HOWARD NORMAN is a three-time winner of National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a winner of the Lannan Award for fiction. His novels The Northern Lights and The Bird Artist were both nominated for a National Book Award. He is also author of the novels The Museum Guard, The Haunting of L, and What Is Left the Daughter.
Next Life Might Be Kinder
eBook
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ISBN-13:
9780547712147
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Publication date: 05/13/2014
- Sold by: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Format: eBook
- Pages: 320
- Sales rank: 282,442
- File size: 5 MB
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“Norman elegantly crafts a murder story that isn’t a mystery; a ghost story without shivers. At its heart, this is a bittersweet love story, about the hole left in a life.” — Seattle Times
Sam Lattimore meets Elizabeth Church in 1970s Halifax, in an art gallery. Their brief, erotically charged marriage is extinguished with Elizabeth’s murder. Sam’s life afterward is complicated. In a moment of desperate confusion, he sells his life story to a Norwegian filmmaker named Istvakson, known for the stylized violence of his films, whose artistic drive sets in motion an increasingly intense cat-and-mouse game between the two men. Furthermore, Sam has begun “seeing” Elizabeth—not only seeing but holding conversations with her, almost every evening, and what at first seems simply hallucination born of terrible grief reveals itself, evening by evening, as something else entirely.
“Beautifully and carefully written and unique, its meaning both elegant and elusive.” — Ann Beattie
“Compelling and satisfying. Howard Norman has written a complex literary novel and a page-turner that’s impossible to put down.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Quirky and probing . . . riveting . . . sexy.” — Washington Post
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This somewhat far-fetched but nonetheless entertaining novel set in 1973 by Norman (The Bird Artist) involves a young man’s struggles to overcome his grief and rage. Thirtysomething Sam Lattimore, a novelist who has published his debut title and struggles to write his second one, lives at a Halifax hotel with his younger wife Elizabeth Church, a Ph.D. candidate writing her dissertation on the British author Marghanita Laski and her 1953 novel The Victorian Chaise-Lounge. While taking lindy dance lessons without Sam, Elizabeth partners with Alfonse Padgett, “a psychopathic thug in a bellman’s uniform.” After he assaults her and later Sam, the couple files a complaint with the hotel security, and the vengeful Padgett soon retaliates by fatally shooting Elizabeth. The devastated Sam begins his psychiatric sessions with the older Dr. Nissensen (these sessions form the opening of the book), in which Lattimore reveals he talks to Elizabeth’s spirit when they meet on the beach at night. Meanwhile, broke and confused by his grief, Sam sells the movie rights to Elizabeth’s lurid murder story to Peter Istvakson, an ambitious and “egotistical” film director. While Istvakson and his production crew shoot the movie on location in Halifax, he harasses the increasingly agitated Sam with personal questions about his marriage to juice up the movie’s realism—pushing Norman’s bittersweet yarn to a violent climax. (May)
"an opening sentence worthy of the Noir Hall of Fame...provocative...haunting...deft"—Janet Maslin, New York Times
"Engrossing...Norman pulls off a fascinating balancing act here: the literary page-turner that, when it’s done, you want to retrace"—The Seattle Times
"compelling and satisfying. Howard Norman has written a complex literary novel and a page-turner that’s impossible to put down."—Minneapolis Star Tribune
"quirky and probing...riveting...sexy"—Washington Post
"This latest novel, a strange and tragic love story told with great power and beauty, is a remarkable achievement… Shining through the confusion and madness is Norman’s masterly depiction of Sam and Elizabeth’s love affair before the murder, showing two people living modest, quiet lives who are redeemed and blessed by having found real love. VERDICT An inspiring and beautiful book; enthusiastically recommended for fans of literary fiction." —Library Journal, STARRED review
"Once again Norman (What Is Left the Daughter, 2010) portrays Nova Scotia as a mystical realm, where the dead haunt the living, and time is tidal. The inspiration for this dark, sexy, allusive, and diabolical tale is found in Norman’s memoir, I Hate to Leave this Beautiful Place (2013), further complicating the novel’s eerie investigation into the yin and yang of verisimilitude and aberration."—Booklist, STARRED review
"Sweet, elegaic...you'll be richly rewarded."—Washingtonian
"a beguiling tale"—Kirkus Reviews
"[A] somewhat far-fetched but nonetheless entertaining novel"— Publishers Weekly
"A nimbus of unknowability lights up this exploration of love, and how we live in the ambiguous context of love, always moving backward and forward, as we do dancing the Lindy. Howard Norman has created a very real mystery, in writing a mystery about what we choose to look at as 'very real.' It’s vivid, haunting, and – as always, with this writer – beautifully and carefully written and unique, it’s meaning both elegant and elusive. I greatly admire Howard Norman’s writing." —Ann Beattie
Norman has been producing award-caliber fiction for many years; The Bird Artist and The Northern Lights were both finalists for the National Book Award. This latest novel, a strange and tragic love story told with great power and beauty, is a remarkable achievement. The book blends macabre elements, including murder, with an absurdity and humor out of Kafka or Pirandello (a film is in fact being made about the murder). It also includes utterly convincing depictions of human love and compassion. The novel's narrator and protagonist, Sam Lattimore, has recently lost new wife Elizabeth, who was killed by a deranged bellman at the Nova Scotia hotel where the couple was living after their recent marriage. Although Sam is able to function almost normally, he is psychologically destabilized by this loss and has convinced himself that Elizabeth talks with him each night when he takes his evening walk on the beach. Shining through the confusion and madness is Norman's masterly depiction of Sam and Elizabeth's love affair before the murder, showing two people living modest, quiet lives who are redeemed and blessed by having found real love. VERDICT An inspiring and beautiful book; enthusiastically recommended for fans of literary fiction.—Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT
A man's anguish over his wife's murder—soon to be a major motion picture—blurs his grasp of reality in the latest moody, Halifax-set tale by Norman (What Is Left the Daughter, 2010; Devotion, 2007, etc.). Sam Lattimore, the narrator of Norman's eighth novel, is in mourning: As the story opens, it's been almost a year and a half since his wife, Elizabeth, was killed by a bellman at the Halifax hotel where they lived. And while he has sensibly taken on a therapist to work through his grief, he less-than-sensibly insists that he often sees Elizabeth on a beach at night, putting piles of books in order. Sam grudgingly sold the rights to the tragedy to a director, but the filming is doing little to help him achieve closure, a word he can't stand anyway. In brief, episodic chapters, Norman shuttles between Sam's present-day processing and his memories of life with Elizabeth, particularly her obsession with the British author Marghanita Laski (1915-1988) and the increasingly unwelcome and threatening advances she endured by the bellman. The quirky, downbeat milieu is typical of Norman's fiction, which balances an obsession with specific details about time and place with more high-flown musings on morality and love. Here, Norman is chiefly concerned with the subjectivity of history, which he explores in terms of Sam's remembrances of Elizabeth, his unshakable visions of her and the filmmaker's rewriting of their lives. This high-concept stuff sometimes works at a low boil: Much of Sam's narration comes in the context of his therapist appointments, which makes the reality-versus-fantasy debate feel too neatly framed, more discussed than described. But while that dampens the impact of Sam's emotional unraveling, it's a beguiling tale overall, a novel Paul Auster might write after a trip to Canada's Eastern shore. Not Norman's finest work but an intriguing attempt to complicate his usual concerns.