Howard Norman holding a photograph by Robert Frank, May 2007. Photo: Emma Norman.

Devotion, Howard Norman’s new novel, is like no other story I have read. But that in fact can be said of all of Norman’s work. A quiet moment is interrupted by a surprising collision—in Devotion, a physical altercation between a man and his father-in-law; in The Museum Guard, the hero’s startling confession that he has stolen a valuable work of art; in The Haunting of L., the protagonist’s dalliance with his employer’s wife—that brings to life a world located elsewhere, somewhere we’ve never been, that comes to seem, in its strangeness, entirely familiar. Norman’s work, his fiction in particular, is disquieting, mysterious, and erotic, with an emotional intimacy that we associate with music or landscape painting. His stories are haunted by an atmosphere of melancholy, a tragic vision captured in Devotion by a flock of mute, wounded swans. Dropping out of high school in his late teens, Norman worked on a fire crew in Manitoba, Canada, with Cree Indians, and was fascinated by their folktales and stories. In the mid-’60s Norman began traveling to Canada and the Arctic to record and translate Native American and Inuit oral lore, and his novels reflect the spirit of these people and even some of their subjects: disconnected lives carried out in the extremity and isolation of an icy northern setting.

I have known Howard Norman all my life, it seems, even though we met only 10 years ago. These days we often have conversations like this one, which took place at an Italian restaurant on Connecticut Avenue in Washington DC called Arucola, which Howard frequents when he is not at home or at Politics and Prose Bookstore, or traveling any avenue, foreign or familiar, discovering in small, examined lives and landscapes, the unlikely, the otherworldly, the lasting truths about art and morality and the depths of the human spirit. As in Halifax, the setting of most of his novels, he makes of a place his own particular landscape.

Devotion came out this spring from Houghton Mifflin and will be published in paperback by Mariner Books in February 2008.

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Issue 100 Summer 2007