Helen Moran: Bon Vivant

Miguel Cervantes

9/10/17

            I like Helen Moran.  I really do. 

She’s crazy, bombastic, death-obsessed and – when it comes to matters of life and death – utterly practical.  Helen’s returned from her self-imposed exile in New York city, “that glittering, amorally rich, and enormous hellhole” (p. 30), to uncover the true cause of her adoptive brother’s suicide.  She suspects the abyss, a lingering, all consuming awareness of life’s futility, a dark and seemingly unavoidable reality that steadily gnaws at the soul, keeping one’s mind in a constant state of negative friction with all things life-affirming. 

Helen styles herself a detective of her adoptive brother’s seemingly unremarkable life, conducting a post-mortem of his suicide that takes her on a path into their shared, troubled childhood.  All the while Helen remarks on the futility of things, the sad, bitter truth underlying our experience as human beings; not glorious, not noble, not even worthwhile – instead we are all subject to the self-soothing illusions that only seem to enrich our lives.  This I think, is one of the reasons why I like Helen Moran, for though she portrays the abyss as a lure, a dark siren of sorts luring us ever closer to the edge of nothing, the truth is that Helen is the abyss. 

In her person, her experiences, her life-choices and her heightened sense of futility throughout life she has actually come to embody the dark place completely.  If her adoptive brother’s life of bland, mind-dulling regularity was a consequence of his choice to contemplate the abyss from the relative safety of his boyhood home, then Helen’s choices – the polar opposite of her brothers – were an active, if not entirely conscious, attempt to enter the void in its entirety.  Helen herself recognizes this on p. 114, after recalling her sexual assault in New York.  She declares herself at peace with what she sees as the ugly aspects of human sexuality, including her own sexual desires, but admits: “Underneath my peace there was anger, an ugly anger, the force of it was formidable, and I was the one who had to live with it.  Everything was bitter.” (p. 114) 

The lens of the void is palpable here, but what is equally remarkable is how Helen deals with her nihilistic self.  Rather than follow her brother’s path, Helen remains insistent that her acquired skills can help her fellow man.  Throughout the entire book she is bursting with helpfulness, turning her attention from troubled teens to her troubled parents to the mystery of her brother’s troubled end and finally, towards her own troubled life.  There is no end of trouble in Helen’s Moran’s world, but she remains utterly practical about all of it, establishing herself as a reliable person (Hey, Sister Reliability!) whose reliable process (“start with the physical and proceed to the mental.” p. 141-2) will lead her steadily towards illumination.  This cherished belief sustains her, and swiftly becomes one of the chief pillars upon which her world view is based. 

The world itself may be a swelling cesspit of humanity, but Helen Moran remains steadfast in her skills of organization, practicality and helpfulness.  As such, she believes steadily in her power to advise: “I have always been a great dispenser of advice and was surprised more people didn’t consult me or seek me out.  Why was I always seeking others out and no one comes to look for me anymore?” (p. 125)

The fact that more people don’t recognize her inherent wisdom bothers Helen quite a bit.  Her inner voice is always struggling to get out, to make that magical leap from one consciousness to another.  It is, in many ways, her only means of contributing to the world around her, making the process all that more crucial.  Yet, throughout my reading of the book, I couldn’t help but wonder if Helen’s inner voice was really that of Helen, or that of the abyss, musing in its own dark way on the matter-of-fact pointlessness of human endeavors. 

I began to sense that Helen’s identity and that of the abyss had merged quite early when, as a twelve-year old, she took her nine-year old adoptive brother’s ‘confession’ during a childhood trip to a broken-down water mill.  The adoptive sibling’s game was well established by then, but this is the first time that we are given an extended look at Helen’s early interaction with her adoptive brother.  The confession is horrible, the punishment lenient, but what rises up from that surreal mixture of play and the expiation of childhood guilt is Helen’s pronouncement, delivered in the fashion of a prophetess of the void,

“You’re going to die at some point, I said, and it’s over.  It’s really over.  It doesn’t matter if you’re forgiven or not.  It’s made up, it’s all pretend.  Do you understand?  It doesn’t matter!” (p. 57)

Rather than relieve her brother of his guilt, rather than pronounce him forgiven, Helen dismisses the fantasy and proclaims life to be a lie.  She demonstrates a keen awareness of mortality, channeling the void to expose our flimsy concepts of guilt, forgiveness and salvation.  The trappings of religious and ritual fall by the wayside, and in Helen’s voice one can detect the certain despair of a child who is permeated by the bleak and unforgiving abyss.  This is the kind of intimate contact that often serves as a downward catalyst, drawing the mind deeper and deeper into contemplation of the body’s fragile and ultimately doomed existence.  Helen’s brother was undeniably affected by revelations such as these, and it’s quite likely that her observations of his character, such as, “he was comfortable anywhere he was not forced to confront his own physical discomfort with being alive,” can be traced backed to their childhood days, when his older adoptive sister invited and nourished a bleak, but undeniably clear world view. 

This certainly begs the question of Helen’s own subsistence: Just how does an individual immersed in the void sustain themselves?  My hunch is that the abyss nourished her.  It hardened her against the trials of her early childhood, her lasting sense of despair and disconnection from her peers, her adoptive parents and her community, and in return Helen became its prophet, allowing its voice to blend seamlessly with hers, producing moments throughout the text where she speaks without heed for person, place or propriety, delivering messages that repel her listeners, chilling them to their core.  She does this readily during her discussion with her adoptive mother and Chad Lambo (p. 74), her conversation with Thomas, one of her adoptive brother’s closest friends (p. 110-17) and over the phone with her adoptive brother’s dentist (p. 142).

There is always a sense of heightened lucidity when Helen speaks to people about her adoptive brother.  She does not shy away from his death or it’s details, but those around her recoil; it really isn’t so much that Helen is ‘disrupting the peace’ (p. 126), she is pointing directly at the ungainly holes in the fabric of our day to day world and reminding everyone of their persistence.  ‘All humans have an inflated sense of ego…” (p. 144) Helen declares, and in the course of her pursuit it becomes apparent that the secrets of her adoptive brother’s suicide lie behind a tangle of egos that are eager to avoid the shadows cast by the abyss. 

So Helen remains an outcast, but she also remains undaunted.  Her connection to her adoptive brother and her desire to make sense of his life spurs her onward and it is this persistence, I think, that makes her so admirable.  Everyone else in her world runs from death, but Helen is determined to unlock its secrets, one slice of funeral cake at a time.