BRATTLEBORO – I don’t usually write book reviews. Novels, plays, fantasies, autobiographies, full-length Shakespearean satires: the whole lot. But I’m moved to tell my fellow Gazette readers about Howard Norman’s new novel, “Come to the Window” (W.W. Norton, 2024). It’s a wonderful story, a book to own and read over and over.
If you don’t know Norman’s work, you can begin with “The Bird Artist,” his first big novel, (early 1990’s) and still one of the great reads to come out as the last century wrapped. It’s quirky, erudite, fun, surprising, and deeply rooted in the land, In this case (as in most of his books), the land in Nova Scotia that spills into the sea.
Norman is from East Calais, halfway between Montpelier and Hardwick, and can be encountered on the streets of both places, studying our most fascinating people, but also maybe just heading to his favorite bookstore or café. My shelf of Norman novels is more than a foot long. A few years back I heard him say, “I’m not writing any more fiction,” a statement I took as a personal loss. For there is no other author currently writing who can match him, for characters who leap off the page to take up guest-residence in my mind.
The plot of “Come to the Window” is simple. A very attractive, very unusual, very naked young woman kills her husband on their wedding night in their marriage bed, when he won’t, as the title says, come to the window to see the enormous whale just beached in front of their hotel. The story follows her trial and well, that’s enough reveal!
Like many writers, theater people, artists of all kinds, Norman was clearly taken aback by the Covid-19 pandemic. The virus’s mysterious arrival, its enormous threat to life, the rules, the public response and the backlash, hit the arts community in various ways. Folks had to figure other means to earn money just to survive. In Howard Norman’s case, the whole thing knocked him back into the race: when he sat down and made himself available to fiction once again, some truly memorable characters showed up, who wanted to talk with us through him, and so he followed their cue, and what he saw outside his window, and set his story a hundred years back in time, at the height of the Spanish Flu.
Toby Havenshaw tells the story. He’s a reporter for the Halifax Evening Mail. His wife is Amelia, a busy, exhausted field surgeon in Europe in World War I. When she returns, we see how strong their marriage is. I’m not giving anything away here. They are both witty, smart, quick to react, patient and long to love. Their love is like the one between Coach and Tami in “Friday Night Lights.” You know, you just know, that they will sleep together every night, if they can. All the other characters, the fascinating events that capture us, revolve around the strong center of their mutual adoration, and that’s that. No spoiler here: you won’t be turning the page to see whether Toby and Amelia fall any less in love.
“Come to the Window” gave me all I have come to expect, actually to beg for, in a Norman novel. It’s got the required murder, like in a game of CLUE. “Elizabeth Frame, with the Revolver, in the Hotel Room.” There are ghosts, or almost ghosts. Old-fashioned newspaper reporters. Orphans. Meals, menus, plot twists you can’t see coming. People who talk to each other in a leaping, crackling style that leaves you laughing, witnessing brilliance you’ll never come close to, no matter how many books you write.
What I want to tell my fellow Gazette readers: “Come to the Window” is vintage, heirloom Howard Norman, written by a man who it turns out couldn’t keep from writing, because the odd phrasings, the gallows humor, the salt spray just won’t leave him alone. I think you should go buy the book. Don’t borrow your best friend’s copy. Go get your own down at the Galaxy Book Shop. That’s a win-win-win. You’ll be glad you did.
Peter Gould
Peter Gould is the creator of the summer Shakespeare camp, Get Thee to the Funnery.
