[In the following review, Davis offers a mixed assessment of Natural History.]

Matched in her spectacular range perhaps only by Toni Morrison, Maureen Howard can write in any style she chooses. Almost defiantly she follows her fancy wherever it leads, gathering unlikely personalities along the way. Natural History might be called, as one of its characters, P. T. Barnum, in a letter to Mark Twain, called his own most famous production, “a colossal traveling exhibition never before equaled.” The novel's multimedia form (well over a hundred pages are screenplay) gives easy passage from coast to coast and across the ocean. Well, not quite easy; multimedia productions on the printed page make their demands. But trust Howard; she always finds her way back to Bridgeport, Connecticut.

As with earlier works, Howard tells her story in separately complete segments. In the first of eight “Museum Pieces,” whose title suggests the Barnum Museum in Bridgeport, she describes an imaginary wall map: “The county entire, Fairfield County is shown as fabulously simple, the shallow blue waters of Long Island Sound, the pale green of its slight elevations in Redding and Trumbull, the heavy pink populace of the industrial centers—your city and others, Danbury, Stamford, Norwalk. Less than you imagined; unstoried, general issue, yet you dare not snap it back into oblivion as though … as though it is not your jurisdiction.”

In that last line Howard may be addressing James Bray, a popular actor who is planning throughout much of the novel to make a serious movie about the life of his father, a Bridgeport police detective until he died relatively young. The film will explore the mystery of his suspicious failure to send to prison a seductive young woman who murdered a World War II soldier.

Or the jurisdiction could rightfully belong to James' neglected younger sister, “Catherine, archivist from age 12, hooked early on queer secrets of the past. … Collecting dates, names, inventions, acts of God or man—truth of it all. …” By this time middle-aged and a genuine spinster (as craftswoman, she spins the wool she weaves), Catherine has gone to the public library to get out the old newspapers James will need to create the background for the film she desperately wants him not to make.

Or the author may be addressing herself, conceding her own need to keep searching among the detritus turned up from her continuing Bridgeport dig. Passionate about possible secrets, she is ambivalent about revealing them.

The characterization of Catherine as archivist occurs in a section called “Double Entry,” laid out in facing pages set in contrasting type. The left-hand pages, devoted to Bridgeport history, mostly from contemporary sources, are in boldface and inventively illustrated. Tom Thumb, the Siamese twins and Jenny Lind appear among hundreds of charming old linecuts. This section also uses lists, statistics, descriptions of gifts to the Barnum Museum from celebrities, poems (apparently the author's own), and scores of quotations, ranging from Sherlock Holmes to Oliver Wendell Holmes, all relating to Bridgeport legends. But Howard frees herself from rules: On a historical page she doesn't hesitate to speak directly to the reader or her characters and even add to their stories, which we expect to find on the facing pages.

Natural History might cause her fans to wonder if Maureen Howard had made a New Year's resolution to abstain from straightforward sentences. Here Lilah Lee, James' rodeo star third wife, gives a hint of her life before she became an anthropology student: “Sold myself to the horses, but inevitable as my tumble in the dust, I fell for one of those cowboys … another and another, bare-assed in bare rooms. Fairly innocent men, not always nice, mostly timid fellas who switched channels to find Westerns on TV. Crossing fully into their world, because the motel rooms were too empty or when the satin shirt and boots were off for the night, riding for the crowd was being no one.”

Howard attracted a following with her first two novels, Not a Word about Nightingales and Bridgeport Bus. But in 1976, with the publication of the third, her unwillingness to pander to those looking for an easy read brought a warning from the Library Journal that Before My Time was only “for discriminating readers.” Three years later, with the appearance of her memoir Facts of Life, described by one reviewer as a “caustic, sarcastic, unaffectionate memoir,” the Journal sounded another alarm: “Recommended only for libraries where her novels are popular.” Yet in 1986 critics called her novel Expensive Habits the work of “a brilliant comic writer.” And Grace Abounding (1982) begins with a delightfully bawdy scene in which a middle-aged heroine driving home from a grim visit to her aged mother enlivens the trip with fantasies about the variously succoring males who might rescue her after the blowout of a tire she purposely keeps in a perilous condition.

Here we have an author who has fun using her talents. Too much, perhaps, if you think of fun as self-indulgence. She seems to write around and over and about Bridgeport to assuage the urgencies of her own obsessions, her compulsion to go back and keep touching the personal wounds that never heal.

Therein, I think, lies the difference between Maureen Howard and Toni Morrison. Though Morrison writes about individuals, their lives connect with great concerns. Big things have happened in Bridgeport, too; far bigger than Barnum's Museum with all its campy fascination. Howard tells of Elias Howe and the invention of sewing machines, but nothing of the life of the people who made them. Early in the century the Bridgeport factory workers never saw winter daylight from one week's end to the next. Wasn't it there that the women, desperate, placed their bodies on the pavement, blocking the rinks coming to break their strike? In the whole section devoted to Bridgeport history we find no mention of such crucial moments.

Phone calls between James Bray and Hollywood types take up much of Natural History. From these, for all the dialogue's acuteness, we learn nothing new. But the reader will surely remember and respond to the brief passages telling of Catherine's social worker roommate visiting a Bridgeport housing project. There she develops an almost demented yearning to adopt and give a future to the spunky, talented seven-year-old daughter of a drug-pushing prostitute. Howard employs all her offhand, unsentimental mastery of specifics to make us suffer through these scenes.

Good writers, even remarkable writers, can limit themselves to their own families. But the great writers, while telling about people they know, somehow by illuminating those lives manage to shine light beyond them, on the world outside. I hope her glimpse of that beguiling child of the project, with vermin in her curls, has caught Howard's imagination and opened her eyes to great new vistas, even in Bridgeport.