The Dearly Departed
Elinor Lipman, 2001
Knopf Doubleday
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375724589
Summary
With her latest work, Elinor Lipman expertly serves up her usual delicious dish of entertainment. When the story opens, the not-so-sunny Sunny Batten has just received news that causes her to be even more morose than usual: her mother, Margaret Batten, has died in a freak accident with Margaret’s alleged fiancé, Miles Finn. Thus Sunny returns to the small New Hampshire town of King George and to the charity bungalow on the edge of the country club’s golf course where Margaret raised Sunny by herself. While at the funeral, Sunny catches her first glimpse of the brash Fletcher Finn, Miles Finn’s son and self-described possessor of “a heart of plutonium.” And who can’t help but notice, as they sit together at the graveside, the resemblance between Sunny and Fletcher, “the flagrant display, wherever one looked, of Miles Finn’s genes” [p. 79]?
But mourning does not become Sunny. Bitter memories of her childhood come flooding back, triggered by encounters with her high school golfing teammates—all boys—and her embarrassment at discovering what her mother’s new midlife hobby had been: acting. To Sunny’s mortification, Margaret had blossomed from a divorced wallflower to a much-admired amateur actress in the town’s local theatre troupe, the King George Players, and, as her daughter discovers, the object of widespread affection.
Sunny’s return to King George proves that one can go home again, as her grief segues into pleasant alliances with the townspeople, in spite of past grievances and perceived slights. Among the hilarious, realistic, and endearing cast of characters with whom Sunny becomes reacquainted are Joey Loach, the detention hall high schooler who has become the town’s heroic police chief; Emil Ouimet, the town physician who wears his love for Margaret on his sleeve; and Randy Pope, the golf-team-captain-turned-respectable-lawyer. Even the wealthy Emily Ann Grandjean, who hired Fletcher to promote her unattainable political aspirations, seems to sympathize with Sunny, and she soon comes to learn that maybe King George is not such a bad place after all. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 16, 1950
• Where—Lowell, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—A.B. Simmons College
• Awards—New England Books Award For Fiction
• Currently—lives in North Hampton, Massachusetts, and New York, New York
Elinor Lipman is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist, known for her humor and societal observations. In his review of her 2019 novel, Good Riddance, Sam Sacks of the Wall Street Journal wrote that Lipman "has long been one of our wittiest chroniclers of modern-day romance."
The author was born and raised in Lowell, Massachusetts. She graduated from Simmons College in Boston where she studied journalism. While at Simon, Lipman began her writing career, working as a college intern with the Lowell Sun. Throughout the rest of the 1970s, she wrote press releases for WGBH, Boston's public radio station.
Writing
Lipman turned to writing fiction in 1979; her first short story, "Catering," was published in Yankee Magazine. In 1987 she published a volume of stories, Into Love and Out Again, and in 1990 she came out with her first novel, Then She Found Me. Her second novel, The Inn at Lake Devine, appeared in 1998, earning Lipman the 2001 New England Book Award three years later.
Lipman's first novel, Then She Found Me, was adapted into a 2008 feature film—directed by and starring Helen Hunt, along with Bette Midler, Colin Firth, and Matthew Broderick.
In addition to her fiction, Lipman released a 2012 book of rhyming political tweets, Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes from the Political Circus. Two other books—a 10th novel, The View from Penthouse B, and a collection of essays, I Can't Complain: (all too) Personal Essays—were both published in 2013. The latter deals in part with the death of her husband at age 60. A knitting devotee, Lipman's poem, "I Bought This Pattern Book Last Spring," was included in the 2013 anthology Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting.
Lipman was the Elizabeth Drew Professor of Creative Writing at Smith College from 2011-12, and she continues to write the column, "I Might Complain," for Parade.com. Smith spends her time between North Hampton, Massachusetts, and New York City.
Works
1988 - Into Love and Out Again: Stories
1990 - Then She Found Me
1992 - The Way Men Act
1995 - Isabel's Bed
1998 - The Inn at Lake Devine
1999 - The Ladies' Man
2001 - The Dearly Departed
2003 - The Pursuit of Alice Thrift
2006 - My Latest Grievance
2009 - The Family Man
2012 - Tweet Land of Liberty: Irreverent Rhymes from the Political Circus
2013 - I Can't Complain: (All Too) Personal Essays
2013 - The View From Penthouse B
2017 - On Turpentine Lane
2019 - Good Riddance
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/27/2019.)
Book Reviews
The Dearly Departed contains a core of dark and mordant wit that distinguishes it, in delightful ways, from the norm.
Washington Post
Almost nobody writes serious entertainment with more panache.
Chicago Tribune
Nothing short of brilliant.... A story so funny and so pleasurable that the reader can only wish it did not have to end.
Booklist
Lipman sets her breezy, workmanlike novel in King George, N.H., a small town where the sudden accidental deaths of a secretly engaged couple summon their two grown-up children to sort out the conundrum of their relation to each other. Both the dead woman's stoical daughter, Sunny Batten, and the man's cranky son, Fletcher Finn, possess an identical corona of satiny gray hair; both are 31; and neither has ever met the other, although their parents have been on-and-off lovers for years. Sunny, who lives in New York, grew up with her mother in King George, and as a girl was a serious golfer. Fletcher, who grew up in Pennsylvania, has just gotten himself fired as campaign manager to Emily Ann Grandjean, an annoying, anorexic rich-girl candidate in a New Jersey congressional race. One look at Sunny and Fletcher's resemblance to each other at the funeral and the town is abuzz with conjecture and benign gossip. Novelist Lipman, who knows from smalltown, confidently enters the head of everyone worth meeting in King George: chief of police Joey Loach, who survives a gunshot thanks to his mother's insistence that he wear a bulletproof vest; Sunny's former best friend, Regina, who married the captain of the golf team; and the waitress at the Dot, Winnie, who keeps tabs on everyone. After the initial plot is pleasantly sketched out, the work feels thin, and Lipman resorts to repetitious dialogue and switches in narrative voice to keep the action moving. Major characters like Sunny and Emily Ann begin to sound alike, and Fletcher's initial, endearing prickliness smoothes out predictably to allow Lipman to tidily tie up the ends of this unremarkable, occasionally humorous, mostly conventional light comedy.
Publishers Weekly
Readers can count on Lipman for stylish, sprightly novels imbued with a deep affection for her all-too-human characters. Her newest offering continues the high standard set by her first novel, Then She Found Me. When Sunny Batten, now in her early thirties, returns home to tiny King George, NH, following the accidental death of her mother and her mother's fiance, Miles Finn, she is thrown back into a milieu that she had gladly left years before. Sunny, the most talented golfer in high school, has nothing but unhappy memories of her adolescence, when she and her mother braved the displeasure of the town by forcing the school administration to make her a member of the previously all-male school golf team. The caring and sympathy that she now receives from everyone she meets comes as a shock, as does meeting Miles Finn's son, Fletcher. Fletcher could be her twin: he has the same facial structure and the same flyaway, prematurely gray hair. Were there pockets in her mother's past of which Sunny was unaware? In this delightfully breezy novel, Sunny learns that you can go home again, with surprisingly happy results. —Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle
Library Journal
Another sharply observed, if avowedly romantic, comedy of manners from Lipman, an unreconstructed Janeite. Sunny Batten gets jolting news from the King George, New Hampshire, police. Her mother has died of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, thanks to a faulty furnace. "She and her fiancé didn't suffer," the police chief tells her gently over the phone. Sunny—short for Sondra but unreflective of her general outlook on life—is devastated. Though they'd been living apart (college, a series of jobs), she and her mother had always been emotionally close. Or so she'd thought. But when she recovers enough to contemplate something other than her horrific loss, she finds that little in her mother's actual world corresponds to her own idea of it. Fiancé? How could there possibly be such a person when Sunny knew nothing of his existence? In the days that follow she learns much about Margaret Batten that comes as a surprise. Miles Finn, the putative fiancé, had in fact been her mother's secret lover for well over 30 years. In addition, there is every likelihood that his relationship to Sunny herself was weightier than she had at first been led to believe. And that being the case, certain ancillary conclusions are unavoidable. At the funeral, for instance—the double funeral, that is—Fletcher Finn, son of the deceased Miles, a brash young man only slightly younger than 31-year-old Sunny, materializes—disconcertingly. Which is to say that his resemblance to her is so striking that the assembled King George folks gasp collectively, leaving Sunny to consider the sudden, unnerving possibility of siblinghood. But not every revelation is disquieting. This is Lipman, after all, and the sensitive, kind police chief turns out to be Joey Loach, who sometimes sat behind Sunny—rather yearningly—in high school study hall. Austen would have approved: astringency with a happy ending.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What physical characteristics or personality traits did Sunny inherit from her mother and father, who was presumably Miles Finn?
2. Regarding Fletcher and Sunny, Emily Ann observes, “Appearances aside, you two seem like complete opposites” [p. 190]. Do Sunny and Fletcher share any similarities other than their physical resemblance? How does each feel about discovering a new sibling? Does it mean more to Fletcher or Sunny? Why?
3. How does Lipman use physical surroundings to create a presence for Margaret and Miles despite their being deceased before the novel begins? [See, for example, the description of Miles’s cabin in Chapter 14 and the contents of Margaret’s house in Chapter 15.]
4. Sunny asks Joey: “Would a truly grief-stricken daughter go directly from the cemetery to the golf course? Or, between the wake and the funeral, give herself a pedicure” [p. 228]? Given the treatment of death and grief in the novel, how might these questions to be answered? Does Sunny handle her grief in an appropriate manner? A realistic manner?
5. A reviewer in the Atlantic Monthly noted, “Sunny learns a universal truth: Things get better after high school.” Do the memories of her high school harassment loom larger in Sunny’s mind than the facts support?
6. Is the grudge that Sunny holds against the high school boys’ golf team justified, or is Randy Pope fair in asserting that “some ladies roll with the punches. Some even laugh instead of carrying a grudge” [p. 137]?
7. In the small town of King George, everyone knows everyone else. This is highlighted best by Dr. Ouimet’s infuriating yet comical dilemma as he searches for someone in whom he can confide his feelings for Margaret: “Who in this town, be they counselor or clergy, wasn’t a patient?” [p. 215] How does Lipman paint life in King George and small town life in general?
8. About the golf course that was her backyard, Sunny says, “I know all the loopholes. All the best times to sneak onto the King George Links, virtually invisible” [p. 96]. And Sunny also comments about Margaret to Fletcher, “She was very conventional, and very worried about what other people thought. Above all else, she wanted to fit in” [p. 163]. As Sunny discovers, she was, and is, hardly invisible to the residents of King George. Moreover, her mother was somewhat less than conventional. In what other ways does The Dearly Departed explore this theme of appearance versus reality?
9. Joey’s mother hovers over and clearly adores her son. What does their relationship say about Joey, and how do his mother’s regular appearances advance the plot?
10. Despite their completely different upbringing, do Emily Ann and Sunny have anything in common? What significance do people’s socioeconomic backgrounds have in King George?
11. Who is the central character of The Dearly Departed? Do the actions of any one character dominate the plot? Does any one character’s viewpoint pervade the narrative?
12. Compare the characters who actively engage in life, such as Margaret, Randy Pope, Emil Ouimet, to those who choose to remain more passive, such as Regina Pope, Emily Grandjean, and Billy and Christine Ouimet. Into which category might Sunny, Fletcher, or Joey be placed? In The Dearly Departed, do people actually change, or is it just perceptions that change?
13. What role does dialogue play in The Dearly Departed? How do conversations reveal feelings and promote both character and plot development? What makes the conversations in the novel realistic?
14. Lipman has been called “a queen of verbal economy” (Boston Magazine). An example might be when we are told that Randy Pope, Sunny’s former archenemy, tracked down Margaret’s personal effects “in person, and found it misfiled in Concord” [p. 252]. Can you think of other examples of the author’s narrative shorthand?
15. Reviewer Maggie Galehouse writes, “If the cast of NBC’s Friends beamed into Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the result might well be Elinor Lipman’s latest novel. Set in King George, N.H. (a town that rivals Grover’s Corners in size and sensibility), The Dearly Departed has the charm and economy of Wilder’s play, along with the quick-witted, intently quirky characters of a successful sitcom” (The New York Times Book Review, July 15, 2001). Is the comparison between The Dearly Departed and a television sitcom apropos? If you are familiar with the Thornton Wilder play Our Town, how is it similar to The Dearly Departed?
16. To what genre of literature does The Dearly Departed belong? Is there a theatrical or dramatic style to the novel?
17. Neal Wyatt remarks, “It is a rare treat to read a book that is at once utterly modern but also evokes the world of Wooster and Jeeves” (Booklist, May 15, 2001). What elements of The Dearly Departed bring about this dichotomy of modernism and quaintness in prose, plot, descriptions, and characters?
18. Is the ending of The Dearly Departed a happy one? Is it satisfying or anticlimactic? Why might Lipman have chosen to end the novel where she does and leave certain questions unresolved? For example, what happens to Billy? Were Miles and Margaret actually engaged or not? Will Fletcher become romantically involved with Emily Ann? Based upon the ending, would you characterize Lipman as an optimist? A romantic?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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