Threatening Weather

July 26, 2013 English

English professor Howard Norman's new memoir, “I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place," is described in The New York Times' Sunday Book Review.

In his new memoir, “I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place,” Howard Norman writes like a man serenely unconcerned with small matters like whether or not his readers actually keep reading. This is unexpectedly arresting. We’re accustomed to memoirists working double time to keep our attention, giving jumped-up accounts of personal disasters while at the same time relentlessly trying to burrow their way into our hearts with lovable, self-deprecating personas. Memoir is a crowded genre, and memoirists too often behave accordingly. Norman — author of the National Book Award finalists “The Northern Lights” and “The Bird Artist,” as well as several other novels — writes with zero desperation. He simply plows his field, and if you want to come watch, fine by him.

The book is divided into five sections, each organized around an unsettling episode or spurring event over the course of Norman’s life: the accidental killing of a swan; the death of a girlfriend; the murder of John Lennon; a case of flu that lasted for months; and, finally, a filicide/suicide committed by a house sitter in Norman’s own home. Another memoirist would foreground the violence or drama of these incidents; Norman instead uses them as occasions for explorations of daily life. Over the course of the book, a coming-of-age story emerges, as well as a loose portrait of the artist, but the main project here is to explore the mysteries that live alongside us, unnoticed. Norman quotes the poet Paul Éluard more than once: “There is another world but it is in this one.”