Customer Reviews

What You Have Left: A Novel

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This small book (only 200 some pages) was crafted with care. You can tell that the author has sweated and suffered over every single word. It's almost perfect.

Allison's debut novel serves notice of a new literary star among us. It's the story of a woman's search for her lost father. She's really looking for herself. Along the way, she rediscovers the mother that she cannot reclaim, only reconsider.

There are some mighty fine characters on the side but this book belongs to the daughter, Holly, and her dad, Wylie. The author has chosen to employ a cross-cutting of chapters that zooms back and forth in time through the viewpoints of several characters.

It's a bold tactic that really adds to the effect of this supple, slyly witty concoction. Fans of coming of age epics, NASCAR, and South Carolina need to turn their friends on to this one.

I predict big things for Will Allison. Now, if he could only write faster! Just kidding. The next book will be well worth the wait.

Holly's mother is dead. Holly is "sentenced to life on (her) grandfather's dairy farm" in South Carolina. Her father disappears. Then he's back.

Sound interesting? I haven't yet told you about NASCAR, Alzheimer's disease, video poker, the Confederate flag . . .

And all that doesn't even account for the brave juxtapositions of time and character offered by the novel's unusual structure, nor the well-made, elegant language of the telling, nor (most importantly) what new light Allison sheds on "the human heart itself."

What You Have Left is a remarkable debut novel. I feel lucky to have found it.

Having just finished Will Allison's debut What You Have Left, I was left with a feeling of loss myself. A sliver of a novel, it went by all too quickly, and this adds to the thematic wallop of the story, as loss after loss plays its way through the consciousnesses of the well-wrought and reflective characters. I suppose, on the good foot, the brevity invites re-reading, but I think I'll wait a bit so as not to dillute the delicious feeling of regret left by the novel's first reading.

The regret palpable in the story is complicated by a sensitive series of portrayals of what it's like to love damaged and/or unavailable people--a feeling familiar to any potential reader (read: any human), at once accessible and wistfully distant. Mr. Allison knows his characters so well that even the most casual comment or gesture adds to the accretion of regret which locks together stories which take place over the span of almost forty years in South Carolina. While the characters are all members of the same family, more or less, it is the hurt and loss which binds them, not only to their own relatives, but more significantly, to the present paths which inspire their present behaviors. The characters are huge without overstatement, and the prose is so insightful as to hurt.

I'll be impatient, no doubt, waiting for Mr. Allison's second novel. As I finished the book, I was reminded of other debuts--McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City and Foer's Everything's Illuminated. The books are radically different in content, but they crackle with the clear precision and promise of the announcement of a major talent. While McInerney's debut seems dated now, I can't imagine Mr. Allison's will twenty or a hundred and twenty years from now. Do yourself a favor and read it; I'd bet in retrospect, you'll feel as if you were at the Kingdome on May 29th, 1995. Except Allison goes five for five.

Allison's emotionally powerful novel takes its characters through difficult ethical questions: what should you do when your beloved grandfather wants to commit suicide; what should you do when you think you've accidentally killed someone; how do you deal with your addiction and its effect on your family; how do you deal with your spouse's equally destructive addiction; how can you achieve emotional closure without seeking revenge? The questions stay with you beyond the page, so fully are the characters and their problems realized. By the end, you've gone through four generations and in the process explored with each character what ultimately is important in a life - the "what you have left" of the title. A very fine and rich book.

Allison's writing is so clean, precise and unobtrusive that I nearly had the first chapter read before leaving the bookstore. I most enjoyed the shifting perspectives from one family member to another as the story unfolded among multiple family members.

This novel will leave you thinking, as it does what good writing should: its characters seem even more real than the folks next door. Allison tells his story--and it's a good story--through multiple viewpoints and styles. This might muddle things in less capable hands, but in Allison's it only deepens the experience. His writing stays clear throughout, almost breathable. It made the getting to know his people all that much easier and enjoyable.

Novels that stick with me produce one commmon effect: I recognize I've reached the end of the story (because of that feeling that this particular ending is the only way it could end), but nonetheless want to know what happened to the characters afterwards. I've been thoroughly involved in what's happening to them, a top-shelf experience to have as a reader.

What You Have Left is like a perfect pop song. The kind that you crank up on a bright summer day as you roll down the windows, step on the gas, and see what that baby can do. Like those summertime songs, this book is infectious, with no fatty in the patty.

The characters are vividly drawn, but the prose is so smooth as to be invisible. It's like I didn't read the story at all; I mainlined it. But don't confuse "pop" with "simple." This book is smart. Complex as the human heart. And that's Will Allison's best trick. Making this whole writing game seem easy as ice cream.

THE book of the summer.

Will Allison's style of writing is simple yet smart. I immediately fell for his characters and found myself engrossed in their lives, unable to put the book down until I finished it. Each chapter is strong enough to easily stand on its own as an excellent short story, but together, the chapters also embody a phenominal work which is funny, emotional, and very human.

My son and I were at the library and had just finished choosing about twenty books about inventing and inventions. I sent him to a chair so he could thumb through his borrowed treasures and I headed off to the fiction stacks. I snaked up and down among the stacks, picking things up and putting them down just as quickly--waiting for the book that called to me. This was it. It sounded interesting, eclectic, substantial and worth the precious moments I can carve out of my days. Surprisingly, a homeschooling mother has very little time to read for her own pleasure, therefore I'm exceedingly picky about my reading material.

The story is no doubt well written and I think that Allison has a knack for word-craft. The back and forth structure of the
novel was interesting and seamless, drawing parallels and connections between the characters beautifully, but in the end I never really felt emotionally connected to or invested in the characters.

It's really the story of how Holly came to terms with her mother's sudden death and her father's abandonment of her on the day of the funeral. That childhood confusion and desperation is the vein that runs though the entire story. Unfortunately, I hated Holly. I didn't find myself wishing her well, rather I wished she'd just grow the heck up and stop treating everyone around her like crap already. I couldn't understand why her boyfriend turned husband put up with her garbage for so long. She didn't deserve the love and devotion that Lyle showered upon her. Maybe it's because Allison is a guy and it's just naturally easier to write from the same sex perspective, but Lyle's story was so much more engrossing and I found myself wishing for his voice to pop in.

One downside of the structure of the novel is that it feels more like little snippets of life, not quite a full story. More like a string of interesting ideas that were never fully developed and flushed out. There were so many times that, dislike for Holly aside, I wished for more detail about a given story. Instead I'm whisked fifteen years to the past or brought back to the present, feeling empty and disappointed.

"Empty" and "disappointed" is also how I felt upon reading the last page. It seemed as though Allison just didn't know how to end it so he wrapped it up in a pretty pink package and sold me bubble gum.

Even though I didn't find this to be a perfect gem, I am glad I discovered it. I look forward to reading more of Allison's work. He is good at what he does and I hope to see him hone his craft.

Will Allison's novel, What You Have Left, is a story of a young woman's search for her father who left when she was five. Her mother died in a water-skiing accident, and after the funeral Holly's father went out to clear his head for a little while and never returned.

The story is told from the viewpoints of Holly, her husband Lyle, but the chapters about Wylie, her father are told from a third person viewpoint, and only two chapters are told from the first person of Holly and Lyle. How accurate their stories are in the first person is up to the reader to decide.

Holly's mother had been a race car driver in her young life, always competitive and resented by a lot of the male drivers. Her husband, Wylie, was never sure of his role as a father and a very upsetting and unsettling incident with his friend's baby made him even more unsure. Maddy, Holly's mother, was often at wit's end with a crying infant.

A stabilizing force in Holly's life was her grandfather, with whom she grew up. She lived on his farm and he cared for her and nurtured her to adulthood. Cal was the person Holly loved best and what eventually happened to Cal was a sad episode in her life.

This very cleanly and well-written book throws out a lot of questions and situations that people face in life such as addictions, suicide, abandonment, and guilt. Holly's grandfather's favorite quote that drove Holly crazy was one that Hubert Humphrey said, "My friend, it's not what they take away from you that counts; it's what you do with what you have left." That applies to each character in this very good first novel that I enjoyed.