[In the following review, Bell argues that Natural History's “uncontainable ingenuity” overshadows the novel's plot.]

The hero of Maureen Howard's Natural History is Bridgeport, Connecticut, where she was born and bred in an Irish Catholic family. A once-thriving manufacturing center on Long Island Sound, Bridgeport, like many such industrial towns of New England, fell victim to blight and decay after the Second World War. In several of her novels and the 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 toward 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 fanatical housekeeping. James is obsessed with magic tricks and movies; Catherine is an earnest Girl Scout, miserably unsure of herself and dreamily pious. Suddenly the family romance is thrust aside by a murder (again!) 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 acquitted. It is never explained, however, why her father's supposed transgression 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 narrative in mind. As it develops—or rather, flits hither and yon with antic restlessness—the novel becomes a pinwheel of history: by turns an assemblage, a jigsaw puzzle, a scrapbook, a hodgepodge, a three-ring circus (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 fragments 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, marriages and children, his unrealistic expectations about the film, and his sister'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 because the author is totting up the debits and credits of the Bray family and of Bridgeport). Splitting the text literally, Howard offers, in the right-hand pages, the story of James's ill-fated movie, which he eventually abandons; his affair with a former nun turned social worker; and Catherine's return, after some catastrophic years in New York, to Bridgeport, where she becomes a famous spinner and weaver. In the left-hand pages, Howard jumbles memory and history, collective and personal, in a mad anthologist's mishmash of quotations (from Sir Thomas Browne to Walt Disney); Bridgeport lore, including the fact that the city was once the leading American manufacturer of corsets; a rummage sale of miscellaneous pop-culture Americana, old engravings, photos, and greeting cards; a tribute to crusty Jasper McLevy, the Irish Socialist roofer who was mayor of Bridgeport for many years; movies and movie houses; the collage boxes of Joseph Cornell; a lengthy detour into Walter Benjamin's thoughts about the arcades of Paris (because Bridgeport once boasted a beautiful arcade of its own); and ending with the world-shaking revelation that Robert Mitchum, no less, was born in Maureen Howard's beloved hometown.

Once we stop to catch our breath—or nudge ourselves awake—after this breakneck roller-coaster ride, we begin to guess what Howard is attempting: to defy the evanescence of memory, to confront the irrecoverability of the past in its living wholeness, to lament the irrevocable dissolution of vanished experience, yet clinging to whatever connections we can impose on the bits and pieces that have endured. Yet all these free associations remain ambiguous, irresolute, and exhausting, in part because the very shapelessness of her “evidence” is self-defeating, in larger part because of her style. Fussy and overburdened, the sentences are so clotted or fidgety that we can't find our way out of the maze. With all the brio and wit that Howard has lavished on her pursuit of lost time, she has not illuminated the past but buried it under the clutter.