A man has driven to the middle of nowhere to visit a house for sale. It has taken him a day to get there from the city; he has been alone all that time. And so he talks. “I think it’s okay to tell a woman she’s beautiful once a year,” he begins. Any more than that and her life will be about being beautiful, entirely. Anything less and she’ll feel a lack of love and attention. My wife always said I never told her she was beautiful enough. But like I said, I don’t think it’s good for women. His voice is confident, teacherly, concerned with the cultivation of character. Yet what could be more dangerous than a woman who knows that she is handsome but also that her husband won’t tell her so? The most beautiful woman of Greek myth, Helen of Troy, left Menelaus for Paris—someone who, I’m guessing, was less parsimonious in his compliments. Makenna Goodman’s new novel Helen of Nowhere has been called “the perfect fairytale for our times,” but an age like ours needs myths more than fairy tales.…