The structure of this remarkable memoir — a series of five essays, or “overlapping panels” as the author calls them — is key to its haunting, quiet power. By choosing this approach over a continuous narrative, author Howard Norman expresses a life lived in big chunks of experience that feel connected yet separate, rich in shared motifs, ideas and sensations. Yet the exact relationship between experiences remains out of reach. In other words, like life.

Presented chronologically, the essays let us watch a boy grow into a man. Young Howard enters puberty fascinated by his brother’s girlfriend and the earthy sexuality of his boss’ wife. But most puzzling of all are the incongruous, fleeting appearances in the neighborhood of his father, who is supposed to be long gone and in California. As with the other sections of the book, this story is a blending of elements that appear in life randomly but fit together with their own surprising logic. Including, in this case, a bookmobile job, a series of anonymous letters to classmates’ fathers and a violent encounter with a swan.

One thing leads to another, since different aspects of Norman’s life always share connections, and the love of birds that starts in the bookmobile’s books takes him in his early 20s to Saskatchewan. There, he grieves for Mathilde, the doomed, enigmatic older woman who is his first love. This experience leads, in a way, to his time in the Arctic recording Inuit tales. Birds and landscapes — familiar elements from other works by Norman, such as his novel The Bird Artist — take him to Vermont and a summer of strange encounters with everything from a Civil War ghost to a relentlessly pestering brother on the run from the law to a potent, predatory barn owl. Humor punctuates these events; the exchanges with the manipulative brother are particularly funny. When Howard turns down yet another request for help sneaking over the Canadian border, the brother asks, “What happened to us, anyway? We used to be so close when you were three and I was six, remember?”

These stories are resplendent with the kinds of details most of us grasp once in a while but that appear to form the texture of Howard Norman’s life. Indeed, the meaning gleaned from life, such as it is, seems to come for Norman from its texture, from its detail and metaphor. He says, “Remember carbon paper? If you handled a sheet carelessly, you would leave fingerprints on everything you touched, as if you’d broken into your own life.” In the Arctic, he speaks of waters “where dark birds disappear, where the light shifts its tones hourly, where whale geyser-spumes hang in wavering columns of mist for up to ten minutes after the whales pass by, like signatures composed on the air.”

Lyrical and impressionistic though they are, these stories feel solid, dealing with very real, powerful experiences, whether it’s growing into an awkward and amazed adolescent, losing a hopeless first love or finding solace in beautiful landscapes at any age. The book does what memoir does best, capturing the feelings of very specific moments, while allowing readers to recognize these feelings as their own.

The final essay is one some readers will find harder to love. It concerns a murder-suicide involving a near stranger. Specifically, it explores the experience of those whose house this terrible thing randomly occurs in — Howard Norman and his wife and daughter. That exploration distinguishes it from the reports we hear of such tragedies. We watch the author and his family labor, not to make sense of it — it is too senseless for that — but to cope, process and move on, each in his or her own way.

There are many steps, some predictable or strange, such as the author’s insistence that three living-room portraits be removed before his return to the house, because they are “witnesses and we shouldn’t have to run the risk of seeing horror reflected in their eyes.” The essay might focus more on the experiences of the author’s wife and especially his daughter — she seems to fend for herself — but perhaps the point is that in such circumstances we each have to find our own way. But the essay rewards patient, sympathetic reading. It has much to say about how incremental it is to work through pain. At one point, after escaping into sleep for half an hour, Norman wakes “to a sense of lessened sorrow” — a small but real gift for which he is grateful.

The essay shares the theme of the healing power of place; Norman travels alone to the California coast and finds solace and insight in the landscape, the birds and the ideas he finds there. He explicitly rejects, however, the idea that life has themes. A student of Japanese literature and culture, he is interested in impression, memory, the shifts and puzzles of life. He chases metaphor, not theme, the same way he chases glimpses of birds all his life; birds offer a recurrent metaphor throughout the book. During his lonely summer in Saskatchewan, he begins to record his sightings as a way to hold onto them: “[K]eeping a ledger of bird names, each one like a found poem, allowed me some purchase on quotidian life.”

Norman’s beautiful memoir shows us how life — his life, ours — is a series of found poems, a collection of extraordinary moments deep within the ordinary. 

Sally Shivnan’s fiction and essays have appeared in The Georgia Review, Antioch Review, Glimmer Train and other journals, and her travel writing has been featured in anthologies including Best American Travel Writing, as well as in The Washington Post, Miami Herald, Nature Conservancy Magazine and many other publications and websites. She teaches creative writing at University of Maryland Baltimore County, where she is the English department’s Director of Writing and Rhetoric.

 

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