\u201cYou\u2019re a woman, obviously.\u201d This dialogue appears on page 99 of \u201cPorthole\u201d and it\u2019s quite helpful because, in the previous 98 pages, I literally kept flipping back and forth, trying to figure out the gender of our narrator.<\/p>\n
This is interesting in a few ways. For one thing, Joanna Howard\u2019s novel is a reminder not to make any assumptions about gender, something I\u2019m working on. For another, confusion about the main character, a famous movie director cooling her heels at a weird-but-fancy rehab resort, is appropriate because she\u2019s clearly confused, too. And, third, one thing Howard seems to be doing is creating a female character of a type we rarely see \u2014 one who exhibits the sort of anti-hero behavior that male characters in books, movies and TV constantly get away with but that women almost never do. She even refers to herself as \u201cmanly\u201d at one point.<\/p>\n
Her name is Helena, and her fictitious films sound similar to those of Oscar-winning \u201cThe Hurt Locker\u201d director Kathryn Bigelow. The reason she\u2019s in rehab is a recent on-set accident that occurred while she and her male lead (also the male lead in her personal life, if you know what I mean) were filming on a boat. He died in the accident, she was in some ways responsible for his death and so her movie studio is financing her stay. The idea is to keep her out of the public eye for a while and, hopefully, rehabilitate her image.<\/p>\n
Over the course of \u201cPorthole,\u201d which takes place in Helena\u2019s brain and in which not much happens in terms of plot, it becomes clear what a big job it will be to repair her image. Helena is a narcissist who thinks \u201cemployee\u201d and \u201clover\u201d are basically the same thing and who routinely objectifies the men in her life because all she cares about is \u201ctheir solid bodies and their delightfully empty heads.\u201d<\/p>\n