Helpless by Barbara Gowdy

Kenneth Whyte, an editor of McLean’s Magazine, asked Barbara Gowdy if her new novel, Helpless, implies that it’s normal for grown men to have sexual fantasies about little girls. Gowdy says she thinks it’s more widespread than we know. True, surely every one with this burdensome fantasy has not acted on it, and maybe it’s not something I thought about much before. The thought makes me uncomfortable, as did much of her novel, which is exactly where she wants the reader to be.

Gowdy has created a story of a moral dilemma, a man who ‘loves’ children, a man who wants his feelings for young girls to remain pure and fatherly, but struggles against his dark desires. Like others in love, all sorts of delusions develop within him, surrounding the object of his amour. One delusion is that he is the protector of a 9-year old girl he has kidnapped, and that all other men in her life desire her in the way he denies. He uses these illusions to justify her capture, as well as demonizing her single mother, convincing himself that Rachel is better off in his ‘care.’

Ron struggles with self-loathing, but he is not overly analytical of his motivations. Gowdy has painted him carefully, showing his inability to engage in mature relationships and his awkwardness at mapping the world together, a difficulty in processing his emotions in any meaningful way. His sexuality seems stuck, puerile, immobilized within his own childhood.

Gowdy said she was careful not to make her pedophile a monster- he has not yet engaged in his desires, you see- and in his mind, if not the reader’s mind, the kidnapping itself was more of a rescue mission. Ron, an oafish, chubby, and scrubbed sort of appliance repair person is ordinary and recognizable. Any efforts Gowdy made to have a somewhat sympathetic character actually succeed in making him even more repugnant. The truth is, with so much outrageous, lurid details of killing and torture and child molesting in the papers, it is the quietness and absence of gore that makes Ron even more disquieting. But the success of the story is that Gowdy does not point at every guy- while Ron really could be the man next door, he is not every man next door, and the storytelling reflects this as the plot unfolds. It’s almost as if she’s revealing something: that it could be anyone, but it is not everyone.

And while Ron’s icky yet mild dreams of kissing his captive or his trembling next to her during Everybody Loves Raymond ekes us out, it’s his cruelty and neglect of the grown woman, Nancy, who loves him, that really illustrates the sick immaturity of his sexuality. Nancy, an ex-addict who went and found herself a ‘nice’ man, one who is hardworking and clean from drugs, finds herself in the middle of a hostage situation. A victim herself of the classic granddad maneuver, and a survivor of methamphetamine addiction, she is slow on the uptake to figure out just what is going on at Ron’s place. You want to shake her and send her off to the cop station, but as soon as Nancy knows for sure, she’s on her way there, despite what it may cost her.

Perhaps too much is made of the girl’s astonishing beauty, but creating Rachel’s character in this way, and keeping her in a carefully made room with objects she will like makes Helpless a modern-day Collector story. The parallels between John Fowles’ stunning 1963 novel and Gowdy’s are many- the ‘collector’ of specimens wants to believe he won’t harm her, that she is being treated like a queen, that she is captive but he has no intent to kill her. Both Rachel and Miranda, deprived of outside contact, come to enjoy the company of their captor, and that is all Ron thinks he wants until his desires start to leave his control.

Like The Collector, there is no gratuitous violence and the text, for the most part, is squeaky clean, leaving the barren darkness of the confused human condition exposed without veils on the page. And in case enough ghosts didn’t haunt my ten years of formerly living on Parliament Street, Gowdy uses Toronto’s Cabbagetown District as her stomping ground, detailing quirky neighbourhood characters and venues with a sharp ear and sharper eye.

Helpless
Barbara Gowdy
Harper Collins, 2007

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