Ordinary People
Judith Guest, 1976
Penguin Group USA
263 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780140065176
Summary
The novel begins as life is seemingly returning to normal for the Jarretts of Lake Forest, Illinois, in September 1975. It is slightly more than a year since the elder of their two teenaged sons, Jordan (nicknamed "Buck"), was killed when a sudden storm came up while he and his younger brother Conrad were sailing on Lake Michigan.
Six months later, a severely depressed Conrad attempted suicide by slashing his wrists with a razor in the bathroom. His parents committed him to a psychiatric hospital from which he has only recently returned. He is attending school and trying to resume his life, but knows he still has unresolved issues, particularly with his mother, Beth, who has never really recovered from Jordan's death and keeps an almost maniacally perfect household and family.
His father, a successful tax attorney, gently leans on him to make appointments to see a local psychiatrist, Dr. Tyrone Berger. Initially resistant, he slowly starts to respond to Dr. Berger and comes to terms with the root cause of his depression ... his identity crisis and survivor's guilt over having survived when Buck did not. Also helping is a relationship with a new girlfriend, Jeannine Pratt.
Calvin, too, sees Dr. Berger as the events of the recent past have caused him to begin to doubt many things he once took for granted, leading to a midlife crisis. This leads to strain in the marriage as he finds Beth increasingly cold and distant, while she in turn believes he is overly concerned about Conrad to the point of being manipulated.
Spoiler
Finally the friction becomes enough that Beth decides to leave him at the novel's climax. Father and son, however, have closed the gap between them. (Summary from Wikipedia.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1936
• Where—Detroit, Michingan, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Michigan
• Awards—Janet Heidegger Kafka Prize, 1976
• Currently—Minneapolis, Minnesota; Harrisville, Michigan
Judith Guest won the Janet Heidegger Kafka Prize for her first novel, Ordinary People, which was made into the Academy Award-winning 1980 film of the same name. Her other novels are The Tarnished Eye, Second Heaven, Killing Time in St. Cloud (with Rebecca Hill), and Errands. She lives with her family in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Harrisville, Michigan. (From the publisher.)
More
Her own words:
I was born in 1936 in Detroit, Michigan and grew up there, attending Mumford High School in my freshman year and graduating from Royal Oak Dondero High school in 1954. I studied English and psychology at the University of Michigan and graduated with a BA in Education in 1958, whereupon I promptly...
a) got married to my college sweetheart,
b) got a job teaching first grade in Garden City, Michigan
c) got pregnant and had a baby boy—all inside 14 months.
I have been writing all of my life—since I was about ten years old, actually—in the closet, to the emotional moment, sticking reams of paper in drawers, never finishing anything. I taught more school, had two more sons and then in 1970 I wrote a short story and sent it to a national contest, where I won 60th prize out of 100. It was a book by Richard Perry entitled One Way to Write Your Novel. I read it from cover to cover and decided I already knew all this stuff, so why didn’t I just write a novel myself? It took me three years, during which time I decided to quit teaching and concentrate on finishing something. In retrospect, it was the most important decision I’ve made to date about my writing.
After I finished Ordinary People, I sent it to a publisher, who turned it down flat. The second sent a rejection letter that read in part: “While the book has some satiric bite, overall the level of writing does not sustain interest and we will have to decline it.” (I know this letter by heart—didn’t even have to look it up.) The third publisher, Viking Press, hung onto it for 8 months before they decided to publish it. They published my second novel (Second Heaven), turned down my third (Killing Time in St. Cloud), so I went to Delacorte. Delacorte turned down my fourth (Errands), so I went to Ballantine (which had turned down my first one). Ballantine turned down my fifth (The Tarnished Eye) so I went to Scribner. This is the book business in a nutshell. Don’t let anyone tell you different.
My private life is a bit more varied and exciting. I have a husband and three sons and seven grandchildren who all live here in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. We see them often, summer together, and do an assortment of family things. They are my real life—my obsession and my best material.
I think I should also say that I am the great-niece of Edgar A. Guest, who was at one time the Poet Laureate of Michigan and who wrote a poem a day for the Detroit Free Press for forty years. Which is where I get my endurance from. I can write for a long time on one novel and not get tired. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
(Pre-internet works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Eight months before the opening of this novel, Conrad Jarrett has attempted suicide.... What Ms. Guest's novel focuses on is Conrad's attempts to knit himself back into the fabric of suburban middle-American life.... It is with admirable skill that the author has made us experience Con's emergence from isolation.... But what is most touching about Ordinary People is the subtle degrees by which Conrad recovers his emotional elquibrium....What we experience in the process is not so much the relief of sudden revelation as the anxiety, despair, and joy of healing that is common to every human experience of suffering and growth.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - New York Times
It is difficult to realize that this is a first novel, because it is written with the simplicity of total authority.... I am particularly grateful to Ms. Guest for emphasizing the human need for open grieving…(She) is one of the few writers who has dared depict this aspect of affluent suburbia.
Madeleine L’Engle (author, A Wrinkle in Time)
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Ordinary People:
1. Why the title? Clearly, it has thematic significance. I think a good discussion can be had by asking what Guest meant by her use of "ordinary." Is it ironic...or sincere. In other words are the Jarretts an ordinary family? How so...or how not so?
2. In the introduction above , Guest says she "wanted to explore the anatomy of depression." Does she do a good job? How realistic is her portrayal of what has become a much discussed mental health issue.
3. You might also trace Conrad's path to health, which is the crux of the story. What are the steps in his process of recovery.
4. Obviously, you'll want to discuss Beth Jarrette—on the surface an unsympathetic character. But Guest's characters are complex, rich in their emotional and psychological make-ups. Try to ascertain Beth's underlying motivations.
5. As Conrad's health improves, Calvin's relationship with Beth deteriorates. Are those two events related? What's going on, or not going on, in that marriage.
6. Watch selected clips from the superb 1980 movie with Mary Tyler Moore, Donald Southerland, and Timothy Hutton as Conrad. Directed by Robert Redford, it swept up the major film awards.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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