Review: What Is Left the Daughter

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’ 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 from Denmark and invite Tilda and Marlais to live with them there. Tilda accepts. Wyatt could relocate to be near them, but won’t leave the world he knows. Instead, he quits the toboggan business, moves to Halifax, and works as a “detritus gaffer,” clearing the harbor of debris. Eighteen years pass in this way. Then he hears from Cornelia: first that Tilda has died and then that Marlais will return to Nova Scotia. At this point, he sits down to write his book-length letter.

While gymnastically artful, and despite moments of beautifully managed pathos (such as the aunt’s death), this novel as a whole is not as powerful as Norman’s best work. The plot is Dickensian, but the supporting texture is not. Symbolism seems to displace the development of character. What does Tilda’s odd penchant for professional mourning and obituaries reveal to us about her? Why her obsession with platitudes? How seriously can we take the uncle’s obsession with wartime news and the static in radio broadcasts as motivation for killing Hans? Complexities of psyche remain unexplored, perhaps most importantly in the case of Tilda. This may be because of Wyatt’s perspective and tact, but as a central character she remains disappointingly flat, especially compared with more dynamic Norman heroines, such as Imogene in The Museum Guard.

The most attractive character is the baker of scones, Cornelia. Baking may have its symbolic aspect—dedication to nourishment—but her humor, humanity, and conscience are fully registered in dialogue and action. She has a teasing, often self-depreciating wit and speaks her mind, for instance calling Wyatt and Tilda’s refusal to write each other “the goddamned stupidest, most selfish thing I’ve heard two people with a daughter doing.” She is familiar with grief and manages her own loneliness. She is not odd but is tolerant of oddity. Her love functions as a force to counter fate or fatalism. “Now and then, life can be improved on,” she tells Wyatt. Her message, like Norman’s, like Shakespeare’s in the Romances, is that tragedy can be healed, some lost things found, and that life goes on.

DeWitt Henry’s most recent memoir is Sweet Dreams: A Family History (Hidden River). He teaches at Emerson College.