What does good living look like? With his marriage and career in meltdown, a man tries to get back to nature in this thought-provoking fable

There has never been a better time than now for Man, the protagonist of Helen of Nowhere, to be a neo-transcendentalist. As a university professor, the lessons he imparts involve encouraging his students to remove themselves from the politics of the city and “the tools of human construction” to pursue the purity of nature. In doing so, Man muses, they might invoke an “innate ability to engage in simply being” outside arbitrary institutions of knowledge, such as the university.

Man is a good person, or so we hear. He is observant, he listens. And of course, “I [love] women,” he tells us. “I’d worked hard for women my entire life.” But “the fact was that war had been declared against me [by] … a faction of women … They were hysterical … and maybe evil, words I could only bring myself to whisper … for I knew the politics behind their deployment.”