Next life might be kinder

Review by New York Times Review

A while ago, on the planet of the novelists, two warring factions argued over whether or not characters had to be likable. Absolutely not, the frowny-face contingent claimed, arguing that one of literature's goals is to illuminate the state of being human, in all its flawed glory. The smiley-face tribe took umbrage: What's the matter with creating characters readers would like to have as friends? But maybe the question of liking or not liking is the easy one. The harder one, maybe, is what should we make of characters who never really allow us to know them? Characters who are in pain for reasons we understand and behave badly for reasons we can comprehend, but who inspire nothing as strong as liking or loathing. What happens when we close a book with neither a shudder nor a smile, but only a shrug? The narrator of Howard Norman's latest novel, "Next Life Might Be Kinder," has so many troubles you can see why he'd be ornery. In Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1971, the novelist Sam Lattimore and the woman who will become his wife, a graduate student named Elizabeth Church, meet at a local art gallery, striking up a conversation over a Robert Frank exhibit. They fall in love and marry quickly. But even before we learn how their story begins, Norman has revealed its not-so-happy ending. "After my wife, Elizabeth Church, was murdered by the bellman Alfonse Padgett in the Essex Hotel," Sam announces on the very first page, "she did not leave me." That's a crackerjack opening, a wily little teaser that tells us whodunit but not why, and hints that Elizabeth's spirit may not have resigned itself to eternal rest. Apparently, it hasn't: Elizabeth, or a specter of her, has been appearing to Sam on the beach near the secluded cottage he bought after her death. She talks to him about her dissertation, on which, it appears, she's still working; she brings books with her and lines them up along the shore. Sam tries to talk to his psychotherapist about these visitations and becomes surly when the good doctor attempts to persuade him, in that round -about, "How does that make you feel?" way therapists have, that he can't possibly be seeing his dead wife. There's more. Sam, desperate for money, has sold the rights to the story of his early marriage and Elizabeth's murder to a self-involved filmmaker named Peter Istvakson, who has his own idea of how the narrative should unfold. "What 'based on a true story' means," he informs Sam, "is my film will tell what really happened, only better." No wonder Sam is miserable: Either he can't let his wife go or she won't let him go. His therapist is trying to wave away the one thing in his life that's currently giving him comfort. And a megalomaniac is trying to reshape the story of his life, right before his eyes. "The progress of this picture will be the progress of my soul," Istvakson explains to Sam, who realizes, wisely, that the only appropriate response is an incredulous eye roll. "I mean, who talks like that?" Sam asks himself. "A real dunce. Go sit in the corner with your dunce cap on, dunce." In his grief, Sam holds everyone at arm's length, and you can't blame him. But by the end of "Next Life Might Be Kinder," we don't know much more about him than we did at the beginning. Sam is about nothing but grief - we see how it makes him churlish, impatient, uncharitable and rude, but those are just adjectives rattling around in the otherwise empty shape of his character. The real subject of the book is the fetching Elizabeth, but we're forced to spend an awful lot of time with the interminably gloomy Sam. Sam's present-day travails alternate with flashbacks, so we learn a lot about Elizabeth and why Sam loved her. She was bright and funny, like the old-Hollywood heroines she adored, Myrna Loy and Veronica Lake. And she was sexy. Sam recalls the night they first made love: "It was in my one-room apartment. She kissed my ears and whispered, 'Tonight, your Elizabeth,' as if reading the title on some lurid cover of a 1940s paperback detective novel. Just the way she said it, enunciating each word in my ear. Each word given equal regard by her tongue and breath." Elizabeth is an idealized figure, more a dream girl than a fully rounded character, which makes sense: She was taken from Sam in the early days of the marriage, days they spent undressing each other and sprawling, in flagrante, on the Victorian chaise longue Elizabeth had brought into the honeymoon cottage/hotel suite they called their home. (The chaise longue has specific meaning for Elizabeth, connected with her scholarly studies.) The two take Lindy lessons together, a detail that will later figure in Elizabeth's tragic end. They have a big Russian blue cat named Maximus Minimum, who likes to listen to the radio. BUT WE NEVER really learn why Elizabeth, this sterling human being - her life so unjustly shortened by a nutcase bellman - would be attracted to a mope like Sam. Nor does Sam's conflict with Istvakson ever pop into strong relief. Sam spends a lot of time complaining about Istvakson, but the filmmaker is barely a presence in the story. Mostly, Sam is just trying to dodge the advances of Istvakson's comely assistant, Lily Svetgartot, who at least injects some verve into his life - and the book - by showing up at inconvenient moments and demanding a cup of coffee as if it were her birthright. With "Next Life Might Be Kinder," Norman - perhaps best known for his 1994 novel "The Bird Artist," another story of murder and emotional reckoning - may be trying to feel his way around the contours of grief without doing anything as obvious as define it, and that's admirable. His prose, at its best, is elegant in its directness. "Closure is cowardice," Sam tells his therapist during one particularly incendiary, frustrated flare-up. "When you lose someone you love, the memory of them maintains a tenacious adhesiveness to the heart - I quote Chekhov there. See, if you don't feel very articulate, it's useful to find people like Chekhov to help you out." When Sam is speaking that plainly, it's easy to connect with his rage and his deep, shuddering despair. No wonder he feels so lost; no wonder he's seeing ghosts. "Next Life Might Be Kinder" is best when it's riffing on those Gothic undertones. Can true love really reach out from beyond the grave? Sam seems to have the answer. We just can't get close enough to find out. 'What "based on a true story" means is my him will tell what really happened, only better.' STEPHANIE ZACHAREK is the chief film critic for The Village Voice.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 27, 2014]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Newlyweds Sam and Elizabeth create a zone of passion, both sexual and intellectual, in their apartment in a Halifax hotel in the early 1970s. Sam is writing his second novel and, for pay, new episodes for old radio shows. Elizabeth is working on her dissertation and learning the lindy. They are erotically bedazzled, steeped in the past, and deliriously happy. Then Elizabeth is murdered. Sam moves into a cottage by the sea, besieged by memories of what led to his beloved's violent death. Each night Elizabeth, calm and collected, appears on the beach, and they talk. Sam's therapist struggles to dismantle this delusion. Desperate for funds, Sam sold the film rights to his and Elizabeth's story. He now loathes the pretentious, manipulative director. While Sam struggles within a vortex of anger and sorrow, his neighbors, a designer and a librarian, offer provocative perspectives on situational ethics and how secrets are kept and revealed. 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.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

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 (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Elizabeth Church After my wife, Elizabeth Church, was murdered by the bellman Alfonse Padgett in the Essex Hotel, she did not leave me. I have always thought a person needs to constantly refine the capacity to suspend disbelief in order to keep emotions organized and not suffer debilitating confusion, and I mean just toward the things of daily life. I suppose this admits to a desperate sort of pragmatism. Still, it works for me. What human heart isn't in extremis? The truth is, I saw Elizabeth last night, August 27, 1973. She was lining up books on the beach behind Philip and Cynthia Slayton's house, just across the road. I've seen her do the same thing almost every night since I moved, roughly thirteen months ago, from Halifax to this cottage. I'm now a resident of Port Medway, Nova Scotia. At three-thirty a.m., sitting at my kitchen table, as usual I made notes for Dr. Nissensen. I see him at ten a.m. on Tuesdays in Halifax, which is a two-hour drive. I often stay at the Haliburton House Inn on Monday night and then travel back to Port Medway immediately following my session. Don't get me wrong, Dr. Nissensen is helping me a lot. But we have bad moments. After the worst of them I sometimes can't remember where I parked my pickup truck. Then there are the numbing redundancies. Take last Tuesday, when Dr. Nissensen said: "My position remains, you aren't actually seeing Elizabeth. She was in fact murdered in the Essex Hotel on March 26 of last year. And she is buried in Hay-on-Wye in Wales. But her death is unacceptable to you, Sam. You want so completely to see her that you hallucinate--and she sets those books out on the sand. It's your mind's way of trying to postpone the deeper suffering of having lost her. One thing books suggest is, you're supposed to read into the situation. To read into things. Naturally, it's more complicated than just that. It can be many things at once. My opinion has not changed since the first time you told me about talking with Elizabeth on the beach"--he paged back through his notebook--"on September 4, 1972, your first mention of this. My position remains that, as impressively creative as your denial is, and to whatever extent it sustains you, it's still denial." "My God," I said. "A life without denial. How could a person survive?" Nissensen smiled and sighed deeply: Here we go again. "What's on the piece of paper you're holding? You've been holding it in clear view since you arrived." I had copied out from a dictionary the definition of "Bardo." "Let me read this to you: 'Bardo--a Tibetan concept meaning intermediate state .' It's when a person's existing between death and whatever's next. And during this state, certain of the usual restraints might not be at work, in some cases for a long, long time." "And you feel this is what you're experiencing with Elizabeth?" "Yes. Which I hope lasts until I die." "So, you've recently found this word in a dictionary and now you're embracing it," Dr. Nissensen said. "Okay, let's go with this a moment. What do you think it means that certain--what was it?--usual restraints might not be at work?" "Well, to start with, obviously a person who's died is usually restrained to being invisible, right? They usually don't show up on a beach and hold conversations." "Yes, I've got quite a notebook filled with your and Elizabeth's conversations." "That makes two of us, then." "I've been curious, Sam. Do you jot these down as they occur? Like a stenographer?" "Like a stenographer, yes, sometimes. But sometimes I just listen closely and write things down the minute I get back to the cottage." "Week after week, you attempt to convince me you're actually having real conversations, rather than, for instance, composing them. At your writing desk. The way you might when writing a novel, say." "Do you consider me a stupid man?" I asked. "Of course not." "A liar?" "Of course not." "No matter whether or not it's called Bardo, the word's not that important. The thing is, I talk with Elizabeth almost every night. And talking with Elizabeth is a reprieve from suffering. After all this time, you still don't get it." "No, no," Nissensen said, "I get it." "Yet you insist on calling what's happening to me an--what was it?" "An advent of mourning." "Advent of mourning. But I despise the word 'mourning.'" "And why is that, Sam?" "Because it implies a certain fixed duration, a measurable time frame, and it also relates to my most hated word: closure. If you love someone and they suddenly disappear--say they die--there is no closure. It's like, it's like--what?--it's like a Bach cello composition playing in your head that doesn't let up. You can't predict for how long. What if it's for the rest of your life? You don't just get closure . You don't just come to terms and then move on. And not even a lobotomy could change my mind about this. And I've read C. S. Lewis, that book of his-- A Grief Observed . I've read some theology and philosophy, advice-to-the-bereaved stuff, and I don't give a goddamn who says what or how dramatic or limited or self-destructive I sound. Closure is cowardice. When you lose someone you love, the memory of them maintains a tenacious adhesiveness to the heart--I quote Chekhov there. See, if you don't feel very articulate, it's useful to find people like Chekhov to help you out." "I don't think being inarticulate is your--" "Look, if I ever said 'Oh, I've found closure with Elizabeth,' please push me in front of a taxi on Water Street--I'd be dead to feeling anyway. You have my permission ahead of time. Shoot me in the head." "I'm your therapist. You'd have to ask someone else." Silence a moment, then he said, "'Dead to feeling.' So the pain keeps you alive to feeling." There was silence for maybe three or four minutes. This seldom bothers me. I just study the room. It is a basement refurbished as an office. Against three walls are shelves of books. Also, there are books crowded and piled haphazardly on tables. Mostly books on psychology, but I've noticed a few novels, too. Dostoyevsky. Thomas Mann. Virginia Woolf. Conrad. Charlotte Brontë. Little that's contemporary. There is a small Van Gogh drawing of a village; I've wanted to ask if it's an original. I've wanted to ask if it was inherited. There are five framed charcoal drawings of various women, not nudes. I know that his wife, Theresa, drew them because there are two others in the exact same style in the waiting room, each bearing her signature. There's his overstuffed chair he sits on, and a sofa his clients sit on. On the table between the chair and the sofa, a box of tissues, a glass, and a pitcher of water. There are five ground-level windows, allowing for plenty of light, but also three floor lamps and one table lamp. The house is in a neighborhood of some of the oldest buildings in Halifax. Dr. Nissensen's is a late-nineteenth-century townhouse. Winter mornings I occasionally hear the clanking echoes of the radiators. A car horn. On rare occasions a voice from the street. "Last week you mentioned that lately Elizabeth has told you things she'd"--he flipped back through his notebook--"kept secret, but not on purpose." "Yes, it's been great." "I'm curious," Dr. Nissensen said. "Is there any particular thing you'd most like Elizabeth to tell you?" "If it's a secret, how would I even know to ask about it?" "I was thinking of the phrase 'a painful secret.'" "There is one thing. It's something lately I sense she wants to tell me." "And now you in fact want to hear it?" "I'm sort of afraid to hear it, actually." He closed his notebook and stared at the cover, then looked up at me. "Is that one thing how she was murdered, Sam? What really happened. Not in the courtroom, what the bellman Alfonse Padgett described as having occurred, but the incident from Elizabeth's point of view. Her own account of it. Which would naturally be the truth to you ​-- ​and should be. Are you afraid, as you say, because you might then experience what she felt at that moment? And yet you want to feel everything she felt. Because you loved her so deeply." "Not past tense, please. Love , not loved ." Excerpted from Next Life Might Be Kinder by Howard Norman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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