Howard Norman on His Latest Novel, What Is Left the Daughter
Howard Norman will be in town tonight to read from his latest novel What Is Left the Daughter at Elliott Bay Book Company at 7 p.m.
Award-winning writer and professor Howard Norman's latest historical fiction novel What Is Left the Daughter is an extraordinary read. Set in the Canadian Maritime Province of Nova Scotia, the book centers around the tragic, unforgettable occurrences that have taken place in Wyatt Hillyer's life, as he details his family's history in a memoir to his estranged daughter Marlais on her 21st birthday. The story is filled with devastating misfortunes: Hillyer is orphaned at 17 after his parents each jump to their deaths on the same night off of separate bridges; a gruesome murder is committed out of madness; WWII hardships; a family member's life is taken when a German U-boat sinks the Nova Scotia-Newfoundland ferry Caribou.
Regardless of the tragedies that have encompassed Hillyer's life and family, he goes on to detail the past in full disclosure to Marlais and to explain the "terrible incident" that has kept them separated for all of these years, consequently giving his daughter his undoubted love and full attention in the only way he knows how--through honesty.
Interested in checking out What Is Left the Daughter for yourself? You're in luck--we'll be treating readers to THREE (!) free copies of the novel this afternoon in a Freeattlest giveaway.
What Is Left the Daughter is structured as a long confessional letter that main character Wyatt Hillyer is writing to his estranged daughter Marlais on her 21st birthday. What prompted you to choose this clever strategy and did you find it more difficult to write the novel in this fashion?
I have always loved the epistolary novel--and I still write at least twenty handwritten letters a month, sometimes in correspondences that have gone on now for nearly forty years: I am thinking of exchanges with the poet W.S. Merwin and an ornithologist friend from British Columbia, for example. Of course, there are wonderful precedents: John Barth's Letters, Natalia Ginsburg's The Town and the Country, The Color Purple, amongst so many others. One could even argue, given their propensity for operatic drama, that Joseph Conrad's actual letters make for a kind of life-long novel.
From the start of my thinking about What Is Left the Daughter, I wanted it to be one long letter and never detoured from that ambition. As for difficulty, I am scarcely the first novelist to say that all novels are difficult to write; if they did not offer difficulty in the writing how would you ever feel you needed to maintain the deepest possible level of engagement with the story, its setting, its characters, every single aspect of the symphonic structure a novel requires? You would have only stayed on the surface of life. The difficulties of writing are the most tenaciously adhesive elements of writing itself, in that they won't loosen their grip until you have dealt with them directly and whole cloth. I have never found a novel easy to write and I am so grateful they are not easy to write. I hope that there is not one single sentence in this new novel that evokes cleverness, but I hope that every sentence evokes thoughtfulness.
Though What Is Left the Daughter details the many tragedies that Wyatt and his family have experienced, the novel can be seen undoubtedly as a story of love during a time of war. Can you tell us more about that?
A friend of mine said that usually in my novels when a man and a woman finally get together, it is because they have exhausted all negative possibilities! I think that is fairly accurate. In What Is Left the Daughter, there are all sorts of courtships and I hope I have offered them with vivid immediacy. In this novel, the ghastliness of WWII (especially as manifested by the sinking of ferries by German U-boats off the coast of Nova Scotia) agitates and even accelerates courtships. I fancy myself as writing love stories, in the sense of how history, my character's own surprising natures, landscape--everything, really--effects the attempt to recognize love when it presents itself, to embrace it, to try and keep it and earn it and how to grieve its absence. But it is true, I see What Is Left the Daughter as a novel about love during wartime, and the aftermath of war's effects on love.
Would you say that Wyatt is finally able to find redemption or a sort of closure with all of the tragic events that have taken place in his life by writing this letter to Marlais, or rather that he is hoping to provide a sense of closure for her?
In my thinking, if you are a deeply feeling person then, if you have experienced tragedy, loss, grief, death, there is really no such thing as "closure." It is not a word I believe in nor have I ever once experienced it. It is a word, to my mind at least, that evokes a kind of theosophical or even spiritual charlatanism or certainly convenience. In fact, in the strictly autobiographical sense, I would truly loathe finding "closure" because then I might create a kind of amnesia for things that have effected me most deeply. I am not a person who is sustained by sadness--no. But when sadness arrives, I do not immediately attempt to close it out. Of late I have found the assertion that there is closure to our deepest griefs to be trafficking in false encouragement. That of course does not mean that time does not heal; it only means that sadness and melancholy are very inventive in their ways of persisting in a person's life. I am not at all afraid of lack of closure.
Death is a major theme throughout What is Left the Daughter--suicides, murder, wartime tragedies. Beyond that, Wyatt's love and adopted cousin Tilda is obsessed with obituaries and dreams of becoming a "professional mourner." Can you tell us more about how death has shaped the novel and your decision in giving Tilda's character these offbeat qualities?
Death is part of the eclecticism of my character's experiences in this novel rather than a theme. In this novel, death is [an emotional refrain], but only one. I originally wanted to write a kind of fictional biography of a professional mourner. I interviewed a few very elderly women who were indeed professional mourners--a kind of freelance employment--in Nova Scotia and found their stories and anecdotes to be wonderful and very compelling. I was grateful to hear those. In my novels I want people to have employments--professional mourners, museum guards, detritus gaffers, movie house proprietors--I give people work. It helps detail their lives. It gives them a little spending money. It is the utilitarian context for all sorts of unforseen things to occur.
Many of your novels and short stories take place in Canada's Maritime Provinces, including What Is Left the Daughter, which is set in the strange small town of Middle Economy, Nova Scotia. Can you tell us more about your choice in using this setting?
I do not subscribe to the idea of provenance as a validating element in fiction. You place a story where you feel most emotionally and intellectually engaged, where your affections and curiosities are most intensely manifested. (If Joseph Conrad was confined by provenance, he would not only have written in Polish but placed his novels in Warsaw.) For me Nova Scotia is an endless archive, both emotionally and historically, of fictional possibility. It is a melancholy place, especially Halifax--but let me clarify that by saying that this sort of subject is very subjective. Halifax is well-met with my own nature. That is how I think of it. To keep placing stories in the Canadian Maritimes to me is not a limitation or a narrowness of embrace, but an exhibit of the generosity of the place itself; it keeps providing. Some of my in-progress memoir, I Hate To Leave This Beautiful Place (on birds and melancholy) is set in Nova Scotia. The new novel I have begun is as well. It is about a librarian.
What Is Left the Daughter is filled with actual WWII historical incidents, such as the German U-boat's sinking of the Canadian ferry Caribou. How did you go about your research to accurately portray the lifestyles and setting during the time of war?
Thinking about a story obsessively is research; libraries provide occasions for research; the Nova Scotia Historical Archive is important always to me; formal interviews with people can be research. For What Is Left the Daughter, there were dozens of accounts of U-Boats, there were church bulletins to read in great numbers from the time period, there were endless conversations with people in their eighties and nineties, there was listening to radio archive broadcasts. But in the end, research can only be an intensifying element to the story itself--you have to have a story you passionately wish to tell.
