What You Have Left: A Novel

by Will Allison

Overview

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

ISBN-13:	9781416546672
Publisher:	Free Press
Publication date:	06/05/2007
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Lexile:	1010L (what's this?)
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Will Allison’s debut novel, What You Have Left, was selected for Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers, Borders Original Voices, and Book Sense Picks, and was named one of 2007’s notable books by the San Francisco Chronicle. His short stories have appeared in magazines such as Zoetrope: All-Story, Glimmer Train, and One Story and have received special mention in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories anthologies. He is the former executive editor of Story. Born in Columbia, South Carolina, he now lives with his wife and daughter in New Jersey. Learn more about Will Allison at www.willallison.com.

Read an Excerpt

The pecky-cypress paneling in the master bedroom of our house is pitted and scarred, the handiwork of a thousand woodpeckers, or at least that's what I imagined as a five-year-old. When I'd asked Cal about his funny-looking walls, though, he told me the pockmarks weren't the result of woodpeckers or worms or beetles, as many people believed, but rather a rare and little-understood fungus. "What makes pecky hard to find," he said, "is that you can't tell if a cypress is infected until you chop down the tree and cut it open."

When he'd purchased the farm, in 1939, the house wasn't a house, it was a grain barn. He divided the building into rooms and framed doors and windows using wood from an old sharecropper's cabin. After that first drafty winter, Josie shivering next to him in bed, he decided to insulate and panel their bedroom walls. He originally thought he'd get the wood from the Colonel's sawmill, but this was the Depression: Cal couldn't afford to buy lumber, and the Colonel couldn't afford to give it away, not even to his own son. The best he could do was let Cal help himself to the scrap pile, which was where he found, underneath an old tarp, a load of pecky cypress, enough to panel the bedroom and his workshop. In later years, people would develop a taste for pecky and an appreciation for its scarcity, but in those days, it was considered junk wood. Josie didn't care; she said it had low-country charm. Mainly, though, she was pleased that Cal went to all that trouble for her even as he worked twelve-hour days trying to establish their dairy farm. Her gratitude was not lost on him, and for the rest of her life, whenever he wanted to please her, he embarked on some new project to make the house more comfortable. Just before my mother was born, he added on a whole second story, and in later years he expanded the dining room and added a built-in china cabinet, then converted the front porch into a sitting parlor with French doors. In 1969, he was halfway done painting the house a minty shade of green that Josie picked out when doctors discovered the tumor in her breast.

After Josie's death, my grandfather let the house fall into disrepair, but during the fall of my sophomore year, when he first began having trouble with his memory, he sold off several parcels of land and started using the money to fix the place up. Though I didn't know it at the time, he did this for me, for when I inherited the farm.

At seventy-two, he was no longer able to do the work himself, so he hired Lyle on the recommendation of an old army buddy. In those days, Lyle was more handyman than general contractor, but he worked cheap, and my grandfather liked his manners, the fact that his family was well off, the fact that he'd been smart enough for grad school but then turned his back on all that academic baloney. Inside a month, Cal was inviting him to join us for happy hour. By then I already had my eye on Lyle — a shirtless guy tuck-pointing a chimney apparently being one of my weaknesses — but he seemed more interested in Cal's company than mine, so I played it close to the chest.

That all changed on the afternoon my grandfather told me he was sick. He'd just finished filling me in on his visit to the VA when Lyle and the two guys who worked for him came crawling out from under the house, brushing soil from their jeans. That week they were trying to fix the sloping floor in the living room. The joists beneath the oak floorboards were supported by heavy girders cut from the heartwood of long-leaf pines, and their plan was to reinforce these girders with steel beams, jack them up, and then build concrete pillars to stabilize the floor. After his crew knocked off for the day, Lyle joined us and began to report on their progress, and soon talk turned to the next project, a new roof. My grandfather didn't mention his health again, but I could think of nothing else, and as he and Lyle droned on about shingles and soffits, I stared out at the fields that once fed Cal's registered Guernseys and quietly plowed my way through two more drinks.

Copyright © 2007 by Will Allison

Table of Contents

Contents

Chapter One 1991 Holly

Chapter Two 1971 Wylie

Chapter Three 1991 Lyle

Chapter Four 1970 Wylie

Chapter Five 1996 Holly

Chapter Six 2001 Lyle

Chapter Seven 1979 Wylie

Chapter Eight 2007 Holly

Reading Group Guide

Reading Group Guide

Discussion Questions

1. This book doesn't start at the beginning of the story. Why do you think the author sometimes showed you the results of a character's actions before revealing his or her personal history? How might it have changed your ideas about Wylie if we read his side of the story first? How were your feelings about Cal affected by this structure?

2. The only two chapters in the novel that are narrated in the first person are chapter 3 (Lyle 1991) and chapter 8 (Holly 2007). Did it feel different to hear the characters speak for themselves in those chapters, rather than hearing their stories from a third-person narrator? How reliable are Holly and Lyle as narrators? Were there any specific passages that stood out to you in these chapters as particularly unreliable?

3. Discuss the relationship between Wylie and Lyle. Why did Lyle initially lie about having met Wylie (p. 67)? Do you think he had Holly's best interests in mind, or his own? What about his decision to switch car keys with Holly at the end of chapter 3 (p. 77) and take the blame when the police arrive? Was this an act of chivalry, or of self-interest?

4. In chapter 2 (Wylie 1971), we learn about the tragedy that befell Gladys and Lester's new baby, Nat. How do Gladys and Lester act as foils for Maddy and Wylie? Could what happened to baby Nat ever have happened to baby Holly? What evidence can you find that Wylie and Lester are different kinds of fathers? What suggests they are similar?

5. Did you view Wylie's decision to leave Holly with Cal as a selfish, or selfless, act? Is he fit for single parenthood? How do you think Holly's life would have been different if Wylie had raised her? How would she be different?

6. Lyle works in construction, and there are long, detailed passages about the projects he undertakes. How do these descriptions act as metaphors for his relationships in the book? As he is renovating Cal's home (p. 8), how is this reflected in his relationship with Holly? What about in his relationship with Cal? When he is reinforcing the foundation of the statehouse (p. 112), does the foundation of his relationship with Holly undergo any simultaneous renovation?

7. The walls of Cal's bedroom are made of pecky cypress, a desirable kind of wood that was once considered trash. "What makes pecky hard to find...is that you can't tell if a cypress is infected until you chop down the tree and cut it open (p. 6)." How is the pecky cypress like the Alzheimer's that runs in Cal's family? Why is it meaningful that Cal got the pecky cypress from the scrap pile at his father's sawmill?

8. Is it significant for you that Wylie and Maddy's relationship began while each of them was dating somebody else? How did learning about Dale and Sheila affect how you felt about Wylie and Maddy? Do you think they were really committed to one another?

9. Many of the characters in the novel battle addictions. What are some of the addictions the characters struggle with? Did any characters succeed in overcoming their addictions? How did the addictive personalities of the characters affect their relationships?

10. An interest in car racing seems to be almost genetic in the novel. How do the characters use their mutual interest in racing to remain close to one another? How does it pull them apart? What did you see as Maddy's primary obstacles? Did she really have to stop racing when she had Holly? How did the sexism she endured affect her relationship to the sport? Do you think racing will play a role in Claire's future, and, if so, will she have to face the same issues her grandmother faced?

11. When Holly and Wylie are finally reunited in chapter 8 (Holly 2007), Wylie's short-term memory has been jeopardized as the result of a seizure caused by a lifetime of drinking. He is convinced that he tried to contact Holly in recent years but got no response. Holly realizes that without the benefit of short-term memory, he is simply believing what he would like to be true. In this circumstance, is it the thought that counts? Do you believe that Wylie does in fact wish he had contacted Holly sooner?

12. How does car racing act as a metaphor for the relationships in the story? Which ones are going around in endless circles? Who is leading the race in different chapters? Who is trailing behind? Which relationships are more like Wylie's figure-8 races, characters just dodging a head-on collision?

13. Why did Holly steal Wylie's videotapes of his visit with her and Claire (p. 208)? Was this a final act of vengeance against the father that left her? Or did she want the tapes for herself and Claire? Will Wylie even remember?

14. At the end of What You Have Left, what do the characters have left? Is Wylie's memory loss a curse, or a blessing in disguise? Do Lyle and Holly have each other? Does Claire have everything she needs? Are you hopeful for the future of this family?

Enhancing Your Book Club

1. Holly and Lyle come to own an antique mall. Check out some antique auctions online at TIAS.com and Collectics.com. Or visit an antique fair or flea market in your hometown. For a full list: fleamarketguide.com/.

2. Cal, Holly, and Lyle met weekly for Bloody Marys. Why not mix up a pitcher for your book club?

1 quart tomato juice

1 cup vodka

1 tbsp lime juice

1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

1/2 teaspoon Tabasco

lime slices

celery

Mix tomato, vodka, lime juice, Worcestershire sauce, and Tabasco in a pitcher. Stir and pour into cocktail glasses with ice. Garnish with lime slices and a stalk of celery.

3. After Wylie's accident, he practices CR -- calorie restriction -- to increase his longevity. Learn about calorie restriction at calorierestriction.org or wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction.

4. Learn more about Will Allison at willallison.com.

Introduction

Reading Group Guide

Discussion Questions

1. This book doesn't start at the beginning of the story. Why do you think the author sometimes showed you the results of a character's actions before revealing his or her personal history? How might it have changed your ideas about Wylie if we read his side of the story first? How were your feelings about Cal affected by this structure?

2. The only two chapters in the novel that are narrated in the first person are chapter 3 (Lyle 1991) and chapter 8 (Holly 2007). Did it feel different to hear the characters speak for themselves in those chapters, rather than hearing their stories from a third-person narrator? How reliable are Holly and Lyle as narrators? Were there any specific passages that stood out to you in these chapters as particularly unreliable?

3. Discuss the relationship between Wylie and Lyle. Why did Lyle initially lie about having met Wylie (p. 67)? Do you think he had Holly's best interests in mind, or his own? What about his decision to switch car keys with Holly at the end of chapter 3 (p. 77) and take the blame when the police arrive? Was this an act of chivalry, or of self-interest?

4. In chapter 2 (Wylie 1971), we learn about the tragedy that befell Gladys and Lester's new baby, Nat. How do Gladys and Lester act as foils for Maddy and Wylie? Could what happened to baby Nat ever have happened to baby Holly? What evidence can you find that Wylie and Lester are different kinds of fathers? What suggests they are similar?

5. Did you view Wylie's decision to leave Holly with Cal as a selfish, or selfless, act? Is he fit for single parenthood? How do you think Holly's life would have been differentif Wylie had raised her? How would she be different?

6. Lyle works in construction, and there are long, detailed passages about the projects he undertakes. How do these descriptions act as metaphors forhis relationships in the book? As he is renovating Cal's home (p. 8), how is this reflected in his relationship with Holly? What about in his relationship with Cal? When he is reinforcing the foundation of the statehouse (p. 112), does the foundation of his relationship with Holly undergo any simultaneous renovation?

7. The walls of Cal's bedroom are made of pecky cypress, a desirable kind of wood that was once considered trash. "What makes pecky hard to find...is that you can't tell if a cypress is infected until you chop down the tree and cut it open (p. 6)." How is the pecky cypress like the Alzheimer's that runs in Cal's family? Why is it meaningful that Cal got the pecky cypress from the scrap pile at his father's sawmill?

8. Is it significant for you that Wylie and Maddy's relationship began while each of them was dating somebody else? How did learning about Dale and Sheila affect how you felt about Wylie and Maddy? Do you think they were really committed to one another?

9. Many of the characters in the novel battle addictions. What are some of the addictions the characters struggle with? Did any characters succeed in overcoming their addictions? How did the addictive personalities of the characters affect their relationships?

10. An interest in car racing seems to be almost genetic in the novel. How do the characters use their mutual interest in racing to remain close to one another? How does it pull them apart? What did you see as Maddy'sprimary obstacles? Did she really have to stop racing when she had Holly? How did the sexism she endured affect her relationship to the sport? Do you think racing will play a role in Claire's future, and, if so, will she have to face the same issues her grandmother faced?

11. When Holly and Wylie are finally reunited in chapter 8 (Holly 2007), Wylie's short-term memory has been jeopardized as the result of a seizure caused by a lifetime of drinking. He is convinced that he tried to contact Holly in recent years but got no response. Holly realizes that without the benefit of short-term memory, he is simply believing what he would like tobe true. In this circumstance, is it the thought that counts? Do youbelieve that Wylie does in fact wish he had contacted Holly sooner?

12. How does car racing act as a metaphor for the relationships in the story? Which ones are going around in endless circles? Who is leading the race in different chapters? Who is trailing behind? Which relationships are more like Wylie's figure-8 races, characters just dodging a head-on collision?

13. Why did Holly steal Wylie's videotapes of his visit with her and Claire (p. 208)? Was this a final act of vengeance against the father that left her? Or did she want the tapes for herself and Claire? Will Wylie even remember?

14. At the end of What You Have Left, what do the characters have left? Is Wylie's memory loss a curse, or a blessing in disguise? Do Lyle and Holly have each other? Does Claire have everything she needs? Are you hopeful for the future of this family?

Enhancing Your Book Club

1. Holly and Lyle come to own an antique mall. Check out some antique auctions online at www.TIAS.com and www.Collectics.com. Or visit an antique fair or flea market in your hometown. For a full list: http://www.fleamarketguide.com/.

2. Cal, Holly, and Lyle met weekly for Bloody Marys. Why not mix up a pitcher for your book club?

1 quart tomato juice

1 cup vodka

1 tbsp lime juice

1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce

1/2 teaspoon Tabasco

lime slices

celery

Mix tomato, vodka, lime juice, Worcestershire sauce, and Tabasco in a pitcher. Stir and pour into cocktail glasses with ice. Garnish with lime slices and a stalk of celery.

3. After Wylie's accident, he practices CR — calorie restriction — to increase his longevity. Learn about calorie restriction at www.calorierestriction.org or www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie_restriction.

4. Learn more about Will Allison at www.willallison.com.

Editorial Reviews

Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Look closely at the jacket of Allison's first novel. I'd bet you'll have the same reaction we did. "Who in their right mind would throw a child up in the air like that?!" Well, indulge yourself in a few dozen pages of What You Have Left, and you'll understand exactly "who" would indulge in such destructive behavior: his characters.

Allison has crafted a novel of southern discomfort, filled with dirt tracks and fast cars and generations doomed to repeat the mistakes of their forebears. Told from the alternating perspectives of Wylie, his daughter, Holly, and her husband, Lyle, it offers up the heartbreakingly humorous revelation that the truth of any matter depends largely upon who's doin' the tellin'.

Is the truth borne by Holly, the wounded daughter of a daredevil, dirt track–driving mother, whose early death sends her into a tailspin? Or by Wylie, the grief-stricken widower who first abandons his daughter, then longs to reconnect with his remaining family? And what of Lyle, who must continue to win the trust of a woman who learned early on that men don't stick around?

In the end, "what you have left" is simple endurance -- summoning the courage to get back behind the wheel after each collision, to keep winding down the dirt track of life -- because sometimes grace reveals itself in a crash of contradictions. (Fall 2007 Selection)

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…The strength of What You Have Left lies in the relationships among its characters…Allison captures the truth and irony of being part of a family, no matter how broken it is.
—The Washington Post

Lily King

Soulful, salt-of-the-earth tales of hurt and hope in redneck-proud South Carolina. Like her NASCAR pioneer mother, Maddy, Holly is a hell-bent driver. She makes hardworking, hunky handyman Lyle mad with love, knocks back whiskey and searches for her father, Wylie, who deserted her as a kid right as Maddy perished from a blood-clot after a water-skiing accident. In shaky hands, this melodrama could border on Harry Crews's po'-folk shtick, but debut novelist Allison keeps things steady. Alzheimer's-ridden like his uncle and father before him, Cal, Holly's grandfather, downs 20 sleeping pills in 1991, leaving Holly bereft. Half this story, then, is Holly's and Lyle's romance-their love tested by such mishaps as Lyle's defiant burning of the Confederate flag atop the statehouse building in Charleston, and Holly's blowing of the family savings on video-poker gambling. The other half flashes back to Maddy and Wylie-their alliance against the good ol' boys jealous of Maddy's race-winning '62 Fairlane, their surviving of such outsized, small-town tragedy as the killing of his infant daughter by their next-door neighbor. In time, the storylines intersect, as Holly learns how to deal with ghosts of traumas past. From its Raymond Carver-esque title to its cast of big-hearted misfits, Allison's picaresque isn't terribly original. But it's tender, smart and efficiently told. By the end, thin as a "martini toothpick," his own mind given over to the dementia of Korsakoff's syndrome, Wylie reunites with his daughter, and the frost inside her starts to melt: "Suddenly I'm five years old again, clinging to his neck as he trundles me away from the hole in the ground where they've just put mymother."Raw-boned, heartfelt prose. Agent: Julie Barer/Barer Literary

Kirkus Reviews