Fanny Howe

 I keep reading, I keep finding writers that intrigue me. I do not recall how I found The Irreconcilable Fanny Howe, but the first paragraph hooked me.

Not every writer surrenders in the sunset of her career to conservatism or hack repetition; still, it is a rare bird who continues not only to stretch but explode the boundaries of her own art after so long. Fanny Howe is one such bird, whose plumage has become ever more brilliant and searching in the work produced in her late life. At eighty-one, with fifty years of publication behind her, her experience is extensive, her writerly mode relentlessly nomadic. In interviews, she’s remarked that where most writers she’s known desire or else “have rooms that they go to each day,” her practice is unsettled: “My room is the road.” Howe, like many of her fictional heroines, is at heart a wanderer, transfixed by the revolutionary potentialities opened through geographic, identitary, and spiritual restlessness.

Starting to take writing seriously again late in life, it is good to know the practice is not pointless.

The review leaves me thinking there is with this writer ideas that I have felt must exist and have eluded my understanding. 

In her ultimate longing for revolution, the narrator seeks “something real,” a solidarity that might transform our material and spiritual condition. Howe has said that every book she’s written has felt like the last, making her “apocalyptic in the writing department,” and London-rose certainly seems to exist at the cliff-edge of experience, of time, perhaps even at the twilight of civilization. “We must join the plants and animals and destroy the man-made. We know that we are mammals inhabiting a globe that is like another animal and we are eating it up,” the narrator insists. If we are indeed at the end of things, however, London-rose asks us to nevertheless refuse defeat, suggesting that “perseverance is one of the greatest virtues,” alongside our inevitable and necessary stumblings. In “Bewilderment,” Howe writes that “the point of art is to show people that life is worth living by showing that it isn’t.” If beauty is to save the world, it must be attended to alongside horror; only in this unresolvability might we discover true meaning, which as Howe points out, is the theological definition that lies behind the term salvation.

sch 10/17/22