Book review: 'I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place'

Howard Norman's I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place, a collection of personal essays available tomorrow, begins as any good summer read could begin. It is August 1964 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the adolescent Mr. Norman is chatting casually with Paris Keller, his older brother's girlfriend. Paris stands topless in Mr. Norman's boyhood home, while her t-shirt, wet from a downpour, tumbles in the dryer. Sexual awakening and reluctant adulthood loom. "It was the first conversation I ever wrote down," the writer admits, a statement impossible to untangle from the bareness of Paris' breasts.

In many ways, this incident among them, Mr. Norman's memoir is emblematic of his era and age: his father is injuriously absent, John Lennon dies, Mr. Norman interacts with another culture and furthers his own self-actualization, namely as a writer. ("You might say that my time in the Arctic was an apprenticeship, for writing and thinking and even for attempting to keep certain aspects of the past as close at hand as humanly possible.")

But there are two important ways in which this book is something much more--and much better--than the standard fare we have come to expect when the word "memoir" graces a cover. First, Mr. Norman positions himself as an incisive vessel to his many, large worlds. Mr. Norman's writing is graceful and compelling, and he does not get bogged down by the endless information a writer is privy to when the subject is himself. It is evident that Mr. Norman has led a life more adventurous than most, and it would have been easy to get lost in his own interesting-ness: he cut his teeth documenting the folklore of the Canadian Northwest Territories, and he has gained considerable prominence as an author since. But conversations with David Mamet are treated with no more circumstance than those with neighbors in Vermont, with whom Mr. Norman and his wife watch Ken Burns' Civil War documentary. His memories of Grand Rapids are as thoughtfully considered as his research among the Inuit populations in the Great White North. Mr. Norman has woven significant events in his life artfully and purposefully, and reading his essays together has the satisfying effect of tapping a tightly strung drum.

The second reason this memoir is such a singular experience is that it is wrapped around, based on, preoccupied with death. In his second essay, "Grey Geese Descending," Mr. Norman makes the following observation about his early twenties:

The novels I was reading at the time deftly orchestrated implausibilities along a clear narrative line, but I could not locate such a line in my own life. Every day seemed autonomously haphazard; one day was disconnected from the next. There was no unifying element of thought or strategy, just a budging of ennui and puzzlement.

In this book, Mr. Norman has indeed located the "line" in his life. I wonder what young Mr. Norman would have thought, in that early "Grey Geese Descending," if he had known that the primary line in his life would turn out to be tragedy. Mr. Norman starts us off light, with the memory of killing a swan during his summer working in a Grand Rapids book mobile and being ignored and then taken advantage of by his father. In the second essay, his first love dies in a plane crash. In the third, John Lennon is murdered. In the fifth, the narrative crescendos to the horrific event when his house-sitter, a poet, kills her two-year-old son and herself in Mr. Norman's home in D.C. while he and his family are vacationing in Vermont.

If the first theme in Mr. Norman's life has been tragedy, the second is bird-watching, Mr. Norman's emotional safety net and a rare opportunity for comic relief. ("No, not that sort of birder, if I understand you correctly," he assures a photographer he meets in the closing essay.) His boyhood swan-killing is incidentally the beginning of his lifelong fascination with birds. These essays are Mr. Norman's thoughtful reflection on his life's trauma, and the birds serve as the physical reminder of the world's loveliness, a loveliness that Mr. Norman is compelled to see. Great sorrow is presented alongside great beauty, and the writer pivots hard on a quotation by Paul Eluard: "There is another world but it's in this one."

This is an ambitious memoir that avoids both sentimentality and false, self-help-style platitudes. Mr. Norman finds order in his vast universe, as he sees and understands it, and the effect is intimate in the way that I want a writer to be intimate with me as a reader, and inspirational in that Mr. Norman leads by example. It is not the nostalgia-soaked beach read I expected from the first few pages. But if the relentless cheeriness of the summer singes your soul as well as your skin--as it does mine, on both counts--this finely crafted collection will be a salve to what ails you, a soaring oystercatcher to enchant and expand your suffering heart. The world seems a larger place after reading Mr. Norman's book; I don't know a higher compliment to give a writer or a person.