The Shame
Makenna Goodman
Reviewed by Lily Buday
Makenna Goodman’s novel The Shame opens with a challenge to the reader: if you’re trapped on a tiny island surrounded by molten lava with only the requisite but unpleasant nutrition that will keep you alive, do you stay there? Or do you risk everything to cross the lava to “a lush and beautiful forest… [where] you can eat pasta with clams, pasta with cheese, pasta with toppings unlike anything you could imagine?” Goodman’s narrator, a Vermont wife and mother named Alma, tells us immediately what her answer is: get off that island, get to that land of never-ending pasta no matter what you have to do to make that happen. But setting aside Alma’s delectable metaphor, what does it actually mean to set out in search of a life that is rich, and full, and satisfying? Alma doesn’t know. I’m not sure that The Shame does, either— but that’s all right, because the novel hinges on the very complexity, the very unanswerability of that question.
Goodman weaves her depiction of Alma’s life on a farm with her husband and children with lush, generous language. But the very fecundity that is present in her prose represents Alma’s struggle— surrounded by plant and animal life and tucked into her daily homemaking routine, she is isolated from society— especially other women— and from any sense of self. She craves, at times, a lightness and a minimalism that is not forthcoming. She wants to be made new.
At the end of the day, The Shame is about what it means to build a life in a world increasingly governed by contradiction, striving to be both ethically and personally fulfilled. There are no easy answers to be found within these pages, but there is something heartening nonetheless about Goodman’s brilliant embrace of the questions themselves.