What You Have Left by Will Allison

What You Have Left by Will Allison

A Review by Lisa Heidle

Will Allison’s first novel, What You Have Left, reminds us that we all have a story, a family story that goes back as far as memory will allow. Like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and The Circus in Winter by Cathy Day, Allison uses the story cycle to introduce us to a broken family in South Carolina. With a timeline that jumps between 1971 and 2007, we meet Holly, Cal, Lyle, and Wylie, all struggling with the age-old question of how to give to each other while being true to themselves.

The story cycles around Holly and the men in her life: her grandfather, husband and the memory of her father. “I was sentenced to life on my grandfather’s dairy farm in the summer of 1976,” Holly tells us. After her mother’s sudden death when she was five, her father, lost in his own grief, leaves the little girl with her grandfather and never returns, leaving a hole that she fills with pain, anger and alcohol.

As Holly moves into adulthood, Cal, her beloved grandfather, is faced with the knowledge that he has Alzheimer’s, as did his father, uncle and grandfather. Having witnessed the deterioration first hand, he is determined not to face the same outcome, but his desire to leave life on his own terms conflicts with his intense love and devotion for Holly.

Allison addresses the issue of suicide and euthanasia when the nineteen-year-old Holly promises to help Cal die when the time comes. Cal asks her when that would be. “…all the answers I could think of—when he could no longer remember his own name, no longer dress himself—being so arbitrary as to seem absurd, because how could I ever really know when his life was no longer worth living?”

When Holly’s boyfriend, Lyle, locates Wylie, the father who abandoned her as a child, he concedes to the man’s wishes and keeps his whereabouts a secret. The choice to do so almost severs his and Holly’s budding relationship. Within the shifting narratives, we are given insight into the internal struggles each character battles and are reminded that the truest gift anyone can give is forgiveness.

Allison avoids creating grandiose characters in What You Have Left; there are no wise-sages or over-the-top protagonists. Each character is the person next door, the mechanic, the hired hand. The female characters are underdeveloped and the men seem confounded by the actions of the women in their lives, but the simplicity of the story does not belie the honesty that fills the pages as each character reaches past experience and locates a new, more complete truth.