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Things to Come and Go
160 pages, Paperback
Published July 27, 2023
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About the author
Bette Howland
9 books43 followersWriter, critic, and MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient Bette Howland died last week at the age of 80. “No matter what her subject is, Mrs. Howland is always looking for the bone and marrow of Chicago,” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in a 1978 review of Blue in Chicago. “And always the prose with which she searches is arrhythmical, nervous, self-questioning, passionate. You can’t fall into step with her, because the moment you do she shifts her cadence and takes off for another part of town, another time, another thing about Chicago.” However, though much awarded and clearly brilliant, she has in recent years been more-or-less forgotten by the literary establishment. “What happened to a career that held such talent and promise?” A.N. Devers asked in a 2015 piece about Howland and her rediscovery by Brigid Hughes, Howland was nomadic and often lived in isolation. Why did she retreat from what she had earned for herself? What role has the literary community played in allowing her work to fall from memory? Her son Jacob thinks the MacArthur is part of the answer.” Indeed, she didn’t publish anything else after winning the award.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
July 29, 2025
things to come and go is a collection that promised me the quiet brilliance of ordinary life. and in many ways, it delivered — just not in the way I had hoped. maybe it's my fault for expecting her to glow like chantal akerman on the page. I wanted that same cinematographic plainness, that precision of detail, the sharp slice of the everyday. and yes, it's all here. But the light flickers. sometimes it dazzles; other times it just… dulls.
howland writes as though peering through a window at people who don’t know they’re being watched. her stories don’t move in straight lines or offer the comfort of narrative arcs. instead, they unfold like a series of half-overheard conversations or lingering glances: fragments of a dinner table, a hallway argument, a memory that smells like breakfast. these aren’t stories you read about people; you read them with them — as if you're sitting across the room, quietly absorbing the mess and ache of human proximity.
what I find most impressive is her slipperiness with the self. even when the first person appears, it never settles into autobiography. the "I" is always a little elusive — not hidden, but never quite pinned down either. we feel the person's nerves, contradictions, the way they half-love and half-resent the world. It’s not a confessional voice — it’s a psychological map. and sometimes, it’s a maze.
this is clearest in the third novella, the life you gave me, where the writing meanders, and not in the good way. the strength of howland’s prose lies in her economy, the ability to capture something vast in just one sentence. when she veers too far from that, when the language gets looser, some of the sharpness gets lost. her storytelling suffers when it forgets the structure that once made it sting.
but the voice — oh, the voice. howland’s prose is never ornate or flashy yet it holds an enormous emotional charge. It’s not just about style, it’s about precision. her words carry the weight of people who say little but feel much. there’s humor too, the kind that bubbles up not from punchlines but from the absurdity of being alive and human and in close quarters with others. a kind of weary laughter that comes with too much knowing.
there’s one moment, narrated from the point of view of a woman working as a nanny:
“and, once in a while, didn’t she wish that those children were hers?”. it landed like a quiet punch. not for what it said, but for how exactly it captured a deeply private contradiction: love without ownership, responsibility that aches because it has no roots. I felt it in my bones, maybe because I’ve felt the same thing with mis niñes (my own students during my teaching practice). that fierce, quiet desire to care more deeply than the world is willing to let you, to give more than your role technically allows. that line wasn’t beautiful because it was lyrical, it was beautiful because it hurt in a way that’s hard to name.
other lines struck with equal precision:
“some days she didn't know what to be afraid of first” — a whole thesis on hypervigilance tucked into one breath. “he liked best the way she smelled these mornings” — a sensory shard of memory that makes you wince with how intimately it knows longing. and then there’s that crisp loneliness of “she was never as lonely now as she had been with him.” if you know, you know.
there’s wit, too, rough-edged and perfectly delivered: “maybe it ain’t poetry, but I never said it was my epitaph”. you can’t teach that kind of line, it’s the kind of truth that sneaks in through the back door and makes itself comfortable.
still I wanted more. or maybe I wanted less — less wandering in the weaker stories, less blurring of what she does best. but perhaps that’s the point. the collection isn’t here to satisfy narrative hunger. it’s here to sit with you, like someone at a diner table who talks about nothing and somehow makes you cry over your coffee.
howland doesn’t just write life — she renders it awkward, uneven, occasionally dull, and heartbreakingly real. it's not always brilliant, but it is always human, and that, maybe, is enough.
howland writes as though peering through a window at people who don’t know they’re being watched. her stories don’t move in straight lines or offer the comfort of narrative arcs. instead, they unfold like a series of half-overheard conversations or lingering glances: fragments of a dinner table, a hallway argument, a memory that smells like breakfast. these aren’t stories you read about people; you read them with them — as if you're sitting across the room, quietly absorbing the mess and ache of human proximity.
what I find most impressive is her slipperiness with the self. even when the first person appears, it never settles into autobiography. the "I" is always a little elusive — not hidden, but never quite pinned down either. we feel the person's nerves, contradictions, the way they half-love and half-resent the world. It’s not a confessional voice — it’s a psychological map. and sometimes, it’s a maze.
this is clearest in the third novella, the life you gave me, where the writing meanders, and not in the good way. the strength of howland’s prose lies in her economy, the ability to capture something vast in just one sentence. when she veers too far from that, when the language gets looser, some of the sharpness gets lost. her storytelling suffers when it forgets the structure that once made it sting.
but the voice — oh, the voice. howland’s prose is never ornate or flashy yet it holds an enormous emotional charge. It’s not just about style, it’s about precision. her words carry the weight of people who say little but feel much. there’s humor too, the kind that bubbles up not from punchlines but from the absurdity of being alive and human and in close quarters with others. a kind of weary laughter that comes with too much knowing.
there’s one moment, narrated from the point of view of a woman working as a nanny:
“and, once in a while, didn’t she wish that those children were hers?”. it landed like a quiet punch. not for what it said, but for how exactly it captured a deeply private contradiction: love without ownership, responsibility that aches because it has no roots. I felt it in my bones, maybe because I’ve felt the same thing with mis niñes (my own students during my teaching practice). that fierce, quiet desire to care more deeply than the world is willing to let you, to give more than your role technically allows. that line wasn’t beautiful because it was lyrical, it was beautiful because it hurt in a way that’s hard to name.
other lines struck with equal precision:
“some days she didn't know what to be afraid of first” — a whole thesis on hypervigilance tucked into one breath. “he liked best the way she smelled these mornings” — a sensory shard of memory that makes you wince with how intimately it knows longing. and then there’s that crisp loneliness of “she was never as lonely now as she had been with him.” if you know, you know.
there’s wit, too, rough-edged and perfectly delivered: “maybe it ain’t poetry, but I never said it was my epitaph”. you can’t teach that kind of line, it’s the kind of truth that sneaks in through the back door and makes itself comfortable.
still I wanted more. or maybe I wanted less — less wandering in the weaker stories, less blurring of what she does best. but perhaps that’s the point. the collection isn’t here to satisfy narrative hunger. it’s here to sit with you, like someone at a diner table who talks about nothing and somehow makes you cry over your coffee.
howland doesn’t just write life — she renders it awkward, uneven, occasionally dull, and heartbreakingly real. it's not always brilliant, but it is always human, and that, maybe, is enough.
Displaying 1 of 1 review