The Confessions of Frances Godwin.
Hellenga, Robert (Author)
Jul 2014. 320 p. Bloomsbury, hardcover, $26. (9781620405499).
Art conservators, college professors, avocado
wholesalers, an elephant who paints, blues musicians, snakehandlers,
Latin teachers, truck drivers—novelist Robert Hellenga writes about all
kinds of people. His books are very different, as
that list of characters’ occupations suggests, but they are similar,
too, with themes reoccurring like motifs in a fugue: Italy, the nature
of beauty, love found and lost, and the rhythms of daily life, which are
somehow sustaining both in their intimacy and
in their very ordinariness. His latest novel and one of his best, The Confessions of Frances Godwin, incorporates all of these themes while telling a story very different from anything he has done before.
Hellenga, who teaches English at Knox College in
downstate Illinois, is one of those writers who inspire a special kind
of devotion in their readers.
When two Hellenga fans encounter one another and learn of their
shared enthusiasm, something happens that’s not unlike members of a
secret society exchanging funny handshakes. Inevitably, the conversation
turns to Hellenga’s first novel,
The Sixteen Pleasures (1994), about art conservator Margo Harrington, who reappears in
Philosophy Made Simple (2006) and The Italian Lover (2007). In Sixteen Pleasures,
Margo is a 29-year-old woman of limited experience who travels to
Florence to help with the restoration of art treasures damaged in the
great floods of 1966.
Living in a convent, she stumbles upon a rare volume of erotica in the
convent library and subsequently tumbles into an affair with an older
and supremely sophisticated Italian man. The novel is a sumptuous and
sensual love story, but it’s also, as Hellenga
has described it, an “occupational story,” in that the most sensual
passages in the book describe Margo’s detailed, loving work on the
damaged pages of the books she restores. Above all, though, the novel
introduces Hellenga’s great theme of the melancholy
transience of love.
The lovers in Hellenga’s moving, profound novels do
not live in a world of conventional happy endings. His romances often
end in attenuated moments of both disappointment and tenderness,
partings that have the feel not of failed relationships
but of life moving on and working out as it must. The theme reappears
in Snakewoman of Little Egypt
(2010), about a young woman named Sunny, who grew up in a
snakehandling church in Illinois’ Little Egypt area and who falls in
love with an anthropology professor, Jackson, entranced by her stories
of the Church of the Burning Bush with Signs Following.
Jackson and Sunny dance between the “safe harbor” of their life
together and “the wider sea of courage, risk, and adventure,” each
teaching the other about the many forms of joie de vivre.
Yes, it is a melancholy story, but it is also immensely satisfying
and even uplifting in that unique way that only deeply felt life can
provide.
That same sense of deeply felt life pervades Hellenga’s new book.
Frances Godwin is a retired highschool Latin teacher looking back at
her life with her late husband, Paul, and musing over wrong turns taken
and roads untraveled.
With marriage and career behind her, she assumes that her life is
winding down but quickly learns differently, as she comes to the aid of
her daughter, trapped in an abusive marriage. What happens is
shocking—the world of decisive action suddenly interrupting
the quiet of a contemplative life—but it isn’t the action that drives
the story but Frances’ attempts to make sense of it. She calls her story
a “spiritual autobiography,” and despite being anything but pious, she
engages in ongoing conversations with God,
who turns out to be quite a wily fellow. Frances wants desperately to
believe that “the universe itself cares,” but what if it doesn’t? That’s
the question she grapples with in the most compelling of terms, never
blandly abstract, always grounded in the particulars
of the everyday. And it is in those particulars that Frances finally
approaches some inevitably tentative answers, or what pass for answers
in a world defined by change: “That’s the problem with autobiography,”
she reflects. “You see a shape, you see ups and
downs, conversions, turning points, reversals. But then you keep on
living, . . . and every time you look down on your life, you see a
different shape.”
The beauty of this novel and, in fact, of all of Hellenga’s work,
lies in the scrupulous attention he pays to those different shapes that
life takes. Like Frances, we find in their very concreteness a way of
living with the uncertainty that surrounds us.
Theresa Collier | Publicist| Bloomsbury
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