Natural History.

This brilliant novel deserves more than a brief review. It moves on at least three levels: it is, first, a study of the Bray family--Billy and Nell, the parents, and James and Catherine their children; it is also a study of "history," a meditation, if you will, on what the word means not only to the Bray children but to all who want to recapture the "past" and discover that it never existed as implacable fact; it is, finally about the "mix" of art and reality, of "word" and "world." These three levels, in effect, do not move in any linear manner; thus any page of the novel combines the various levels and, indeed, makes them into a maze of meaning, an epistemological labyrinth.

If, for example, we simply read the story of Billy Bray, we discover that his life is dominated by one event--the investigation of the murder of a soldier by a woman who pleads self-defense. I underline investigation because we eventually learn that in the investigation, any exploration of motives is unclear. Bray, who works as a detective for the state government, offers one version of the murder. But this version is a perversion; it is his story; it does not account for the full complexity of the event.

And Bray's investigation is viewed in different ways. Catherine, a spinster at age fifty, recognizes that her childhood and adulthood have, in a mysterious way, been shaped by Bray's testimony. She lives alone because she cannot ever be sure about the motives of men, including those of her brother James. An actor (of limited ability), James has been influenced by his father; he has refused to accept "ordinary" happenings. He tries to rewrite--or, better yet--to recreate Billy in a movie he wants to sell to his agent.

The second level of the novel has as its setting more than the "private" Bridgeport or Bray family. It is a bold "double entry" into the way "history" is an odd, mysterious fiction. Perhaps the centerpiece of the novel is the section called "double entry." We are told that in "the beautiful concept of double-entry bookkeeping the debt and credit must agree; no inaccuracies or altered circumstances are admitted .... "This section of the novel can be read in several ways; we can read the fascinating references to Bridgeport in the life of P.T. Barnum, Lincoln, and other famous historical figures. (Barnum is, perhaps, the secret hero of the novel because he was not only a citizen of Bridgeport but a genius who recognized the need to carry history into the unreality of life. Indeed, he saw history--whatever it is--as a kind of duplicity, a hoax, a stage show.) On the right-hand side of this section of double entry we can continue to read about the Brays. Howard is, in a sense, questioning the relation of private and public history, of those uncanny associations which can never be correctly explained. She writes: "Double entry, designed to place equivalencies...when something is missing...when something is lost, you simply set down a number on the other side of the page to compensate, reconcile...as if to balance, naturally...as if to insist that the beautiful system must hold."

The "beautiful system" in effect, leads us to the third level of the novel. What exactly is the relationship of language to life? Can words ever capture life? Is it possible to describe those longings which lie at the heart of "simple" Billy or James? It is interesting to note that Howard ends her "double entry"--now notice the dark pun!--with a series of speculations on vowels. She is aware that "a" or "e" or "0" are symbols; they exist because they began as "pictures": "In the beginning was the picture. It was the initial A, peak and crossbar simpler than drawing of horse upon the wall of cave."

The three levels intersect in our minds. We recognize that we can never understand "nature" or "history" in any completely rational way. We crosscut events and motives in an unconscious way. We manipulate them--or are manipulated by them?--so that our constructions are in continual flow, refusing finality.

Perhaps the invisible message of the entire novel is that humanity is flawed, that it can never know unearthly designs.