HENRY, HIMSELF
STEWART O'NAN
How do you capture a character's entire life in a novel? Do you write a grand, sweeping doorstop that details every important moment of the character's time on Earth chronologically? You can. However, in his seventeenth (!) novel Stewart O'Nan narrows the focus, concentrating on just a single year in the life of his protagonist, Henry Maxwell.
Henry's seventy-five, a man who's lived his entire life in Pittsburgh; he worked as an engineer, even working on rocket programs, but these days his life is much simpler. He's what comes to mind when you think of a typical father and grandfather; Henry spends most of his free time at his workbench, fussing with household projects, endlessly fiddling and tinkering; in social gatherings he's reserved, usually letting his charismatic wife Emily carry conversations, and he's tried to take a neutral approach when it comes to dealing with the problems of his children. But in Henry, Himself we learn that there's a lot boiling underneath Henry's placid surface; hearing classical music reminds him of his first great crush. She was his childhood piano teacher, a captivating German woman who, after a year, moves back to her home country and (Henry assumes) dies during World War Two. Emily's gentle teasing about his love of leftovers reminds him of desperately eating a horse he and his troop found in a flattened French barn. Planting flowers brings him bittersweet memories of his white-hot romance with Sloan, a socialite with whom he had an affair after the war, a secret he's never revealed to Emily.
This isn't the first time O'Nan's written about Henry. Wish You Were Here follows the Maxwell family at their summer cottage a year after Henry's death. Emily, Alone picks up eight years later and gives us deep insights into Emily, a country girl who transformed herself into a city woman, hard to please and full of passion, someone who still misses her husband greatly. Each time the reader gets the feeling that O'Nan is returning to these characters because he has more to say, which makes perfect sense with this book; in both of the previous Maxwell novels Henry's always been a (metaphorical) ghost hovering just out of frame, recollected when Emily throws away her old luggage or finally trades in Henry's ancient station wagon.
In Henry, Himself we learn that Henry, who always seemed to absolve himself of family drama, is in fact intensely curious, eavesdropping on his children when they visit, trying to figure out their lives from afar. He's the kind of man who organizes his receipts in reverse chronological order and hesitates to call professionals to clean the gutters even with it's raining heavily outside. His stubbornness is both a positive and, as his body begins to betray him, a curse; more and more he has to rely on his son Kenny to do laborious projects at their cabin in Chautauqua. He putters around the house, waiting for the mail, and there's even a (surprisingly funny) chapter in which Henry literally watches the grass grow, determined to make his lawn green once again after years of urinary assaults by his dog Rufus.
He worries about his daughter Margaret, an alcoholic who can never seem to get a handle on her finances, and is concerned that Emily will die before him, leaving him alone. Readers of the other Maxwell books know the sad truth: Henry doesn't have much time left, and Emily will live on for at least a decade without him.
The great gift of Henry, Himself is that O'Nan gives us a chance to spend some intimate time with a man fiction lovers have been hearing about from time to time since 2002; we get to watch him stealthily sneak candy bars out of the freezer and pay his taxes and walk Rufus and struggle to make gravy. Even after reading 370 pages we wish that Henry was still here.
