American Housewife: Stories
Helen Ellis, 2016
Knopf Doubleday
208 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385541039
Summary
A sharp, funny, delightfully unhinged collection of stories set in the dark world of domesticity, American Housewife features murderous ladies who lunch, celebrity treasure hunters, and the best bra fitter south of the Mason Dixon line.
Meet the women of American Housewife:
♦ They wear lipstick, pearls, and sunscreen, even when it's cloudy.
♦ They casserole. They pinwheel.
♦ They pump the salad spinner like it's a CPR dummy.
♦ And then they kill a party crasher, carefully stepping around the body to pull cookies out of the oven.
These twelve irresistible stories take us from a haunted prewar Manhattan apartment building to the set of a rigged reality television show, from the unique initiation ritual of a book club to the getaway car of a pageant princess on the lam, from the gallery opening of a tinfoil artist to the fitting room of a legendary lingerie shop.
Vicious, fresh, and nutty as a poisoned Goo Goo Cluster, American Housewife is an uproarious, pointed commentary on womanhood. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1970
• Raised—Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA
• Education—M.A., New York University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Helen Ellis is the author of two novels, a collectiion of short stories, and one of essays. She is also a world class poker player.
Her first novel, Eating the Cheshire Cat (2001), is a dark comedy written in Southern Gothic fiction style. It tells the story of three girls raised in the South and the odd, sometimes macabre, tribulations they endure.
Her second novel, The Turning Book: What Curiosity Kills (2010), is a "teen vampire" story about a 16-year-old girl from the South adopted into a wealthy New York City family. The book's plot includes shape-shifting, teen romance, and the supernatural.
Ellis's story collection, American Housewife (2016) contains 12 stories that turn the stereotypical housewife ideal on its head. Each one centers on the trials and tribulations of a particular housewife.
In addition to writing, Ellis also competes in high-stakes poker tournaments. Passionate about poker from the time her father first taught her the game when she was six, she began playing in tournaments in 2008. Two years later, she won $20,000 at the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.
A year later, fellow author Colson Whitehead (Sag Harbor, etc.) hired her as his coach in the World Series of Poker. He wrote about the expperience in his book The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky and Death (2014).
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/3/2016. Also from a 12/22/2015 New York Times article.)
Book Reviews
Ms. Ellis, 45, calls herself a housewife. But that only begins to describe her. She is also a shrewd poker player who regularly competes in high-stakes tournaments, and the author of a forthcoming story collection, American Housewife, that focuses a dark and humorous lens on the domestic… The stories are addictive and full of pitch-perfect observations like, "the only thing with less character than Chardonnay is wainscoting" and "Delores was as fertile as a Duggar." They are populated by, among others, neighbors in a co-op whose fight over decorating turns deadly; women in a book club trying to seduce a new member into carrying their babies; and a chilling series of dead doormen.
J. Courtney Sullivan - New York Times
The 12 compact tales are delightfully dark and leave readers always rooting for the housewife, no matter how twisted her plots…. With punchy writing and unique conundrums, American Housewife can be devoured in a sitting. Resist. The tales are best consumed like the pinot grigio some of these housewives enjoy—daily.
Christina Ledbetter - Washington Post
Satirical humor as twisted as screw-top bottles — and more effervescent than the stuff that pours out of them… American Housewife is a better cure for winter blahs than hot chocolate… The opening story captures her frisky, subversive take on domesticity… Ellis's [one-liners] are outrageously good… ‘What I Do All Day’ is a three-page tour-de-force, boasting as many dazzlers as a wealthy Upper East Side matron's jewelry box… Amid the furious activity, Ellis works her story to a touching punchline you never saw coming. This is shock and awww writing… Ellis is a master of the unhinged monologue, delivered by narrators whose conventional, seemingly benign, honeyed patter gradually reveals the disturbing demon within.
Heller McAlpin - NPR
The first line of Helen Ellis' book of short stories is a kind of call to arms for the American housewife. Quote, "inspired by Beyonce, I stallion walk to the toaster." Ellis is a self-described housewife. She's the kind of Southern lady that deals a mean hand of cards and once played at the World Series of Poker.
Rachel Martin - NPR Morning Edition
Delightful in its originality and eerie, almost demented, humor… Ellis’s stories start in a place that’s quite familiar—the domestic sphere of New York City’s ritzy Upper East Side, where the author also resides—and end in a place that’s decidedly not. Her characters are stealthily complex, their perfectly composed, well-maintained exteriors the ideal cover for inner lives that seethe with pathos and ambition.”
Julia Felsenthal - Vogue.com
The perfect cocktail of Amy Sedaris's wacky wit and Margaret Atwood's insight, Ellis's prose is both searingly funny and emotionally sound… Pithy, witty, and biting, a combination that makes Ellis's writing delicious… The women in these stories are alone in their homes all day, and in that they possess a unique power, command over a confined kingdom.
Claire Luchette - Elle.com
Crackle[s] with domestically ambivalent characters: the modern day Betty Drapers in Helen Ellis’s short story collection, American Housewife, whose tensions over wainscoting and book clubs escalate into near-farce.
Vogue
Ellis...turns domesticity on its head in her darkly funny 12-story collection, featuring hausfraus in various stages of unraveling.... [She] hits the satirical bull’s-eye with a deliciously dry, smart voice that will have readers flipping the pages in delight.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Each story is lively and active. The hilarity of each premise will pull in readers, and the twists will keep them glued to the pages. Anyone who has...felt awkwardly settled into the domestic life will appreciate this not-to-be-missed collection. —Mara Dabrishus, Ursuline Coll. Lib., Pepper Pike, OH
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Ellis’s 12 short stories about women under pressure are archly, acerbically, even surreally hilarious.... Her pacing is swift and eviscerating, and her characters’ rage and hunger for revenge are off the charts… Perfectly crafted. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
The wives in these guffaw-out-loud short stories by novelist Ellis are a wonderfully wacky crew.... The 12 stories here cheekily tackle subjects ranging from neighborhood book clubs to reality TV shows, and while a few of them feel, sadly, like filler, breaking up the madcap momentum, on the whole, they are deliciously dark and deliriously deranged.
Kirkus Reviews
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 start a discussion for American Housewife...then take off on your own:
1. Of the 12 stories, which do you find funniest, or most pointed? Did the stories resonate with parts of your life? Did any of them offend you or make you uneasy? Which ones made you laugh the hardest?
2. What, precisely, in these stories, is Helen Ellis skewing? Talk about the stereotypical housewife and how each story, or perhaps all of them together, subverts the supposed ideal?
3. Follow-up to Question 2: On the surface, Ellis might be accused of poking fun at her creations. But is she? Could you make the case that, ultimately, her characters are sympathetic, silly or self-absorbed on the surface but with hidden depths, even tragic flaws?
4. Ellis has a brilliant touch with one-liners. Take the fury and near violence of "What I Do All Day"; then talk about that last line. How does it undercut what comes before? Were you taken by surprise?
5. Pick out other passages/lines to discuss. Do you find them sad, funny, poignant, or dead-on accurate: Here are a few for starters:
"Dead Doorment" —When my husband's at work I don't get lonely. I have plenty to do. There's the dusting.
"The Fitter—A perfect bra provides "the confidence of a homecoming queen. It's a tiara for your ta-tas.
"Hello! Welcome to Book Club!" —Your Book Club name will be a secret name that only we will call you. Trust me, you’ll like it. It feels like a dollar bill in your bra.
(Questions by LitLovers. Feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend
Katarina Bivald, 2013 (2016, U.S.)
Sourcebooks
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781492623441
Summary
Once you let a book into your life, the most unexpected things can happen...
Broken Wheel, Iowa, has never seen anyone like Sara, who traveled all the way from Sweden just to meet her book-loving pen pal, Amy.
When she arrives, however, she finds Amy's funeral guests just leaving. The residents of Broken Wheel are happy to look after their bewildered visitor—there's not much else to do in a dying small town that's almost beyond repair.
You certainly wouldn't open a bookstore. And definitely not with the tourist in charge. You'd need a vacant storefront (Main Street is full of them), books (Amy's house is full of them), and...customers.
The bookstore might be a little quirky. Then again, so is Sara. But Broken Wheel's own story might be more eccentric and surprising than she thought.
A heartwarming reminder of why we are booklovers, this is a sweet, smart story about how books find us, change us, and connect us. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Katarina Bivald, born in 1983, lives outside of Stockholm, Sweden. The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend, published in 2013 (2016 in the U.S.), is her first novel.
When she was 15, Katarina began working part time in a small independent bookshop and did so for the next 10 years. "In a way," she says, "you can say I grew up in one." When she began writing Broken Wheel she decided to fill it with everything she knew—mostly books. But she came to realize that the people who read books, who visit bookstores, who linger there and chat, would become the real center of her story.
Surprisingly, when she started Broken Wheel, Katarina had never stepped foot in the U.S.—and she certainly never visited small-town American where her book is set. It didn't matter though: she feels she's "spent a lifetime knowing the U.S. through books and television and movies." (Adapted from an American Booksellers Association interview. Retrieved 2/3/2016.)
Book Reviews
Charmingly original....sweet, quirky.
Bethanne Patrick - Washington Post
A heartwarming tale about literature's power to transform..
People
This charming, book-loving story captures readers' hearts from the very first page.... This is a must-read for book lovers who enjoy a witty, feel-good story that goes beyond the surface.
Romance Times Review
(Starred review.) [A] delight.... Bivald fills the pages with book references, chief among them Austen and Bridget Jones, but it is her characters that will win readers over.... As in [Jane] Austen, love conquers but just who and how will come as a pleasant surprise.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [A] heartwarming and utterly charming debut by Swedish author Bivald. This gentle, intelligent Midwestern tale will captivate fans of Antoine Laurain's The Red Notebook, Nina George's The Little Paris Bookshop, and Gabrielle Zevin's The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry. An ideal book group selection, it reminds us why we are book lovers and why it's nice to read a few happy endings. —Susan Clifford Braun, Bainbridge Island, WA
Library Journal
In this sleepy charmer, a Swedish bookseller finds friendship, love, and more books in the small town of Broken Wheel, Iowa..... [I]f she and her neighbor Tom can admit their feelings for each other, she might be there for good.... [R]eaders won't want to leave Broken Wheel, either.
Kirkus Reviews
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 start a discussion for The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend...and then take it from there.
1. One of the themes in The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend is how a single individual can strengthen a community or repair fragile lives. First, why does Sara Lundqvist decide that the people of Broken Wheel need a bookstore? Next, how does she become a catalyst for change—what is it about Sara that gives her such influence?
2. Discuss the nature and contents of Sara and Amy Harris's two-year correspondence. What do the letters reveal about each of them. Amy, for instance, writes the following:
John says I think about historic injustices too much. Maybe he’s right, but it’s just that it doesn’t feel historic to me. We never seem to be able to accept responsibility for them. First, we say that’s just how things are, then we shrug our shoulders and say that’s just how things were, that things are different now. No thanks to us, I want to reply, but no one ever seems to want to hear that.
—What do you make of Amy's view of human indifference to injustice. Is she cynical, overly idealistic, or realistic?
—What about Sara? What do the letters reveal about her character?
3. Have you ever had a long-lasting correspondence with someone you didn't know...or even with someone you did know? Can letter writing form as deep a relationship as personal contact?
4. What do you think of Sara's emotional engagement with books:
Sara couldn’t help but wonder what life might be like if you couldn’t daydream about Mr Fitzwilliam Darcy...because you yourself had created him.
—Is your attachment to books as strong as Sara's? Do you sometimes wonder if your involvement with them takes precedence over your real life?
5. Another theme in Broken Wheel is the power of books to change lives. What gives them such power—what's their secret? What is the town of Broken Wheel like when Sara arrives, and how does it change by the book's end.
6. Follow-up to Question 5: Now talk about specific characters in the novel and how individual lives are changed through reading. Which character's story engaged you most?
7. What book has changed your life...or the life of someone close to you?
8. What other works does The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommends bring to mind? Have you read, for instance, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, 84 Charing Cross Road, or The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry? If so, how does this book compare to any of those?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Expatriates
Janice Y.K. Lee, 2016
Penguin Publishing Group
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525429470
Summary
Sex and the City meets Lost in Translation. —The Skimm
Janice Y. K. Lee explores with devastating poignancy the emotions, identities, and relationships of three very different American women living in the same small expat community in Hong Kong.
♦ Mercy, a young Korean American and recent Columbia graduate, is adrift, undone by a terrible incident in her recent past.
♦ Hilary, a wealthy housewife, is haunted by her struggle to have a child, something she believes could save her foundering marriage.
♦ Margaret, once a happily married mother of three, questions her maternal identity in the wake of a shattering loss.
As each woman struggles with her own demons, their lives collide in ways that have irreversible consequences for them all. Atmospheric, moving, and utterly compelling, The Expatriates confirms Lee as an exceptional talent and one of our keenest observers of women’s inner lives. (From the publishers.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1972
• Where—Hong Kong, China
• Education—Harvard University
• Currently—lives in Hong Kong
Janice Y. K. Lee was born and raised in Hong Kong and graduated from Harvard College. A former features editor at Elle and Mirabella magazines, she currently lives in Hong Kong with her husband and children. (From the publisher.)
More
Janice Lee was born in Hong Kong to Korean parents and lived there until she was fifteen, attending the international school. She then left for boarding school in New Hampshire, where she learned the true meaning of winter.
From there, she moved south to Cambridge, MA, where she spent four years at Harvard, developing a taste for excellent coffee, Au Bon Pain pastries, and staying up all night, sometimes indulging in all three at the same time. She also pleased her parents by meeting, on the very first day of school, the man who would become her husband.
After graduating with a degree in English and American Literature and Language, she relocated down to New York where she got her first post-college job fetching coffee as an assistant to the beauty editor at Elle magazine. After a few months booking massages learning about the cosmetics industry, she heard about a job in the features section and was able to switch departments and return to her true roots, being happily inundated with books on a daily basis.
She then moved to Mirabella magazine where she did more of the same. As much as she enjoyed her job, she eventually came to realize that if she stayed on this career track, she would have no time to write her own book, something that had been a goal of hers since elementary school.
Taking a deep breath, she quit to freelance, think about writing, and eventually ended up at the Hunter College MFA Program, which at the time was headed up by the wonderful Chang-Rae Lee. She spent most of her time in grad school writing short stories, some of which got published, but most of which are still languishing in various states of completion on her computer.
She was about to graduate with no definite plans when she received a letter from Yaddo, the artists’ colony, saying that her application for a summer residency had been approved. She also found out she was pregnant with her first child.
At Yaddo, she started to organize her thoughts into what would become The Piano Teacher. After she had her first child, she put away the book for a year, adjusting to her new life as a mother. Then she had another child and picked it up again. Then she moved to Hong Kong. When she found out she was pregnant with her third and fourth (twins!) she had all the incentive she needed to finish the book, seeing as how she might not have any time to do anything ever again.
Five years after she started it, she had a good first draft and sold The Piano Teacher two months before she gave birth to the twins. When she told her mother she had sold her first novel, her mother asked whether Janice's husband had been the buyer. Really. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
A female, funny Henry James in Asia, Janice Y. K. Lee is vividly good on the subject of Americans abroad.... [The Expatriates is] vibrant social satire: Inside these dark materials lies the sharpness of a comic novelist, and Lee’s eye for the nuance and clash of culture, class, race and sex is subtle and shrewd.
New York Times Book Review
At turns illuminating, entertaining, cringe-inducing, piercing . . . With meticulous details and nuanced observations, Lee creates an exquisite novel of everyday lives in extraordinary circumstances.... How Lee’s triumvirate reacts, copes, and ventures forth (or not) proves to be a stupendous feat of magnetic, transporting storytelling.... Mark my words: The Expatriates will appear repeatedly on year-end award nominations and all the 'best of' compilations."
Christian Science Monitor
A nuanced reminder of how shockingly easy it can be to lose everything in a moment and of how to reinvent one’s life after a fall.
San Francisco Chronicle
One chief pleasure of The Expatriates is watching how the lives of Hilary, Mercy and Margaret converge and are changed by that convergence, and how they each metabolize grief. A more subtle yet lingering benefit is getting to know Lee's acutely observed Hong Kong, a city on the cusp of change that must eventually affect the lives of expatriates and locals alike.
Los Angeles Times
Powerful [and] nuanced...poignant and compelling.... The Expatriates moves with urgency, but also takes time to slowly reveal a complex story. Lee’s storytelling is intricate, precise and rich enough to keep the reader seduced until the end.
Seattle Times
One of the novel’s strengths is Lee’s exploration of the sometimes subtle interplay between different layers and types of privilege; another is her empathy for the loneliness that her characters must endure. The result is a shrewd and moving study of how race, gender and education constrain the options that life gives you.
Financial Times
We imagine we know these [expatriate] women, who are distanced from their work, friends, and family, but we don’t. Janice Y. K. Lee does. Set in Hong Kong, The Expatriates looks inside the lives of three women...all in crisis, all needing one another in ways they, and we, can’t imagine.
Vanity Fair
A novel about displacement and belonging.... A thoughtful portrait of motherhood trade-offs, the book also offers sharp insights into the tensions between moneyed expats and the impoverished locals who serve them. (The Best New Books)
People
We found ourselves racing through this exotic, sexy, heartbreaking book.... We couldn’t wait to find out what happens to each of the women.
Glamour
Janice Y.K. Lee’s absorbing, poignant novel...[is a] nuanced story of the ordinary heroism needed to move past some of life’s worst experiences. It’s a great read and a testament to the strength and resilience we all have.
Redbook
After...The Piano Teacher, Lee returns with a captivating book about three American women living in an expatriate community in Hong Kong. She explores their experiences with love, loss, and uncertainty about the future and the unexpected ways their lives intersect.... [C]ompelling.
Publishers Weekly
Like Jodi Picoult and Kristin Hannah, Lee is a perceptive observer of her compelling characters and brings them vividly to life in this moving novel
BookPage
Hong Kong sets the stage for stories of expatriation, cultural divide, and, most strikingly, the varying ways in which grief causes isolation.... An unfortunate side effect of unraveling tragedy is that these characters are lost in reflection, and so there's not much present action and the narrative is often lacking immediacy.... [Still, it is a] richly detailed novel.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. SPOILER ALERT: DON’T READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN’T FINISHED THE NOVEL.
2. Have you ever lived outside your native country for an extended period of time? If so, how did your experience compare with Lee’s description?
3. Would you be interested in living the expatriate life in Hong Kong? What about it appeals to you? What aspects would you find difficult to accept?
4. Do you think Margaret is a good mother? Why or why not?
5. Is Mercy solely to blame for what happened in Seoul? Is she as unlucky as she believes herself to be?
6. Does Margaret initially feel a connection to Mercy because she herself is a quarter Korean? When we are in an unfamiliar environment, do we naturally gravitate toward those most similar to ourselves?
7. Is Charlie a missed opportunity for Mercy or would the relationship not have worked out anyway, given Mercy’s luck?
8. Did your opinion of Mercy change over the course of the novel? Why or why not?
9. What is your take on the anonymous discussion-board post describing Hilary’s initial relationship with Julian as similar to "trying on a coat"?
10. Overall, do social media outlets like Facebook, Instagram, and message boards such as the one Hilary haunts make people more or less connected with their fellow human beings? What are their pluses and minuses?
11. Did David ultimately help Hilary to overcome her indecision about adopting Julian? What do you think David will do at the end of the book? Will he be a happier person?
12. Would a child have healed David and Hilary’s marriage or was the rift between them already too great?
13. If you are a mother, do you feel that having a child is a transformative experience? Can a woman who’s not a mother understand the depth of Margaret’s loss?
14. What aspect of The Expatriates most resonated with you? Why?
15. Where do you see each of these three women in five years?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Portable Veblen
Elizabeth McKenzie, 2016
Penguin
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594206856
Summary
Nominated, 2016 National Book Awards
An exuberant, one-of-a-kind novel about love and family, war and nature, new money and old values by a brilliant New Yorker contributor.
The Portable Veblen is a dazzlingly original novel that’s as big-hearted as it is laugh-out-loud funny. Set in and around Palo Alto, amid the culture clash of new money and old (antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across its pages, The Portable Veblen is an unforgettable look at the way we live now.
A young couple on the brink of marriage—the charming Veblen and her fiance Paul, a brilliant neurologist—find their engagement in danger of collapse. Along the way they weather everything from each other’s dysfunctional families, to the attentions of a seductive pharmaceutical heiress, to an intimate tete-a-tete with a very charismatic squirrel.
Veblen (named after the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term “conspicuous consumption”) is one of the most refreshing heroines in recent fiction. Not quite liberated from the burdens of her hypochondriac, narcissistic mother and her institutionalized father, Veblen is an amateur translator and “freelance self”; in other words, she’s adrift.
Meanwhile, Paul—the product of good hippies who were bad parents—finds his ambition soaring. His medical research has led to the development of a device to help minimize battlefield brain trauma—an invention that gets him swept up in a high-stakes deal with the Department of Defense, a Bizarro World that McKenzie satirizes with granular specificity.
As Paul is swept up by the promise of fame and fortune, Veblen heroically keeps the peace between all the damaged parties involved in their upcoming wedding, until she finds herself falling for someone—or something—else. Throughout, Elizabeth McKenzie asks: Where do our families end and we begin? How do we stay true to our ideals? And what is that squirrel really thinking?
Replete with deadpan photos and sly appendices, The Portable Veblen is at once an honest inquiry into what we look for in love and an electrifying reading experience. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 24, 1958 (?)
• Raised—near Los Angeles, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California-Santa Cruz; M.A., Stanford University
• Currently—lives in Santa Cruz, California
Elizabeth McKenzie is the author of the novel The Portable Veblen (2016), the collection, Stop That Girl (2005), short-listed for The Story Prize, and the novel MacGregor Tells the World (2007), a Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and Library Journal Best Book of the year.
Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the Pushcart Prize anthology, and has been recorded for NPR’s Selected Shorts. She was an NEA/Japan US-Friendship Commission Fellow in 2010.
She received her BA from University of California-Santa Cruz and her MA from Stanford. She was an assistant fiction editor at The Atlantic and currently teaches creative writing at Stanford's school of continuing studies. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
One of the great pleasures of reading Elizabeth McKenzie is that she hears the musical potential in language that others do not—in the manufactured jargon of economics, in the Latin taxonomy of the animal kingdom, even in the names of our own humble body part.... Her dialogue has real fizz and snappity-pop. It leaves a bubbled contrail. Ms. McKenzie's ear is not her only asset. There is also her angled way of seeing things. The hats on all of her characters sit slightly askew. The Portable Veblen, Ms. McKenzie's second novel, may be her most cockeyed concoction to date…. It's a screwball comedy with a dash of mental illness; a conventional tale of family pathos; a sendup of Big Pharma; a meditation on consumption, marriage, the nature of work….The Portable Veblen is a novel of such festive originality that it would be a shame to miss.
Jennifer Senior - New York Times Book Review
Irresistibly comedic…. McKenzie…has an appealingly light, playful touch…. The Portable Veblen is about how very squirrelly family dysfunction can be—and about how, as many of us never get tired of reading, love sometimes can conquer all.
Seattle Times
[A] funny, philosophical novel…. Oddball characters and plot turns abound, including talking squirrels and bureaucratic ironies worthy of Catch-22. But a sober question occupies its core: Do our parents' best intentions do us harm?
Minneapolis Star Tribune
A wild ride that you will not want to miss…rambunctious and sober, hilarious and morbid, [with] strong echoes of Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut….This unforgettable novel offers a heartfelt and sincere investigation into the paradoxical nature of love, familial as well as romantic.
Elizabeth Rosner, San Francisco Chronicle
A sweet, sharply written, romantic comedy about the pitfalls of approaching marriage…. McKenzie imbues her characters with such psychological acuity that they, as well as the off-kilter world they inhabit, feel fully formed and authentic…. With its inspired eccentricities and screwball plot choreography, McKenzie’s novel perceptively delves into that difficult life stage when young adults finally separate—or not—from their parents. In the end, The Portable Veblen is a novel as wise as it is squirrely.
Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air
A smart charmer about a brainy off-center couple who face up to their differences—and their difficult, eccentric families—only after they become engaged…. [The Portable Veblen] is ultimately a morality tale about the values by which we choose to live…McKenzie’s delightfully frisky novel touts…a world in which "underdogs and outsiders" like Thorstein Veblen, her appealing cast of oddballs and nonconformists, and even bushy-tailed rodents feel "free to be themselves."
NPR.org
Modern romance, Big Pharma, and one very intuitive squirrel collide in McKenzie’s clever, winningly surreal novel…. McKenzie has a pitch-perfect ear for a certain kind of California kookery…. It’s hard not to be charmed by Veblen’s whimsy.
Entertainment Weekly
Ambitious…. [McKenzie’s domestic scenes] accurately and funnily capture the complexities of modern families, made knotty by the work we’re encouraged to do in our individual lives. Think The Corrections meets The Wallcreeper—where the warring wants of career-centric success and familial harmony converge, tension and comedy emerge.
Huffington Post
No matter how many novels you’ve read, it’s safe to say you’ve never read a novel like The Portable Veblen. The book] brings together its disparate themes and worlds with confidence and dexterity, [making the standard well-made novel seem as timid as—well, as a squirrel.
Slate
(Starred review.) [O]ffbeat and winning.... McKenzie writes with sure-handed perception, and her skillful characterization means that despite all of Veblen’s quirks—she’s an amateur Norwegian translator with an affinity for squirrels—she’s one of the best characters of the year. McKenzie’s funny, lively, addictive novel is sure to be a standout.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) McKenzie skewers modern American culture while quoting from a panoply of voices, with Frank Zappa, Robert Reich, and, of course, Thorstein Veblen among them. The result is a wise and thoroughly engaging story in a satirical style comparable to the works of Christopher Moore and Carl Hiaasen. —Susanne Wells, Indianapolis P.L.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) The reader can't help rooting [the young couple] on. McKenzie's idiosyncratic love story scampers along on a wonderfully zig-zaggy path, dashing and darting in delightfully unexpected directions as it progresses toward its satisfying end and scattering tasty literary passages like nuts along the way.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add the publisher's questions if and when they're made available. In the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to kick off a discussion for The Portable Veblen...then take off on your own:
1. Describe Veblen Amundsen-Hovda. What do you think of her?
2. Describe Paul Vreeland. What do you think of his character? Is he sympathetic? If you didn't find him so at first, did you change your mind by the end of the novel? Or not.
3. Talk about Veblen and Paul's relationship. How are the two different from one another—consider the disparity between their values, desires and approaches to life. Why are they drawn to each another? What do you predict for the long-term?
4. Both Veblen and Paul have complicated families. Talk about the parents, and Justin, and the roles they play in this book. Do you find them funny or irritating...or what? Is there a "villain" among the bunch? Or not really.
5. At one point, when talking of Veblen and her mother, Paul tells Veblen:
Somehow I got the feeling she was jealous of you and that you try to avoid having her feel that way because it ruptures the equilibrium you're desperate to maintain for some reason. And that maybe you feel like you have to have a strange life so that you don't surpass her.
Is Paul correct in his assessment? Veblen thinks at first that he might be right, but then thinks, no, he's not. What do you think?
6. Okay...talk about the squirrels. What is Veblen attached to them? What does her relationship with the particular squirrel reveal about her? Is it part of the book's charm ...or a gag that feels drawn-out, over-the-top? Up to you.
7. The book is described as funny, even hilarious, and quirky. What do you find funny? Consider, for instance, Veblen's conversations with her mother, or the first time Paul meets Melanie and she hands him the list of all her illneses she's preapred in advance. Or dropping off the package in the park, the "errand" that Paul's parents undertake when Veblen first meets them.
8. In what way is the book more than a love story? In addition to, say, its critique of the military-pharmaceutical complex, what are some of its other concerns?
9. One of the conflicts in the book is the consideration of marriage vs. independence. How do those competing ideas play out in the book? Where do you fall on the subject?
10. In considering Veblen's eccentricity and her father's madness, McKenzie seems to be blurring the distinctions between the two. Where do you think she draws the line?
11. Consider Veblen's name and her namesake, Thorstein Veblen. Why is Veblen (the heroine) drawn to Veblen (the scholar-writer)? In what way does the latter reflect this work's thematic concerns?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Only Love Can Break Your Heart
Ed Tarkington, 2016
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616203825
Summary
Love can make people do terrible things.
Welcome to Spencerville, Virginia, 1977.
Eight-year-old Rocky worships his older brother, Paul. Sixteen and full of rebel cool, Paul spends his days cruising in his Chevy Nova blasting Neil Young, cigarette dangling from his lips, arm slung around his beautiful, troubled girlfriend. Paul is happy to have his younger brother as his sidekick.
Then one day, in an act of vengeance against their father, Paul picks up Rocky from school and nearly abandons him in the woods. Afterward, Paul disappears.
Seven years later, Rocky is a teenager himself. He hasn’t forgotten being abandoned by his boyhood hero, but he’s getting over it, with the help of the wealthy neighbors’ daughter, ten years his senior, who has taken him as her lover. Unbeknownst to both of them, their affair will set in motion a course of events that rains catastrophe on both their families.
After a mysterious double murder brings terror and suspicion to their small town, Rocky and his family must reckon with the past and find out how much forgiveness their hearts can holds. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1973
• Raised—central Virginia, USA
• Education—B.A., Furman University; M.A., University of Virginia; Ph.D, Florida State
• Currently—lives in Nashville, Tennessee
Ed Tarkington received a BA from Furman University, an MA from the University of Virginia, and PhD from the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Florida State. A frequent contributor to Chapter16.org, his articles, essays, and stories have appeared in Nashville Scene, Memphis Commercial Appeal, Post Road, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Southeast Review, and elsewhere. A native of Central Virginia, he lives in Nashville, Tennessee. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Set against the backbeat of classic rock hits of the 1970s, Ed Tarkington’s pitch-perfect first novel pays tribute to music, love and growing up in small-town America. That Tarkington throws in illicit sex, a perverted cult leader and a multiple murder only enhances the novel's hypnotic grip on its readers.... This novel may be a murder mystery wrapped in the cloak of Southern Gothic charm but, at its essence, it's a novel about love. Love for the music that informed Tarkington's formative years and love for the familial and romantic relationships that can hurt as much as uplift us.
Chicago Tribune
A coming-of-age story that evolves into a whodunit with tangled roots in three families whose lives collide in 1977.... [A] well-plotted, generous inquiry into the intricacies of the human heart—especially the broken variety.... Secrets abound, imaginations run wild.
Atlanta Journal Constitution
A clear winner—a taut, engrossing, crisply written tale of loss and abiding love.
Charlotte Observer and Raleigh News & Observer
A lush mystery-within-a-coming-of-age-tale-within-a-Southern-Gothic. If a book could have an Instagram filter, Tarkington’s would be set on something called "Nostalgic."... [I]nteresting, readable and beautifully written.
NPR Books
Tarkington’s writing is talky, devoid of flash, and calls to mind a young Pat Conroy.... [P]ropulsion is its primary attribute. Not mere plot propulsion—though there’s plenty of that, especially after the corpses turn up—but emotional propulsion: Tarkington’s fidelity to period and place is matched by his fidelity to human contradictions, to the gray area between heroism and villainy in which most of us reside. The gothic elements add spice, but the protein in this assured debut—the part that sticks to your ribs—is the beautiful but ever-threatened connection between Rocky and Paul. Only Love Can Break Your Heart is a novel about brotherhood, most of all, about the delicate fortress of that bond.
Garden & Gun
(Starred review.) This heartbreakingly effective coming-of-age story about the importance of love in one’s life is replete with moments of harsh cruelty and tender love. Beautifully written, it vividly brings to life its Southern characters, landscape, and small-town claustrophobia.
Library Journal
Tarkington’s impressive first novel achieves every author’s goal: Once you start reading, you can’t stop. And as an added bonus for Neil Young fans, Tarkington’s riveting tale provides plenty of classic rock riffs, too
Booklist
Tarkington carefully lays out his elaborate storyline and sensitively depicts his troubled characters, but it all seems rather pat, right down to the After-the-Main-Events summary.... Well-written and observed, though the characters and situations are familiar from many, many previous novels.
Kirkus Reviews
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 start a discussion for Only Love Can Break Your Heart...and then take off on your own:
1. Describe the relationships and family dynamics of the Askew household. Why does Rocky's mother distrust Paul, the smoking-drinking bad boy, while the Old Man remains devoted to him? Talk about the couple's marriage. Consider, also, the relationship between the two brothers.
2. How well has Tarkington shaped his characters? Are they convincing—do they seem to live and breath as real people? Finally, do you come to care about them, flaws and all?
3. What affect does Paul's desertion have on Rocky? Why isn't Rocky angry at his brother?
4. Why is Neil Young's song important to Rocky? What is the song's thematic significance to the novel? Consider the various forms of love at work in this story—as well as the ways that love both hurts and uplifts the characters.
5. Rocky is inducted into manhood by Patricia Culver. What do you think of Patricia? What are the consequences of the affair?
6. Contrast Rocky and Patricia's affair with the burgeoning love between Rocky and Cinnamon. In what way is that love "pure and good and true"?
7. Do the musical and pop culture references enrich the story for you? Are they helpful in setting the mood or in creating a sense of the 1970s and '80s? Or do you find them distracting?
8. Tarkington writes of the era of the 1970s as "the sweaty, nauseous, split-headed peak of the hangover between Watergate and "Morning in America." People, he writes, "believe that the country had, in fact, found sympathy for the devil." Are you old enough to remember those times? Does Tarkington's description ring true to you? Are there any parallels with the societal norms of today?
9. When Leigh insists she can't wait to get away from Spencerville, Rocky tells her, "You won't stay away forever." Why does he say that?
10. This book is described as a classic coming of age: an older, wiser narrator looks back at a younger self during a time of crisis. Surviving the crisis becomes a rite of passage, a threshold leading to maturity. In what way does Only Love Can Break Your Heart conform to that literary model? What does Rocky come to learn about the world and his place in it? How is the older Rocky, our narrator, different from his younger self?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)