Indivisible
By: Fanny Howe.
Series: Semiotext(e) native agents
Publisher: Semiotext(e); Distributed by the MIT Press
Published: 2000
Place of publication: Los Angeles, USA; Cambridge, USA
Language: eng
Number of pages: 283
Description: Henny's life spans the tempestuous multi-racial world of hipsters and activists in working-class Boston during the 60s and its subsequent fall-out.On the verge of religious conversion, Henny, the book's narrator, locks her husband McCool in a closet so that she might talk better to God. Then she proceeds to make peace with the dead by telling their stories. Lewis, Henny's true love, is a wheelchair-bound black activist and political journalist whose working-class mother is jailed when the group's cache of explosives is found in her home. Then there's their wealthy friend Libby, who crosses the globe in search of enlightenment and spiritual peace. Guiding these characters on their journey are figures as divergent as Nietzsche and Bambi, Marx and St. John of the Cross.As Christopher Martin writes in Rain Taxi, Henny's function as a narrator is to hoist the entire structure of the novel onto her brittle, uneven shoulders and deliver all the embarrassing facts directly to us, her reader/God -- only then do we realize the full breadth and beauty of the narrative Howe has surreptitiously constructed all along.