Writers are forever exploring the boundary between fiction and memoir, asking questions of truth and meaning in the act of recovering the past as narrative. In his latest novel, What Remains, Nicholas Delbanco makes the exploration central. A fictionalized history, the novel traces the Delbanco family from it origins in Italy, through Germany and England, to its endpoint in America. The family fled inquisitions and Nazis, continually forced to abandon the past. Such history has been written, but Delbanco has re/collected it in the form of personal myth.

      In the first chapter, Karl, the father of main character Benjamin (Delbanco himself), contemplates ways that he can see the world as premodern artists could not. He can see it from above, as from an airplane, taking in the entire landscape at once. Or he can see it from a spaceship, the entire globe within the frame of his mind. This global perspective informs Delbanco’s re/collecting, which is an attempt at seeing one’s self, past and present, in the Greek sense of Kairos: a nonsequential sense of time, where past and present unite in the moment of perception.

      Karl further reflects on his project of self-portraiture, remarking on the prevalence of the form in the history of painting. But Karl is not concerned with verisimilitude:

            What troubled Karl was not the face, its arrangement and propor

            tion and knowledgeable innocence, but rather where it sits on the

            canvas and how it belongs to the larger idea, the change in the

            nature of space after Sputnik: what relation we bare to the world.

      Similarly, Delbanco is unconcerned with accurately reporting the times, places, and events of his past, believing the task to be impossible. In the “Prologue” to the novel, the middle-age Benjamin recounts a trip he made in 1984 to his family’s former home in London. After reacquainting himself with the artifacts of his past, he is shocked to find that he had been sorely mistaken about each and every detail:

            So all that Proustian recall was false, a misremembered past. My

            madeleine was chocolate cake, my gooseberry bush belonged to a

            neighbor, where we lived was three doors down. And though it

            seems funny and just a touch sad that history should prove so

            subject to revision, I’ve come to feel grateful for inexactness: the

            gift, as it were, of invention.

      By referring to the inexactness of the past as “the gift … of invention,” Delbanco suggests that re/collecting is of particular importance to the artist. Delbanco’s re/collecting, then, is a distinctly personal project that has informed his own art from its earliest days. When his mother claims the obsolescence of the iI naquit form of the verb naître, the youthful Benjamin defends himself thus: “But anyhow . . . we have to learn how to use it; it’s called the historical past. There is perfect and imperfect and also the pluperfect and the passée simple and the historic past.” In a wonderful moment of irony, Benjamin’s mother says, “All right . . . but tell your teacher that your mother thinks this is excessive and will serve no useful purpose … ” Prior to What Remains, Delbanco published fourteen novels and four works of non-fiction, many of which explore the process of re/collecting personal myth from various perspectives. What Remains, then, is in more than one way the culmination of a project extending from his childhood into the present.