In ‘The Needle’s Eye,’ Fanny Howe Explores Definitions of Youth

In her newest collection of prose, poetry, and essays, “The Needle’s Eye,” National Book Award finalist Fanny Howe delves into definitions of adolescence, a universal period of perpetual uncertainty and self-discovery. Through experimental language, Howe examines our collective societal relationship with the “struggle on the part of a youth to transcend and escape the ugly fate of adults,” recontextualizing youth in both contemporary tales and stories faded by the passage of time. Howe’s writing dovetails inventive format with original technique, unified by a topical theme, in an enriching and visceral reading experience.

Howe subverts what might otherwise be blandly erudite anecdotes, infusing them with an emotionally resonant vitality. The poem “In Prism” draws upon the story of the medieval saints Francis and Clare of Assisi, who become vivid characters in a complicated historical narrative. The writing draws upon many historical, artistic, and literary sources, with varied references ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne to Lionel Rogosin’s documentary “On the Bowery” to the Upanishads. While this blend can sometimes make for a jarring experience, it is also thrilling to embark on a narrative journey that jumps from era to era. In one instant, we travel alongside the medieval romance of Francis and Clare; in the next, we examine the upbringing of the Tsarnaev brothers, responsible for the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. The latter story is controversial, but Howe has a unique capacity for humanizing those with deviant psychologies as much as she can humanize those who have faded in the hazy depths of obscurity, who would otherwise be one-off mentions in a history textbook.

Howe’s writing transcends not only the limitations of time but also those of genre, surpassing limits of conventional form and structure. Her experimental language, though sometimes verging on the inaccessible, creates complex stories with layers of nuance to parse through. “I met a person who could taste the grass and herbs a beast had eaten in the meat on her plate,” she writes in “F Plus.” “I only taste my tongue in a leaf of lettuce, a strawberry.” Other sections, though, prove more emotionally accessible to the quotidian reader. “How strange it is to grow from childhood, to have to discard your clothes, now tight and short,” Howe writes in “The Child’s Child,” “like Alice to find yourself bending where once you were tiny. To rise higher than the knees of your father, to watch your fingers and shoes lengthen.”

Memory and human perception also play a thought-provoking role in “The Needle’s Eye.” Howe questions the legitimacy of human perception in shaping the objective truth. In “On the Bowery,” Howe cites the work of Innokenty Annensky, a Russian poet, who writes, “To the human brain, a hallucination is the exact same thing as seeing the world just as it is.” The human memory, Howe suggests, will never be quite as adequate as the experience of reality in the present. “Memories blink and flash and capture moments of the past in sepia and gray, like the glimpse of a distant place, far beyond where you are standing,” she writes. “The distance, like the past, is blurred. Kids and old people forget about keys and phones and scarves and pills, because these are not primal needs but secondary to the animal who is half asleep in us. They join like shadows at the end of the day.”

“The Needle’s Eye” sounds experimental enough to be incoherent, yet Howe narrowly evades an overly disconnected reading experience by infusing each prose-poem with ties to relevant counterparts in the rest of the collection. Working deftly with symbolism and motif, Howe links each piece through subtle, thematic connections. The repeated image of pure gold and the mirror, for example, links the stories of Francis and Clare to modern psychological case studies. And the underlying theme of societal treatment of women and girls proves relevant to stories as eclectic as that of Alina Tsarnaeva, younger sister of the Tsarnaev brothers (in “Alina Tsarnaeva”), as well as that of Greek nymphs (in “Nymphs Without Names”). These logical ties facilitate the drawing of connections, unifying separate chapters in one cohesive work of writing.

Perhaps what infuses “The Needle’s Eye” with such presence, such urgency, is its tendency to draw existential questions from historical anecdotes. In “Like Grown-ups,” an account of French philosopher Simone Weil, Howe questions, “What could the value of one human person be among hordes of others? What would make a single individual matter in a vast and uprooted world? Why not silence or step on anyone who gets in your way?” In the same page, Howe references Rossellini’s “Europa ‘51” to provide an answer to the existential question, an eloquent line that resonates deeply. “There is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done,” she writes. “It is this above all that is sacred in every human being.”