In the Middle of Nowhere

by Fanny Howe

In The Middle of Nowhere  is a fictional story set in a New England town. It shows a glimpse into the meeting of the lives of four characters. Moods of landscape and weather reflect their states of mind, and incline them towards actions which represent the terminal points of character.

238 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Fanny Quincy Howe was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. She was raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Howe wrote more than 20 books of poetry and prose. Her major works include poetry such as One Crossed Out, Gone, and Second Childhood; the novels Nod, The Deep North, and Indivisible; and collected essays such as The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life and The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation.
Howe received praise and official recognition: she was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize by the Poetry Foundation. She also received the Gold Medal for Poetry from the Commonwealth Club of California. In addition, her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for the most outstanding book of poetry published in 2000. She was a finalist for the 2015 International Booker Prize. She also received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Arts Council, and the Village Voice. She was professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego and lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's a spare, gripping, refined quality to Howe's descriptions, to the way she begins interweaving the lives of these meticulously realized characters. As the novel progresses, though, the writing is always perfect, but my interest waned: the titular Middle of Nowhere never found a sense of place, instead her concerns seem entirely with the stifling morality freighted onto the decisions facing her characters. Even the essentially irreligious somehow seem weighted with god, something which surely makes much more sense to Howe than it can to me, but I felt left with little else to hold this together. In the end, I liked the characters, mostly, but not the courses Howe was bent on locking them to for dubious conceptual purpose -- the ones condemned, the one freed, all of it flickering away into pointless oblivion gleamed with a thin and frustrating meaning.

Still, I love Howe's earlier Fiction Collective novel Holy Smoke. Messier, weirder, more jaded and conflicted, spurious towards its own religion as only the actually religious are capable of (as fallen priests may, perhaps, conduct the best black masses), seething with unpredictable creation rather than, as here, railroaded to foregone judgement.