Five Days
Douglas Kennedy, 2013
Atria Books
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451666359
Summary
From the critically lauded, internationally bestselling author of The Moment comes a profoundly moving novel that explores how a single brief encounter can change one’s life.
Laura spends her days looking at other people’s potential calamities. She works in the radiography unit of a small hospital on the Maine coast, bearing constant witness to the fears of patient after frightened patient. In a job where finding nothing is always the best possible outcome, she is well versed in the random injustices of life, a truism that has lately been playing out in her marriage as well. Since being downsized, her husband, Dan, has become withdrawn, his emotional distance gradually corroding their relationship. With a son in college and a daughter soon due to leave home, Laura has begun to fear that the marital sounds of silence will only deepen once the nest is truly empty.
When an opportunity arises to attend a weekend medical conference in Boston, Laura jumps at this respite from home. While checking in, she meets a man as gray and uninspired as her drab hotel room. Richard is an outwardly dull, fiftysomething insurance salesman. But during a chance second encounter, Laura discovers him to be surprisingly complex and thoughtful, someone who, like herself, is grappling with the same big questions about decisions made and the human capacity for self-entrapment. As their conversation deepens and begins to veer into shared confessions, the overwhelming sense of personal and intimate connection arises. A transformative love affair begins. But can this potential, much-longed-for happiness be married to their own difficult personal circumstances? Can they upend their lives and embrace that most loaded of words: change?
A love story as clear-sighted and ruminative as it is affecting, Five Days will have you reflecting about the choices we all make that shape our destinies. Crafted with Kennedy’s trademark evocative prose and pitch-perfect in its depiction of the complex realities of modern life, it is a novel that speaks directly to the many contradictions of the human heart. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1955
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Bowdoin College; a year
at Trinity College, Dublin.
• Awards—Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; Grand Prix du Figaro
• Currently—divides his betweeen London, Paris, Berlin, Montreal and Maine.
Douglas Kennedy, an American novelist, was born in Manhattan in 1955, the son of a commodities broker and a production assistant at NBC. He was educated at The Collegiate School and graduated magna cum laude from Bowdoin College in 1976. He also spent a year studying at Trinity College Dublin. He explained:
I was a history major. Retrospectively, I think the history major provides much better training for a novelist. So much of what I do in my own fiction is observational; is looking at behavior. By studying human history you really see how human folly endlessly repeats itself. In my work—in whatever form it takes—I am very much grappling with what it means to be American in this way.
In 1977, he returned to Dublin and started a co-operative theatre company with a friend. He was later hired to run the Abbey Theatre's second house, The Peacock. At the age of 28, he resigned from The Peacock to write full-time. After several radio plays for the BBC and one stage play, he decided to switch directions and wrote his first book, a narrative account of his travels in Egypt called Beyond the Pyramids, which published in 1988. Kennedy and his wife moved to London that year, where Kennedy expanded his journalistic work, and wrote for the Sunday Times, Sunday Telegraph, Listener, New Statesman, and the British editions of Esquire and GQ.
His 10 novels have been translated in 22 countries. His most recent novel Five Days was published in 2013. His 2011 novel The Moment became a #1 Bestseller in France, as did his 2010 novel, Leaving the World. He received the Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2007. In November 2009, he received the first “Grand Prix du Figaro,” awarded by the newspaper Le Figaro.
Kennedy has two children, Max and Amelia. He divides his time between London, Paris, Berlin, Montreal and Maine. (From Wikipedia.)
Read an interview with the author in the Financial Times
Book Reviews
A gripping emotional rollercoaster, pressing so many buttons it’s likely to have readers examining their own what-might-have-beens.
Daily Mail (UK)
Laura Warren is a radiographic technician in Maine, trained to spot disease in others, but unable to determine the cause of her own sadness in the bumpy 11th novel from Kennedy.... [She] jumps at the opportunity for a weekend conference in Boston. There she meets Richard Copeland... [and the two] find in their shared loneliness a common longing to lead a better life together, if they can find the courage to change. While Laura and Richard’s quickly developing relationship is rarely believable, Laura’s confusion and fear are well drawn, and Kennedy ably raises questions about marriage, identity, and happiness.
Publishers Weekly
Kennedy (The Moment) has a way with women, or at least with women characters.... He does this so well that the reader may double-check the author's name to see whether "he" isn't really "she." Laura, 42, married Dan Warren 23 years ago.... She is also the family's mainstay both financially and emotionally.... When Laura attends a work conference in Boston, she meets Richard, a married insurance salesman. Within a few days, the two recognize their unlikely but increasing connection. Finding in each other a mirror image of lost passion, sad marriages, broken dreams, self-doubt, and a corresponding regard for wordplay and art, they offer each other the bolstering and applause they so sorely lack at home. —Sheila M. Riley, Smithsonian Inst. Libs., Washington, DC
Library Journal
The prolific Kennedy explores his favored themes of mortality, love, and loss in this fluidly written tale. Deftly depicting how certain choices can unexpectedly narrow a life, instead of expanding it, he has much to say about the nature of happiness, the difficulty of change, and the great divide between obligation and desire.
Booklist
Two middle-aged, ordinary Mainers have an opportunity to alter their lives through love. Laura, a radiology technician in a small town, is a seasoned diagnostician of the benign or deadly menaces lurking within her patients, even if delivery of the good or bad news must be left to her supervising physician. The fact that she has sold herself short all her life has led to disappointments on every level.... When, at a conference in a Boston hotel, she meets, by chance, insurance salesman Richard, she soon sees the parallels in their lives.... As passionate embraces cinch the deal, it seems that these two lost souls have lucked into a second chance—but will they dare to take it? Despite pages of self-revelatory dialogue, Richard and Laura remain ciphers who may not command enough reader identification to make us care whether their future promises new love or merely a fresh hell. Despite some character underdevelopment, a fine tale of lives re-examined.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Why do you think Douglas Kennedy wrote Laura’s story as it happens in just five days? How would the novel be different if it weren’t limited to this time frame? What does it gain by the limitation?
2. Laura and Lucy “both read to find windows into our own dilemmas” (page 49). Do you choose books for the same reason? What book has recently spoken to you the most? Why?
3. How do Laura’s, Dan’s, and Richard’s relationships with their parents affect their lives? Their marriages? Does it change how they parent their own children?
4. Though there were problems already, Laura and Dan’s marriage went downhill when he lost his job. How does this financial pressure change their relationship? If Dan hadn’t been laid off, do you think they would have stayed married?
5. “That’s been one of the unwritten rules of our friendship: we tell each other everything we want to share. We ask advice and give it reciprocally. But we stop short of saying what we really feel about the other’s stuff” ( page 50). Do you think this is a good “rule” for friends to have? What would you have said to Laura if you were Lucy?
6. Is adultery really a betrayal of trust—or, in the case of Laura, a necessary way for her to begin to confront the empty sadness of her marriage?
7. Why wouldn’t Five Days be the same story if it were told from Richard’s point of view? Does Douglas Kennedy accurately capture the voice of Laura?
8. Both Richard and Laura spent most of their lives in Maine, in small towns with lots of gossip and not much financial opportunity. Could these characters come from any small town, spending a weekend in any big city? Why, or why not?
9. Ben and Billy seem to relate best to one parent. Is this always the case in family life?
10. Laura and Richard both dwell on what direction their lives might have taken if only Eric hadn’t died or Richard had left with Sarah. What is your “possible” life story?
11. Ben, Sally, Billy, and even Laura are in some ways defined by their first relationships. How does this theme play an important part of the novel?
12. Were you surprised by the outcome of Laura and Richard’s affair?
13. In the end, divorce seems to be accomplished without much legal melodrama, at least once the decision is made to end the marriage. How would this novel be different if the divorce were more contentious? Do you think this is an accurate portrayal?
14. Would Laura have had the strength to leave her marriage if she hadn’t met Richard? Why, or why not?
(Questions issued by publisher.)