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Bookshelf: Recommended Books and Writers

2011; Emerson College; Volume: 37; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/plo.2011.0106

2162-0903

Sarah Banse, Adrian Blevins, Chelsea Rathburn, Scott Stanfield,

Themes in Literature Analysis

Recommended Books and Writers Henry DeWitt, Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough, Jocelyn Lieu, Maryanne O'Hara, and Linwood Rumney What Is Left the Daughter by Howard Norman (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010): For newcomers to Howard Norman’s fiction, this, his sixth novel, will seem deliberately and beguilingly odd. There is, for example, a murder acknowledged from the outset. The first person narrator, Wyatt Hillyer, is writing an account of his life to his estranged daughter, Marlais, who was taken from him as a child by her mother, Tilda, to be raised in Denmark. Now Tilda has died, and Marlais, twenty-one, has returned to Middle Economy, Nova Scotia, the town of her birth, to take the post of librarian. Hillyer lives four hours away in Halifax, and his 243-page letter is an effort to reach out for contact, understanding, and love. The time of his writing is 1967 (the era of Vietnam, civil rights, and the pill, none of which are mentioned, though the Beatles are) but the era that Wyatt writes about is the wartime 1940s. Wyatt describes his involvement in the murder of a German student, first his rival for Tilda’s love, then her husband. Even though Tilda later bears Marlais, Wyatt’s child, she never forgives him for this murder, which was committed by her own adopted father, Wyatt’s uncle, in an act of crazed hatred for all Germans, with Wyatt helping him to dispose of the body in the sea. One of Norman’s ironies is that this provincial hatred of Germans mirrors that of the Nazis toward Jews. As Wyatt later reflects: “My uncle in effect had (to paraphrase Scripture) become what he beheld.” Norman’s Nova Scotia is a country of the mind. As in his previous novels, it seems to be a version of pastoral, sheltered from the business of our media-shrunken world. Add to this the historical distance, from the 1920s on, which Norman evokes with a fetish for period detail and a certain nostalgia. This is a world of telegraphs, radios, letters, libraries, phonographs, and museums. There is no tv or mass-marketing, and of course no Internet. Wyatt’s letter begins by recounting the odd tragedy of his parents’ [End Page 185] separate yet simultaneous suicides when he was seventeen. Following their deaths, Wyatt is taken in by his father’s brother and his wife, who earlier adopted Tilda after her own parents died, also simultaneously, from “wasting disease.” Living with Tilda under his uncle’s roof, Wyatt falls in love. “Completely gone,” he writes; “smitten…She was too much beauty.” But he never declares himself, even when Tilda takes up with the German student, and when both his aunt and his baker friend Cornelia urge him to. “I’m not a student of people,” his aunt says, “but when you and Tilda are in the same room, you should just see how you light up.” In addition to his uncle’s racial hatred, Wyatt’s refusal to speak up as a suitor is the second perversity driving the plot. Something in Wyatt holds back, and something in Tilda’s curious nature knows of his devotion, but prefers Hans, treating Wyatt as if he were her brother by birth. Following the murder, Wyatt’s uncle goes to prison for life, and Wyatt for three years. Once released, Wyatt returns to East Economy and restarts his uncle’s toboggan business at the age of twenty-three. The war is over. Tilda has lost her baby by Hans, and mourns Hans publicly at the docks every morning. Cornelia again tells Wyatt that he loves Tilda and should propose. Tilda is unforgiving, but nevertheless calls him to the library where she is alone and they have sex, conceiving Marlais. Wyatt writes: “Your mother was the love of my life. I was not the love of hers. You became the love of both of ours.” For two years, Tilda, Wyatt, and Marlais live together over Cornelia’s bakery, although Wyatt is treated as a pariah by the rest of the town. Cornelia acts as a grandmother, but Wyatt writes that “we didn’t add up as a family.” Then Hans’ parents visit...