Poking at the Bubble of Masculinity
In Helen of Nowhere, author Makenna Goodman probes the mind of the middling academic
By Amanda Rahn
“Sorry, I’ve gotta take this!”
A classic refrain from a friend’s boyfriend whenever I found myself in the unhappy role of dinner guest. He worked in the glass box of a publishing house in New York City and was constantly excusing himself from the table to take phone calls from his boss.
These dinners were stuffed with talk of his grueling work hours, the many books he took on, the incredible changes he made to the final products, not that he ever got the credit he deserved. Everyone in the office agreed the boss was a bitch — their words, not his! He considered himself a big-time respecter of women, but privately figured he would rise above her station in three to five years.
What he wouldn’t admit, during the dinner party or after, was that he actually edited cookbooks — not novels — and taught spin classes on the weekends to pay for half the overpriced flat he shared with his PhD candidate girlfriend. On Saturday mornings, you could open Venmo and watch in real time as he requested $4.25 for her drip coffee from the café with the Marzocco on the countertop.
This acquaintance, of course, is an individual. A single person. So what does a single person have to do with the collective experience of living as a man, today? Makenna Goodman, the author of Helen of Nowhere, might argue that the line between the individual and the collective is not so sturdy. Erasing that distinction by reducing the Man of her novel to an abstraction allows her to prod at the maligned masculine en masse.
She’s in good company. There’s a whole group of writers poking at the bubble of masculinity these days. This year’s Booker Prize theme was described as what it means to be human in an ever-changing world, but critics were quick to point out a more specific theme evident from this year’s list — what it means to be a man in a changing world. Helen of Nowhere was selected as a longlist pick for this year’s prize.
The Blokes of Blokedom
Last year, the theme was also masculinity in decline, a fact Kevin Power aptly described in a New York Review of Books piece on Flesh, the 2025 Booker Prize winner by David Szalay: “He writes with great formal rigor about the foot soldiers of contemporary blokedom.”
This year, another legion of foot soldiers of contemporary blokedom are marching all the way to the Booker Prize ceremony. Makenna Goodman’s male protagonist is one of these soldiers, this time from the angle of a disgraced professor.
The professor, having faced self-described humiliation from his female colleagues, “women, who were critics, who encouraged others to be critical too,” and convinced his wife is on the side of the woke female professors in his midst, flees to the countryside to buy a house and, finally, find some peace.
Helen of Nowhere is structured like a six-act play, with its four characters listed with brief descriptions at the front of the book. “Late fifties, wool button vest, arborist-style pants with a worn-in notebook crease in the back pocket, lives in the city” is the description for the Man. From his perspective, we learn how important he considers his teaching:
We read and we wrote, but the greatest work of all was to remove ourselves from the politics of the city and allow the voice of nature to speak to us, through us. Through the act of such communion, our own true nature might reveal itself.
The Man plans to recoup alone in the woods and perhaps stage a comeback. His porter to the peaceful life, a character simply called the Realtor, is there to lull him into the purchase of the home far away from the city.
She speaks of the previous owner of the house, Helen, at length. Helen took on the project of a self-sustained lifestyle with fervor. She chopped her own wood, planted her own crops, and kept her own animals. Helen, it would seem, was a better outdoorsman than he could ever hope to be.
As the sky darkens, the realtor asks if he’d like to have a sort of séance — she could let Helen embody her, and explain things herself, if he wants. He plays along:
I didn’t know what to think. But I had nothing to lose from playing this game. Helen was the owner. Helen had left the city, Helen was an all-encompassing love, what did I care?
It was night.
Maybe Helen was a player in this game, maybe she would appear, and we would all make love, and it would be this elemental awakening that I needed.
(An idea repeated throughout the novel is that Goodman’s protagonist craves the bacchanal but fears the chorus of women ripping him limb from limb.)
Following a quasi-talk therapy session between the Man and entity, the flesh-and-blood Helen appears and offers him a new path forward. The last chapter, titled Wife, reveals our Man transformed into his wife’s beloved dog (spoiler, my apologies).
What does the author wish to communicate about the masculine experience? The explanation lies in our Man, a figure whittled down to a series of reflexes and reactions. This paper cutout of a character allows Goodman to examine the behaviours of the “maligned” male in different situations. If we put the paper cutout in front of a class and one of the students is a pretty woman, will he later pursue the student romantically? (Yes.) If we put the paper cutout in a room with a ghost, will he ask the entity why his wife is mad at him? (Yes.) If given the chance to drop the act of being a good person, with no consequences, will he do it? (Obviously.)
And when confronted by an otherworldly combination of realtor, spirit and therapist, will he finally be able to see the truth of his life? Or is it just his nature to avoid the facts in favour of his preferred truth: That he’s the victim and only the purification of the great outdoors can heal all wounds (and transgressions).
Kings of the Ivory Tower
It’s telling that our nature-loving protagonist is not the gun-wielding, squirrel-eating outdoorsman of rural America. Goodman places her target, instead, on the middling academic with his righteous, petite-bourgeois taste in all-weather trousers. This wannabe Whitman, preaching the interconnectedness of all things, surely enlarging himself on the maxim that he contains multitudes. Perhaps he glossed over this other line in Leaves of Grass: “The same inexorable price must still be paid for the same great purchase.”
Goodman has written on the fallacy of finding peace in nature before. In her 2021 article titled “Who Gets to Live ‘the Good Life’?” published in the New York Review of Books, she began to pull on the thread that would weave together her future novel.
“Especially in times of crisis, the compelling pull of simplicity-in-nature — one of the many contradictions in the mythos of America — tends to reassert itself,” she writes, noting the influx of people fleeing cities during the COVID-19 pandemic. This great American myth is one she is herself immersed in. Goodman spent ten years at a small publishing house editing texts on regenerative agriculture while also running her own homestead; she’s more than qualified to speak on the inherent lie of the modern day back to nature movement.
What is articulated in this slim novel? A man upset with his wife and career. The belief in the power of nature to harbor and heal. And, to borrow a line from the Old Testament, a masculine desire for an everlasting kingdom, a dominion to endure through all generations.
The everlasting kingdom in this case is academia, yet the idea that men are being pushed out of the ivory tower while women flourish is untrue, per a 2023 study published in ScienceAdvances titled “Gender and Retention Patterns Among U.S. Faculty.”
In most academic fields, women remain underrepresented among tenure-track and tenured faculty compared to the U.S. population despite their steadily rising share of doctoral degrees. This pattern is often explained by a so-called ‘leaky pipeline’ effect, in which women leave faculty jobs at higher rates than men at each career stage, leading to a progressive increase of men’s faculty representation.
So, if women aren’t actually coming for men’s jobs, why all the fuss? Is Goodman’s protagonist rooted in reality? Put another way, do male professors really feel threatened? Apparently, yes. In the post-MeToo decade, men have perceived their position in the academic world to be fading.
In 2024, researchers at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence at Bielefeld University confirmed that “high-status” men who felt “threats to [the] groups’ moral or social image, loss of privileges, status decline, and loss of power or resources” opposed equality initiatives and actively backed anti-equality policies and practices.
Goodman’s protagonist expresses this very idea:
My colleagues said I took few risks when it came to hiring, and they accused me of reacting to departmental changes with a subtle, quiet redirection, followed by a willful forgetting. I always told myself this deprioritization was because the institution at large was an unfriendly home to revolutionary ideas and their makers, not that I was unfriendly to them myself. But they felt otherwise.
I was not a bad man. Nowhere near it. But they said I was anyway.
What does Goodman suggest for these men, having endured their collective humiliation?
Pure, absolute transformation.
Back to my buddy, that lucky bloke at the big publishing house. His PhD candidate girlfriend’s research was well received and she was offered a tenure-track professorship at an Ivy some years later. They moved for her career after he failed to get the promotion he so deserved (the hiring manager described him as “caustic”).
She got a book deal. He wrote a story for children, querying agents and receiving a final, fatal no. She got a promotion. He found a new place to teach spin classes.
He took on a personality related to the great outdoors. He became a Thoreau mystic, spending his weekends roughing it next to placid bodies of East Coast water. She spent more time at the office. He got an L.L. Bean credit card.
Last I heard, they were planning to adopt a dog.
Amanda Rahn (she/her)
I am a journalist, editor, and writer from the United States, and my work appears in Midwest magazines on topics ranging from textile arts to education policy. I am a graduate of Wayne State University’s journalism school and of the Columbia Publishing Course at Oxford University and am currently pursuing a graduate degree at Utrecht University. In high school, I sometimes drove my father’s 12-seater carpet van alone on the highway. Once you change lanes going 75 mph in a truck like that, everything else seems easy.
