The Humanity Project
Jean Thompson, 2013
Blue Rider Press
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780142180907
Summary
After surviving a shooting at her high school, Linnea is packed off to live with her estranged father, Art, who doesn’t quite understand how he has suddenly become responsible for raising a sullen adolescent girl.
Art’s neighbor, Christie, is a nurse distracted by an eccentric patient, Mrs. Foster, who has given Christie the reins to her Humanity Project, a bizarre and well-endowed charity fund.
Just as mysteriously, no one seems to know where Conner, the Fosters’ handyman, goes after work, but he has become the one person Linnea can confide in, perhaps because his own home life is a war zone: his father has suffered an injury and become addicted to painkillers.
As these characters and many more hurtle toward their fates, the Humanity Project is born: Can you indeed pay someone to be good? At what price?
Thompson proves herself at the height of her powers in The Humanity Project, crafting emotionally suspenseful and thoroughly entertaining characters, in which we inevitably see ourselves. Set against the backdrop of current events and cultural calamity, it is at once a multifaceted ensemble drama and a deftly observant story of our twenty-first-century society. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Jean Thompson is the author of The Humanity Project (2013), The Year We Left Home (2012), the acclaimed short fiction collections Do Not Deny Me (2009) and Throw Like a Girl (2007), the novel City Boy (2004); the short story collection Who Do You Love (1999), a National Book Award finalist for fiction; and the novel Wide Blue Yonder (2002), a New York Times Notable Book and Chicago Tribune Best Fiction selection.
Her short fiction has been published in many magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, and been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize. Jean's work has been praised by Elle magazine as "bracing and wildly intelligent writing that explores the nature of love in all its hidden and manifest dimensions."
Jean's other books include the short story collections The Gasoline Wars and Little Face, and the novels My Wisdom and The Woman Driver.
She has been the recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, among other accolades, and taught creative writing at the University of Illinois—Champaign/ Urbana, Reed College, Northwestern University, and many other colleges and universities. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Thompson's thoughtful new novel ponders the sins we commit in the name of love and our capacity for compassion.... Thompson asks what can we actually do to change the lives of others, and investigates the value of good intentions, finding answers in the emotional lives of richly-drawn characters who do what they must–and what they think they must—in order to help the ones they love.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Thompson achieves exceptional clarity and force in this instantly addictive, tectonically shifting novel. As always, her affection and compassion for her characters draw you in close, as does her imaginative crafting of precarious situations and moments of sheer astonishment.... Thompson is at her tender and scathing best in this tale of yearning, paradox, and hope.
Booklist
(Starred review.) [T]his book isn't preachy, and Thompson has a knack for rendering characters who are emotionally fluid.... Thompson caps the story with a smart twist ending that undoes many of the certainties the reader arrived at in the preceding pages. A rare case of a novel getting it both ways: A formal, tightly constructed narrative that accommodates the mess of everyday lives.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The novel opens with a brief chapter set in italics, and other similar passages are interspersed throughout the novel. Although the italicized section at the end of the book is clearly Linnea’s, who did you think was speaking in these earlier sections? What kind of voice does it seem to be?
2. What brings Conner and Linnea together? Linnea refers to it as either a "desperate friendship or peculiar courtship." What do they give to each other?
3. Does Linnea's arrival change Art? How so? What compels him to reach out to Beata and invite her to lunch?
4. Beata asks Art what he’d like to be doing in ten years, and tells him that she wants "to be entirely new…new work, new house. Everything new and amazing." What do you make of this? What does it tell the reader about Beata? What does Art’s reaction to this comment tell you about him?
5. We get to know the characters both through the sections they narrate, and by the opinions and responses of other characters. Were there some characters you believed more than others? Was it interesting to pick out the discrepancies between different characters’ points of view?
6 A reviewer of the book writes that it "vividly, insistently poses questions we should be asking." What, in your view, are the questions it asks? (Suzanne Berne, The New York Times Book Review)
7. Several characters wonder aloud what "The Humanity Project" means, or even what "humanity" means. Does the novel have an answer to this question? What is the purpose of the project? Is it actually definable? Does it succeed in any way?
8. Towards the end of the novel, Christie wonders: "What if she were to allow herself to feel everything she really felt…why fight against her every instinct and impulse, bend herself into some impossible and hobbled shape, hold herself back with every step?" Why do you think it has "taken her so long to even ask" these questions?
9. What does the book have to say about virtue? What is it, and what is it not? Does the novel make a judgment at all?
10. Consider the parent-child relationships depicted in the novel: Linnea and Art, Conner and Sean, Leslie and Mrs. Foster, "Laurie" and the shooter. What kind of picture of parenthood does the book paint? Linnea says that she can understand why her mother chose her husband over her child. Do you believe her?
11. Can you understand Linnea’s impulse to change her name and find a new identity? Why does she lie to Connor about what happened to Megan?
12. Discuss Christie ("Nursie") and Sean’s reunion. Christie thinks, "how strange to be so remembered and so touched, in so much forlorn darkness." This line closes the main action of the novel. Would you consider it a hopeful end? Would you agree with Christie that "to be alive is to be, in spite of everything, hopeful?"
(Questions issued by the publisher.)