The Confessions of Frances Godwin: A Novel
*Starred Review* Art conservators, college professors, avocado wholesalers, an elephant who paints, blues musicians, snake-handlers, 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 pieces of art she helps restore. 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 snake-handling 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 high-school 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. --Bill Ott