Interview about CONFESSIONS

An interview with me about The Confessions of Frances Godwin–part of WNIJ’s Summer Book Series–will be broadcast on June 27 at 6:34 am and at 8:34 am. You can hear it live on Morning Edition at www.WNIJ.org. The web posting will go live at around 6:30 am.

Three reviews of CONFESSIONS

Publishers Weekly (5/19/14)

In Hellenga’s (The Sixteen Pleasures) latest novel, a Latin scholar on the precipice of old age wistfully recounts her life—beginning in 1963, the year she and her husband “joined our bodies—if not our souls.” Francis Godwin, a lapsed Catholic and graduating senior at Knox College in Illinois (where Hellenga has taught since 1968), met Paul at a party in celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday. “Paul and I began a torrid affair—at least that’s how I thought of it at the time, though ‘torrid,’ from Latin torridus, meaning parched or scorched, — is perhaps not the right word.” Their marriage was a meeting of the minds, but also a pairing of opposites: “He loved Homer, I loved Vergil; he turned to Plato for his metaphysics, I turned to Lucretius.” In the last year of Paul’s life, their grown daughter Stella’s reprobate husband, Jimmy, wreaks havoc on their quiet lives, triggering a primal virulence within Francis unknown even to herself. Reeling from the aftershock of her impulsivity, which goes unpunished, she must reevaluate herself and her faith. The minor characters aren’t as strong as Francis, but Hellenga’s feisty and learned narrator, who travels from the Casa di Giulietta in Verona to TruckStopUSA in Ottawa, is an entertaining guide. (July)

Chicago Magazine (5/29/14)

Six Great Summer Books by Local Authors

http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/June-2014/Six-Great-Summer-Reads/

The Confessions of Frances Godwin by Robert Hellenga

Bloomsbury USA (July 8)

The Galesburg, Illinois, novelist chronicles the twilight-year confessions of a widowed Latin teacher whose hernia operation prompts her to reexamine her life. In its best moments, Hellenga’s deceptively simple prose recalls that of Marilynne Robinson (Gilead).

Shelf Awareness (6/19/14)

The Confessions of Frances Godwin is told in the end-of-life recollections of widow and retired high-school Latin teacher Frances Godwin. She narrates her story in a no-nonsense, practical Midwest voice, yet faced with death and loss, she mostly wants to understand the spiritual value of her life. Despite growing up in a strong Polish Catholic farm family in Galesburg, Ill., under a matriarch who believed that homemade pierogi and a full church confession to "clean out your attic" were central to living a good life, Frances strayed from the church and fell in love with her Shakespeare professor, Paul. While attending a postgraduate Latin seminar in Rome, she met up with him and soon became pregnant with their daughter, Stella--all before Paul divorced his wife and finally married Frances. Paul's good humor and easy camaraderie with her uncles win over her suspicious mother, but Frances never quite shakes the nagging guilt over her adultery and out-of-wedlock pregnancy. When a grown Stella takes up with Jimmy, a thuggish ex-con Italian Catholic from a Milwaukee produce-distribution family, and Paul develops rapidly advancing lung cancer, Frances finds herself racking up more sins, guilt and remorse to protect her family ("I had crossed a line.... No going back. Not that there's ever any going back.... Actually, there was a way to go back. I knew the drill: contrition, confession, satisfaction. But I was in no mood to turn around").

Like his previous novels The Fall of a Sparrow and The Sixteen Pleasures, Robert Hellenga's new novel is based in the heart of the Midwest with significant interludes in the ancient cities of Italy. Both Classics scholars, Paul and Frances warm to the cadences of Romeo and Juliet in Verona, trade lines from Catullus and Shakespeare over Paul's special Parmesan lamb chops and an aged Barolo, track the constellations with a home telescope, and enjoy Chopin's études that Frances plays on their old Blüthner grand piano. Yet this is also a thoroughly Midwestern novel, with all its hog slaughtering, school plays, train whistles and truck stops. Hellenga neatly balances the pallet trucks of the wholesale produce business with the idiosyncrasies of translating the ribald poetry of Catullus. He even throws in an imagined dialogue between Frances and an irreverent God ("I have a lot of things to do. Do you have any idea how many galaxies there are, just in the visible universe?") and somehow makes it work.

The complex but homespun Frances, who genuinely wants to understand her life and live her last years well, carries the work. She sees clearly and speaks plainly when she finally confesses again after 43 years: "We're all stardust. But that's not enough. Not for me, anyway." Although the story ranges wide, The Confessions of Frances Godwin is firmly rooted in the culture and values of Hellenga's perfectly rendered Midwest.

            –Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kansas

Robert Hellenga's Midwestern widow looks back on a life of good intentions and disappointments with open eyes and hope for redemption.

                        A CHRISTMAS LETTER, Ploughshares, Spring 2014

            I was in Florence, Italy, when my father died. It was Easter Sunday and I was staying with old friends, the Marchettis, in their apartment near Piazza delle Cure, a quiet neighborhood on the north edge of town that you entered from via Faentina. We hadn’t gone into the center for the big Easter celebration, but we’d watched the dove and the exploding cart on the television.

            We were just sitting down to our first course–a rich broth thickened with egg yolks–when I got a telephone call from my sister. My sister doesn’t speak Italian, but she managed to make herself understood, and Signora Marchetti waved me to the phone in the small entrance hallway.

            “Are you ready for this?” my sister said.

            “I’m ready.”

            “Dad’s dead,” she said. “Out at the club. He fell down in the locker room. Drunk. They couldn’t rouse him. He was dead by the time they got him to the hospital.”

            “I thought they kicked him out of the club?”

            “He got reinstated. He got a lawyer and threatened to sue them.” . . .

I think this is my best story. It will be published on line by Electric Literature on June 11 and will stay on line for one week. You can read it by Googling <Electric Literature's Recommended Reading> or by just clicking.