Mermaids in Paradise
Lydia Millet, 2015
W.W. Norton & Co.
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393245622
Summary
Mermaids, kidnappers, and mercenaries hijack a tropical vacation in this genre-bending sendup of the American honeymoon.
On the grounds of a Caribbean island resort, newlyweds Deb and Chip—our opinionated, skeptical narrator and her cheerful jock husband who's friendly to a fault—meet a marine biologist who says she's sighted mermaids in a coral reef.
As the resort's "parent company" swoops in to corner the market on mythological creatures, the couple joins forces with other adventurous souls, including an ex–Navy SEAL with a love of explosives and a hipster Tokyo VJ, to save said mermaids from the "Venture of Marvels," which wants to turn their reef into a theme park.
Mermaids in Paradise is Lydia Millet's funniest book yet, tempering the sharp satire of her early career with the empathy and subtlety of her more recent novels and short stories. This is an unforgettable, mesmerizing tale, darkly comic on the surface and illuminating in its depths. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 5, 1968
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Raised—Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• Education—B.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; M.S., Duke University
• Awards—PEN Center USA Award for Fiction; Pulitizer finalist
• Currently—lives near Tuscon, Arizona
Lydia Millet is an American novelist. Her third novel, My Happy Life, won the 2003 PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, and she has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Salon wrote of Millet's work, "The writing is always flawlessly beautiful, reaching for an experience that precedes language itself."
Millet was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Toronto, Canada. She holds a BA in interdisciplinary studies, with highest honors in creative writing, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Master's in environmental policy from Duke University. Millet lives in Tucson, Arizona with her two children. She worked for Natural Resources Defense Council for two years before joining the Center for Biological Diversity in 1999 as a staff writer.
Works
Millet is best known for her dark sense of humor, stylistic versatility, and political bent. Her first book, Omnivores (1996), is a subversion of the coming-of-age novel, in which a young girl in Southern California is tormented by her megalomaniac father and invalid mother and finally sold in marriage to a real estate agent. Her second, George Bush, Dark Prince of Love (2000), is a political comedy about a trailer-park woman obsessed with the 41st American President.
Brief but weighty, her third book, My Happy Life (2002), is a poetic, language-oriented work about a lonely misfit trapped in an abandoned hospital, who writes the poignant story of her life on the walls. It is narrated by, as the Village Voice glowing deems her, "an orphan cruelly mistreated by life who nevertheless regards her meager subsistence as a radiant gift." Despite the horrors that amount to her life, she still calls herself happy.
Jennifer Reese of the New York Times Book Review commented on Millet's new approach to the treatment of the literary victim, saying "Millet has created a truly wretched victim, but where is the outrage? She has coolly avoided injecting so much as a hint of it into this thin, sharp and frequently funny novel; one of the narrator's salient characteristics is an inability to feel even the mildest indignation. The world she inhabits is a savage place, but everything about it interests her, and paying no attention to herself, she is able to see beauty and wonder everywhere."
Millet's fourth novel, Everyone's Pretty (2005), is a picaresque tragicomedy about an alcoholic pornographer with messianic delusions, based partly on Millet's stint as a copy editor at Larry Flynt Publications. Sarah Weinman of the Washington Post Book World called it "both prism and truth" "With a sharp eye for small details, a keen sense of the absurd and strong empathy for its creations," Millet creates a kaleidoscope of quirky characters. The New York Times Book Review called her fifth novel, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005), an "extremely smart…resonant fantasy." It brings three of the physicists responsible for creating the atomic bomb to life in modern-day New Mexico, where they acquire a cult following and embark on a crusade for redemption.
How the Dead Dream (2008) is "a frightening and gorgeous view of human decline," according to Utne Reader. It features a young Los Angeles real estate developer consumed by power and political ambitions who, after his mother's suicide attempt and two other deaths, begins to nurture a curious obsession with vanishing species. Then a series of calamities forces him from a tropical island, the site on one of his developments, onto the mainland where he takes a Conrad-esque journey up a river into the remote jungle. Eye Weekly summarized this black comedy, noting "American culture loves its stories of hubris, downfall and ruin as of late, but it takes a writer of Millet's sensitivity to enjoy the way down this much."
Love in Infant Monkeys (2010) is a short story collection featuring vignettes about famous historical and pop culture icons and their encounters with other species.
Her 2011 novel Ghost Lights made best-of-the-year lists in the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle and received strong critical attention. The novel stars an IRS bureaucrat named Hal—a man baffled by his wife’s obsession with her missing employer. In a moment of drunken heroism, Hal embarks on a quest to find the man, embroiling himself in a surreal tropical adventure (and an unexpected affair with a beguiling German woman). Ghost Lights is beautifully written, engaging, and full of insight into the heartbreaking devotion of parenthood and the charismatic oddity of human behavior. The Boston Globe called it "[An] odd and wonderful novel," while the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote, "Millet is that rare writer of ideas who can turn a ruminative passage into something deeply personal. She can also be wickedly funny, most often at the expense of the unexamined life."
Ghost Lights was the second in an acclaimed cycle of novels that began with How the Dead Dream in 2008. The third, Magnificence (2012) completes the cycle.
Magnificence introduced Susan Lindley, a woman adrift after her husband’s death and the dissolution of her family. Embarking on a new phase in her life after inheriting her uncle’s sprawling mansion and its vast collection of taxidermy, Susan decides to restore the extensive collection of moth-eaten animal mounts, tending to "the fur and feathers, the beaks, the bones and shimmering tails." Meanwhile an equally derelict human menagerie—including an unfaithful husband and a chorus of eccentric old women—joins her in residence. In a setting both wondrous and absurd, Susan defends her legacy from freeloading relatives and explores the mansion’s unknown spaces. Jonathan Lethem, writing for the Guardian, called it "elegant, darkly comic…with overtones variously of Muriel Spark, Edward Gorey and J. G. Ballard, full of contemporary wit and devilish fateful turns for her characters, and then also to knit together into a tapestry of vast implication and ethical urgency, something as large as any writer could attempt: a kind of allegorical elegy for life on a dying planet. Ours, that is." The book was nominated for an L.A. Times Book Prize.
The September 2012 release of Shimmers in the Night was the second in The Dissenters, an eco-fantasy series for young adults. Beginning with The Fires Beneath the Sea, the plot follows two young siblings as they search for their mother, a shapeshifting character who is fighting against forces who wants to make the planet over in their own image.
Pills and Starships (2014) is a young adult novel set in "a dystopic future brought by global warming."
Mermaids in Paradise (2015) tempers the sharp satire of Millet's early career with the empathy and subtlety of her more recent novels and short stories. In a sendup of the American honeymoon, Mermaids in Paradise takes readers to the grounds of a Caribbean island resort, where newlyweds Deb and Chip—the opinionated, skeptical narrator and her cheerful jock husband—meet a marine biologist who says she's sighted mermaids in a coral reef.
"Karen Russell" wrote "leave it to Lydia Millet to capsize her human characters in aquamarine waters and upstage their honeymoon with mermaids. I am awed to know there's a mind like Millet's out there—she's a writer without limits, always surprising, always hilarious. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/13/2015.)
Book Reviews
It's a bold move to make mermaids the center of a grown-up story, even in a novel as hilariously funny as this one. But Lydia Millet's novels raise the bar for boldness. Through the window of the unlikeliest events or plot twists, she poses the questions many contemporary writers shy away from, or simply skirt…Millet's writing—witty, colorful, sometimes poetic—is, line by line, a joy to read, and her storytelling is immensely compelling. But there's always an equally compelling philosophical discussion humming beneath everything. In Mermaids in Paradise that discussion is about the different ways people see the world, and how perceptions form belief…In her most original way, Millet dares us to examine how we ever know when to be "hard core," or when it's safe to let down our guard. It's a testament to her novel's power that these mermaids retain their mystery, and that the ending of Mermaids in Paradise is one of the most luminous and unsettling in recent fiction
Rene Steinke - New York Time Book Review
Millet, with her keen sense of the absurd, brings the book to a surprising conclusion, and makes a point about corporate greed and the destruction of the environment without being heavy-handed.
Moira Hodgson - Wall Street Journal
A hilarious genre-bender that strikes some serious chords.
Jane Ciabattari - BBC.com
Suspenseful, philosophical, and tropical—the funniest you’ll ever read on ecotourism and the wisest you’ll ever read on mermaids.
Natalie Beach - Oprah Magazine
[A] deft satire…. Millet ramps up the suspense.
Melissa Maerz - Entertainment Weekly
(Starred review.) Absurdity and paranoia permeate the latest novel from Millet [Characters] brainstorm...how to save the mythical creatures—namely with videos, social media, and celebrity connections. In an era of uncharted connectivity, Millet comically deflates clear-cut distinctions between truth, fiction, and moral high ground.... [A] thrilling piece of fabulist fiction.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [S]mart and funny.... Millet means to criticize a rapacious culture that wants to simplify and categorize everything, from the resort profiteers to churchy types who see the mermaids as symbols of godlessness.... An admirable example of a funny novel with a serious message that works swimmingly. Dive in.
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.)
The Happiest People in the World: A Novel
Brock Clarke, 2014
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616201111
Summary
Take the format of a spy thriller, shape it around real-life incidents involving international terrorism, leaven it with dark, dry humor, toss in a love rectangle, give everybody a gun, and let everything play out in the outer reaches of upstate New York—there you have an idea of Brock Clarke’s new novel, The Happiest People in the World.
Who are “the happiest people in the world”? Theoretically, it’s all the people who live in Denmark, the country that gave the world Hans Christian Andersen fairy tales and the open-face sandwich. But Denmark is also where some political cartoonists got into very unhappy trouble when they attempted to depict Muhammad in their drawings, which prompted protests, arson, and even assassination attempts.
Imagine, then, that one of those cartoonists, given protection through the CIA, is relocated to a small town in upstate New York where he is given a job as a high school guidance counselor. Once there, he manages to fall in love with the wife of the high school principal, who himself is trying to get over the effects of a misguided love affair with the very CIA agent who sent the cartoonist to him. Imagine also that virtually every other person in this tiny town is a CIA operative.
The result is a darkly funny tale of paranoia and the all-American obsession with security and the conspiracies that threaten it, written in a tone that is simultaneously filled with wonder and anger in almost equal parts. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1968 (?)
• Where—Springfield, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Dickinson College
• Awards—Mary McCarthy Prize for Fiction
• Currently—lives in Portland, Maine
Brock Clarke is the author of several books of fiction, most recently the novels The Happiest People in the World (2014), Exley (2010—a Kirkus Book of the Year, finalist for the Maine Book Award, and longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award), and An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England (2008—American Library Associate Notable Book of the Year, New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice pick). His books have been reprinted in a dozen international editions, and have been awarded the Mary McCarthy Prize for Fiction, the Prairie Schooner Book Series Prize, a National Endowment for Arts Fellowship, and an Ohio Council for the Arts Fellowship, among others.
Clarke’s individual stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Boston Globe, Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, The Believer, Georgia Review, New England Review, and Southern Review and have appeared in the annual Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies and on NPR’s Selected Shorts.
He lives in Portland and teaches creative writing at Bowdoin College and in University of Tampa’s low residency MFA program. (Adaptd from the author's website.)
Book Reviews
[Clarke knows] how to get a novel off to a snorting good start.... The Happiest People in the World begins with a raucous bar scene featuring party streamers, smoke, prone bodies, spilled fluids and a stuffed moose with a surveillance camera in its left eye.... [Clarke has] success in dreaming up oddball originals that have instant appeal.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Brock Clarke…has never shied away from the ridiculous plot twist or the implausible personality quirk. And this new book is packed with them: Indeed, it is built almost entirely out of them. There is essentially nothing in it that, removed from context, makes any sense. Not that you would want it to…The Happiest People in the World is built for speed, not comfort. You have to lower yourself into it and let it carry you away. It's like what might have come to be had the Coen brothers collaborated with the Three Stooges: an energetic exercise in the incompatible mediums of dark humor and slapstick, in which nobody ever really knows what the hell is going on, the reader included—only that it hurts. Which is to say that the book is also emotional, sometimes very sweetly so. Clarke's work can be seen as a continuing investigation into American haplessness; his characters are forever powerless against their own worst impulses, and against the vicissitudes of fate
J. Robert Lennon - New York Times Book Review
[A] dark and funny satire.... The ridiculous confusion of infidelities, secret identities and double-crosses that plays out reflects the absurdity of any country obsessed with spying on its own people.
Wall Street Journal
Clarke may be playing with fire here, but he’s wearing so many oven mitts that the humor feels ham-fisted and lukewarm.... Which is a shame because The Happiest People in the World contains amusing elements—about marriage, small towns, Danes and spies—but they’re weighed down in the corpulent body of this novel.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
A zany and fast-paced book that explores the myriad ways people of all nations make themselves and others unhappy.... Clarke's comedy is complex and packed with big ideas, but also wonderful sentences.... This book is a goofball, but a goofball with an edge; its humor and quirkiness are not ends in themselves, but doors that Clarke uses to open the view out onto a bigger vista: the span of America, unto itself, and in relation to the world.
Chicago Tribune - Printers Row
A literary first: a book that feels like the love child of Saul Bellow and Hogan’s Heroes, full of authorial cartwheels of comedy and profundity.
GQ
(Starred review.) [A] whiz-bang spy satire bundled in an edgy tale of redemption. Impulsive cartoonist Jens Baedrup leaves his wife and home in Denmark with the help of love-lorn CIA spy Locs (aka Lorraine).... Clarke dazzles with a dizzying study in extremes, cruising at warp speed between bleak and optimistic, laugh-out-loud funny and unbearable sadness. His comedy of errors is impossible to put down.
Publishers Weekly
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.)
The Siege of Krishnapur
J.G. Farrell, 1973
New York Review of Books (Classic)
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781590170922
Summary
J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur is both a gripping tale of the siege of a remote British outpost during the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and a fascinating, and blisteringly comic novel of ideas. Farrell’s picture of the British Empire in crisis raises questions with a bearing on contemporary conflicts between East and West.
In 1857, Indian soldiers in the British army—known as sepoys—rebelled against their colonial overlords, and serious conflict broke out in the northern half of the subcontinent. In Farrell’s novel, the British inhabitants of the fictional town of Krishnapur ignore rumors of unrest only to find themselves under siege by the rebels.
Trapped in a dwindling number of buildings, subject to repeated attack, and suffering both from sickness and the oppressive heat of summer, the British community soon finds itself under threat from within, too, as the simple certainties of superiority and invulnerability that have sustained them and the British Empire begin to crumble.
Farrell’s characters, from the local priest and doctor to the young men and women who have come east to make their fortune or marry, are shown responding to this challenge in unexpected ways. Especially interesting and sympathetic is the character of Mr Hopkins, the administrative head, or Collector, of Krishnapur. In him, Farrell offers an unforgettable picture of a decent man enduring the death of his ideals.
With its many memorable characters, riveting battle scenes, and tragicomic appreciation of the ironies of history, this masterful novel—winner of the Booker Prize in 1973—will keep readers on the edge of their seats. (From the publisher.)
This is the second book in Farrell's Empire Trilogy; the first is Troubles (1970). The Singapore Grip (1978) is the third.
Author Bio
• Birth—January 25, 1935
• Where—Liverpool, England, UK
• Death—August 11, 1979
• Where—Bantry Bay, County Cork, Ireland
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Booker Prize; Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Lost Man Booker Prize
James Gordon Farrell was a Liverpool-born novelist of Irish descent. He gained prominence for a series of novels known as the Empire Trilogy (Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip), which deal with the political and human consequences of British colonial rule.
Farrell's career abruptly ended when he drowned in Ireland at the age of 44, swept to his death in a storm. "Had he not sadly died so young,” Salman Rushdie said in 2008, "there is no question that he would today be one of the really major novelists of the English language. The three novels that he did leave are all in their different way extraordinary."
Troubles received the 1971 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and The Siege of Krishnapur received the 1973 Booker Prize. In 2010 Troubles was retrospectively awarded the Lost Man Booker Prize, created to recognise works published in 1970. Troubles and its fellow shortlisted works had not been open for consideration that year due to a change in the eligibility rules.
Early life and education
Farrell, born in Liverpool into a family of Anglo-Irish background, was the second of three sons. His father, William Farrell, had worked as an accountant in Bengal, and in 1929 he married Prudence Josephine Russell, a former receptionist and secretary to a doctor. From the age of 12 he attended Rossall public school in Lancashire.
After World War II, the Farrells moved to Dublin, and from this point on Farrell spent much time in Ireland: this, perhaps combined with the popularity of Troubles, leads many to treat him as an Irish writer. After leaving Rossall, he taught in Dublin and also worked for some time on Distant Early Warning Line in the Canadian Arctic.
In 1956, he went to study at Brasenose College, Oxford; while there he contracted polio. This would leave him partially crippled, and the disease would be prominent in his works. In 1960 he left Oxford with Third-class honours in French and Spanish and went to live in France, where he taught at a lycee.
Early works
Farrell published his first novel, A Man From Elsewhere, in 1963. Set in France, it shows the clear influence of French existentialism. The story follows Sayer, who is a journalist for a communist paper, as he tries to find skeletons in Regan's closet. Regan is a dying novelist who is about to be awarded an important Catholic literary prize. The book mimics the fight between the two leaders of French existentialism: Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The two argue about existentialism: the position that murder can be vindicated as an expedient in overthrowing tyranny (Sartre) versus the stance that there are no ends that justify unjust means (Camus). Bernard Bergonzi reviewed it in the New Statesman in the 20 September 1963 issue and said, "Many first novels are excessively autobiographical, but A Man from Elsewhere suffers from the opposite fault of being a cerebral construct, dreamed up out of literature and the contemporary French cinema." Farrell himself came to dislike the book.
Two years after this came The Lung, in which Farrell returned to his real-life trauma of less than a decade earlier: the main character Martin Sands contracts polio and has to spend a long period in hospital. It has been noted that it is somewhat modeled after Farrell, but it is modeled more after Geoffrey Firmin from Malcolm Lowry 1947 novel, Under the Volcano. The anonymous reviewer for The Observer wrote that "Mr. Farrell gives the pleasantly solid impression of really having something to write about" and one for The Times Literary Supplement that "Mr. Farrell's is an effective, potent brew, compounded of desperation and a certain wild hilarity."
In 1967, he published A Girl in the Head. The protagonist, the impoverished Polish count Boris Slattery, lives in the fictional English seaside town of Maidenhair Bay, in the house of the Dongeon family (which is believed to be modelled after V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas). His marriage to Flower Dongeon is decaying. His companion is Dr. Cohen, who is a dying alcoholic. Boris also has sex with an underaged teenager, June Furlough. He also fantasizes about Ines, a Swedish summer guest, who is the "girl in the head." Boris is believed to be modelled after Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Like its two predecessors, the book met only middling critical and public reaction.
Empire Trilogy
Troubles (1970) tells the comic yet melancholy tale of an English Major, Brendan Archer, who in 1919 goes to County Wexford in Ireland to meet the woman he believes he may be engaged to marry. From the crumbling Majestic Hotel at Kilnalough, he watches Ireland's fight for independence from Britain. Farrell started writing this book while on a Harkness Fellowship in the United States and finished it in a tiny flat in Knightsbridge, London. He won a Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for the novel, and with the prize money travelled to India to research his next novel.
Farrell's next book The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and his last completed work The Singapore Grip (1978) both continue his story of the collapse of British colonial power. The former deals with the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Inspired by historical events such as the sieges of Cawnpore and Lucknow, the novel is set in the fictional town of Krishnapur, where a besieged British garrison succeeds in holding out for four months against an army of native sepoys, in the face of enormous suffering, before being relieved.
The third of the novels, The Singapore Grip, centres upon the Japanese capture of the British colonial city of Singapore in 1942, while also exploring at some length the economics and ethics of colonialism at the time, as well as the economic relationship between developed and Third World countries at the time that Farrell was writing.
The three novels are in general linked only thematically, although Archer, a character in Troubles, reappears in The Singapore Grip. The protagonist of Farrell's unfinished novel, The Hill Station, is Dr McNab, introduced in The Siege of Krishnapur; this novel and its accompanying notes make the series a quartet.
When The Siege of Krishnapur won the Booker Prize in 1973, Farrell used his acceptance speech to attack the sponsors, the Booker Group, for their business involvement in the agricultural sector in the Third World. In this vein, some readers have found Farrell's critique of colonialism and capitalism in his subsequent novel The Singapore Grip to be heavy-handed, although those new to the book after the crash of 2008 might not find it so.
Death
In 1979, Farrell decided to quit London to take up residence on the Sheep's Head peninsula in southwestern Ireland. A few months later he was found drowned on the coast of Bantry Bay, after falling in from rocks while angling. He was 44.
He is buried in the cemetery of St. James's Church of Ireland in Durrus. The manuscript library at Trinity College, Dublin holds his papers: Papers of James Gordon Farrell (1935–1979). TCD MSS 9128-60.
Legacy
Ronald Binns described Farrell's colonial novels as "probably the most ambitious literary project conceived and executed by any British novelist in the 1970s."
In the 1984 novel Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie, Vinnie Miner, the protagonist, reads a Farrell novel on her flight from New York to London. In the 1991 novel The Gates of Ivory by Margaret Drabble, the writer Stephen Cox is modelled on Farrell.
Charles Sturridge scripted a film version of Troubles made for British television in 1988 and directed by Christopher Morahan.
Quotes
Farrell said to George Brock in an interview for The Observer Magazine, "the really interesting thing that's happened during my lifetime has been the decline of the British Empire." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/12/2015.)
Book Reviews
Suspense and subtlety, humour and horror, the near-neighbourliness of heroism and insanity: it is rare to find such divergent elements being controlled in one hand and being raced, as it were, in one yoke. But Farrell manages just this here: his imaginative insight and technical virtuosity combine to produce a novel of quite outstanding quality.
Times (UK)
The magnificient passages of action in The Siege of Krishnapur, its gallery of characters, its unashamedly detailed and fascinating dissertations on cholera, gunnery, phrenology, the prodigal inventiveness of its no doubt also well-documented scenes should satisfy the most exacting and voracious reader. For a novel to be witty is one thing, to tell a good story is another, to be serious is yet another, but to be all three is surely enough to make it a masterpiece.
John Spurling - New Statesman
[A] masterpiece as unclassifiable as Giuseppe Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard or Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, The Blue Flower. A historical novel, a comedy of manners, an intellectual history, an evocation of scene: It is all of these. But it is the inimitable combination of these ingredients that gives the book its perculiar savor.
Columbus Dispatch
Discussion Questions
1. Why does the Collector idealize the Great Exhibition? What ideals does it embody? How does the authorial voice serve to put into perspective the Collector’s sanguine faith in these ideals? What final verdict on the Great Exhibition do the events of the novel leave us with?
2. How are women—both individually and as a group—characterized? How do the men see them? In the last days of the siege, two of the women have become integral to the survival of the community: Lucy Hughes has proven herself to be skilled at making rifle cartridges and Louise Dunstaple works tirelessly to help Dr. McNab in the hospital. How do these actions change your perception of each of them? Have the women changed significantly, or now, at the end, have we simply been offered a different view of them?
3. Farrell’s novel is richly sensory. How does he use sensory details—particularly auditory and olfactory details—to create atmosphere and build tension? Choose several passages that you felt were especially vivid and explain why.
4. The British compound acts as a petri dish, in which prevailing ideas about class, race, sex,and religion are enacted within a small, closed community. Given the events that unfold, what conclusions can be drawn about the state of the larger society? Give examples of how Victorian social hierarchies are acted out amongst the besieged community.
5. How does George Fleury evolve as the novel progresses? Why does he become more appealing to Louise Dunstaple—whom he later marries—when before the siege she had no interest in him at all? Compare Fleury and Louise’s brother, Harry. Why is Fleury often in opposition to so many people in Krishnapur, especially Hari, the Collector, and the Padre?
6. The novel’s humor springs from the mocking and ironic portrayal of its characters. Describe the tone of The Siege of Krishnapur. Are the characters nuanced individuals, or are they types? Does the novel’s irony and humor diminish our ability to feel sympathy for them?
7. How would you characterize Lieutenant Cutter? What qualities of the British in India does he typify?
8. Characters in Farrell’s novel often remain stubbornly committed to their beliefs, even inspite of convincing evidence to the contrary. Discuss the argument about cholera treatmentbetween Dr. Dunstaple and Dr. McNab. Why is Dr. Dunstaple so unwilling to reconsider his point of view? What arguments are ultimately compelling to the community and why is this alarming? What broader inferences about British society in India can be drawn from the argument between the two men?
9. "The Collector was astonished by how little the Prime Minister had changed during his month of captivity.... The siege had simply made no impression on him whatsoever" [p. 226]. Why has the siege had such little effect on the Prime Minister? Why has it had a greater impact on Hari?
10. Do you think that Hari is a convincing character? What ideas and values of European culture does he cherish? Why did he and Fleury not see eye to eye when the latter visited the Maharajah’s palace? Why, even in spite of his humiliating imprisonment, does Hari remain fond of the Collector?
11. Many years after the siege, the Collector, a former avid proponent of the arts, says, "Culture is a sham. It’s a cosmetic painted on life by rich people to conceal its ugliness" [p. 343]. How and why have the Collector’s ideas changed so radically? What are his final thoughts on leaving India and how has he come to them.
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Secret Wisdom of the Earth
Christopher Scotton, 2015
Grand Central
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455551927
Summary
After witnessing the death of his younger brother in a terrible home accident, 14-year-old Kevin and his grieving mother are sent for the summer to live with Kevin's grandfather. In this peeled-paint coal town deep in Appalachia, Kevin quickly falls in with a half-wild hollow kid named Buzzy Fink who schools him in the mysteries and magnificence of the woods. The events of this fateful summer will affect the entire town of Medgar, Kentucky.
Medgar is beset by a massive Mountaintop Removal operation that is blowing up the hills and back filling the hollows. Kevin's grandfather and others in town attempt to rally the citizens against the 'company' and its powerful owner to stop the plunder of their mountain heritage. When Buzzy witnesses the brutal murder of the opposition leader, a sequence is set in play which tests Buzzy and Kevin to their absolute limits in an epic struggle for survival in the Kentucky mountains.
Redemptive and emotionally resonant, The Secret Wisdom of the Earth is narrated by an adult Kevin looking back on the summer when he sloughed the coverings of a boy and took his first faltering steps as a man among a rich cast of characters and an ambitious effort to reclaim a once great community. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1961
• Rasied—Maryland surburb of Washington, D.C., USA
• Education—B.A., McDaniel College
• Currently—lives in Annapolis, Maryland
In his words
I grew up about 30 miles outside of Washington, D.C. in what was then undeveloped country. It was a place of cornfields and tree houses, dammed-up creeks and secret swimming holes. In the summers, my brothers and I would dash out around 8:00 am for wherever and return just in time for dinner in the evening. It was a magical place to be a kid and I wanted to recapture that wonder of discovery as fourteen year-old Kevin explores his new surroundings in my debut novel The Secret Wisdom of the Earth.
When I was about Kevin’s age, developers bought up most of the land and the idyllic bounds of my childhood became one big construction site—creeks were backfilled and swimming holes ran to mud. All of us neighborhood hellions felt a great sense of loss at the destruction of our woods—one we couldn’t quite understand or articulate, but it hung over us that summer like a fogged-in field.
By the time I went off to college, the countryside of my youth was solidly suburban. It was in college that I first fell in love with Appalachia. Initially for her music—the spinning lilt of a fiddle reel; the compact fury of a mandolin run; the plaintive harmonies—then, for her beauty, as I came to know the region in my twenties with little but a backpack and a camp stove.
About that time, I met a good friend’s mother for the first time—she was an incredibly beautiful woman who seemed to carry with her a deep-set sadness. I asked my friend about it and he told me the story of how his three-year-old brother died in the most horrific accident at home you could possible imagine. I carried the story of this child’s death with me for many years and knew that I had to write a novel about its effect on a family. I also knew that Appalachia, a region I’d come to loved so well, would be a perfect setting for this nascent coming-of-age novel.
But as the years unspooled—I graduated from college, began a career, moved to London, got married, had kids—I discovered innumerable reasons not to write. In fact, I perfected the art of excuse-making. On and on, month after month, year-to-year.
And as I stared down forty, I realized that this great bright dream of being a novelist was in danger of becoming my single biggest regret. I began writing The Secret Wisdom of the Earth the very next day, with the awful death of my friend’s young brother as the tragedy that sets the story in motion.
It was slow-going, to be sure—I’d rise at 5:00 a.m. each morning, write in the quiet hours before work, then revise and edit in the evenings after putting my boys to bed. But it was in this routine of early rising and evening editing that the main characters, Kevin, Buzzy, Pops, Tilroy and Paul, began to take shape.
I completed about half of the novel in London—fleshing out those characters, their relationships and the loss each of them suffers—but something was clearly missing from the story. The various plot paths I needed to tie everything together turned out to be nub ends. I moved back to the States and immediately went down to eastern Kentucky in hopes of breaking this narrative logjam. It was on this trip that I saw my first Mountaintop Removal operation.
The horrific gray scar of that mine brought back the sense of sickening loss I’d had at fourteen when the pristine woods I’d grown up in were cut down, hauled away and replaced with tract housing. I knew then, looking out over this massive, denuded landscape in Kentucky, that the eradication of these proud ancient mountains was a fitting allegory for a loss that all of the main characters suffer. Once I connected these themes, the rest of the story began to bubble forth.
My trips to Kentucky, talking with folks and listening to their stories, showed me that the apologue of Mountaintop Removal is a complicated one—one that can’t be reduced to simply good vs. evil or rich vs. poor. I tried to portray this hard-bought paradox and lay it alongside Kevin’s story in a compelling way. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Scotton’s accomplished debut is the story of Kevin Gillooly, a 14-year-old boy who moves to coal country and learns about courage and violence, beauty and danger, from his wise, weathered grandfather and a best friend well versed in backwoods survival.... Neither the first portrait of mining country nor the most original, Scotton’s novel nonetheless makes for compelling reading.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Debut author Scotton sets a captivating modern morality tale in Kentucky's coal country, 1985.With the small-town aura of To Kill a Mockingbird, a man reflects on the summer he learned that tradition, greed, class, race and sexual orientation can make for murder.... A powerful epic of people and place, loss and love, reconciliation and redemption.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How did your view of what happened to Joshua (and, subsequently, what happened to Kevin and the rest of his family) change as it was gradually revealed exactly how he died and how his death affected each member of the family?
2. Kevin is withdrawn, angry and wracked with guilt when he arrives in Medgar. How does Pops make Kevin feel comfortable in his home away from home? How does Pops’ influence in particular change Kevin as a person?
3. Describe Buzzy’s relationship with Cleo. How did each brother view the other? What were the different ways that each of them were tested, and how did they each end up ultimately?
4. Pops works with animals and grew up on the land he continued to live on, while Buzzy knows all about the forest and the ways its inhabitants can help humans. How are their relationships with nature different from Kevin’s? How is Kevin’s understanding of land and nature changed by the end?
5. Is it possible for Joshua’s accident to have been Kevin’s fault, even partially? How would you feel in Kevin’s place? In his parents’ place?
6. How did Kevin’s grandmother Sarah affect Medgar? Pops? Kevin?
7. Why was Paul’s reveal of his homosexuality—a fact that almost everyone knew—such a shock at the town meeting?
8. Pops describes the Budget family as "different." What role do they play in the community of Medgar? How does Tilroy fit in with his family at the beginning of the novel, and how does his death change the family in the end?
9. How do class and financial status shape the different inhabitants of Medgar? Discuss the meaning of quotes such as the following one from Pops about Buzzy’s family: "The Finks are poor, but they’re proud poor. Esmer runs the Hollow hard. Kids stay in school, they truck their garbage out once a week. These are solid people."
10. Compare the attitude toward Paul and Paitsel at the meeting the night before Paul’s beating ("We can’t be havin this kinda sick, Satan devil cancer in our town") and the conversations Kevin heard from all different townspeople regarding Paul days later ("Uncommon generous. No better man in town, I say"). How do those two different perspectives get pulled back and forth, both in the town and in Kevin’s mind?
11. Pops physically punished Bubba Boyd for speaking ill of Sarah: "The fury that exploded and the speed with which it arrived frightened m—it was as if a raging magma, held down for so long by rearing and position ruptured its vessel and spewed forth in an overpowering surge." How does this capacity to become enraged fit with the rest of Pops’ character?
12. Describe the turmoil that Buzzy suffered between when he witnessed the attack on Paul and when he finally confessed to Kevin. What would you have done in his place?
13. When Buzzy got an A in school, his father’s reaction was surprising to Kevin: "Buzzy the Brain, gonna live above his rearin." Why would a parent react like that? What did that statement make Kevin realize about the truth of living in the hollow?
14. "It’s like you own the universe." Why did Tilroy attack Paul?
15. Pops tells the boys about the magic and power he felt after climbing Red Cloud, a feeling he compares to theirs upon climbing Old Blue on their tramp, and Kevin feels he understands the new knowledge: "Yesterday was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. The whole day was a test. I know I can do harder things, now." What other experiences in the story brought out similar reactions in Kevin and Buzzy? Do you think that the "magic" of Red Cloud or the white stag can really exist?
16. How did the difficult and daring rescue of Pops help Kevin (and Buzzy) complete his summer transformation from boy to man?
17. Kevin finds a moment of connection and empathy when he considers Tilroy’s body for a final time: "I stayed for just a moment more and thought about my own father; how I still wanted his approval, still craved his love, still drank up drops of attention. I considered the shell of Tilroy one last time and pondered the certainty of rearing; the inevitability of desire; and the turn life takes when the two are set hard against." How was he able to call up understanding for this troubled young man who violently killed a good man and shot Kevin’s own grandfather and friend? How would you have felt in Kevin’s place?
18. Considering what happened by the end of the summer to all the different characters—Kevin and his family, Buzzy and his, Tilroy and his, Paul and Paitsel—do you find everyone’s transformations (or lack of) satisfying? Why or why not?
19. Kevin and Buzzy have changed since they became fast friends the summer that Kevin moved to Medgar. Buzzy expresses his envy of Kevin and the life he always knew Kevin would have, even when they were young. What kept the boys so close together during their teenage years, and why have they grown up to have such dissimilar lives? Do you think either of them could have done anything to maintain their close relationship?
20. The lingering effects of violence are an important theme in the novel. How does the violence done to the mountains serve as an allegory for the violence perpetrated by and done to characters in the novel?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Catch-22
Peter Heller, 1961
Simon & Schuster
540 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781451626650
Summary
Fifty years after its original publication, Catch-22 remains a cornerstone of American literature and one of the funniest—and most celebrated—books of all time. In recent years it has been named to “best novels” lists by Time, Newsweek, the Modern Library, and the London Observer.
Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him.
But his real problem is not the enemy—it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous missions he’s assigned, he’ll be in violation of Catch-22, a hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.
As revealing today as when it was first published, this brilliant novel expresses the concerns of an entire generation in its black comedy. World War II flier John Yossarian decides that his only mission each time he goes up is to return—alive! (From the publisher.)
More
Yossarian is a paranoid American bombardier stationed off the Italian coast during World War II who believes that everyone is out to kill him. Fearing he will be killed during a bombing run, Yossarian takes desperate measures to avoid flying, such as checking himself into a hospital with a fake liver condition and moving the bomb line on the map of Italy, which postpones the bombing mission to Bologna.
Yossarian and his comrades are in a Catch-22: They can be grounded on the basis of insanity; however, if they ask to be grounded because of insanity, their concern for their safety proves their sanity.
While Yossarian’s desire to get out of the war is the story’s focal point, Heller’s satirical narrative also relays the antics of Yossarian’s comrades—the men of the 256th Squadron—and positions those antics amid such themes as war, hypocrisy, justice, death, government bureaucracy, and greed. Teeming with Catch-22 situations, the ultimate "catch" for Yossarian is a test of his own integrity. Should he stand by truth and face court-martial or should he turn his back on his comrades and become a hero? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 1, 1923
• Where—Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
• Died—December 12, 1999
• Where—East Hamton, New York
• Education—University of Southern California, New York University;
M.A., Columbia University
Joseph Heller was an American satirical novelist, short story writer, and playwright. The title of one of his works, Catch-22, entered the English language to refer to a vicious circle wherein an absurd, no-win choice, particularly in situations in which the desired outcome of the choice is an impossibility, and regardless of choice, a same negative outcome is a certainty.
Although he is remembered primarily for Catch-22, his other works center on the lives of various members of the middle class and remain examples of modern satire.
Early years
Joseph Heller was born in Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York, the son of poor Jewish parents, Lena and Isaac Donald Heller, from Russia. Even as a child, he loved to write; as a teenager, he wrote a story about the Russian invasion of Finland and sent it to the New York Daily News, which rejected it. At least one scholar suggests that Heller knew that he wanted to become a writer, after recalling that he received a children's version of the Iliad when he was ten.
After graduating from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1941, Heller spent the next year working as a blacksmith's apprentice, a messenger boy, and a filing clerk. In 1942, at age 19, he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. Two years later he was sent to the Italian Front, where he flew 60 combat missions as a B-25 bombardier. His unit was the 488th Bombardment Squadron, 340th Bomb Group, 12th Air Force. Heller later remembered the war as "fun in the beginning.... You got the feeling that there was something glorious about it."
On his return home he "felt like a hero.... People think it quite remarkable that I was in combat in an airplane and I flew sixty missions even though I tell them that the missions were largely milk runs." ("Milk runs" were combat missions, but mostly uneventful due to a lack of intense opposition from enemy anti-aircraft artillery or fighters).
After the war, Heller studied English at the University of Southern California and NYU on the G.I. Bill. In 1949, he received his M.A. in English from Columbia University. Following his graduation, he spent a year as a Fulbright scholar at St Catherine's College, Oxford (1949–50) and, after returning home, he taught composition at Pennsylvania State University for two years (1950–52). He also taught fiction and dramatic writing at Yale.
He then briefly worked for Time Inc., before taking a job as a copywriter at a small advertising agency where he worked alongside future novelist Mary Higgins Clark. He was first published in 1948, when The Atlantic ran one of his short stories. The story nearly won the "Atlantic First."
He was married to Shirley Held from 1945 to 1981. They had two children.
Catch-22
While sitting at home one morning in 1953, Heller thought of the lines
It was love at first sight. The first time he saw the chaplain, [Yossarian] fell madly in love with him.
Within the next day, he began to envision the story that could result from this beginning, and invented the characters, the plot, and the tone that the story would eventually take. Within a week, he had finished the first chapter and sent it to his agent. He did not do any more writing for the next year, as he planned the rest of the story. The initial chapter was published in 1955 as "Catch-18" in Issue 7 of New World Writing.
Although he originally did not intend the story to be longer than a novelette, Heller was able to add enough substance to the plot that he felt it could become his first novel. When he was one-third done with the work, his agent whose assistant, Candida Donadio, liked it and sent it to publishers. Heller was not particularly attached to the work, and decided that he would not finish it if publishers were not interested. The work was soon purchased by Simon and Schuster, who gave him US $750 and promised him an additional $750 when the full manuscript was delivered. Heller missed his deadline by four to five years but, after eight years of thought, delivered the novel to his publisher.
The finished novel describes the wartime experiences of Army Air Corps Captain John Yossarian. Yossarian devises multiple strategies to avoid combat missions, but the military bureaucracy is always able to find a way to make him stay. As Heller observed,
Everyone in my book accuses everyone else of being crazy. Frankly, I think the whole society is nuts—and the question is: What does a sane man do in an insane society?
Heller has also commented that "peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it."
Just before publication, the novel's title was changed to Catch-22 to avoid confusion with Leon Uris' new novel, Mila 18. The novel was published in hardback in 1961 to mixed reviews, with the Chicago Sun-Times calling it "the best American novel in years" while other critics derided it as "disorganized, unreadable, and crass." It sold only 30,000 copies in the US hardback in its first year of publication. Reaction was very different in the UK, where, within one week of its publication, the novel was number one on the bestseller lists.
Once it was released in paperback in October 1962, however, Catch-22 caught the imaginations of many baby boomers, who identified with the novel's anti-war sentiments. The book went on to sell 10 million copies in the United States. The novel's title became a buzzword for a dilemma with no easy way out. Now considered a classic, the book was listed at number 7 on Modern Library's list of the top 100 novels of the century.
The movie rights to the novel were purchased in 1962, and, combined with his royalties, made Heller a millionaire. The film, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Alan Arkin, Jon Voight, Bob Newhart, Paula Prentiss, and Orson Welles, was released in 1970.
Other works
Shortly after Catch-22 was published, Heller thought of an idea for his next novel, which would become Something Happened, but did not act on it for two years. In the meantime he focused on scripts, completing the final screenplay for the movie adaptation of Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl, as well as a television comedy script that eventually aired as part of McHale's Navy.
In 1969, Heller wrote a play called We Bombed in New Haven. It delivered an anti-war message while discussing the Vietnam War. It was originally produced by the Repertory Company of the Yale Drama School, with Stacy Keach in the starring role. After a slight revision, it was published by Alfred A. Knopf and then debuted on Broadway, starring Jason Robards.
Something Happened, was finally published in 1974. Critics were enthusiastic about the book, and both its hardcover and paperback editions reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
Heller wrote another five novels, each of which took him several years to complete. One of them, Closing Time, revisited many of the characters from Catch-22 as they adjusted to post-war New York. All of the novels sold respectably well, but could not duplicate the success of his debut. Told by an interviewer that he had never produced anything else as good as Catch-22, Heller famously responded, "Who has?"
Heller maintained that he did not "have a philosophy of life, or a need to organize its progression. My books are not constructed to "say anything." Only when he was almost one-third finished with the novel would he gain a clear vision of what it should be about. At that point, with the idea solidified, he would rewrite all that he had finished and then continue to the end of the story. The finished version of the novel would often not begin or end with the sentences he had originally envisioned, although he usually tried to include the original opening sentence somewhere in the text.
Teaching
In the 1970s Heller taught creative writing at the City College of New York. After the publication of Catch-22, Heller resumed a part-time academic career as a teacher of creative writing at Yale University and at the University of Pennsylvania.
Illness
In December, 1981, Heller was diagnosed with Guillain–Barré syndrome, a debilitating syndrome that was to leave him temporarily paralyzed. He was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit of Mount Sinai Medical Hospital for a month and was transferred in January (1982 to the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine. His illness and recovery are recounted at great length in the autobiographical No Laughing Matter, which contains alternating chapters by Heller and his good friend Speed Vogel. The book reveals the assistance and companionship Heller received from a number of his good friends—Mel Brooks, Mario Puzo, Dustin Hoffman and George Mandel among them.
Heller eventually made a substantial recovery. He later married Valerie Humphries, one of the nurses who helped him become well again.
Later years
In 1991 Heller returned to St. Catherine's at Oxford as a visiting Fellow for a term and was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the college. In 1998, he released a memoir, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here, in which he relived his childhood as the son of a deliveryman and offered some details about the inspirations for Catch-22.
He died of a heart attack at his home in East Hampton, on Long Island, in December, 1999, shortly after the completion of his final novel, Portrait of an Artist, as an Old Man. On hearing of Heller's death, his friend Kurt Vonnegut said, "Oh, God, how terrible. This is a calamity for American literature."
Catch-22 controversy
In April 1998, Lewis Pollock wrote to The Sunday Times regarding "the amazing similarity of characters, personality traits, eccentricities, physical descriptions, personnel injuries and incidents" in Catch-22 and The Sky is a Lonely Place (Face of a Hero in the U.S.), published in 1951 by Louis Falstein. Falstein's novel was available two years before Heller wrote the first chapter of Catch-22 (1953) while he was a student at Oxford. The Times stated:
Both have central characters who are using their wits to escape the aerial carnage; both are haunted by an omnipresent injured airman, invisible inside a white body cast.
Stating he had never read Falstein's novel, or heard of him, Heller said: "My book came out in 1961.... I find it funny that nobody else has noticed any similarities, including Falstein himself, who died just last year." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/4/2014.)
Book Reviews
Catch-22 is the only war novel I've ever read that makes any sense.
Harper Lee
One of the most bitterly funny works in the language.... Explosive, bitter, subversive, brilliant.
New Republic
To my mind, there have been two great American novels in the past fifty years. Catch-22 is one.
Stephen King - Entertainment Weekly
Below its hilarity, so wild that it hurts, Catch-22 is the strongest repudiation of our civilization, in fiction, to come out of World War II.... [T]his novel is not merely the best American novel to come out of World War II; it is the best American novel that has come out of anywhere in years.
Nelson Algren - Nation
It’s the rock and roll of novels.... There’s no book like it.... Surprisingly powerful
Norman Mailer - Esquire
One of the greatest anti-war books ever written.
Vanity Fair
Discussion Questions
1. A complex, chaotic structure makes the novel difficult to follow. How might this structure parallel, represent, and/or elevate themes in the story? How does Heller piece together the chronology of events?
3. Chapters tend to be named for individuals in the story; however, titles are deceptive because they tend to be about other characters. Why might Heller have named chapters after one character but have written them about another?
4. Yossarian shares a tent with a “dead man.” What role does this mysterious character play?
5. Chief White Halfoat is illiterate, yet he is assigned to military intelligence. Identify and discuss other examples of Heller’s cynicism toward the government and/or other institutions.
6. Choose a poignant passage/scene. How does Heller make this passage/scene work (e.g., how does he evoke emotion in the reader)?
7. Of the multiple characters in the story, which are you drawn to the most? Why? Are there any completely moral characters in the story? Explain.
8. Major Major is described as “the most mediocre of men.” What do the events in his past and present life tell us about humanity and destiny?
9. Both Captain Wren and Captain Piltchard are described as “mild” and “soft-spoken” officers, and they love the war. Why might their personalities be fitting for someone who loves the war?
10. Yossarian returns to the hospital several times. What role do the hospital settings play in the story? In what way might the hospital settings foil the bombing/war scenes? In what way might they be reflective times for Yossarian? For other characters?
11. Compare and contrast Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn. Are they both hypocrites? Why or why not?
12. Circumstances surrounding Snowden’s death are revealed slowly. What does his death mean to Yossarian? To others?
13. Discuss the significance of déjà vu in the story and how it relates to religious faith.
14. While much of the novel is military satire, the story does delve into the private sector. How might Mrs. Daneeka be a satirical character?
15. One of the ironies of the story occurs at the end in which Yossarian has an opportunity to go home a hero. In essence, he has the system in a Catch-22. Explain.
16. Discuss whether the ending of Catch-22 is uplifting or downbeat. Is it a victory or a defeat?
17. Most of the characters in Catch-22 are over-the-top in the sense that, in many ways, they are caricatures of themselves. What must Heller have known about humanity to make them all so recognizable?
18. What do you believe is Heller’s view of a capitalistic society?
19. Is Catch-22 a comic novel or a story of morality? Explain.
20. What does Catch-22 say about war?
21. Discuss the literary significance of Catch-22 and its relevance in the twenty-first century.
22. How does Catch-22 compare to other war stories you have read? How does it compare to other satires
23. How might Catch-22 be described as an allegory?
24. Discuss how the novel can be described as a struggle between the individual and an institution.
25. Discuss the meaning of sanity as it applies to the story.
top of page (summary)