Who hasn’t wondered what it would be like to escape into a different life? It’s a fantasy that seems to preoccupy the American author Makenna Goodman more than most. In her 2020 debut, The Shame, she wrote about a creatively frustrated woman in rural Vermont who decides, suddenly, to flee to New York. Its successor, Helen of Nowhere, involves a getaway in the opposite direction. The protagonist, an unnamed disgraced literature professor, is convinced that happiness can be found if we ‘remove ourselves from the politics of the city and allow the voice of nature to speak to us, through us’. The book, which is structured more like the script of a play than a conventional novel, functions as both an ode to and a satire of transcendentalist ideas about nature. 

Goodman herself moved from New York City to Vermont in 2008 after a couple of unhappy years working in corporate publishing. But Helen of Nowhere isn’t a work of autofiction. The self-obsessed professor fails to keep up with the intellectual zeitgeist or nurture his marriage. He idealises rural living as a lifestyle in opposition to what he sees as the liberal, female take­over of the academic establishment (‘war had been declared against me’). We learn that, prior to his dismissal – the details of which are left somewhat vague – the professor taught a class on ‘True Nature’, designed around the premise that ‘within nature exists the divine’. For his former colleagues, though, one of whom is his wife, nature is ‘not neutral’. Their doctrine is that ‘any so-called purity was imposed upon it by those of us with the need to use nature as a shield from our own complicity with systems of destruction’.

Clinging to his philosophy and tiring of the artificial green spaces in the city, the professor resolves to seek ‘the real thing’. In ‘Act 2’, titled ‘Realtor’, he views a house for sale in the countryside. The word ‘realtor’ (‘estate agent’ to British readers) seems to extend a promise: to