This Must Be the Place
Maggie O'Farrell, 2017
Knopf Doubleday
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345804723
Summary
An irresistible love story, an unforgettable family. Bestselling author Maggie O’Farrell captures an extraordinary marriage with insight and laugh-out-loud humor in what Richard Russo calls “her breakout book.”
Daniel Sullivan leads a complicated life.
A New Yorker living in the wilds of Ireland, he has children he never sees in California, a father he loathes in Brooklyn, and his wife, Claudette, is a reclusive ex–film star given to pulling a gun on anyone who ventures up their driveway.
Together, they have made an idyllic life in the country, but a secret from Daniel’s past threatens to destroy their meticulously constructed and fiercely protected home.
Shot through with humor and wisdom, This Must Be the Place is an irresistible love story that crisscrosses continents and time zones as it captures an extraordinary marriage, and an unforgettable family, with wit and deep affection. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1972
• Where—Coleraine, Northern Ireland, UK
• Raised—Wales and Scotland, UK
• Education—Cambridge University
• Awards—Costa Award; Betty Trask Award; Somerset Maugham Award
• Currently—lives in London, England
Maggie O'Farrell is a British author of contemporary fiction, who was once featured in Waterstones' 25 Authors for the Future. It is possible to identify several common themes in her novels—the relationship between sisters is one, another is loss and the psychological impact of those losses on the lives of her characters.
The Vanishing Act Esme Lennox was published in 2007. In 2010 O'Farrell won the Costa novel award for The Hand That First Held Mine. Her 2013 novel, Instructions for a Heatwave, also received wide acclaim.
Maggie was born in Ireland and grew up in Wales and Scotland. At the age of eight she missed a year of school due to a viral infection, an event that is echoed in The Distance Between Us. Maggie worked as a journalist, both in Hong Kong and as the Deputy Literary Editor of The Independent on Sunday. She has also taught creative writing.
She is married to the novelist William Sutcliffe, whom she met at Cambridge. They live in Hampstead Heath, London, with their two children. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural," reads the epigraph to Maggie O'Farrell's seventh novel—a quote from Louis MacNeice's poem Snow that might serve as an appetizer (or warning, depending on your proclivities) for what's to come. This Must Be the Place is an "incorrigibly plural" book, offering its story through a kaleidoscopic proliferation of points of view, fractured chronologies and geographical shifts. The result…is marvelous, a contemporary and highly readable experiment whose ambitious structure both enacts and illuminates its central concern: what links and separates our 21st-century selves as we love, betray, blunder and soldier on (and back) through time…This wide-ranging novel has a vivid sense of play, despite its sometimes sober subject matter. Mostly, its experiments bear fruit.
Elizabeth Graver - New York Times Book Review
Compassionate.… Few contemporary writers equal Maggie O’Farrell’s gift for combining intricate, engrossing plots with full-bodied characterizations.
Washington Post
Extraordinary.… An engrossing novel… from a writer of impressive, perhaps masterly, skills.
Washington Times
Intensely absorbing.… O’Farrell writes novels in which you can happily lose yourself.
NPR
[M]agical…. There is enough possibility and randomness for three books, yet the story never feels overstuffed, and when it ends, the reader is stunned and grateful, relieved that in the face of all that can go (and have gone) wrong, some things have come right.
Publishers Weekly
On holiday in Ireland to escape the stress of a terrible custody battle, young American professor Daniel Sullivan meets and falls in love with celebrated actress Claudette…. They end up living blissfully together …but a secret from Daniel's past won't stay put.
Library Journal
[A] sophisticated story about love [with] an interlocking series of narratives set from 1944 to 2016, in places ranging from Sussex to Goa to Brooklyn…. Juicy and cool, this could be O'Farrell's U.S. breakthrough book.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. For an epigraph, O’Farrell selected a quote from a poem by Louis MacNeice: "World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural." What does this mean? Why do you think she chose it?
2. We see various parts of the story through the eyes of more than a dozen characters, jumping back and forth in time. How do their points of view build on one another?
3. Daniel introduces Claudette to readers by saying, "My wife, I should tell you, is crazy" (page 5). Now that you’ve read the entire novel, do you believe he means this?
4. Why does Daniel’s hearing Nicola Janks’s voice on the radio set the entire story in motion?
5. On page 31, Daniel thinks,
That same feeling of dislocation between what you thought you were doing and what you actually did envelops me as I sit there, as I press my elbows into the surface of my desk. All along I’d thought my life had been one thing, but it now seems it might have been something else entirely.
What does he mean? Is he right about that?
6. The first chapter from Claudette’s perspective, "I Am Not an Actress," is told from the first-person plural and second-person point of view. Why do you think O’Farrell chose to tell that portion of the story like that? What effect does it have?
7. What does Niall’s eczema symbolize?
8. On page 59, Phoebe describes her feeling of dissociation, "Like I’ve been cut down the middle and I’m in two places at once, or I’m getting radio interference from somewhere, or I’m just a shadow." On page 361, Marithe describes a similar sensation. Aside from sharing a father, what is the connection between the girls?
9. What do we learn from the auction catalog of Claudette’s memorabilia?
10. When Myrna advises Daniel to go home—"ʻLeave whatever this is alone. What can be gained from turning over old coals?’" (page 118)—why doesn’t he listen? What could have changed if he had?
11. Several chapters are told from the perspective of minor characters, such as Lenny and Maeve. How does this reset your understanding of what’s happening?
12. Pascaline describes Daniel as "someone who is so… different on the inside from how they are on the outside" (page 134). What does she mean by that?
13. Why does Daniel’s career as a linguist, studying the way language changes, matter to the story? What does it tell us about his character?
14. What propels Daniel to track down Todd?
15. Why didn’t Todd give Daniel’s letter to Nicola?
16. How does Teresa’s story affect your understanding of Daniel’s behavior? What purpose does her story serve in the novel as a whole?
17. On page 249, Ari describes his stammer as being like an iceberg, "ʻOnly a small part of it is visible, while under the water is a large, jagged, dangerous mass of ice.’" What else in the novel might be described this way?
18. Grief affects some characters more profoundly than others. What similarities do you see in how Daniel and Niall dealt with Phoebe’s death? And differences?
19. Why does Claudette react the way she does when Daniel tells her about Nicola?
20. In the interview transcript, Timou tells the interviewer that Claudette ran away because of "you." "ʻNot you personally but what you stand for. You are the synecdoche for what she ran away from’" (page 314). What does this mean?
21. Rosalind’s chapter, "Always to Be Losing Things," reads almost like a stand-alone short story. Why do you think O’Farrell chose to add another layer to the novel? What do we learn here?
22. Rosalind tells Daniel, "ʻI have a theory …that marriages end not because of something you did say but because of something you didn’t. All you have to do now is work out what it is’" (page 351). Does Daniel work this out? What does he say to Claudette?
23. Siblings—step-, half, full—play major roles in the novel. How might things have been different if, say, Lucas wasn’t always there for Claudette, or Ari didn’t eventually gain siblings of his own?
24. Toward the end of the novel, Daniel disarms Claudette by complimenting her on her parenting. Why does this have such an effect on her?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)