Hello, My Name Is Henry is a debut slice-of-life novel that expands upon the narrative recounted in Micah Schnabel’s song of the same name from his album Your New Norman Rockwell. The titular character in both is a 28 year old man working at a convenience store who feels that life is passing by around him but can’t seem to escape the cycle of poverty and mental illness that hovers around his past. The book is a pretty scathing critique of Americana—more on that shortly—and has a direct tone that reads like a progressive version of Bukowski.
The novel retains the sincerity of Schnabel’s lyrics, though often presents itself as more prosaic than his musical work. I think of the way he builds scenes in “#33 Dryer” and “Emergency Room” as essentially perfect illustrations-in-words. The novel is somewhat more on-the-nose in tackling issues, with the central character often narrating exactly what the problems in America are: systemic poverty in small communities and the lack of responsiveness of politicians, the proliferation of harmful addictions and the shocking attempts to reduce the accessibility of naloxone (even among first responders!!), racism, toxic masculinity, and so on. I agree with essentially all of his views—and I appreciate that some of the minor conflicts in the book are Henry responding to homophobic and racial slurs; the way he strives to take action is an encouraging layer to a character who is often unmotivated and sedentary.
You get a pretty good sense of Henry’s views and values throughout the book and the small town has a plethora of other characters. In some ways, the novel reads as a series of portraits and I find the characters to be pretty nicely developed. That said, Schnabel breaks a central rule of literary fiction: characters are introduced and shortly after are provided long monologues expressing their views, intentions, and life stories. There’s a transparency (or perhaps authenticity) to the characters that gives them a charm, even if the writer inside me keeps shouting to show not tell. It’s especially strange because, presumably, Henry has known these people for years and in a small town everyone knows each others’ business, but it just so happens to be the case that in the duration of the novel they pour their hearts out. Just suspend your disbelief a little bit, deal?
Of Henry’s interactions with other characters, I find the most beautiful and compelling to be his friendship with Josh, who is an effective foil for Henry. Josh moved to “the city” years earlier to make a life for himself, but still maintains a correspondence with Henry. The two write letters back and forth, and Josh continually encourages Henry to come join him, but Henry is always held up by being too broke for a bus ticket. There’s a tragic bent to their friendship, where Josh seems to really want the best for Henry, but Henry is too stunted to make a move for himself. What really resonated for me, though, is that the two bond over a comic series called Memory Currency [a title which reappears as a song on Schnabel’s album The Teenage Years of the 21st Century]. The fictional (?) comic is described in a really compelling way, where the artist seems to perpetually shift. The two characters have been reading the comic for years but can’t make sense of it, though they come to some interpretive breakthroughs (the comic is the writer dreaming his audience? the continual changes of the central character’s design signal a shift in direction or a new concept being introduced?). I really liked the way they spoke about that and it rang so true in a way some of the dialogue does not.
I am hesitant to spoil the ending of the book because it revolves around Henry’s friendship with Josh. There is some carefully placed foreshadowing around 40 pages before the climax of the book and while I had somewhat predicted what would happen, the delivery in the final pages of the book is fantastic. The devil’s in the details, but the tension of the final scene is very well-crafted and heartbreaking, with the novel’s final line being a nice encapsulation of the central theme of the book: “The easiest thing in this world is to become the very thing you fear the most.”
The book is laced with tragedy. Even moments that inspire rage are given a kind of pity that is hard to ignore; people often talk about how we need to be united in these divisive times, and the sympathy Henry (and Schnabel) extend to others seems a good model for how to start. There are some non-starters (when little white boys are play fighting, Henry extends sympathy for their small town lives, but when they use the N-word he says “fuck ‘em” and walks off), but in most cases Henry finds ways of being sympathetic to others (when a drug addict he knows tries to rob the convenience store he accidentally shoots a gun at Henry and Henry makes sure not to report the culprit to the police).
There’s a powerful scene that I think encapsulates the tenderness of Henry’s character. One night, his grandfather has an episode and Henry’s mother and grandmother have to go out looking for him. When they find him, he has a shotgun and after they seem to calm him down, he walks up to his wife and daughter and kills himself in front of them. Henry doesn’t get the details of what happened until a few years later, but he knows something has happened. The tenderness and self-effacement he demonstrates in the morning is beautiful. Henry narrates that he had been up all night and “when [he] pretended to wake up that morning, [he] rose slowly, making noise to let my mother know that I was awake” (76). He shows such consideration for his mother where he does not want to take her off guard, and then he “walked slowly across the shag carpet. [He] gave [his] mother a short hug and said good morning” (76). There’s something touching about the way he mothers his mother in the scene, and it’s met with a beautiful and devastating reciprocity:
“She asked if I wanted a bowl of cereal.
I said I did.
The only other thing I remember is that we were out of milk” (76).
The scene is beautifully constructed with a devastating event, moments of tenderness, and it’s then undercut by a reminder of the poverty of the central characters. The structure of the novel is set up in a series of short chapters, which gives Schnabel the opportunity to deliver short gut punches strategically to punctuate the central points of the main story.
When it comes to the main story, I suppose you could say that it’s about Henry wanting to leave town, though it’s a portrait of the town as much as anything. About halfway through the novel, there’s a central event that precipitates a number of changes. Henry witnesses a car accident where the driver runs a red light and runs over a little girl. The driver is a scumbag who keeps offering defences for why it’s the girl’s fault. Meanwhile, Henry moves the girl from under the car and cradles her in his arms, singing to her while she passes away. Schnabel returns to the idea several times that she gets heavier and that’s when Henry knows she has died, even before it’s confirmed. It’s a devastating touch.
The little girl’s death catalyzes a number of deep conversations with people who are concerned for his well-being. The best, in my opinion, is the conversation Henry has with the owner of the convenience store. In that scene, the reactions in the conversation seem true and Schnabel uses one of the best examples of personification that comes to mind in my recent reading. The boss “stops talking for a beat, as if he’s waiting for me to stop him. I don’t say anything. The hum of the cooler seems to get louder for a moment, but I know it’s just the silence turning up the volume on us” (66). I love that line for two reasons: one, it just feels like an experience I’ve had where all of a sudden noise gets louder at an awkward moment. The second is that in the construction of the sentence, the silence is turning up the volume of the cooler—something that is soundless driving up the sound of something else is a compelling line, and I like that it can also be read as silence turning up its own volume.
This paragraph will spoil a key plot point, so skip ahead two paragraphs (or just listen to my playlist for a while and scroll). Following the little girl’s death, a revelation comes to light that seems to me to be too coincidental. The girl’s dad is a real scumbag who doesn’t care about his daughter dying because her mom cut him out of her life. He returns to town now in the hopes of ‘being there’ for his ex, but he’s an alcoholic that seems incapable of being there even for himself. There’s a sequence of events that seems improbable: Josh comes to town to check on Henry and they get into a fight with the girl’s dad, Rick. Rick later shows up at Henry’s apartment and robs and attacks him with a knife. At the end of the altercation, it’s revealed that Rick is Henry’s long lost dad.
Beyond the coincidence, there’s a bit of a contradiction in the text. Henry judges Rick for being a terrible father to the girl and Rick says that even though he was bad, she was his blood and so he still has a claim to her as his daughter. The underlying message seems to be that blood is not so important as connection and actually doing the work of maintaining relationships, which I can endorse. After Henry realizes the girl was his half-sister, though, he starts referring to her as his sister pretty consistently. It’s an interesting contradiction, since he only met her a few moments before her death and yet now claims that bond. Initially I chalked up the inconsistency to some underlying biases that slipped into the text, but the more I think about it the more it seems like it’s another example of the final line’s aphorism: “The easiest thing in this world is to become the very thing you fear the most.” He never wants to be like his deadbeat father, and yet despite his best efforts here he is replicating that same narrative that allows Rick to be a father without performing fatherhood. It’s a pretty clever spin, actually.
Overall, Hello, My Name Is Henry is a touching novel that delivers all the genuine sincerity of Schnabel’s music, if sometimes more prosaic than necessary. That said, the more I think about the book the more I like it. Writing this review has forced me to process some of the things I overlooked or dismissed during my reading. The novel has that meandering quality that is the taste of many, encapsulating something like a complicated kindness by Miriam Toews or even a less problematic The Catcher in the Rye. There’s a lot of positives for Schnabel’s debut novel, and I’m confident that with a second novel we would see a continued refinement of his writing style, incorporating more of the poetic quality from his music.
I recognize my own position here as a reviewer of books: I know that when I recommend a book to you, it could take days or weeks or months or years before you get around to it. I have the rare opportunity here to make a more immediate recommendation. Do yourself a favour and listen to some of Micah Schnabel’s music while you wait for your online independent bookstore order to arrive.
Happy reading!
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