by Kelly Pickerill
I spied a good looking book on Joe’s desk a few months back; it was the review copy of Howard Norman’s new book, not due out till July. Well, it’s July! And not only has his book arrived at Lemuria, but Howard Norman himself will be here on Friday, the 30th!
I really enjoyed reading this book. At the start, Wyatt Hillyer sits down to write a letter to his adult daughter whom he hasn’t seen since she was very young. Though Marlais doesn’t know her father and may never be close to him, Wyatt wants her to know what happened to him in the five years before she was born, the years when, during World War II in Canada, he participated in a violent crime that changed his life.
I loved the tone and texture of Norman’s novel more than any other aspect. Because it’s a letter, the events Wyatt recalls are a mixture of memory and fact. The dialogue can lack verisimilitude, though that’s forgiven because Wyatt is recalling conversations that took place more than twenty years previous. But Wyatt is a careful wordsmith, meticulously choosing how he relates the events that eventually lead to his daughter’s birth — his parents’ simultaneous suicide, when he’s eighteen, because they are in love with the same woman, the secret infatuation Wyatt harbors for his cousin, Tilda, once he comes to live with her family, Tilda’s affair with a German student and the uproar their relationship causes in the small town of Middle Economy, and the events of the war which the citizens of Canada are finding more and more distressing, especially Wyatt’s uncle.
In the review in the Washington Post by Ron Charles, he points out that the epistolary style results in an “odd disconnect between the novel’s sober tone and its outrageous plot” making for a story that “seems shocking only in retrospect.”
At the time, you lean in, trying to catch every word, lulled by his voice as he describes the most ordinary lives that just happen to be punctuated by macabre accidents and bizarre acts of violence.
Come out to Lemuria on Friday starting at 5 to hear Howard Norman read from What Is Left the Daughter.
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