WHAT YOU HAVE LEFT

Girl, Interrupted - washingtonpost.com

The title of Will Allison's first novel, What Yo u 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.