The Confessions of Frances Godwin

May 19, 2014
In Hellenga’s (The Sixteen Pleasures) latest novel, a Latin scholar on the precipice of old age wistfully recounts her life—beginning in 1963, the year she and her husband “joined our bodies—if not our souls.” Francis Godwin, a lapsed Catholic and graduating senior at Knox College in Illinois (where Hellenga has taught since 1968), met Paul at a party in celebration of Shakespeare’s birthday. “Paul and I began a torrid affair—at least that’s how I thought of it at the time, though ‘torrid,’ from Latin torridus, meaning parched or scorched, — is perhaps not the right word.” Their marriage was a meeting of the minds, but also a pairing of opposites: “He loved Homer, I loved Vergil; he turned to Plato for his metaphysics, I turned to Lucretius.” In the last year of Paul’s life, their grown daughter Stella’s reprobate husband, Jimmy, wreaks havoc on their quiet lives, triggering a primal virulence within Francis unknown even to herself. Reeling from the aftershock of her impulsivity, which goes unpunished, she must reevaluate herself and her faith. The minor characters aren’t as strong as Francis, but Hellenga’s feisty and learned narrator, who travels from the Casa di Giulietta in Verona to TruckStopUSA in Ottawa, is an entertaining guide.

May 15, 2014
Catullus, the confession box, a loaded gun and a muscle car punctuate a former teacher's memories in a novel rich with life and strangely awkward.Entering retirement after teaching Latin for 41 years in Illinois, Frances Godwin begins to write of her past in what becomes a "spiritual autobiography" as she ponders love, regrets, losses and wrongs unredressed. Her 33-year marriage ends painfully as her husband slowly succumbs to lung cancer. She can't forgive herself for not granting some of his wishes. She's also troubled by her violence in dealing with her daughter's abusive husband, then struggles with the Roman Catholic imperative to formally confess her sin. As happens to many of the main characters in the six previous novels by Hellenga (Snakewoman of Little Egypt, 2010, etc.), this Midwesterner goes to Italy, where she unburdens her soul to a priest whose reaction is laissez faire. Odder still are a meeting with her dead husband and her conversations with the voice of God. They're presented as literal chats-comic, ironic, combative (the Almighty on Bill Clinton: "I told him to keep it in his pants"). There's another sort of deity in the deus ex machina supplied by the valuable vintage car she left covered for years in her garage. With a woman as intelligent and well-grounded as Frances-a published translator of Catullus, an accomplished pianist, a lover of beauty, a seeker of life's pith-these implausible elements raise unfortunate doubts about whether she should be taken seriously.A resourceful storyteller, Hellenga presents a likable heroine confronting guilt, self-doubt and wavering faith, a woman strong enough to do just fine without divine intervention.

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June 15, 2014

What transgressions would a retired high school Latin teacher in Illinois have to confess? You'd be surprised. In this fictional "spiritual autobiography," Frances Godwin looks back at the unexpected twists and turns her life has taken in this nuanced character study of a complex woman. Frances and her late husband, Paul, a college professor, shared a deep love of music, literature, and, especially, all things Italian. (Italy is almost a character itself in this novel.) Frances has known her share of trouble over the years; her daughter, Stella, has an unerring instinct for choosing the worst possible boyfriends. When lowlife Jimmy viciously abuses Stella, Frances takes the law into her own hands, surprising herself and the reader. Hellenga tackles some big questions here, but not without humor. In a state of crisis, the protagonist suddenly begins hearing what she assumes is the voice of God, even though she doesn't really believe in him. VERDICT In this highly original novel exploring the hidden depths of one older woman, Hellenga (The Sixteen Pleasures) shows that he is a writer who deserves to be more widely known. [See Prepub Alert, 1/26/14.]--Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2014

Because Hellenga is the author of Snakewoman of Little Egypt and The Sixteen Pleasures, readers of serious fiction will want to grab this new book, the fictional memoir of a retired high school Latin teacher. Frances looks back on her life with some regrets but remains in the here and now, intervening when her daughter's husband gets abusive.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2014
Art conservators, college professors, avocado wholesalers, an elephant who paints, blues musicians, snake-handlers, Latin teachers, truck driversnovelist Robert Hellenga writes about all kinds of people. His books are very different, as that list of characters' occupations suggests, but they are similar, too, with themes reoccurring like motifs in a fugue: Italy, the nature of beauty, love found and lost, and the rhythms of daily life, which are somehow sustaining both in their intimacy and in their very ordinariness. His latest novel and one of his best, The Confessions of Frances Godwin, incorporates all of these themes while telling a story very different from anything he has done before. Hellenga, who teaches English at Knox College in downstate Illinois, is one of those writers who inspire a special kind of devotion in their readers. When two Hellenga fans encounter one another and learn of their shared enthusiasm, something happens that's not unlike members of a secret society exchanging funny handshakes. Inevitably, the conversation turns to Hellenga's first novel, The Sixteen Pleasures (1994), about art conservator Margo Harrington, who reappears in Philosophy Made Simple (2006) and The Italian Lover (2007). In Sixteen Pleasures, Margo is a 29-year-old woman of limited experience who travels to Florence to help with the restoration of art treasures damaged in the great floods of 1966. Living in a convent, she stumbles upon a rare volume of erotica in the convent library and subsequently tumbles into an affair with an older and supremely sophisticated Italian man. The novel is a sumptuous and sensual love story, but it's also, as Hellenga has described it, an occupational story, in that the most sensual passages in the book describe Margo's detailed, loving work on the pieces of art she helps restore. Above all, though, the novel introduces Hellenga's great theme of the melancholy transience of love. The lovers in Hellenga's moving, profound novels do not live in a world of conventional happy endings. His romances often end in attenuated moments of both disappointment and tenderness, partings that have the feel not of failed relationships but of life moving on and working out as it must. The theme reappears in Snakewoman of Little Egypt (2010), about a young woman named Sunny, who grew up in a snake-handling church in Illinois' Little Egypt area and who falls in love with an anthropology professor, Jackson, entranced by her stories of the Church of the Burning Bush with Signs Following. Jackson and Sunny dance between the safe harbor of their life together and the wider sea of courage, risk, and adventure, each teaching the other about the many forms of joie de vivre. Yes, it is a melancholy story, but it is also immensely satisfying and even uplifting in that unique way that only deeply felt life can provide. That same sense of deeply felt life pervades Hellenga's new book. Frances Godwin is a retired high-school Latin teacher looking back at her life with her late husband, Paul, and musing over wrong turns taken and roads untraveled. With marriage and career behind her, she assumes that her life is winding down but quickly learns differently, as she comes to the aid of her daughter, trapped in an abusive marriage. What happens is shockingthe world of decisive action suddenly interrupting the quiet of a contemplative lifebut it isn't the action that drives the story but Frances' attempts to make sense of it. She calls her story a spiritual autobiography, and despite being anything but pious, she engages in ongoing conversations with God, who turns out to be quite a wily fellow. Frances wants desperately to believe that the...