Junctures - The Journal for Thematic Dialogue

Jutel, Annemarie

Review: Jørn Hansen & Niels Kayser Nielsen, (eds), "Sports, Body and Health" (Odense, DK: Odense University Press, 2000)

Thorpe, Holly

English

Snowboarding Bodies: Dressing for Distinction

McKinlay, Pam

Colophon: Junctures, Issue 5:space

Pack, Margaret

Making the Unseen Seen through the use of Multimedia Approaches in Counselling and Social Work Education

Grainger, Andrew

Rugby Island Style: Paradise, Pacific People, and the Racialisation of Athletic Performance

Lloyd, Mike

Seacoast Stuff

Martin, Michael G

119
Helpless is about a man named 
Ron who falls in love with, and then 
kidnaps, a six-year-old girl named 
Rachel. The author, Barbara Gowdy, 
very quickly clues her readers in 
to Ron’s paedophilic thoughts 
and feelings in what amounts to 
progressively louder whispers of 
our domestic bugbear equivalent 
to the foreign suicide bomber. But 
Ron maintains a tenuous control. 
His self-restraint, even when he has 
Rachel completely within his grasp, 
Gowdy says she finds “heroic”.1 His 
struggle to stay on the side of good 
and right, to control his urges, to 
put Rachel’s welfare above his lust 
and his compulsion to fetishise her, 
is what this novel is about. He never 
acts on his feelings – he maintains 
control insofar as he never molests 
or rapes the girl – and whether 
or not this is strictly realistic, it 
leaves the open-minded reader in 
a difficult ethical position. 
Gowdy revels in leaving her readers 
in difficult ethical positions.
Throughout her career, Barbara 
Gowdy has consistently chosen 
to write about characters who 
live outside of constructed social 
norms, and to write about these 
characters with a sense of defiant 
irony that can hardly be called 
subtle. She is a provocateur, a 
muckraker of the human condition. 
Her willingness to be graphic, to 
expose the reader in a profound 
sense, and to offend in order to 
edify, make Gowdy an unsung 
hero of transgressive literature, 
a genre generally considered 
the province of male authors like 
Michael G Martin
The Monster At The End 
of The Book: A Review of 
Barbara Gowdy’s Helpless
(New York: Picador, 2007)
REVIEW ESSAY
Martin – Helpless – Junctures, 11, Dec 2008-11-02
120
William Burroughs, Irvine Welsh, and Chuck 
Palahniuk. 
In the lead-in to a 1998 Artforum International 
interview, Carol Anshaw observes that Gowdy 
“consciously shapes the language in her fiction 
so as not to intrude on the thoughts which 
she communicates”.2 Her prose is spare and 
precise; she creates the illusion that she is 
allowing the story to tell itself, except perhaps 
in the moments when she seems to smirk or 
wink from the margins. 
A practiced reader quickly sees the care 
with which Gowdy renders Ron. His social 
awkwardness, weight problem, drinking 
problem, and his attraction to machines 
(collectible vacuum cleaners) make him 
absurd in very human ways; she might even 
intend him to be read as autistic. He is tender 
in his care of Nancy, his girlfriend, and defies 
stereotyping sufficiently for the reader to allow 
for his faults, even as they become more 
apparent and disturbing: 
 His heart started drumming again. What 
exactly had happened with Rachel?  Were 
his feelings those of a father, a protector, or 
was he romanticizing his lust?  He topped 
up his glass and tried to think about this 
honestly. Both feelings were there, he 
decided, one shielding the other. Like 
lighting a match and cupping your hand 
around it against the wind. (p. 21) 
Gowdy presents Ron’s appreciation of Rachel’s 
beauty as unremarkable, even as we come to 
understand that this appreciation is lust turning 
to obsession. She is a beautiful child, and her 
mother is increasingly uncomfortable with the 
attention men pay her. As the novel opens, 
Celia “…has to finish filling in the modelling-
school application if she wants to make the 
deadline.” A photographer eyes Rachel “as if 
she were a used car” and tells Celia, “Little girls 
are a big deal right now” (p. 2). Celia is tempted 
by the thousand dollars he promises, but “Nine 
strikes her as a little young to start trading in on 
your looks….”  (p. 2).  Her misgivings, the subtly 
transmitted impression that she is being asked 
to sell her daughter, is, by itself, the striking 
critique of commonplace child eroticism in 
culture and media that Gowdy intends. In a 
Maclean’s Canada interview in May 2007, 
Gowdy admits that this social commentary was 
a big part of the genesis of the novel, which 
she intended to be about a family dealing with 
a child’s abduction.3 Helpless seems to have 
grown well beyond the author’s original scope, 
however; Ron is too central and too compelling 
to be the antagonist, and it is he who changes 
most in this novel.
Before he kidnaps Rachel, Ron stalks her. He 
sees that she lives in a house with a gay man, 
and that this man is often left alone with her. 
His reaction is so completely realistic – how 
many people still equate paedophilia and 
homosexuality? – that even his ignorance 
serves to create sympathy for him. He really 
does seem to believe that she is in danger, and 
he doesn’t see that his homophobic reaction 
is really jealousy, or that he represents the 
real danger she is in. As he prepares for the 
kidnapping by finishing his basement and 
furnishing a cell with a television and bed 
and dollhouse, he even involves Nancy in his 
delusion, subconsciously preying on her history 
as a sexually abused child and the capacity for 
denial that seems to be their strongest link to 
one another. Ron tells Nancy: 
 “After a while she’ll start to feel safe. 
She’ll want to stay because for the first 
time in her life she’ll understand what 
it is to live in a real home. We’ll be like 
parents to her. She’ll have both a mother 
– a good mother – and a father.” 
A crack of longing opens in Nancy. ”But she’ll 
tell people.”
Martin – Helpless – Junctures, 11, Dec 2008-11-02
121
“We’ll keep her down in the basement until 
we’re sure she won’t….”  (p. 94) 
Throughout the rest of the novel, Celia and her 
landlord Mika search for Rachel, imagining the 
worst despite their best efforts, burdened with 
pain and guilt. This draws surprising parallels 
between the characters, as Ron struggles to 
maintain control of his mounting sexual urges, 
to deny his guilt and maintain his delusion. And 
this is the novel’s greatest single achievement: 
the reader can legitimately pull for Ron. We 
want Ron to succeed, to maintain control, 
to remain the man he believes himself to 
be despite mounting evidence, and so it is 
difficult to deny that he is the protagonist. We 
sympathise with Rachel’s mother, Celia, and 
her other loved ones, certainly; but the only 
one who can effect a positive outcome to a 
very dark narrative is Ron. And we know that 
Ron is weak. We know that Ron, like Rachel, 
is helpless. 
A grown man who is “head over heels in 
love”4 with a six-year-old girl is a strange 
protagonist for a feminist author to adopt, 
though a passing acquaintance with Gowdy’s 
other work tends to lessen one’s surprise. 
Gowdy’s short story “Disneyland” was a staple 
in contemporary readings classes in creative 
writing programmes in the United States 
when it was published in The Best American 
Short Stories of 1989 (Boston: Houghton 
Mifflin, 1989).5 In “Disneyland” a father gives 
his children (apparently) inadequate gifts 
for Christmas, watches them cry for a few 
minutes, and then tells them that they are 
going to Disneyland for a summer vacation. 
Instead, the protagonist has her first period 
while entombed in a home-made bomb 
shelter with her alcoholic mother and this 
same maniacal father. The story became 
part of Gowdy’s novel, Falling Angels (Toronto: 
Somerville House, 1989), in which she visits 
the subject of juvenile eroticism when the 
father makes a pass at his youngest daughter 
(presumably because she has come to look 
so much like her mother), though Gowdy’s 
principal theme is always the way women’s 
bodies are constructed as dirty, foreign, and 
deficient. In Mister Sandman (South Royalton, 
Vt.: Steerforth Press, 1997), she writes about 
a married couple who are both secretly and 
painfully in love with the memories of same-sex 
sexual partners; they are outed to each other 
by their mute, albino daughter’s prodigious 
talent for composing music from recordings 
of secret conversations. In The White Bone 
(New York: Henry Holt, 1999), the protagonist 
is a young female elephant burdened by her 
enormous memory. Even in The Romantic 
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2003), which 
deals with much more conventional characters 
and conflicts, Gowdy’s sense of realism leans 
heavily toward the Gothic. 
I used Gowdy’s only book of short stories, 
We So Seldom Look on Love (New York: 
HarperCollins, 1992), in a first-year rhetoric 
course for business students at Babson College 
in Wellesley, Massachusetts. The students got 
that Gowdy wants us to understand that the 
female necrophile who narrates the title story 
is both a hyperbolic representation of male 
sexuality and a challenge to phallocentric 
culture; that the two-headed man’s obsession 
with normalcy ironically renders him monstrous; 
and that “Body and Soul” was meant to be 
uncomfortable for its readers in pointing to our 
constructions of social and physical difference. 
While many were excited by the outrageous 
subjects and situations Gowdy works with in 
these stories, many just couldn’t come to the 
point where they thought reading – or writing 
– incendiary and often graphic material of this 
nature was time well spent.
Martin – Helpless – Junctures, 11, Dec 2008-11-02
122
The following semester, I taught a research 
writing course to many of the same students 
based on disability studies scholarship. The 
class explored the ways the legal system and 
mass media construct physical perfection, 
physical fitness, physical and mental norms, 
and disability and deformity – themes and 
subjects at the centre of most of Gowdy’s work. 
Some of the most vocal students teased me 
for subjecting them to We So Seldom Look 
on Love, and the author became a point of 
comparison for unpopular assignments in 
the class: “At least it wasn’t Barbara Gowdy.” 
When I said I was reading her latest book, and 
that Gowdy was trying to create sympathy for 
a paedophilic protagonist, one young woman 
affected an expression of disgust and said, 
“Of course she is.”  Another student, a fan of 
Gowdy’s work because elements of it reminded 
him of his beloved Fight Club,6 articulated the 
reaction I believe Gowdy depends on:  “I don’t 
want to understand [paedophiles]; they should 
just be killed.”  This student had used an essay 
titled “Victims and Victors: Representation of 
Physical Disability on the Silver Screen” in his 
research, though he echoed a stereotype of 
disabled people the authors articulate – the 
disabled are “better off dead”.7 His hostility 
and revulsion supersede any rational argument 
about whether or not a problematic sexuality 
(and, by extension, mental condition) makes 
a person somehow not a person: paedophilia 
negates the paedophile’s right to life, and all of 
his human rights, in the minds of many people. 
Another stereotype of paedophiles is the belief 
that they get their just rewards when they are 
raped and brutalised in prison, ignoring any 
question of whether or not justice can be 
achieved through rape and brutality. 
This common hostility seems to surface in 
Kenneth Whyte’s interview of the author for 
Maclean’s Canada. The interview certainly 
demonstrates a gulf between the experiences 
of Gowdy and Whyte, as Gowdy repeatedly 
shocks him with harsh realities of girlhood: 
Whyte: There’s no doubt kids are more overtly 
sexualised today, but on the other hand there 
is a lot more social concern about men acting 
on sexual interest in young girls today than ever 
before. We’re firmly against it, there’s almost 
a hysteria about it.
Gowdy: Yes, we believe it’s almost the worst 
feeling you can have, as a  man – sexual 
interest in a child, girl or boy. It didn’t used to 
be the case. I mean, when I was a girl in the 
‘50s there were what we called funny men or 
gropers – the milkman was one, there was 
a guy down the street who in exchange for a 
candy would grope you. And we took advantage 
of that because we wanted the candy. And we 
knew these men were creepy, icky, and lost in 
a way, but we weren’t frightened by them.8 
Gowdy also mentions that more tolerant 
attitudes towards “sexual interference with 
children”9 less serious than rape might 
keep more children alive, a chilling point 
nevertheless worthy of scrutiny.
Whyte continually asserts that Ron is a 
paedophile, while Gowdy makes the distinction 
that Ron has “paedophilic thoughts” that he 
has not acted upon – thoughts which, she says, 
plague many men who are “heroic” in their 
choice not to act upon them. Whyte counters 
with the fact that Ron has done nothing 
“except kidnapping a little girl because he’s 
attracted to her...,” and Gowdy has a difficult 
time backpedalling. Then, Whyte goes on to 
ask Gowdy, essentially, if paedophiles should 
be considered human beings – after asking 
her why she would write about a paedophile 
at all. The more he objects to Gowdy’s very 
project, the more Helpless seems an important 
novel. Gowdy wants to appreciate human 
struggle in all its forms, but Helpless may do 
more than that. Gowdy sees what Ron feels as 
love, however repulsive his love may seem to 
Martin – Helpless – Junctures, 11, Dec 2008-11-02
123
the reader, or the interviewer.10 Gowdy never 
lets the reader forget that Ron is dangerous, 
but dares one to consider Ron human. The 
question then becomes, should we consider 
people like Ron mentally ill?  Should we 
construct his sexuality as psychological 
damage? Can we, after seeing other human 
beings categorised as monsters for whatever 
differences they demonstrate from the socially 
constructed sexual norm, conveniently call 
him a monster and be done with it? And, if so, 
can we also maintain our delusion that what 
Ron feels is so bad and wrong as to nullify his 
human rights, but that there is nothing wrong 
with the commonplace juvenile eroticism used 
in advertising, fashion, and popular film?11
What we lack, practically, is treatment for 
people like Ron, or even an awareness of 
his paedophilic feelings as a psychological 
disorder. Historically, much more effort has 
been directed towards the punishment of the 
offender than to the rehabilitation of the victim, 
with the result that many victims – both male 
and female – grow up to become predators, 
or to (at least) exhibit these predatory feelings 
which they cannot express, even to a therapist, 
for fear of being branded and institutionalised 
as a threat to others. At the end of the novel, 
after returning Rachel to her front yard, Ron 
drives away supposing he will kill himself. 
Here, consciously or unconsciously, Gowdy 
draws upon that pervasive stereotype shared 
by both paedophiles and disabled people, and 
anyone else who exists outside of mental and 
physical norms.12 
In this way Helpless is very much like Theodore 
Weesner’s novel The True Detective (New 
York: Summit Books, 1986), based upon a 
tragic real-life kidnapping in New Hampshire.13 
Weesner’s paedophile is a socially isolated 
young man with no self esteem, himself 
a victim of sexual and emotional abuse, 
who tries through half the novel to find an 
acceptable sexuality to express. He fails, 
kidnaps and rapes a boy who is fatally injured 
when he tries to escape, and commits suicide 
before the eyes of a compassionate policeman 
who mourns the loss of both boys.
The True Detective is more strictly speaking 
realistic, and harsher in its realism, than 
Gowdy’s narrative; the kidnapped boy in The 
True Detective is raped and then killed by 
a paedophile driven to desperation by the 
expression of what he, like Ron, sees as love. 
The end of Helpless is a relief, a happy ending 
when we know no such ending is likely or even 
possible in the real world. As Whyte asserts, 
Gowdy can write about anything she wishes. 
Any interpretation of her forced, classically 
comedic ending is inextricably bound up with 
the reader’s view as to whether a person can 
be something other than what he chooses. 
Both authors present us with paedophiles who 
possess consciences. Weesner’s kidnapper 
is compelling because the author shows us 
a young man who does not seem to have any 
way of stopping himself from committing a 
series of actions that are morally repulsive, 
even to him. But Ron does everything he can 
to control his urges – he drinks, he averts 
his gaze, he immerses himself in a fantasy 
that he is Rachel’s protector. The fact that he 
maintains control may be the most shocking 
element of this terrifying book.
1 Kenneth Whyte, “Interview with Barbara Gowdy,” 
Maclean’s Canada, 5 March 2007, http://www.
macleans.ca/homepage/magazine/article.jsp?c
ontent=20070305_103076_103076 (accessed 
9 July 2008). 
2 Carol Anshaw, “Odd lot” (Interview with author 
Barbara Gowdy), Artforum, June 1998, http://
findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3202/
is_199806?tag=artBody;col1 (accessed 9 July 
2008). 
3 Whyte, “Interview with Barbara Gowdy.”
Martin – Helpless – Junctures, 11, Dec 2008-11-02
124
4 Ibid.
5 Best American Short Stories 1989, ed. Margaret 
Atwood (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989).
6 Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (New York: WW 
Norton, 1996).
7 Rhonda S Black and Lori Pretes, “Victims and 
Victors: Representation of Physical Disability 
on the Silver Screen,” Research and Practice 
for Persons with Severe Disabilities, 32 (2007), 
66–83.
8 Whyte, “Interview with Barbara Gowdy.”
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Black and Pretes, “Victims and Victors.”
13 Theodore Weesner, The True Detective (New 
York: Summit Books, 1987).
Michael Gerhard Martin holds an MFA in 
Fiction from the University of Pittsburgh.  He 
is a Lecturer in the Rhetoric Program at 
Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts 
and teaches Fiction workshops for the Johns 
Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth 
Summer Programs.  He lives in Beverly, 
Massachusetts. 
Martin – Helpless – Junctures, 11, Dec 2008-11-02


Michael G Martin The Monster At The End of The Book: A Review of Barbara Gowdy’s "Helpless" (New York: Picador, 2007)

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