The New York Review of Books

Nancy Crampton

Howard Norman, East Calais, Vermont, 2000

When you read a novel by Howard Norman, you enter into a very particular world. That of course is one of the oldest pleasures novels afford. You lived for a while with Robinson Crusoe on his island as his only companion. Narratives before Defoe were episodes loosely strung together. Shakespeare’s plays are “worldly” in the sense we mean; Samuel Beckett’s aren’t. The sense of being in a world requires something more than immediacy. With Henry James’s novels you are in the close atmosphere of the personal relations of a couple, a group, a circle. A world needs defining limits.

The limits of the agitated world of Norman’s earlier novel The Bird Artist (1994) are those of a village called Witless Bay in Newfoundland. Not very far from it, across the waters of the North Atlantic in Nova Scotia, is the village of Middle Economy (Upper and Lower Economy on either side), some hours’ distance from Halifax. This is the world of the ambiguous personal history narrated by Wyatt Hillyer in What Is Left the Daughter, Norman’s latest novel.

Witless Bay seemed a made-up name, surely. In fact we weren’t quite sure, realizing that Norman (himself aptly named) had roamed the northernmost regions of the continent for years and knew them down to their holes and corners. So we consulted The Times Atlas of the World. And there it was in tiniest letters on Newfoundland’s eastern shore—Witless Bay.

Norman’s new novel, like The Bird Artist, unfolds spontaneously, freshly. It is alive with modest people who work at their trades or keep shops. This small, lower-middle- and working-class world possesses a surprising number of unselfconsciously, narrowly cultivated people, especially in classical music. Their speech is educated though not highly educated (democratically educated); on the fringes you hear country voices. They say things like “In your life happiness is either cut to your length or isn’t” and “My husband and I called a truce and neither slept.”

Middle Economy should seem familiar but it doesn’t. To call its economy lower-middle- and working-class is not quite right, for the village doesn’t have the class consciousness that would justify such terms. It seems a quiet, civil place. The librarian of Middle Economy, Mrs. Oleander, is thrilled to find a poem by “Miss Elizabeth Bishop” in a magazine, for “Miss Bishop” grew up “in Great Village. Practically a neighbor!” (The poem is “Casabianca,” about love that is inarticulate and can only “stammer” when it tries to utter itself out of the flames of passion—”Love’s the boy stood on the burning deck/trying to recite ‘The boy stood on/the burning deck.’”) Middle Economy is not an idyllic place. There are perilous goings-on inside its limits, perilous, as is often the case, because of love. There are perils of a different kind too—offshore sinkings of ships by German U-boats. The time is the early 1940s, the war has crossed the ocean, and Canadians are being killed. The paths of the two perils will cross.

What Is Left the Daughter consists of a long letter written by Wyatt Hillyer to his daughter Marlais, whom he last saw when she was six. It begins:

Marlais, today is March 27, 1967, your twenty-first birthday. I’m writing because I refuse any longer to have my life defined by what I haven’t told you. I’ve waited until now to relate the terrible incident that I took part in on October 16, 1942, when I was nineteen.

Wyatt’s use of the word “incident” for the brutal murder of the just-married husband of Marlais’s mother Tilda, in which he himself was involved, is clumsy and ingenuous, as Wyatt and his entire letter are. So many “I” narrators never come alive, sometimes because the author wants it that way, as with Scott Fitzgerald’s sideline narrator Nick Carraway. Wyatt is pale but alive.

He is, he tells us, an orphan, and was orphaned suddenly, sensationally: his father and mother both jumped to their deaths from different bridges in Halifax on the same evening. One after the other, two policemen come to tell Wyatt (seventeen years old) about each suicide, in their cops’ way. It is funny if also grim. Father and mother were both deeply in love with their pretty neighbor Reese Mac Isaac, who loved them both. This most unusual isosceles triangle was impossible and Wyatt’s parents elected to end it. Passion doesn’t often keep in mind the children. There is also a love triangle in The Bird Artist, and this present novel has a second one after the tragic first. Norman, it seems, is drawn to the woe that is in love.

Wyatt is adopted by his Aunt Constance and Uncle Donald, under whose roof lives another adoptee, his cousin Tilda, with whom he had already fallen in love before he became an orphan. His love for Tilda is intense, everlasting, and, though never offered, nevertheless plainly rejected. Tilda falls in love with Hans Mohring, a German student of philology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, over the course of a single bus ride, and Wyatt must watch as the two rent a room in the village and immediately start living together. Wyatt is the boy Elizabeth Bishop calls “Love,” standing on the burning deck trying to recite “The boy stood on the burning deck” while his “poor ship went down in flames.” He doesn’t understand “Miss Bishop’s” poem and is instructed by his aunt, who dearly loves him, in how to meet a poem halfway with your own poem that you make out of the poet’s poem. “The way I see it?” she tells Wyatt. “A poem reaches out exactly halfway, then you reach out halfway, then see what happens.” The same could be said about reading this novel.

Uncle Donald makes sleds and toboggans and Wyatt learns the trade. Donald avidly follows the war on the radio as he works, listens to Beethoven, and begins papering the walls of his workshop with clippings about ships sunk by German submarines in Canadian waters. U-boats attacked virtually unopposed in the first years of World War II. Infuriated by the German attacks, he is hardly cordial to his daughter’s German lover. He smashes all the recordings of his beloved Beethoven and deposits the fragments on the bed his daughter shares with Hans.

The story edges near to diatribe in its horror of insensate patriotic fury. Here the author seems ingenuous himself. What is lacking is a hard, knowing sense of war and its furies. There is a similar lack of firmness in Aunt Constance’s easygoing advice on how to read a poem—making a poem of your own out of your lack of understanding of the poem before you. “If your thinking’s willful and generous toward a poem,” she says, “the poem’ll be equally those things back. As for meaning, it’ll mean something different to each person.” Make up anything you please, but the poem on the page remains the poet’s and you must study to possess it. Well, Aunt Constance is kindly and she speaks in character.

Tilda and Hans are obsessed with death. Tilda, like Wyatt, has lost both her parents and she has composed obituaries since adolescence for imaginary deceased. The young, good-looking girl continues to be fascinated by death and decides to take up the occupation of paid “professional mourner,” a Nova Scotia custom that provides for those who die without family. Her family is horrified but she is not of the persuadable kind. She is very good at mourning, wailing and moaning as if possessed so that she collapses on the grave. It is truly felt emotion, and you feel it. Hans for his part dictates a running obituary of himself to Tilda, adding to it as occasion offers. Tilda and Hans seem a happily morbid pair. Nevertheless it’s strange. Why are they both possessed by death? We’ve no idea.

The “terrible incident” in Wyatt’s letter’s first line is Uncle Donald’s murder of Hans. Tilda had married Hans just that day and Hans had bought new copies of the records that Donald had smashed (after piecing together the fragments of the originals to see what they were). Meanwhile, returning from a christening in Newfoundland, Aunt Constance goes down with the ferry torpedoed in the Cabot Strait. The news drives her husband into madness. Bringing the new records to Donald as a son-in-law’s offering, what he calls an “amends” (for being German), Hans is greeted by his new father-in-law with a steel toboggan runner brought down on his head. Wyatt punches Donald and strikes him—and watches paralyzed as he shoots his son-in-law. As “in a dream” the nineteen-year-old, commanded by his uncle, fetches a tarpaulin. Far out in the Bay of Fundy they launch Hans’s body in a toboggan into the sea.

When Wyatt and Hans had walked through the cold evening rain to Uncle Donald’s workshop and to the German youth’s death, Hans had embraced Wyatt and told him that in just such weather he and Tilda had taken refuge in the library and there conceived a child. If Hans had had the slightest suspicion of Wyatt’s love for Tilda, his speaking so would have been most dishonorable and insidiously cruel, but we don’t know. Nor do we know how Wyatt felt a minute or two later when the toboggan runner split Hans’s skull. Wyatt surely suffered from Hans’s words but we aren’t told so. Did it influence the stupor he fell into? Why hadn’t he gone on punching and striking his uncle, why didn’t he raise a cry?

What are we to make of this mixture of love and murder and war? Norman suggests nothing. He does not seem to believe in explanations, or at least not psychological explanations. Psychology has its various essential uses but is it now a dead end for the imagination, for original imaginations? The novel—that is, the letter—is written in language that suits the character of Wyatt: plain, clear, simple with an occasional flight of vivid metaphor. It is very pleasing in its directness. Wyatt has a story to tell and he goes ahead and tells it. It has a pleading note, for he is writing to his adored child long absent in Denmark, whither her mother had removed her.

After turning themselves in, uncle and nephew are tried before a magistrate brought in from Halifax. There is no jury; the villagers gathered in the library are jury enough with their running commentary and outbursts of laughter and anger. The easy, familiar character of a village is very pronounced in the improvised courtroom. The accused plead guilty: the uncle is sentenced to prison for life, Wyatt for three years.

A great strength of the novel is the women. First the benign ones: Wyatt’s Aunt Constance and his steadying, sustaining, middle-aged close friend Cornelia, who keeps the bakery shop, a village dropping-in place. His aunt converses with an intelligent, quiet irony, Cornelia with a sharper one. The women are an opposition party of kindliness against the indignant and uncharitable, the party always in power. Wyatt has irony too. As silent as he is about his love for Tilda he will aim an unobvious remark at good- natured Hans, his rival—advising him, for instance, to be mindful of his heart condition and try not to “black out before you have another of those cookies.” But Hans is not his rival, because Wyatt never steps up to the plate.