City on Fire
Garth Risk Hallberg, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
944 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385353779
Summary
New York City, 1976.
Meet Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney, estranged heirs to one of the city’s great fortunes; Keith and Mercer, the men who, for better or worse, love them; Charlie and Samantha, two suburban teenagers seduced by downtown’s punk scene; an obsessive magazine reporter and his idealistic neighbor—and the detective trying to figure out what any of them have to do with a shooting in Central Park on New Year’s Eve.
The mystery, as it reverberates through families, friendships, and the corridors of power, will open up even the loneliest-seeming corners of the crowded city. And when the blackout of July 13, 1977, plunges this world into darkness, each of these lives will be changed forever.
City on Fire is an unforgettable novel about love and betrayal and forgiveness, about art and truth and rock 'n' roll: about what people need from each other in order to live … and about what makes the living worth doing in the first place. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1978-79
• Rasied—Greenville, South Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., Washington University (St. Louis)
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Garth Risk Hallberg was born in Louisiana and grew up in North Carolina. His writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, Best New American Voices 2008, and, most frequently, The Millions; a novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family, was published in 2007. He lives in New York with his wife and children. This is his first novel. . (From the publisher.)
Learn more about the author on Vulture.com.
Book Reviews
[A] big, stunning first novel and an amazing virtual reality machine, whisking us back to New York City in the 1970s…with bravura swagger and style and heart. [Hallberg] captures the city's dangerous, magnetic allure—for artists, for dreamers, for kids eager to escape the platitudes of suburbia. And he also captures what it's like to be young in New York, propelled by the dizzying adrenaline-rush of possibility and frightened, too, by the fragility of urgent ambitions…The ghosts of New York memorialized by earlier writers—F. Scott Fitzgerald, J. D. Salinger, Richard Price—hover over City on Fire…But this novel is defiantly and indelibly Mr. Hallberg's own: a symphonic epic…drawing upon his XXL tool kit as a storyteller: a love of language and the handsprings he can make it perform; a bone-deep knowledge of his characters' inner lives that's as unerring as that of the young Salinger; an instinctive gift for spinning suspense not just out of dovetailing plotlines and odd Dickensian coincidences but also from secrets buried in his characters' pasts…[City on Fire is] a novel of head-snapping ambition and heart-stopping power—a novel that attests to its young author's boundless and unflagging talents.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
The question of whether City on Fire is good does not lend itself to a glib answer. But no one can say it isn't ambitious, and exceptionally so for a first novel. Hallberg devotes more than 900 pages to his own effort to recreate the face of an entire city in all its confounding complexity, complete with collagelike inserts replicating a coffee-stained manuscript by one character and the dense East Village zines of another. His talent is as conspicuous as the book's heft. There's rarely a less than finely honed sentence or a moment when you don't feel that a sophisticated intelligence is at work. Hallberg expertly manages the gear-shifting of multiple narratives and time frames (some back stories date to 1960) while keeping his present-tense New York in sharp relief…Hallberg delivers a fresh vision of New York that is more dreamscape than reportage.
Frank Rich - New York Times Book Review
Dazzling.... City on Fire is an extraordinary performance.... Hallberg inhabits the minds of whites and blacks, men and women, old and young, gay and straight with equal fidelity . . . making every one of them thrum with real life.... And what endlessly fascinating characters they are!.... [The novel’s] Whitmanesque arms embrace an entire city of lovers and strivers, saints and killers.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
To a person who did live in New York in the nineteen-seventies—to wit, this person—Hallberg’s powers of evocation are uncanny.... It’s not the facts that bring the nineteen-seventies to life in City on Fire. What Hallberg is after is an atmosphere, and he gets it.
Louis Menand - The New Yorker
Thrilling...brings gritty 1970s Manhattan to life.... A kind of punk Bleak House.... An exuberant, Zeitgeisty New York novel, like The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Emperor’s Children, or The Goldfinch.
Vogue
Garth Risk Hallberg has written the kind of debut novel that only comes around once every 20 years or so—one that everyone who’s read it roots for.... An edge-of-your-seat epic, which is as tightly told as it is ambitious.
Elle
It’s hard to believe this layered New York epic is a debut: The glitter and grime of the city’s punk heyday are captured in gorgeous detail as multiple stories converge.
Entertainment Weekly
A soaring debut.... Over the course of Hallberg’s magisterial epic, distinctions of class, race, geography, and generation give way to an impression of the human condition that is both ambitious and sublime.
Vanity Fair
Hallberg’s maniacally detailed, exhaustingly clever depiction of 1970s New York is packed with urban angst, intellectual energy, and sinister pitfalls, much like the city it evokes. This epic of drugs, sex, and rock and roll combines fiction and new journalistic accounts of real events.... [An] occasionally overwritten effort, but others will be left to wonder how so much energy could generate so little light.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) This epic, well-written, and highly entertaining first novel is set in New York City from around Christmas 1976 to the blackout of July 1977.... Throughout, Hallberg expertly handles the multiple shifts in perspective, vibrantly portraying a specific time and place and creating memorable characters—especially Charlie and Regan, a complicated mess of a poor little rich girl who manages to be heroic in her own way—all wandering the vast, ongoing American dreamscape that is New York City. —James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Completely engrossing.... This magnificent first novel is full to bursting with plot, character, and emotion, all set within an exquisitely grungy 1970s New York City.... Graceful in execution, hugely entertaining, and most concerned with the longing for connection, a theme that reaches full realization during the blackout of 1977, this epic tale is both a compelling mystery and a literary tour de force.
Booklist
Engrossing.... When the city goes dark, [it] is like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Manhattan edition.... As in the fiction of Saul Bellow, Hallberg’s heroes are theorists of their own universe.... Every ley line is a life story, every subplot a window on a New York niche . . . The story itself is dramatic, intermixing a police procedural with a terrorist plot, an addiction plot, an art plot, various adultery plots.... The result is a narrative that is immense.
Bookforum
(Starred review.) Rough-edged mid-1970s New York provides the backdrop for an epic panorama of musicians, writers, and power brokers and the surprising ways they connect.... [T]his novel becomes an ambitious showpiece for just how much the novel can contain without busting apart. The very-damn-good American novel.
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)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
Sharp Objects
Gillian Flynn, 2006
Broadway Books
254 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307341556
Summary
Fresh from a brief stay at a psych hospital, reporter Camille Preaker faces a troubling assignment: she must return to her tiny hometown to cover the murders of two preteen girls.
For years, Camille has hardly spoken to her neurotic, hypochondriac mother or to the half-sister she barely knows: a beautiful thirteen-year-old with an eerie grip on the town.
Now, installed in her old bedroom in her family's Victorian mansion, Camille finds herself identifying with the young victims—a bit too strongly.
Dogged by her own demons, she must unravel the psychological puzzle of her own past if she wants to get the story—and survive this homecoming. (From the publiher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 24, 1971
• Where—Kansas City, Missouri, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Kansas; M.A., Northwest University
• Awards—Ian Fleming Steel Daggers
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois
Gillian Flynn is an American author, screenwriter, comic book writer, and former television critic for Entertainment Weekly. Her three published novels are the thrillers: Sharp Objects, Dark Places, and Gone Girl.
Early life
Flynn was born in Kansas City, Missouri. Both of her parents were professors at Metropolitan Community College–Penn Valley: her mother, Judith Ann (nee Schieber), a reading-comprehension professor; her father, Edwin Matthew Flynn, a film professor. "Painfully shy," Flynn found escape in reading and writing and watching horror movies.
Flynn attended the University of Kansas, where she received her undergraduate degrees in English and journalism. She spent two years in California writing for a trade magazine for human resources professionals before moving to Chicago where, in 1997, she earned a Master's in journalism at Northwestern University.
Career
Initially, Flynn wanted to work as a police reporter but soon discovered she had no aptitude for police reporting. She worked briefly at U.S. News & World Report before being hired as a feature writer in 1998 for Entertainment Weekly. She was promoted to television critic, writing about both tv and film.
Flynn attributes her craft to her 15-some years in journalism:
I could not have written a novel if I hadn't been a journalist first, because it taught me that there's no muse that's going to come down and bestow upon you the mood to write. You just have to do it. I'm definitely not precious.
Although Flynn considers herself a feminist, some critics accuse her of misogyny because of the unflattering depiction of female characters in her books. Yet feminism, she feels, allows for women to be bad characters in literature:
The one thing that really frustrates me is this idea that women are innately good, innately nurturing.
Flynn also said people will dismiss...
trampy, vampy, bitchy types—there's still a big pushback against the idea that women can be just pragmatically evil, bad, and selfish.
Books
Flynn began writing novels during her free time while working for Entertainment Weekly. Her three books are—
♦ Sharp Objects (2006) revolves around a serial killer in Missouri and the reporter who returns to her Missouri hometown from Chicago to cover the event. Partly inspired by Dennis Lehane's 2001 Mystic River, the book deals with dysfunctional families, violence, and self-harm. It was shortlisted for the Mystery Writers of America Edgar in 2007 for Best First Novel by an American Writer. It won the Crime Writers' Association "New Blood" and "Ian Fleming Steel Daggers" awards.
♦ Dark Places (2009) centers on a woman investigating her brother who was convicted in the 1980s, when she was only a child, of murdering their parents.The book explores the era's satanic rituals and was adapted into a 2015 film. Flynn makes a cameo appearance in the film.
♦ Gone Girl (2012) concerns a couple, the wife of which disappears on their fifth wedding anniversary, and her husband who comes under police scrutiny as the prime suspect.
The novel hit No. 1 on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestseller list for eight weeks. Times culture writer Dave Itzkoff wrote that the novel was, except for the Fifty Shades of Grey series, the biggest literary phenomenon of 2012. By the end of that year, Gone Girl had sold over two million copies (print and digital).
After selling the film rights for $1.5 million, Flynn wrote the Gone Girl screenplay. The 2014 film, starring Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike, was released to popular and critical acclaim.
Other writing
Flynn was an avid reader of comic and graphic novels when she was a child. She collaborated with illustrator Dave Gibbons and wrote a comic book story called "Masks," as part of the Dark Horse Presents series. It came out in 2015.
Flynn agreed to write the scripts for Utopia, an forthcoming HBO drama series adapted from the acclaimed British series Utopia. The HBO series is to be directed and executive produced by David Fincher, who also directed Gone Girl.
Personal life
She married lawyer Brett Nolan in 2007. They met through Flynn's grad school classmate at Northwestern but did not start dating until Flynn, then in her mid-30s, moved back to Chicago from New York City. The couple still resides in Chicago with their two children. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/13/2015.)
Book Reviews
[A[ mesmerizing psychological thriller. Camille Preaker, a novice reporter with a history of self-mutilation, is sent to her hometown in Missouri to cover the murder of one teenage girl and the disappearance of another.... [M]akes one's blood run cold.
Publishers Weekly
Fans of psychological thrillers will welcome narrator/Chicago Daily Post reporter Camille Preaker with open arms...As first-time novelist Flynn expertly divulges in this tale reminiscent of the works of Shirley Jackson, there is much more to discover about Wind Gap and, most of all, about Camille.
Library Journal
This impressive debut novel is fueled by stylish writing and compelling portraits.... In a particularly seductive narrative style, Flynn adopts the cynical, knowing patter of a weary reporter, but it is her portraits of the town's backstabbing, social-climbing, bored, and bitchy females that provoke her sharpest and most entertaining writing. A stylish turn on dark crimes and even darker psyches.
Booklist
Flynn delivers a great whodunit, replete with hinting details, telling dialogue, dissembling clues. Better yet, she offers appalling, heartbreaking insight into the darkness of her women's lives: the Stepford polish of desperate housewives, the backstabbing viciousness of drug-gobbling, sex-for-favors Mean Girls, the simmering rage bound to boil over. Piercingly effective and genuinely terrifying.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Soon after arriving in Wind Gap, Camille reflects, "Curry was wrong: Being an insider was more distracting than useful." What exactly was Curry wrong about? What advantages did he think Camille’s "insider" status would bring with it? Was he, ultimately, wrong?
2. After ten years of abstinence, what is it that motivates Camille’s promiscuity during her return to Wind Gap? What do you make of her choice of partners—both relative outsiders in the town?
3. Does Camille deliberately sabotage her relationship with Richard? Could they have made a good couple?
4. Driving through Wind Gap, Camille describes the character of each distinct section of town, including its architecture: often poorly executed renovations and new construction. What do you make of her critiques? How are their homes symbolic of the people of Wind Gap?
5. Does Amma feel real affection for Camille? What are her motivations for getting closer to Camille?
6. What similarities do you see between Camille and Amma? What similarities do you think Camille sees?
7. Why is Amma so obsessed with her dollhouse? What significance does it hold for her?
8. Camille is addicted to "cutting," a form of self-harm. Why do you think she specifically cuts words into her skin?
9. Camille is shocked when her suspicions about Marian’s illnesses are confirmed. Do you think she believes Adora deliberately killed Marian? Do you believe Marian’s death was intentional?
10. Is there goodness in Adora? Are there any moments when she seems to you more human, or more kind?
11. How would you describe Alan—a man who, as Camille says, never sweats—living among so much anxiety? Do you see this type of contrast—between cleanliness and filth, order and disorder—elsewhere in the book?
12. The story about cutting off her own hair before school-picture day is attributed both to Ann and to Camille. Why do you think the author makes this connection?
13. Discuss the role of substance abuse in the book. How does it define the characters, their behavior, and the town of Wind Gap? How does it contribute to the telling of the story, as the focus—and the substances themselves—intensify during the course of the book?
14. Discuss the theme of violence throughout the book, including animal slaughter, sexual assault, cutting, biting, and, of course, murder. What do you make of the way residents of Wind Gap respond to violence?
15. "A ring of perfect skin." One on Camille’s back, another on her mother’s wrist. What significance does this have? How alike are Camille and her mother? In what crucial ways are they different?
16. Why does Camille allow herself to be poisoned by Adora?
17. In describing her crimes, Amma recalls happy, "wild" times with Ann and Natalie. Why isn’t Amma able to keep these girls as friends? Do their violent undercurrents doom these friendships to fail, or could they have been overcome?
18. As a reporter, Camille often has to distinguish between original quotes and quotes that are influenced by "true crime" dramas. What is the author saying about our society and our exposure to crime stories? Are the police working the case also guilty of this pop-culture shorthand?
19. At the end of the book, Camille isn’t certain of her answer to one key question: "Was I good at caring for Amma because of kindness? Or did I like caring for Amma because I have Adora’s sickness?" What is your opinion?
20. How important do you think the outward appearance of the people in Sharp Objects is to their personalities? Ugliness and beauty are themes throughout the book, but are they the key themes? Or do the characters rise above the visual?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Avenue of Mysteries
John Irving, 2015
Simon & Schuster
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451664164
Summary
John Irving returns to the themes that established him as one of our most admired and beloved authors in this absorbing novel of fate and memory.
In Avenue of Mysteries, Juan Diego—a fourteen-year-old boy, who was born and grew up in Mexico—has a thirteen-year-old sister. Her name is Lupe, and she thinks she sees what's coming—specifically, her own future and her brother's.
Lupe is a mind reader; she doesn't know what everyone is thinking, but she knows what most people are thinking. Regarding what has happened, as opposed to what will, Lupe is usually right about the past; without your telling her, she knows all the worst things that have happened to you.
Lupe doesn't know the future as accurately. But consider what a terrible burden it is, if you believe you know the future—especially your own future, or, even worse, the future of someone you love. What might a thirteen-year-old girl be driven to do, if she thought she could change the future?
As an older man, Juan Diego will take a trip to the Philippines, but what travels with him are his dreams and memories; he is most alive in his childhood and early adolescence in Mexico. As we grow older, we live in the past—most of all, in what we remember and what we dream. Sometimes, that past is more vivid than the present.
Avenue of Mysteries is the story of what happens to Juan Diego in the Philippines, where what happened to him in the past—in Mexico—collides with his future. (From the pubisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 2, 1942
• Where—Exeter, New Hampshire, USA
• Education—B.A., University of New Hampshire; M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Awards—American Book Award (Garp); Academy Award; Best Screenplay (Cider House)
• Currently—lives in Vermont
John Irving is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.
Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim in 1978 after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978. A number of of his novels, such as The Cider House Rules (1985), A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), and A Widow for One Year (1998), have been bestsellers. He won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1999 for his script The Cider House Rules.
Early years and career
Irving was born John Wallace Blunt, Jr. in Exeter, New Hampshire, the son of Helen Frances (nee Winslow) and John Wallace Blunt, Sr., a writer and executive recruiter. The couple parted during pregnancy, and Irving grew as the stepson of a Phillips Exeter Academy faculty member, Colin Franklin Newell Irving (as well as the nephew of another faculty member, H. Hamilton "Hammy" Bissell). Irving attended Phillips Exeter and participated in school wrestling program, both as a student athlete and as assistant coach. Wrestling features prominently in his books, stories, and life.
Irving's biological father, a World War II pilot, was shot down over Burma in 1943, although he survived. Irving learned of his father's heroism only in 1981 and incorporated the incident into The Cider House Rules. He never met has father, however, even though on occasion Blunt attended his son's wrestling competitions.
Irving's published his first novel, Setting Free the Bears (1968) when he was only 26. The book was reasonably well reviewed but failed to gain a large readership. In the late 1960s, he studied with Kurt Vonnegut at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. His second and third novels, The Water-Method Man (1972) and The 158-Pound Marriage (1974), were similarly received. In 1975, Irving accepted a position as assistant professor of English at Mount Holyoke College.
World According to Garp
Frustrated at the lack of promotion his novels were receiving from Random House, his first publisher, Irving moved to Dutton. Dutton made a strong commitment to his new novel—The World According to Garp (1978), and the book became an international bestseller and cultural phenomenon. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1979 but won the award the following year when the paperback edition was issued.
The film version of Garp came out in 1982 with Robin Williams in the title role and Glenn Close as his mother; it garnered several Academy Award nominations, including nominations for Close and John Lithgow. Irving makes a brief cameo in the film as an official in one of Garp's high school wrestling matches.
After Garp
Garp transformed Irving from an obscure, academic literary writer to a household name, and his subsequent books were bestsellers. The next was The Hotel New Hampshire (1981), which sold well despite mixed reviews from critics. It, too, was adapted to film, starring Jodie Foster, Rob Lowe, and Beau Bridges. Irving also received the 1981 O. Henry Award for "Interior Space," a short story published in Fiction magazine in 1980.
In 1985, Irving published The Cider House Rules. An epic set in a Maine orphanage, the novel's central topic is abortion. Many drew parallels between the novel and Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist (1838). It took Irving nearly 10 years to develop the screenplay for Cider House, and the film—starring Michael Caine, Tobey Maguire, and Charlize Theron—was released in 1998. It was nominated for several Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and earned Irving an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
In 1989, four years after publishing Cider House, Irving came out with A Prayer for Owen Meany, also set in a New England boarding school (and Toronto). The novel was influenced by Gunter Grass's 1959 The Tin Drum, and contains allusions to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter and works of Dickens. Owen Meany was Irving's best selling book since Garp and, today, remains on many high school reading lists.
That book, too, was later adapted to film: the 1998 Simon Birch. Irving insisted that the title and character names be changed because the screenplay was "markedly different" from the novel. He is on record, however, as having enjoyed the film.
Other works
In addition to his novels, he has also published nonfiction: The Imaginary Girlfriend (1995), a short memoir focusing on writing and wrestling; Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1996), a collection of his writings, which includes a brief memoir and short stories; and My Movie Business (1999), an account of the protracted process of bringing The Cider House Rules to the big screen,
In 2004 he published a children's picture book, A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound, illustrated by Tatjana Hauptmann. It had originally been included in his 1998 novel A Widow for One Year.
Life
Since the publication of Garp, which made him independently wealthy, Irving has been able to concentrate solely on fiction writing as a vocation, sporadically accepting short-term teaching positions —including one at his alma mater, the Iowa Writers' Workshop—and serving as an assistant coach on his sons' high school wrestling teams. (Irving was inducted into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1992 as an "Outstanding American.")
Irving's four most highly regarded novels—The World According to Garp, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, and the 1998 A Widow for One Year—have been published in Modern Library editions. In 2004, a portion of A Widow for One Year was adapted into The Door in the Floor, starring Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger.
On June 28, 2005, the New York Times published an article revealing that Until I Find You (2005) contains two elements about his personal life that he had never before discussed publicly: his sexual abuse at age 11 by an older woman, and the recent entrance in his life of his biological father's family.
Works
1968 - Setting Free the Bears
1972 - The Water-Method Man
1974 - The 158-Pound Marriage
1978 - The World According to Garp
1981 - The Hotel New Hampshire
1985 - The Cider House Rules
1989 - A Prayer for Owen Meany
1994 - A Son of the Circus
1995 - The Imaginary Girlfriend (non-fiction)
1996 - Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (collection)
1998 - A Widow for One Year
1999 - My Movie Business (non-fiction)
1999 - The Cider House Rules: A Screenplay
2001 - The Fourth Hand
2004 - A Sound Like Someone Trying Not to Make a Sound (Children's book)
2005 - Until I Find You
2009 - Last Night in Twisted River
2012 - In One Person
2015- Avenue of Mysteries
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/12/2015.)
Book Reviews
Irving fans will recognize similarities with past work: a circus, ambiguous parentage, a child with supernatural powers, various Christian churches, and a transvestite.... Diehard Irving fans will likely enjoy this latest, but those without such loyalties might be better served...[by] A Prayer for Owen Meany.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Successful novelist...is taken under the wing of a mysterious mother and daughter, who seem to appear and disappear at opportune times and manipulate his actions....The "mysteries" in the title refer primarily to the religious sense of the word, particularly as manifested in miracles and visions of the Virgin Mary. —Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis
Library Journal
(Starred review.) An empathically imagined, masterfully told, and utterly transporting tale of transcendent sacrifice and perseverance, unlikely love, and profound mysteries.
Booklist
Irving works his familiar themes—Catholicism, sex, death—with a light and assured touch, and though the dream-narrative construct is a little shelf-worn, it serves the story well. Though not as irresistible as early works..., a welcome return to form.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Where does the title of the book come from? Why do you think Irving chose it? What is the Avenue of Mysteries and why is it important to Juan Diego? How does the title correspond to the major themes of the book? What are some examples of mysteries in the novel? Are they ever demystified or explained? How do Juan Diego, Lupe, Vargas, and the other characters respond to and feel about mysteries? Do they share a unified point of view?
2. At the beginning of the novel, readers learn that Juan Diego doesn’t want to be identified as Mexican American. Why? What does this tell us about him? How does Juan Diego choose to identify himself?
3. What are the “two lives” that Juan Diego says he lived and why does he say that he lived them “on parallel tracks”? Where does Juan Diego say is where he “lived most confidently, and with the sweetest sense of knowing who he was”?
4. Does Avenue of Mysteries ultimately suggest whether such a thing as fate exists? Does Juan Diego’s life seem to be determined by fate, by his own choices, or by coincidence? How do Lupe’s predictions contribute to a dialogue about fate in the novel?
5. Evaluate the treatment of religion and faith in the novel. Consider the discussions of religion that take place between Juan Diego and his sister, between Vargas and Eduardo, and between Eduardo and Juan Diego. Which of the characters have religious faith and which do not? What are the reasons for their faith or lack thereof? What causes Juan Diego to feel that he had “an ax to grind...with certain social and political policies of the Catholic Church”? What does Juan Diego say that he had “instead of religion”?
6. Who is Flor and what is her relationship to Juan Diego? How does Irving depict the transgender experience? How does Eduardo feel about Flor? What can we learn about love and relationships from her interactions with Eduardo?
7. What does the novel reveal about the relationship between fiction and autobiography? What does Juan Diego say is the most important thing about his novels? Where does Juan Diego say the ideas for his novels come from? What does Juan Diego believe constitutes good writing? Who does Juan Diego believe are the best readers? Do you agree? Why or why not?
8. Evaluate the portrayal of women in the novel. What does the novel indicate about gender and womanhood? What does Lupe’s mind reading reveal about the treatment of women in this society? How do the passages about Guadalupe and the Virgin Mary contribute to this dialogue?
9. Juan Diego embarks on a physical journey to the Phillipines, but he also embarks upon a journey through dreams and memory. Why does he set out on his physical journey and what happens to him along the way? How is he changed by these experiences? Does he ever reach his destination? What other journeys—physical or symbolic—do he and the other characters take? How are they changed?
10. Why do you think Lupe chose to crawl into the lion’s cage? Does Juan Diego understand her motives for doing this? How does he come to terms with her death? Why do you think that Lupe ultimately asked to have a Catholic funeral despite the feelings she expressed about religion?
11. Miriam and Dorothy appear and disappear throughout the book. Who are these women? How does Juan Diego feel about them? Would you say that he trusts them? Why or why not? How do they compare to or differ from the other female figures in the story?
13. Who is el gringo bueno? Why is he in Mexico? What role does he play in Juan Diego’s life? What does Juan Diego promise himself after talking to el gringo bueno?
14. Why does Lupe refer to the statue of the Virgin Mary as “the Mary Monster”? Why does she prefer icons representing Guadalupe to those of the Virgin Mary? How do these icons compare to the statue given to her by el gringo bueno? What was your reaction this gift?
15. Irving has said that he begins his novels by writing the last sentence. Evaluate the final sentence of the book. How does it tie in with the major themes of the book? At the conclusion of the novel, what does the author say that people really want when they die? Do you agree?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Golden Age (Last Hundred Years Trilogy, 3)
Jane Smiley, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307700346
Summary
The final volume of the acclaimed American trilogy—a richly absorbing new novel that brings the remarkable Langdon family into our present times and beyond.
A lot can happen in one hundred years, as Jane Smiley shows to dazzling effect in her Last Hundred Years trilogy. But as Golden Age, its final installment, opens in 1987, the next generation of Langdons face economic, social, political—and personal—challenges unlike anything their ancestors have encountered before.
Michael and Richie, the rivalrous twin sons of World War II hero Frank, work in the high-stakes world of government and finance in Washington and New York, but they soon realize that one’s fiercest enemies can be closest to home; Charlie, the charming, recently found scion, struggles with whether he wishes to make a mark on the world; and Guthrie, once poised to take over the Langdons’ Iowa farm, is instead deployed to Iraq, leaving the land—ever the heart of this compelling saga—in the capable hands of his younger sister.
Determined to evade disaster, for the planet and her family, Felicity worries that the farm’s once-bountiful soil may be permanently imperiled, by more than the extremes of climate change. And as they enter deeper into the twenty-first century, all the Langdon women—wives, mothers, daughters—find themselves charged with carrying their storied past into an uncertain future.
Combining intimate drama, emotional suspense, and a full command of history, Golden Age brings to a magnificent conclusion the century-spanning portrait of this unforgettable family—and the dynamic times in which they’ve loved, lived, and died: a crowning literary achievement from a beloved master of American storytelling. (From the publisher.)
This is the final volume of the Last Hundred Years Trilogy. The first is Some Luck, published in 2014, and the second is Early Warning, published in early 2015.
Author Bio
• Birth—September 26, 1949
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Rasied—Webster Groves, Missouri
• Education—B.A., Vassar College; M.A., M.F.A, and Ph.D., Iowa University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 1992; National Book Critics Circle Award, 1991
• Currently—lives in Northern California
Jane Smiley is the author of numerous works of fiction, including The Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, Ordinary Love & Good Will, A Thousand Acres (for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize), and Moo. She lives in northern California. (From the publisher.)
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Jane Smiley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist.
Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained a B.A. at Vassar College, then earned an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar.
Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in the Atlantic Monthly. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. In 1995 she wrote her sole television script produced, for an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. M. Forster's seminal Aspects of the Novel, that roams from eleventh century Japan's Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji to twenty-first century Americans chick lit.
From 1981 to 1996, she taught undergrad and graduate creative writing workshops at Iowa State University. She continued teaching at ISU even after moving her primary residence to California.
In 2001, Smiley was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
As the book opens in 1987, family members are back at the Iowa farmstead.... The title, readers come to suspect, is an ironic reference to the Gilded Age, another era of boom, bust, and shady dealings.... What lingers...aren’t the encounters with marquee historical events...but Smiley’s detailed depiction of the kaleidoscopic geometries of family.
Publishers Weekly
Centering on...the children of family pillar Frank Langdon.... Smiley is most successful in relaying historical fiction; chapters set in the future often seem extraneous. Yet the boon of Smiley's writing is her unforgettable characters and unexpected relationships.... A fitting conclusion to the trilogy —Stephanie Sendaula
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Smiley sustains an enthralling narrative velocity and buoyancy, punctuated with ricocheting dialogue...[with] precisely calibrated prose, abiding connection to the terrain she maps, fascination with her characters, and command of the nuances of the predicaments.... Readers will be reading, and rereading, Smiley’s Last Hundred Years far into the next. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
The title is decidedly sardonic, given the number of deaths and disasters Smiley inflicts on the Langdon family and kin in the final volume of her Last Hundred Years trilogy.... Despite all the dire events, the narrative energy of masterfully interwoven plotlines always conveys a sense of life as an adventure worth pursuing.
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)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
After You
Jojo Moyes, 2015
Penguin Publishing
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525426592
Summary
How do you move on after losing the person you loved? How do you build a life worth living?
Louisa Clark is no longer just an ordinary girl living an ordinary life. After the transformative six months spent with Will Traynor, she is struggling without him. When an extraordinary accident forces Lou to return home to her family, she can’t help but feel she’s right back where she started.
Her body heals, but Lou herself knows that she needs to be kick-started back to life. Which is how she ends up in a church basement with the members of the Moving On support group, who share insights, laughter, frustrations, and terrible cookies. They will also lead her to the strong, capable Sam Fielding—the paramedic, whose business is life and death, and the one man who might be able to understand her. Then a figure from Will’s past appears and hijacks all her plans, propelling her into a very different future. . . .
For Lou Clark, life after Will Traynor means learning to fall in love again, with all the risks that brings. But here Jojo Moyes gives us two families, as real as our own, whose joys and sorrows will touch you deeply, and where both changes and surprises await.
After You is quintessential Jojo Moyes—a novel that will make you laugh, cry, and rejoice at being back in the world she creates. Here she does what few novelists can do—revisits beloved characters and takes them to places neither they nor we ever expected. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—B.A., London University
• Awards—Romantic Novel of the year (twice)
• Currently—lives in Essex, England
Jojo Moyes is a British journalist and the author of 10 novels published from 2002 to the present. She studied at Royal Holloway, University of London and Bedford New College, London University.
In 1992 she won a bursary financed by The Independent newspaper to attend the postgraduate newspaper journalism course at City University, London. She subsequently worked for The Independent for the next 10 years (except for one year, when she worked in Hong Kong for the Sunday Morning Post) in various roles, becoming Assistant News Editor in 1988. In 2002 she became the newspaper's Arts and Media Correspondent.
Moyes became a full-time novelist in 2002, when her first book Sheltering Rain was published. She is most well known for her later novels, The Last Letter From Your Lover (2010), Me Before You (2012), and The Girl You Left Behind ( 2013), all of which were received with wide critical accalim.
She is one of only a few authors to have won the Romantic Novelists' Association's Romantic Novel of the Year Award twice—in 2004 for Foreign Fruit and in 2011 for The Last Letter From Your Lover. She continues to write articles for The Daily Telegraph.
Moyes lives on a farm in Saffron Walden, Essex with her husband, journalist Charles Arthur, and their three children. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Think Elizabeth Bennet after Darcy's eventual death; Alice after Gertrude; Wilbur after Charlotte. The "aftermath" is a subject most writers understandably avoid, but Moyes has tackled it and given readers an affecting, even entertaining female adventure tale about a broken heroine who ultimately rouses herself and falls in love again, this time with the possibilities in her own future.
Maureen Corrigan - NPR
Like its predecessor, After You is a comic and breezy novel that also tackles bigger, more difficult subjects, in this case grief and moving on.... We all lose what we love at some point, but in her poignant, funny way, Moyes reminds us that even if it’s not always happy, there is an ever after.
Miami Herald
This unexpected sequel to Moyes's Me Before You reveals what happened to Louisa Clark after that book's heart-wrenching finale.... This book doesn't reach the emotional level of its predecessor; it lacks the intense focus on two characters that elevated Me Before You.... [Still, the] many surprises and misunderstandings are all neatly tied up by the end. —Melanie Kindrachuk, Stratford P.L., Ont.
Library Journal
Narrator Louisa is not quite as much fun this time around, but the optimistic final pages hint that her adventures may continue into another book. Moyes is a Maeve Binchy for the 21st century....[with] an understanding of family dynamics, a nod to social issues, plenty of moral uplift, and a sentimental streak, all buoyed by a rollicking sense of humor.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What is Louisa’s emotional state at the start of this book? What has transpired for her between Will’s death and now?
2. Lou’s gig at the Shamrock and Clover is a great source of humor in the book. What other function does this particular job play in the book and how does it serve the story?
3. Lou worries that after her accident everyone thinks she’s suicidal. How would you describe her mental state and her role in the fall? Is she responsible, and why or why not?
4. Throughout the book Lou and her loved ones question her life decisions, and if she is in fact “living” at all after Will’s death. What is holding her back and what ultimately allows her to make changes?
5. Lou finds herself attracted to Sam, but she isn’t always straightforward with him about her feelings. What keeps her from being intimate with him?
6. How are the Traynors dealing with their complex grief in different ways?
7. How does the Moving On Circle help Lou? What insights does she take away from her experience?
8. In Chapter 19, the point of view changes to Lily’s perspective. Why does the author make this shift and how does it serve the overall plot of the book?
9. A running theme in the novel is about personal freedom and how Lou, Treena, and their mother all feel trapped by their respective situations. How do they learn from one another? How might they each benefit from having more freedom?
10. What does Lou learn from her relationship with Sam and how might these lessons serve her in her new life?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)