The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Nod by Fanny HoweBrian Lennon
Fanny Howe. Nod. Sun & Moon, 1998. 217 pp. $18.95.
“And many frightening sights abroad/ Till morning in the land of Nod”: so, under the rubric of a nursery rhyme, proceeds Fanny Howe’s tenth book of fiction. It would be a groaner, this opening, if not for the arch and caustic skepticism of what follows: “Meanwhile the father thought his wife was seeing through him. The fact is, he had for many years been subject to depression and his only way of surmounting this was to seduce with intense, focused stares certain women whom he then agonizingly embraced, pawing at their inner thighs and breasts, begging them to massage his sex. . . .” This is the story of two sisters, the older of who gets all the attention (from their mother’s former lover, no less), and their parents, who go by “the father” and “the mother”—though, hardly cut out for monogamy, that’s about all they are. The historical setting is World War II; the geographical locale, Ireland. Which is important; but the principal movements of the novel occur on seemingly “universal” planes—those of family life and its frequently repressive effects on adult social identity. If Howe is relentlessly unsentimental, this is not to say she’s disengaged; on the contrary, like Lydia Davis or Diane Williams or her nouveau roman antecedent, Nathalie Sarraute, Howe configures a feminist sensibility that admits no distinction between ostensibly “feminized” sexuality and ostensibly “masculinized” intellect. At the same time, she makes no attempt to reconcile a woman’s heterosexual desire with her disgust at the generic shortcomings of its objects (men). If it’s men, therefore, who suffer most severely from her wit, the result is never anything less than genuinely comic: “And she rolled to the north and stood looking down at him for the first time ever. His smile crossed his white teeth exactly when a donkey brayed outside in the dawn.” [Brian Lennon]