The Center of Everything
Laura Moriarty, 2003
Hyperion Books
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780786888450
Summary
In Laura Moriarty's extraordinary first novel, a young girl tries to make sense of an unruly world spinning around her. Growing up with a single mother who is chronically out of work and dating a married man, 10-year old Evelyn Bucknow learns early how to fend for herself.
Offering an affecting portrayal of a troubled mother/daughter relationship, one in which the daughter is very often expected to play the role of the adult, the novel also gives readers a searing rendering of the claustrophobia of small town mid-western life, as seen through the eyes of a teenage girl.
Evelyn must come to terms with the heartbreaking lesson of first love—that not all loves are meant to be—and determine who she is and who she wants to be. Stuck in the middle of Kansas, between best friends, and in the midst of her mother's love, Evelyn finds herself...in The Center of Everything. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 24, 1970
• Where—Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
• Education—B.S.W. and M.A., University of Kansas
• Currently—Lives in Lawrence, Kansas
Laura Moriarty received her master’s degree from the University of Kansas, and was awarded the George Bennett Fellowship for Creative Writing at Phillips Exeter Academy. The Center of Everything is Moriarty's first novel. Her second, The Rest of her Life, was published in 2007, While I'm Falling in 2009, and The Chaperone in 2012. (From the publisher.)
Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:
• There are other Laura Moriartys I shouldn't be confused with: Laura Moriarty the poet, and Laura Moriarty the crime writer. If it helps, I'm Laura Eugenia Moriarty, though I've never used my middle name professionally.
• I got my first job when I was sixteen, cooking burgers at McDonald's. I've been a vegetarian since I was ten, so it was a little hard on me. I'm also technically inept and kind of dreamy, so I frustrated the guy who worked the toaster to the point where he threatened to strangle me on a daily basis. I kept that job for two years. I gave Evelyn a job at McDonald's too, and I made her similarly unsuccessful.
• Another job I was really bad at was tending bar. I was an exchange student at the University of Malta about ten years ago. I thought I wanted to go to medical school, so I signed up to take all these organic chemistry and physiology classes. In Malta. It was terrible. The Maltese students were into chemistry. I had a lab partner named Ester Carbone. There was a rumor my instructor had his house built in the shape of a benzene molecule. I couldn't keep up. I dropped out in February, and I needed money. Malta has pretty strict employment laws, and the only job I could get was an illegal one, working at a bar. I don't know anything about mixed drinks, and I don't speak Maltese. I think I was supposed to stand behind the bar be American and female and smile, but I ended up squinting at people a lot, so eventually, I was in the back, doing dishes. That was the year I started writing.
• The Center of Everything has a few autobiographical moments, but not many. I grew up with three sisters in Montana. When you say you're from Montana, people get this wistful look in their eyes. I think they've seen too many Brad Pitt movies. I saw A River Runs Through It, which is set in my hometown, Bozeman. That movie drove me nuts: I don't think anyone is even wearing coat in the whole movie. They can't keep filming up there in August and tricking everyone. Of course, now I live in Maine.
• I have tender hands, and the worst thing in the world, for me, is going to an event that requires a lot of hand shaking. Some people shake nicely, but some people have a death grip, and it's really painful. The thing is, you can't tell who's going to be a death gripper and who isn't. Big, strapping men have shaken my hand gently, but an elderly woman I met last month almost brought me to my knees. She was smiling the whole time. I went to a hand shaking event a month ago, and I went along with the shaking, because I didn't want to look rude or standoffish or freaky about germs. But hand shaking just kills me. I'm not sure what to do about it. I went back to Phillips Exeter a month ago, and a very polite student reintroduced himself to me and extended his hand to shake. I actually tried to high five him. He looked at me like I was a crazy person. My sister told me I should take a cue from Bob Dole and carry a pen in my right hand all the time, so I might try that.
• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here is her response:
It's difficult to pick just one, of course. But I will say that while I was writing The Center of Everything, I read Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World, and it made a strong impression on me. I only knew about Sagan from watching the Nova Channel when I was a kid, but I happened upon an essay he'd written before he died. I was so impressed I went to the library and checked out some of his books. In The Demon Haunted World, Sagan stresses the importance of skepticism and rational reasoning when considering the mysteries of the universe.
It's easy for us today to see the insanity of the witchcraft trials, but Sagan gives a sympathetic account of how frightening the world must have seemed in those times, and how quickly our ability to reason can be dismissed in the face of fear and superstition. Today, Sagan points out, we have crop circles, alien abductions, and religious fundamentalism; the book has a great chapter called "The Baloney Detection Kit," an important tool for any open-minded skeptic. What I like most about Sagan is that he seems skeptical without coming across as cynical. He looks at the vastness of the universe and the intricacy of the natural world with so much wonder and awe, and he's able to translate it to a reader who isn't a scientist, such as myself. I also noticed how he refrains from making fun or putting down his opponents; there's such a generosity of spirit in his writing. I tried to put a bit of Sagan in Evelyn, the narrator of The Center of Everything. (Author interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Laura Moriarty's debut novel has the makings of something wearily familiar: the Midwestern mother-daughter coming-of-age story, featuring at least one episode in which Mom leaves home looking like a movie star but winds up collapsing in tears. Happily, Ms. Moriarty's artful, enveloping book is a lot more interesting than its genre initially suggests. It traces not only stormy adolescence, but also the essential stages of Evelyn's moral and intellectual evolution.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
It's not easy to build a novel around a personality, but Moriarty does it well.
Anne Stephenson - USA Today
Lively and endearing… complete tour of…conflicts between mother and daughter, as well as between the narrator's hopes and dreams.
Denver Post & Rocky Mountian News
Teriffic…. Moriarty has steady confidence…expertly wringing poignancy from…young lives…. A deeply satisfying novel
San Diego Union Tribune
For 10-year-old Evelyn Bucknow, there really is no place like home. On all the world maps she's ever seen, the United States has been smack dab in the middle, with Kansas in the middle of that. "I feel so lucky to live here, right in the center," she proclaims, in Moriarty's wonderfully down-to-earth debut. Dazzled by visions of Ronald Reagan on the television, the twinkle in his eye and his contention that "God put America between two oceans on purpose," Evelyn's youthful optimism is shaken by her young single mother Tina's inability to take control of her life. As Tina falls for her married boss, who gives her a car (his contribution to the trickle-down theory) but leaves her pregnant and shattered, Evelyn grows closer to her neighbor, a curly-haired scamp named Travis (who has eyes only for Evelyn's stunning friend, Deena) and her Bible-thumping grandmother, a regular listener to Jerry Falwell's radio show. As a teenager, she is influenced by a couple of liberal-minded teachers, one an emigre from New York and the other an introverted biology instructor intent on teaching evolution, but she never cuts her family ties. With renewed faith in her scatterbrained but endearing mother and with college on the horizon, she begins to find her place in the social and political spectrum and to appreciate the vastness of a world that just might extend beyond the Sunflower State. Moriarty deftly treads the line between adolescence and adulthood, and insecurity and self-assurance, offering a moving portrait of life in blue-collar middle America.
Publishers Weekly
Evelyn Bucknow's world has been quite small up till now. She and her mother live in Treeline Colonies, a collection of cramped apartments teetering on the edge of a highway in the middle of Kansas. Her grandmother visits every week, smelling of cigarettes and bearing gifts, including stories about God and Wichita, where she lives with her husband, the grandfather Evelyn has never met and the father her mother no longer speaks to. But she is getting older, and luckily she takes the reader along as she enters a widening world of new friends, cruel enemies, fresh pain, and Travis Rowley, "thief, breaker of locks, my own dark avenger and first true love." This world is a place of hard knocks and little self-pity, especially for the charming and prescient Evelyn. Moriarty builds an addictive and moving portrait of this poor, Midwestern girl in the Eighties, reminiscent of Dolores in Wally Lamb's She's Come Undone, so well realized that one forgets it is fiction and so infectious that one never wants to put it down, even after turning to the last page. Essential for fiction collections. —Rachel Collins
Library Journal
(Adult/High School) Evelyn Bucknow, 10 years old at the start of this novel, lives with her single mother. Struggling to make ends meet, Tina is a loving, if sometimes absentminded, parent. Won over by the seemingly kind attention of her married boss, she has an affair that leaves her pregnant and in dire financial straits when she is fired from her job. Evelyn narrates the story, and readers witness her growing maturity in the face of circumstances that are beyond her control. With dawning awareness and increasing resentment, she sees that her mother's poor choices are creating havoc in their lives. Evelyn is determined to avoid the same mistakes and use her intelligence to get out of the cycle of poverty that is so much a part of her youth. YAs will enjoy this engrossing novel and connect to the authentic and changing voice Moriarity gives Evelyn as she grows into adulthood. Her thoughts and feelings ring true to the angst and insecurity that are often associated with adolescence. Readers, along with the protagonist, feel sympathy and understanding for human failings. —Julie Dasso, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
School Library Journal
A pleasantly wry, spunky debut, set in the Reagan era, about a fatherless girl who uses her brains as the way out of her mother's hopeless welfare state. Ten-year-old Evelyn Bucknow, plain but brainy, has learned something about the inequities of the world from her less-than-privileged, conservative vantage point in Kerrville, Kansas. Her Vietnam vet grandfather has disowned Evelyn's mother, Tina, for her early sins and still considers her a "whore." Evelyn's grandmother, Eileen, is an Evangelical Reaganite who doesn't believe Tina will make it to heaven. And Evelyn's own fourth-grade classmates rub in her state of impecunious fatherlessness. Yet Evelyn is at the top of her class, winning the science prize over the town's rich girl because our heroine plays by the rules. And even when her first love and neighbor, handsome kleptomaniac Travis Rowley, falls ungratefully for Evelyn's beautiful new friend Deena, Evelyn resists the entrapments of failure that the welfare state seems to expect of her. Much as in another recent storyteller clashing with a dim-bulbed mom (Stephanie Rosenfeld's Massachusetts, California, Timbuktu, p. 638), Evelyn finds her wits sharpened by adversity and by her mother's ill planning-in this case, her getting pregnant by a kind but married boss, who skips town. Still, when it seems the new baby's retardation is the demonstration of God's just deserts, Evelyn finds strength—and Moriarty pumps literary vigor into her narrative—by reversing a reader's expectations. Evelyn's voice is a lone, steely cry against the chorus of small-town righteousness for which President Reagan's TV speeches form the background noise. And while Moriarty is no fancy prose stylist, shelistens carefully to the speech of her characters, and Evelyn and Tina's voices, especially, ring true without sounding dopey or sentimental. Among the plethora of first novels tracking preteen daughters of sorry single mothers, Moriarty's gutsy opener is hard not to like.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Who is narrating? What historic or other signposts are available to the reader so that the story can be located in time and place? To whom or what does the title refer?
2. What do you think of Evelyn, Tina, and Eileen? What about Tina's father? What kind of people are they? What do they look like? What is Sam's role in the family and in the story? Share your impressions of other characters that stand out, and why.
3. When do you learn the narrator's name? What is going on in the story when this occurs? What, if any, is the significance of the scene where the narrator's name is revealed? When do you learn the narrator's name? What is going on in the story when this occurs? What, if any, is the significance of the scene where the narrator's name is revealed?
4. How does Moriarty use language to reflect the experiences and thoughts of the characters? Examine and discuss whether or not Evelyn's thoughts and spoken words are reflective of a child's point of view, and why. Share some examples that you find effective and/or moving.
5. How do Evelyn's feelings about her mother affect your feelings about Tina? Explore whether or not you are sympathetic or disgusted by Tina, and why. At the end of Chapter 11, why does Evelyn not wipe her mother's kiss off of her forehead? Share some examples of how Moriarty brings out the mother/daughter relationship and whether or not you can relate to it, and why.
6. Why do you believe Tina doesn't speak to her father? How do you respond when you learn that he told the family that a "little horse" is coming to dinner? Discuss this scene, and its implications. Consider how such a small phrase can reveal so much.
7. The car that doesn't shift is one of the many symbols Moriarty uses. What is its symbolism? Share some of the other symbols used throughout the story and how they are utilized.
8. Discuss the whole school milieu that Moriarty evokes in The Center of Everything. What are the roles of friendship pins and particular pieces of clothing in the lives of grade-school kids? What are your memories and experiences of these years? Share whether or not you think Moriarty successfully conveys these school experiences, and why.
9. Discuss the use of religion as a recurring theme throughout the book. As a storytelling device, what purpose does it serve? Why would a man as "religious" as Tina's father shun his daughter and be so unforgiving? How does Eileen live her beliefs? How does religion affect Evelyn? What happens at the church meeting with the healer? Why do people believe in healers? Share whether or not Tina comes to believe in some sort of religion, and why.
10. Why does Moriarty use the struggle between evolution and creationism in the story? What makes it particularly useful here? Why do people have this debate? Examine whether or not the characters' positions ring true, and why. What would you say to those who have different beliefs than yours?
11. Do you believe Deena's pregnancy is motivated by Travis' change of plans? Should Evelyn have shared this Deena? What position does Evelyn put herself in by doing this?
12. How does the car accident that kills Traci affect Evelyn? What motivates Evelyn to initially keep Traci's belongings hidden? Examine the significance and possible symbolism of Evelyn hanging onto Traci's clothes and locket into high school, and what they represent to Evelyn after Traci's death.
13. Discuss the underlining theme throughout the novel of being chosen or not being chosen.
14. Discuss Moriarty's use of foreshadowing throughout The Center of Everything. How does it influence your reading?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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