid bare here and the reader is asked questions about the purposeful forgetting in which we all engage, the true nature of power exchange and the weird horror of our realised dreams.

transcription

ben lerner

The writer, father of one and narrator of Ben Lerner’s new novel has travelled to Providence where he went to college, and where he is to conduct what will be the final published interview with Thomas, his ninety year old mentor and father of his friend, Max. But after his narrator drops his smartphone in the hotel sink, he arrives at Thomas’s house with no recordig device, a fact he is mysteriously unable to confess.

What unfolds from this dreamlike, nightmarish, circumstance is both a brilliant meditation on those technologies that enrich and impoverish our connections to each other, that store and obliterate the memories that make us who we are, and a moving exploration of the experience of being a son, of becoming a man and of trying to be a ‘good’ father.