[In the following review, Robinson praises the experimental narrative techniques used by Howard in Natural History.]

Maureen Howard writes about her abiding subject, the family, with fierce rigor, as though she were at the same time writing in defense of the family novel itself. Not for her the cozy domestic zones where passions are labeled and personal histories are smugly untangled into “relationships.” In the seven books she has published since 1960, Howard's humor and ready sympathy are buttressed by a stubborn refusal to slim down her people and their stories. She insists on taking her time, conferring on her novels such seriousness that reading them takes time, too. The narratives are bumpy, full of abrupt turns, disconcerting stops and starts. Readers keep busy putting together all the pieces she lays before them. “Come now,” she seems to say, “You didn't expect me to do all the work for you.”

Howard deliberately makes it impossible to generalize about her families, fending off the sociologists with a barrage of complicating information. “I may have a fatal resistance to abstractions,” she wrote in her deft 1978 memoir, Facts of Life. Indeed there are few “key” passages in Howard's books where significances are at last spelled out, for she knows that a bald statement, untempered by self-deprecation, risks toppling her entire narrative. Instead Howard works by accumulation of more portable details—totemic objects, deceptively offhand utterances, telling gestures. It's by such small observations—a woman's “frayed Keds sliced for the bunions”; a man unwittingly acquiring his father's favorite conversation starter, “tell me”—that Howard's characters are best measured. They show off new aspects of their personalities with such frequency that we are challenged to keep making acts of recognition, to hold off reaching conclusions. At the very moment someone seems finally to have selected a permanent mask, Howard proposes a contradictory way of looking at him, one that is just as convincing. The “facts of life,” the character's life, are constantly in dispute.

In Bridgeport Bus (1965), for instance, the character Mary Agnes Keely is ever more inventive at self-renovation, but also determined at times to tarnish her new luster and retreat to familiar ground. Pinkham Strong in Expensive Habits, from 1986, renounces his aristocratic breeding and opens an East Village used-clothing store, but also obsessively investigates his family's labelled past. Still another character, Margaret Flood in the same novel, wants to lock into her relationships with friends, offspring, spouses current and ex, yet at the same time longs to get out from under the suffocating attention. She relies on routine—familiar wisecracks, well-rehearsed fumblings in love and enmity—but nonetheless thrills to those times when routine breaks down in a moment of flirtation or blasphemy. Such mercurial characters occupy a rigid institution like the family only tentatively, and rarely for long. Howard's families are never more vivid than when they dissolve; never more poignant than when they try, and usually fail, to regroup.

Howard's refreshing distrust of psychological consistency and ultimate “meaning” informs her new novel, Natural History, making its emotional appeal indirect, unassuming, yet all the more satisfying once found. Again the central figures form a family, and again the family imperfectly coheres, demands to be seen in fragments. But now Howard reaches further, beyond domestic history into histories of places, beliefs, longings, and vices.

In Natural History Howard returns to her native Bridgeport, Connecticut, the city fled in Bridgeport Bus and later retrieved in Facts of Life. This time she comes upon Bridgeport just as it slides from World War II prosperity, when its industries profited handsomely from military contracts, to the gray beleaguerment and dog-eared homeliness it still retains. As the war winds down, Billy Bray is comfortably settled in his tiny fiefdom as county detective, on easy terms with both the district attorney and the local mob, an expert at making his indifference seem charming and masking his bewilderment with banter.

Billy's family doesn't know much more about him than his colleagues do. Nell, his wife, no longer presses him for intimacy and instead tries to obscure her disappointment with elaborate facades. Her efforts only make the sadness more obvious: the woman reared to expect dignity and order in the domestic sphere has never quite given up hoping for a reprieve. She's always tidying shelves of majolica plates and Toby jugs, tearing down cobwebs, patching frayed elbows, or sewing loose buttons tighter—all the while worrying that others will notice the seam, the flaw, the dust.

Nell's daughter, Catherine, inherits some of the same intense self-abnegation. Even at age 11, she's anxious about her salvation, pursued by visions of mortal sin, desperate to learn how to transcend the everyday and give herself over to a redeeming mission. Catherine's brother, James, the fourth corner in the family, also wants a way out of household claustrophobia, but can't imagine what might follow such a violent severance. He is cocky and secretive, in love with movies and magic tricks, able to turn his family into rapt spectators at his performance as son and brother.

“Four faces … each dealt a small portion of wrong and pain,” Howard writes. But even at its most acute, the pain never quite breaks through the surface of their well-practiced stoicism—even when Billy's detective work takes him into the middle of a tabloid-tailored murder case and he suffers public humiliation from the acquittal of the sulky socialite who shot the soldier on leave. Not for another forty years, with Billy and Nell long dead, would their children, now in their 50s—Catherine a professional weaver, James a Hollywood actor looking for a way to regain his bankable allure—return to Bridgeport and try to identify what, if anything, held the Brays together.

Just as her characters spend most of their lives trying to dodge destined identities and elude the consequences of their past, Howard achieves her own amazing formal sleight of hand, assuming numerous guises in which to tell her story. Natural History is a novel always in the midst of breaking free of itself, its pages filled with brilliant variations on the screenplay, the encyclopedia, the diary, and, of course, the history book. In a prefatory note, Howard refers to the novel's “entries,” as if Natural History were a captain's log.

Acknowledging its affinities with the distinguished tradition of narrative restlessness and genre-trespassing headed by Sterne and Joyce, Natural History is part mystery story, part domestic etude, part epic saga. Chapters of telegraphic reflection presented in a clipped first person vie with aloof, majestic narration in other chapters; points of view swerve violently. Often the book jumps literary boundaries altogether and reaches toward the greater tangibility of the collage. A middle section called “Double Entry” presents one story on its right-hand pages and, on the opposite pages, an assortment of drawings, photographs, diagrams, doodles, essays (including a particularly apt homage to Joseph Cornell), and scavenged images and quotations from brochures, calling cards, menus, advertisements, and newspapers—all of which speckle another written version of the Bray chronicle.

With welcome leniency, Howard announces at the start of “Double Entry” that readers should feel free to “dip in, flip back, or simply read on.” She learned of the pleasures of multiplicity and distraction, she says, from Walter Benjamin, whose shade hovers over the entire novel as a sort of ideal reader. But Howard doesn't adopt the flaneur's wide-ranging curiosity simply for the amusements available. Such resourcefulness is necessary if she (and her characters) are ever going to understand their relationship to what is remembered. A subtle current of desperation runs beneath the novel—fear at the consequences of not retrieving the past, perhaps, or worry about what might happen if the search is successful—and that tension seems to impel Howard toward greater and greater acts of narrative ingenuity.

Perhaps the atmosphere in Natural History is so pressed because, having exerted its attractions in book after book, the city of Bridgeport has assumed an almost mystical awesomeness. Here Howard writes as if she wants to compass and contain its force once and for all. Thus Natural History periodically returns to cool descriptions of Bridgeport's layout: at the start Howard explicitly maps the territory, chanting its streets and avenues—North, Parrott, Main, Iranistan, Golden Hill—as if thereby to elicit their secrets one by one. But real information about this town and its citizens isn't so tractable. A long chapter called “Closet Drama,” in which the prose is rigged with stage directions and notes about lighting, allows more of one character, James, to come into view. His monologue provides details of his failed marriages, show-biz rivalries and debacles, and a sudden resolution to change his fate, but most of all it allows us to hear his voice. His uneasy blend of chutzpah and self-disgust—his “you bet!” and “babe!” giving way to long silences, stammerings, and blustery impersonations—reveals the soured man hoping to act his way out of himself.

Catherine's lingering, exploratory rhythm is a marked change from her brother's. And still different voices come from Catherine's feisty roommate Mary Boyle, a social worker; Mr. De Martino, an old clarinet teacher; and James's wife, the rodeo-smitten Lilah. Having netted these lives in her imagination, Howard pulls them apart with ever-steady fastidiousness, acquiring their varied languages, dictions, ways of carrying themselves.

If Walter Benjamin is one inspiration for the novel's style, Bridgeport's favorite son, P. T. Barnum, is surely the other. He is a constant presence, captivating in his unabashed love of performance, his tireless search for the extraordinary specimen and dazzling event designed to guarantee enchantment. James is his most obvious emulator, but Barnumism in one form or another overtakes most of the characters. Whenever he's most pinched by a sense of his own weakness, Billy plays up the hardboiled detective role, tossing salty quotables to the adoring reporters. Peaches, a neglected girl under Mary Boyle's care, creates macabre tableaux in her housing project living room, spectacular visions of her mother's many lives and lovers—her way to regain a family. Others in Natural History are always self-consciously fretting about how convincing they are as seductress, mover-and-shaker, martyr, or madwoman, as though they still believe that a sharp style can cover up a troubled and troubling substance.

Linguistically acrobatic, imaginatively daring, Howard herself is the most debonair performer in Natural History. Her attraction to theater animates many of her previous books; here, however, she gives herself full rein to ponder the form explicitly—in screenplay fragments, in monologues, in musings on the daily circuses at and away from home. This constant experimenting may offer her a way to transcend the sometimes exhausting inwardness of her fiction. With earlier books she reached a challenging impasse, having brought a program of character dissection to its apparent limit and running the risk of ending up in an airless world. Rather than back away from her sensibility and retrench, however, Howard chooses to barrel onward, extending her method of snaring experience to its extreme. Only occasionally does her writing idle (“Closet Drama” has its intermittent longueurs), but in general Howard widens her emotional reach, moving closest to the psychological complexity envisioned in her earliest works.

When Natural History does pause in its progress through styles and forms, it is usually to show that Howard has not embraced her narrative strategy uncritically. Her love of spectacle prevails, yet to a degree never reached by her characters she also understands the sham of performance—the actor's flight from sustained scrutiny, the razzmatazz that blinds real insight. A performed self, she cautions, can often become a simplified self. The distrust she brought to family fiction always remains ready to turn on herself: in the increasing flamboyance of her forms, she shows how often she has questioned the rightness of showing off all the tricks, wondered if she shouldn't have been more discreet with her characters and herself.

That mixture of fascination and aversion lends Howard's writing its unusually charged energy. A passage in which she expresses genuine wonder at one aspect of a personality will be followed by a section grounded in “been-there, done-that” tones. Throughout Natural History, she sounds jaded, but not yet resigned, disillusionment having made her tougher on the people that catch her attention. She's cosmopolitan company, but also fed-up with the fashionable and weirdly thrilled by Bridgeport's boarded-up buildings in smelly alleys and its aluminum-sided houses with lawn gnomes. Howard negotiates a persona for herself in which the self-mockery doesn't wilt into self-effacement, and in which the confident pace doesn't smooth over the ripples of insecurity, the spasms of self-doubt. A lived life—its disappointments, hard work, minor elations—shows in her prose, her survivor's patter, its don't-waste-my-time jauntiness:

It's the insupportable present goads me to project on the defenseless past, brings me back like James to better times. He's primed for his movie, his art, which gives us the sensation of living without direct experience of life. Please, forgive me that last if I enter a slight adjustment to the books: I do not talk to any intellect in nature, but am presuming an infinite heart somewhere into which I play—Henry David Thoreau, Dec. 24, 1840. Play—as an actor? Instrument? On a Christmas Eve play into, as to an audience or congregation, surely. Lord, it's good to come up with the answers, but abandon all thought that I am second sight, able to predict from my side that Cath won't on her life, that James will for the hell of it.

Howard's deep skepticism explains why Natural History isn't a history at all, and never could be. After rummaging in her characters' lives and roaming the byways of her city, she accepts the deviousness of her prey: the past, she writes, is “unrecoverable.” It can't be seen whole, she realizes; its unities are illusory; one looks in vain for its beginning, middle, and end. On its own, the conclusion isn't anything special—what novelist hasn't had to acquire such wisdom?—but what makes it unusual here is Howard's tone: she's elated.

A palpable relief buoys the final chapters of Natural History, as the Bray children leave their histories undisturbed. Having come to Bridgeport to scout locations for a movie he's planning about the socialite-and-soldier murder case, James had hoped to unravel the confusion surrounding his father's involvement—but Catherine successfully thwarts him. We know she's right to do so, not just because there is a sordid secret better left unrevealed, but because, once it appears to be understood, the past will be reduced and shelved. It will no longer have the anchoring weight or the cautionary force of mystery.

This novel glows only subtly with a warmth that, for want of a better word, can be called spiritual—yet such is the quality of Howard's faith in the power of description and inquiry. Character and author alike stand before their lives, remembered conversations, emptied rooms, and once-treasured hand-me downs—and persist in contemplation, asking question after question, hoping to articulate these things back into circulation. It is the writer's (and characters') ignorance and the inevitable frustration of their effort at knowledge that keeps them alive. If fiction can ever be said to be “moral,” it achieves such stature not in legislating “the moral of the story,” but rather in resisting easy catharsis, fixing the reader's attention on the ambiguous and the unanswerable.