[In the following review, Perrin offers a negative assessment of Natural History, calling the novel “almost unreadable.”]

In 1965, Maureen Howard published a stunningly good novel called Bridgeport Bus. It's about a 35-year-old virgin named Mary Agnes Keeley. She lives in Bridgeport, Conn., with her suffocating Irish mother (her fireman father is dead) and works as secretary to the president of a zipper company. Then she breaks loose and goes to New York. She finds men, adventures, a somewhat better job; she writes one part of the book herself in a surrealistic mode.

Thirteen years later, Maureen Howard published an exceptionally well-written memoir called Facts of Life. The central character is another M. K., only this time it is Howard herself. Maiden name: Maureen Kearns. The book tells of her childhood in an Irish section of Bridgeport, Conn., where her father was a policeman. Not a cop on the beat, but a detective—in fact, the County Detective for Fairfield County.

Now Maureen Howard has published an almost unreadable novel called Natural History. It's about an Irish family in Bridgeport, Conn., named Bray. Billy Bray, the father, is the County Detective for Fairfield County. Like the Keeleys and the Kearnses, he has two children, a daughter and a son, and they are the principal human characters in the book. Only this time the son gets more space than the daughter.

Lots of artists work a narrow vein. It has been said of Vivaldi that he wrote the same concerto 400 times. Jane Austen's novels could be described as six variations on the theme of upper-middle-class courtship in England around the year 1800. There is no sin in Howard's going back to Bridgeport and to an Irish family of four. The sin is the unreadability of the latest version.

The plot, if you can call it that, runs thus. In 1945, Billy Bray, County Detective, investigates a murder. The slightly sluttish wife of an army major shoots and kills an army private in her bedroom. Detective Bray fails to get her convicted, and the dead soldier's brother stalks the Bray family for a time, planning revenge. He doesn't go through with it.

Meanwhile, the two Bray kids, aged 11 and 13 at the time of the shooting, grow up and leave Bridgeport. You learn their adult histories in bits and snatches, in stream of consciousness, in an interminable imaginary stage-show. Cath, the daughter, goes to a New York, becomes a researcher with Time. At some point she turns suicidal, but doesn't go through with it. Instead she moves back to Bridgeport, and now leads a reclusive and mostly unhappy life as a weaver. James, the son, becomes a movie star, has a mostly miserable life, and eventually returns to Bridgeport to make a movie about the shooting. He doesn't go through with it. The book dribbles to an end. It has about as much suspense as a phone book.

But then, Maureen Howard clearly did not intend it to have suspense—or to tell any conventional sort of story. She clearly no longer believes in stories. What does she believe in? Disillusionment. Loss. Human folly.

As far as I can tell, the real character in this book is the city of Bridgeport itself, and the author's purpose is to say goodbye to Bridgeport in two different ways. Goodbye first to the city a child would know—that city so much more perfect than it could possibly ever appear to adult eyes. Goodbye, that is, to the illusion of wise parents, happy neighborhood, secure life.

But second, goodbye to the historical Bridgeport of 1945 (and also the earlier Bridgeport of P. T. Barnum). That city has turned to slums and depression and homeless people in parks, and the book is a kind of wake.

There is much daring in how the wake is presented. One 80-page section, for example, has the “narrative” on right-hand pages only, while on the left-hand pages there is a semi-psychedelic melange. It includes bits of history: a letter from P. T. Barnum to Mark Twain, the entry for Bridgeport in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. It also includes poems, quotes from Abraham Lincoln (he liked Bridgeport oysters) and much tightrope dancing by Maureen Howard herself. At one point (right-hand pages) a statue of Barnum comes alive and visits James in his bedroom.

But I have to say: daring, yes; successful, no. Some individual passages are wonderful—Maureen Howard is, after all, a very good writer—but it is hard to imagine the person who would read the whole book for pleasure.

What one can hope is that Howard now truly has Bridgeport out of her system, and is free to apply her great talent to other and perhaps more readily tellable matters.