[In the following positive review of Natural History, Anshaw commends the novel's “subtle and subjective notion of story.”]

Stories can't always be held within conventional forms. Although novels most often put one page after the other in a forward progression, most narratives in life are not composed of a neatly chronological sequence of events, or even of just the events themselves. In truth, stories jump forward then back again, head off in several directions at once and include the imaginings of the participants as well as their behavior. It is this subtle and subjective notion of story that Maureen Howard plies in her latest novel.

Natural History is the story of both a family, the Brays, and a city, Bridgeport, Conn., (Howard's own home town). The first section of the book covers just a single March Saturday during World War II, following each of the Brays—parents Billy and Nell, children James and Cath—through small, quotidian events that nonetheless demonstrate the characters that will determine their fates.

Billy, a county detective, begins investigating the shooting death of a young soldier by the “Double Indemnity”-ish, 23-year-old wife of an absent Army major. Cath is humiliated when her project—Cotton, Queen of the South—does not win at the Girl Scout jamboree. James takes a clarinet lesson, buys some new magic tricks, and ducks the afternoon in the continuous night of a movie theater. While Nell worries obsessively about James coming to harm on his boyish way through his day, picturing the aftermath of a bicycle accident, “his fair head come to rest on a granite curb,” Cath is in fact running toward her father's passing car, out into the street with her failed project, “where she is hit—gently, unimportantly—by an oncoming car.”

From this one-city, one-day, Irish-American saga of swirling points of view, Howard jumps into an even more Joycean sequence of obliquely narrated pieces, tracking Cath and James into their very different adulthoods—his start as an aspiring actor in New York, hers as a low-rung editor in the Luce empire, a bad-luck girl with men who don't love her, then leave her to battle “the terrors of Saturday night” with enough Miltown to stop the pain that accompanies consciousness.

The novel's form then becomes eerily cinematic, with stage directions and props set out for James' ghostly narrator to tell the story of his rise to the middle rungs of fame.

“James steady almost inaudible: EX-ERCISE. You are permitted one direction, bare-assed in bare room. Let it be this: ‘Actors should be like martyrs but alive, still signalling to us from the stake.’ Anto-neen Artaud.

“The woman's laugh again then an intimate whisper: Later … yes, later, I gave my self to one cowboy, then another, beer breath, Westerns on TV. …”

The woman is a rodeo queen James meets on location, Lilah, who improbably becomes his devoted wife, throwing in her lot with him for the long run. Which has surprising turns. An unexpected last shot at parenthood. A late-in-life burst onto the mainstage of fame as the star of a detective show. In the end, James becomes loved by millions for impersonating the father who thought his acting a waste of lawyerly talents.

Meanwhile Cath has settled outside Bridgeport with her “particular friend,” Mary Boyle, a nun turned social worker who takes on the horrors of the projects every day while Cath sits at her loom, becoming a cult celebrity, a weaver in the ancient traditions, a curator of forgotten patterns.

Events do occur in the book, sometimes even in rough sequence. James, for instance, comes back to Bridgeport in hopes of making a movie based on his father's infamous case—the one with the 23-year-old wife and the dead soldier in her kitchen. While he's in town doing research, he meets Mary Boyle and, for an afternoon, they become lovers:

“James Bray doesn't know Mary Boyle from Minnie Mouse, from some cute extra, day hire on a film. Their intimacy crisscrossing time is the wily trick of an old Hitchcock thriller; or maybe his coming home, call it that, casts him back to lovesick boy, a role he never had much time for.”

But it is the reverberation of events—of Billy Bray's infamous case, of James' interlude with Mary Boyle, of Lilah's breeding her prize mare—that form the center of the novel, for it is really, Howard seems to be saying, the vibrations between us that add up to life, more than our individual actions.

The author is also drawn to the importance of place. Bridgeport, a city in decline through the whole of the Bray children's lives, looms as a character in their story. To give this background its full due, Howard lays out a long middle section of the book—“Double Entry”—with the narrative progressing along the righthand pages while the left-hand ones are cluttered with an old Sears catalog hodgepodge of lore on “The Park City,” on P. T. Barnum, who headquartered there (the commissioning in 1945 by Barnum & Bailey's Circus of George Balanchine to choreograph “The Elephants' Polka” to the music of Igor Stravinsky is my personal favorite), portraits of Tom Thumb and Jumbo the elephant, quotes from Louis Aragon, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin, along with scattered diagrams ranging from a scrap of crossword puzzle to one of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion car.

“Dip in, flip back or simply read on,” Howard instructs the reader, confronted with this peculiar format, and later she quotes Emerson: “All the facts of natural history, taken by themselves, have no value, but are barren like a single sex. But marry it to human history, and it is full of life.” Which would seem to be arguing for an amplification of the sort of story that can be told from a single point of view, with an ordinary narrator, leaving out all the bytes of public culture that inform our private affairs. Still, it's sometimes hard to see what Howard hopes to gain by this fragmentation.

Although readers may sometimes get lost in the maze of this book, those who persevere will be amply rewarded. Natural History is more than a story; it is an exponential explosion of all our complacent ideas of what a story is, how big it can be, how deep it can run, and how strong the currents are that pass through its wires of connection.