Love and Murder in Witless Bay by Martin Greenberg and Paula Fox

Love and Murder in Witless Bay

June 9, 2011

Martin Greenberg and Paula Fox

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What Is Left the Daughter
by Howard Norman
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 243 pp., $25.00

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.

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