INDIVISIBLE

Howe’s latest (after Saving History, 1993, etc.), another in the Native Agents series (“new American writings in the mostly-female first-person that turns a public ‘I’ out onto the world”): here, middle-aged narrator Henny has locked her husband McCool in a closet. She’s tired of his drinking and his lies, but there is another, darker reason that only becomes clear later on: Henny is determined to live on a richer spiritual plane that the one she’s inhabited up to now. As Henny’s story zigs and zags through her past in short elliptical chapters that are more impressionistic than descriptive, she recalls how she met her friend Tom, a would-be monk who’s “desireless without being cold and ironic,” at a women’s prison. Tom was visiting his friend Gemma, the mother of Julio, a blind boy Henny looks after. Henny was visiting Mimi, the mother of Lewis, a foreign correspondent paralyzed by a gunshot and later killed by a hit-and-run driver. Henny also recalls her emotionally fragile mother, who found stability working as a maid for a wealthy couple whose daughter Libby became Henny’s best friend. Libby took drugs, slept around, and died young. When Henny confesses to Tom the real reason why she imprisoned McCool, he helps her solve the problem once and for all. At peace with the past, she can continue her spiritual pilgrimage.

A badly muddled novel of ideas that goes nowhere at some length.