PEARL
K.
BELL
69
memoir
Facts of Life,
Bridgeport has been Howard's Dublin, the native
ground that has possessed her imagination with the ferocious tenacity of
a demon - the demon of memory- that will never let her go. In this
new, enormously ambitious and eccentric novel, Howard concentrates
on yet another Irish Catholic family, the Brays, whom we first meet to–
ward the end of the War.
Billy Bray, the father, is a swaggering county detective; his wife Nell,
who "married down," is chronically worried about her teenage children,
James and Catherine, and tries to exorcise her amorphous anxieties in fa–
natical housekeeping. James is obsessed with magic tricks and movies;
Catherine is an earnest Girl Scout, miserably unsure of herself and dream–
ily pious. Suddenly the family romance is thrust aside by a murder
(again.0
that Billy is assigned to investigate in a nearby town. An aggressively sexy
woman, whose husband is a major in the Army in Italy, has shot a young
soldier. She claims the soldier followed her home from a local tavern
and was plainly up to no good. Years after the murder, which relentlessly
haunts the Bray children, Catherine suspects that Billy had treated himself
to the sexual favors of the accused woman and made sure she was acquit–
ted. It is never explained, however, why her father's supposed transgres–
sion plagues Catherine well into middle age.
But any attempt to convey what passes for plot in
Natural History
is
doomed, for Howard has a great deal more than straightforward narra–
tive in mind. As it develops - or rather, flits hither and yon with antic
restlessness - the novel becomes a pinwheel of history: by turns an as–
semblage, a jigsaw puzzle, a scrapbook, a hodgepodge, a three-ring cir–
cus (the exploits of the great showman P. T . Barnum, a luminary of
Bridgeport, play a prominent part in the book), a recycling bin, a
screenplay, and much more. Within bits of murky suggestion and frag–
ments of fact, we learn that James becomes a Hollywood actor. When
he realizes his film career isn't going anywhere, he decides to return to
Bridgeport to make a movie about the wartime murder, in which he
will play the father-detective. Thus the long chapter called "Closet
Drama" takes the form of a screenplay, complete with lighting and stage
directions, that wanders erratically through James's movie career, mar–
riages and children, his unrealistic expectations about the film, and his sis–
ter's opposition to the whole idea because it might expose the unsavory
truth about their father.
But the display of Howard's uncontainable ingenuity in "Closet
Drama"
is only one segue. Midway through
Natural History,
she embarks
on
the most arduously daring of extravagant improvisations, an eighty–
page
section called "Double Entry" (as in bookkeeping, presumably be–
cause the author is totting up the debits and credits of the Bray family
