Product Description

What You Have Left is an unforgettable story of love, loss, and, most of all, longing.

In 1976, on the day of his wife's funeral, Wylie Greer drops off his five-year-old daughter, Holly, at his father-in-law's dairy farm on the outskirts of Columbia, South Carolina. Wylie tells her he just needs a little time to clear his head, but thirty years pass before Holly sees her father again -- "time I spent wondering what I'd done to make him leave," she says, "and what I could do to make him come back."

What You Have Left is about a father and daughter trying to make their way back to one another across decades of uncertainty and ambivalence -- all the while hoping to discover that what they have left is worth salvaging. It's also the story of a grandfather bent on suicide, a pioneering female NASCAR driver, a heartbroken amnesiac, a video poker junkie, and assorted other liars, cheaters, and lovers who, despite their best intentions, never quite live up to their own expectations.

Are we doomed to repeat our parents' mistakes? Can lies save love instead of destroying it? Is letting go the same as giving up? Shot through with sly humor and a knowing sympathy for human weakness, What You Have Left takes up these and other questions as it examines the weight of history, the nature of loss, and the possibility of forgiveness. Making use of bold shifts in viewpoint and time, Allison proves a brilliant observer of the emotional legacies handed down from parent to child and the ways loss defines us. This stunning debut brims with an affection for humanity exactly as it is -- in all its ignorance and awareness, its swagger and humility, its despair and hope.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #721892 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-05
• Released on: 2007-06-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Loss and redemption take center stage in story writer Allison's beautifully written debut novel. When five-year-old Holly's mother dies suddenly in the summer of 1976, Holly's father, Wylie, leaves her in the care of her grandfather, Cal, and disappears. Holly's coming-of-age on her grandfather's South Carolina dairy farm is a turbulent one, producing a volatile woman with drinking and gambling problems. She does manage, however, to land a good husband in Cal's contractor, Lyle, and the two have a daughter. Meanwhile, Wylie drinks himself close to death and works odd jobs, while Cal endures the deaths of his wife and daughter with stoic dignity. But an Alzheimer's diagnosis proves too much to bear, leaving Cal to put his affairs in order before making an early, quiet exit. It's more than 15 years later before Holly and Wylie reunite, providing the deeply felt emotional core of this earnest novel. Characters' tension-fraught relationships are well played, and Allison is adept at navigating a labyrinthine web of psychological underpinnings. Though the structure has its stymied moments (chapters are chronologically jumbled and are told in various voices, narrative styles and tenses), the nonlinear narrative gives Allison a trove of angles, and he nails all of them. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
The title of Will Allison's first novel, What You Have Left, is a play on words. What Wylie Greer leaves behind in 1976 is his 5-year-old daughter, Holly. And what Holly is eventually left with is her aging grandfather and an ache that no amount of rage, alcohol or video poker can satisfy. The novel takes its place on the shelf of American abandonment fiction, a subgenre that ranges from Huckleberry Finn to Housekeeping. In spare, transparent prose, Allison takes us through nearly four decades in the lives of a South Carolina family crippled by the past and unarmed for the future.

Like many fiction writers, Allison has come to the novel via the short story. His chapters, non-chronological and from a variety of perspectives, read like autonomous, sometimes too tightly compressed pieces. Though focusing on one particular tension in each chapter, the author has the short story writer's habit of averting his gaze at the last minute, leaving the reader to guess how the crisis played itself out. And big things sometimes happen too quickly. While painting the state capitol, Holly's husband, Lyle, burns the Confederate flag on a bet, loses his job and is forced to ask his father for work. "He didn't seem to notice that in the course of the last day, he had become exactly the person he never wanted to be."

The strength of What You Have Left lies in the relationships among its characters. When Lyle, who has been as present as Wylie has been absent in Holly's life, tracks down her father, he ends up promising Wylie he won't tell Holly. As the two men say goodbye, Lyle thinks, "I get the feeling he sizes me up, decides then and there that though I may be important in his daughter's life, I'm not necessarily permanent. Not like blood relations. Not like him." In deft passages such as this, Allison captures the truth and irony of being part of a family, no matter how broken it is.

When Wylie finally does make contact, it is Holly's daughter Claire who is able to respond without bitterness. But Wylie has suffered seizures from alcohol poisoning and has lost his short-term memory. He asks Claire how old she is several times within a few minutes.

" 'I'm ten,' she said. 'Same as the last time you asked.'

" 'Maybe so,' my father said, 'but you'll be eleven before I remember it.' "

In their easy rapport and the bond that grows between them, Holly finally finds her peace -- and the novel its surest step.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Allison's engaging debut dissects the guilt and betrayal embedded in the history of one South Carolina family. Shifting narrators relate the saga of four generations, beginning in 1991 when Holly is 20, struggling with the fact that her grandfather Cal is planning to overdose rather than fall victim to Alzheimer's. Cal raised Holly after her mother Maddy died in an accident and her father Wylie disappeared, unable to cope with his grief. Allison flashes back to the early years of Maddy and Wylie's marriage, when they dreamed of entering the NASCAR circuit, then jumps to Holly's somewhat troubled marriage to Lyle after Cal dies. Eventually the aging Wylie becomes the narrator as grandfather to Holly and Lyle's daughter, and the facts surrounding his subsequent disappearance and lack of communication over the years are seen through yet another lens. Allison clearly empathizes with his characters' foibles and manages always to find some measure of humor when they repeatedly let each other down. Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

weird, wonderful, slice of life
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.

"the human heart itself"
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.

Very Impressive Debut
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.