Necessary Lies
Diane Chamberlain, 2013
St. Martin's Press
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-1250054517
Summary
A small southern town fifty years ago, and the darkest—and most hopeful—places in the human heart.
After losing her parents, fifteen-year-old Ivy Hart is left to care for her grandmother, older sister and nephew as tenants on a small tobacco farm. As she struggles with her grandmother’s aging, her sister’s mental illness and her own epilepsy, she realizes they might need more than she can give.
When Jane Forrester takes a position as Grace County’s newest social worker, she doesn’t realize just how much her help is needed. She quickly becomes emotionally invested in her clients' lives, causing tension with her boss and her new husband. But as Jane is drawn in by the Hart women, she begins to discover the secrets of the small farm—secrets much darker than she would have guessed. Soon, she must decide whether to take drastic action to help them, or risk losing the battle against everything she believes is wrong.
Set in rural Grace County, North Carolina in a time of state-mandated sterilizations and racial tension, Necessary Lies tells the story of these two young women, seemingly worlds apart, but both haunted by tragedy. Jane and Ivy are thrown together and must ask themselves: how can you know what you believe is right, when everyone is telling you it’s wrong? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1950
• Where—Plainfield, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., M.A., San Diego State University
• Awards—RITA Award
• Currently—lives in North Carolina
Diane Chamberlain is the bestselling American author of some 30 novels, primarily surrounding family relationships, love, and forgiveness. Her works have been published in 20 languages. Her best-known books include The Silent Sister (2014), Necessary Lies (2013), and The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes (2006).
In her own words:
I was an insatiable reader as a child, and that fact, combined with a vivid imagination, inspired me to write. I penned a few truly terrible "novellas" at age twelve, then put fiction aside for many years as I pursued my education.
I grew up in Plainfield, New Jersey and spent my summers at the Jersey Shore, two settings that have found their way into my novels.
In high school, my favorite authors were the unlikely combination of Victoria Holt and Sinclair Lewis. I loved Holt's flair for romantic suspense and Lewis's character studies as well as his exploration of social values, and both those authors influenced the writer I am today.
I attended Glassboro State College in New Jersey as a special education major before moving to San Diego, where I received both my bachelor's and master's degrees in social work from San Diego State University. After graduating, I worked in a couple of youth counseling agencies and then focused on medical social work, which I adored. I worked at Sharp Hospital in San Diego and Children's Hospital in Washington, D.C. before opening a private psychotherapy practice in Alexandria, Virginia, specializing in adolescents. I reluctantly closed my practice in 1992 when I realized that I could no longer split my time between two careers and be effective at both of them.
It was while I was working in San Diego that I started writing. I'd had a story in my mind since I was a young adolescent about a group of people living together at the Jersey Shore. While waiting for a doctor's appointment one day, I pulled out a pen and pad began putting that story on paper. Once I started, I couldn't stop. I took a class in fiction writing, but for the most part, I "learned by doing." That story, Private Relations, took me four years to complete. I sold it in 1986, but it wasn't published until 1989 (three very long years!), when it earned me the RITA award for Best Single Title Contemporary Novel. Except for a brief stint writing for daytime TV (One Life to Live) and a few miscellaneous articles for newspapers and magazines, I've focused my efforts on book-length fiction and am currently working on my nineteenth novel.
My stories are often filled with mystery and suspense, and–I hope–they also tug at the emotions. Relationships – between men and women, parents and children, sisters and brothers – are always the primary focus of my books. I can't think of anything more fascinating than the way people struggle with life's trials and tribulations, both together and alone.
In the mid-nineties, I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a challenging disease to live with. Although my RA is under good control with medication and I can usually type for many hours a day, I sometimes rely on voice recognition technology to get words on paper. I’m very grateful to the inventor of that software! I lived in Northern Virginia until the summer of 2005, when I moved to North Carolina, the state that inspired so many of my stories and where I live with my significant other, photographer John Pagliuca. I have three grown stepdaughters, three sons-in-law, three grandbabies, and two shelties named Keeper and Jet.
For me, the real joy of writing is having the opportunity to touch readers with my words. I hope that my stories move you in some way and give you hours of enjoyable reading. (With permission from the author's website. Retrieved 6/6/2014.)
Book Reviews
Jane...discovers that part of her job is deciding whether young girls...should be sterilized, in order to keep them from having babies that depend on the state. A captivating look at the little-discussed eugenics program that was responsible for sterilizing more than 7,000 American citizens—some without their knowledge—this engrossing novel digs deep into the moral complexity of a dark period in history and brings it to life.
Publishers Weekly
Chamberlain brings to light the horrors inflicted for years on victims of the eugenics sterilization program. By allowing Ivy and Jane to tell their stories, Chamberlain humanizes the survivors. This is a troubling account, considering how recently involuntary sterilization occurred in this country. —Lesa Holstine, Evansville Vanderburgh P.L., IN
Library Journal
An idealistic North Carolina social worker defies her employers to save impoverished children from overzealous social engineering in Chamberlain's well-researched page-turner. Chamberlain's....novel, set in 1960, examines the impact of such interventions on a tiny, almost feudal enclave of tobacco farmers. Two narrators represent opposite poles of Southern society.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Did the truth about Mr. Gardiner’s involvement with Mary Ella surprise you? If not, at what point did you begin to suspect it?
2. Charlotte gives Jane a lot of reasons for why the Eugenics Sterilization Program is a good thing for both individuals and society. What are the reasons she gives and what were your reactions to them?
3. Various people throughout the story tell Jane that she is too emotionally invested in her clients, and Fred refers to her as "a loose cannon." Have you ever been in a situation where you had to balance emotional investment with professionalism?
4. Jane picks up on a lot of subtle but important details about the Harts during the extra time she spends with them. What key pieces of information does she glean from these interactions that she doesn’t get from her formal interviews?
5. At one point Ivy observes that, "It was like the whole world was moving forward, taking Henry Allen with it, while I was holding still." How are the lives and actions of the various female characters influenced or restricted by their role in society as women?
6. Jane knows Lois for a short time, but it is a time when Jane most needs a friend, and Lois has a profound effect on her. Has there been someone who was only in your life briefly, but had a big impact on you?
7. How much of a role do you think the loss of Jane’s sister played in her determination to help Ivy?
8. Jane’s mother tells her, "Sometimes coloring outside the lines can cost you. Only you can figure out if it’s worth it." Can you think of a situation from your own life to which this applies? Did coloring outside the lines cost you, and was it worth it?
9. How did you feel about the way the different characters lives turned out, as revealed by Ivy at the end of the story?
10. What do you think you would have done if you were in Jane’s position? Would you have put Baby William in foster care sooner, or not at all? Would you have told Mary Ella about her sterilization? Would you have gone as far as hiding Ivy in your home?
11. What would you have done in Ivy’s position? Would you have gone with Jane? Would you have taken a different path?
12. Jane realizes that whether or not a person is perceived as intelligent has a lot to do with whether or not he/she is in a familiar environment. What examples of this do we see?
13. How do racial prejudices play a role in different people’s assumptions, including Jane’s, about what is happening between the residents at the Gardiner’s farm?
14. Ivy realizes that she and Jane have more in common than she ever imagined. What are some similarities between them?
15. The social services system as depicted in this novel displays a hierarchy of power that trickles all the way from Jane’s boss, Fred, through the different levels in the office and the different people on the Gardiner’s farm all the way down to Baby William. What different levels of power do we see, and how are people at each level restricted in the power they have over their own actions and the actions of others?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Infatuations
Javier Marias (Margaret Jull Costa, trans.), 2013
Knopf Doubleday
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307950734
Summary
From the award-winning Spanish writer Javier Marias comes an extraordinary new book that has been a literary sensation around the world: an immersive, provocative novel propelled by a seemingly random murder that we come to understand—or do we?—through one woman’s ever-unfurling imagination and infatuations.
At the Madrid cafe where she stops for breakfast each day before work, Maria Dolz finds herself drawn to a couple who is also there every morning. Though she can hardly explain it, observing what she imagines to be their “unblemished” life lifts her out of the doldrums of her own existence.
But what begins as mere observation turns into an increasingly complicated entanglement when the man is fatally stabbed in the street. Maria approaches the widow to offer her condolences, and at the couple’s home she meets—and falls in love with—another man who sheds disturbing new light on the crime.
As Maria recounts this story, we are given a murder mystery brilliantly reimagined as metaphysical enquiry, a novel that grapples with questions of love and death, guilt and obsession, chance and coincidence, how we are haunted by our losses, and above all, the slippery essence of the truth and how it is told. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September, 20, 1951
• Where—Madrid, Spain
• Education—University of Madrid
• Awards—International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; Prix
Femina Etranger; Romulo Gallegos Prize (Venezuela); Prix
Formentor
• Currently—lives in Madrid, Spain
Javier Marias is a Spanish novelist, translator, and columnist. The recipient of numerous prizes, he has written thirteen novels, three story collections, and nineteen works of collected articles and essays. His books have been translated into forty-three languages, in fifty-two countries, and have sold more than seven million copies throughout the world.
Marías was born in Madrid. His father was the philosopher Julian Marias, who was briefly imprisoned and then banned from teaching for opposing Franco. Parts of his childhood were spent in the United States, where his father taught at various institutions, including Yale University and Wellesley College. His mother died when Javier was 26 years old. Marias's first literary employment consisted in translating Dracula scripts for his maternal uncle, Jesus Franco. He was educated at the Colegio Estudio in Madrid.
Writing
Marias began writing in earnest at an early age. "The Life and Death of Marcelino Iturriaga," one of the short stories in While the Women are Sleeping (2010), was written when he was just 14. He wrote his first novel, The Dominions of the Wolf (1971) at age 17, after running away to Paris. His second novel, Voyage Along the Horizon (1973), was an adventure story about an expedition to Antarctica.
After attending the Complutense University of Madrid, Marias turned his attention to translating English novels into Spanish. His translations included work by Updike, Hardy, Conrad, Nabokov, Faulkner, Kipling, James, Stevenson, Browne, and Shakespeare. In 1979 he won the Spanish national award for translation for his version of Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Between 1983 and 1985 he lectured in Spanish literature and translation at the University of Oxford.
In 1986 Marias published The Man of Feeling and, in 1989, All Souls, which was set at Oxford University. The Spanish film director Gracia Querejeta released El Último viaje de Robert Rylands, adapted from All Souls, in 1996.
His 1992 novel A Heart So White was a commercial and critical success, with Marias and Margaret Jull Costa (the translator) becoming joint winners of the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His 1994 novel, Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me, won the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos Prize.
The protagonists of the novels written since 1986 are all interpreters or translators of one kind or another, based on his own experience as a translator and teacher of translation at Oxford University. Of these protagonists, Marías has written, "They are people who are renouncing their own voices."
In 2002 Marías published Your Face Tomorrow 1: Fever and Spear, the first part of a trilogy that is his most ambitious literary project. The first volume is dominated by a translator, an elderly don based on an actual professor emeritus of Spanish studies at Oxford University, Sir Peter Russell. The second volume, Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream, was published in 2004. In 2007, Marias the completed the final installment, Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell.
Marias operates a small publishing house under the name of Reino de Redonda. He also writes a weekly column in El País. An English version of his column "La Zona Fantasma" is published in the monthly magazine The Believer.
Marias was elected to the Royal Spanish Academy in 2006. At his investiture in 2008 he agreed with Robert Louis Stevenson that the work of novelists is "pretty childish," but also argued that it is impossible to narrate real events, and that “you can only fully tell stories about what has never happened, the invented and imagined.” (Adapted from Wikipedia and the publisher. Retrieved 11/01/2013.)
Book Reviews
For established fans, The Infatuations will be another welcome shipment of Marias; for new readers it is as good a place to start as any. Whatever else we may think is going on when we read, we are choosing to spend time in an author's company. In Javier Marias's case this is a good decision; his mind is insightful, witty, sometimes startling, sometimes hilarious, and always intelligent.
Edward St. Aubyn - New York Times Book Review
Mysterious and seductive; it’s got deception, it’s got love affairs, it’s got murder—the book is the most sheerly addictive thing Marias has ever written . . . Marias is a star writer in Europe, where his best-sellers collect prizes the way Kardashians collect paparazzi. He’s been hailed in America, too, yet he’s never broken through like Haruki Murakami or Roberto Bolaño. This should change with his new novel, The Infatuations, which is the ideal introduction to his work.
Fresh Air/NPR
The work of a master in his prime, this is a murder story that becomes an enthralling vehicle for all the big questions about life, love, fate, and death.
Guardian (UK)
A haunting masterpiece.... The lasting challenge to literature is to achieve a satisfying marriage between high art and the low drives of a simple plot. The Infatuations is just such a novel . . . Just as Macbeth is a thriller that’s also a great tragedy, The Infatuations is a murder story that’s also a profound story of fatal obsession.... Don Quixote was first published as long ago as 1620. I wouldn’t be surprised if The Infatuations soon acquired an equally devoted following.
Observer (UK)
Extraordinary.... Marias has defined the ethos of our time.
Alberto Manguel - Guardian (UK)
Absorbing and unnerving.... A labyrinthine exploration, at once thrilling and melancholy, of the meanings of one man’s death—and a vivid testimony to the power of stories, for good or ill, to weave the world into our thoughts and our thoughts into the world.
London Sunday Times
Marias shows that death is hardest on those left living.... With philosophical rigor, Marias uses the page-turning twists of crime fiction to interrogate the weighty concepts of grief, culpability, and mortality.... The novel’s power lies in its melding of readable momentum and existential depth...[as well as] clarity and digressive uncertainty; a novel that further secures Marias’s position as one of contemporary fiction’s most relevant voices.
Publishers Weekly
Marias turns a narrative about an apparently random homicide into a metaphysical inquiry fraught with ambiguity as accounts of the incident vary in their degree of accuracy and detail, a plot twist presents a questionable motive, and even the victim's name isn't certain.... [Maria's] fluid yet digressive style may not be to everyone's liking. When it comes to a novel exquisitely questioning the nature of fact and truth, however, this is a highly rewarding literary experience. —Lawrence Olszewski, OCLC Lib., Dublin, OH
Library Journal
An apparently random street murder sparks musings on shades of guilt and the mutability of truth.... As always with Marías, there are no definitive answers, only the exploration of provocative ideas in his trademark style: long, looping sentences... that mimic the stuttering starts and stops of a restless mind.... Marias' rare gift is his ability to make this intellectual jousting as suspenseful as the chase scenes in a commercial thriller. He's tremendously stimulating to read.... Blindingly intelligent, engagingly accessible—it seems there's nothing Marías can't make fiction do.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Over the period of a few years, Maria has spent part of every morning watching a married man and woman in a neighborhood café. She is drawn to them because of their seeming happiness, “as if they provided me with a vision of an orderly or...harmonious world” (4). Is this a strange thing to do? What does it reveal about Maria?
2. The “Perfect Couple,” as Maria calls Miguel and Luisa, is abruptly severed when a homeless man stabs Miguel to death in a seemingly unmotivated attack. When Maria learns that Miguel was killed on the same day she last saw him, she realizes that “his wife and I had said goodbye to him at the same time, she with her lips and I with my eyes only” (30). What do you think of Maria’s reaction to the murder? Is Maria in love with Miguel?
3. When Maria visits Luisa, both speculate on what Miguel might have been thinking as he was being stabbed and as he lay dying (50-51). Maria’s projection of Miguel’s state of mind proceeds in single sentence of more than two pages in length (52-54). What role does the imagination—especially imagining the thoughts or experiences of others—play in this novel? Why do you think the novel is occupied with questions about different possible paths and outcomes?
4. Luisa tells Maria that Miguel’s death has changed her way of thinking: “It’s as though I’ve become a different person since then...with an unfamiliar, alien mentality, someone given to making strange connections and being frightened by them” (49). She now hears a siren and is overcome with dread, not knowing who might be ill or wounded or dying. Has her husband’s death made Luisa think more like a novelist?
5. Maria imagines that in thinking of the bizarre misfortune of being attacked by a stranger, Miguel might have thought of Maria herself as one of a number of people “who are merely vague extras or marginal presences, who inhabit a corner or lurk in the obscure background of the painting and whom we don’t even miss if they disappear” (53). If Maria, as our narrator, is such a vague extra or marginal presence, do her first-person narration and her presence as a central character in the story dispel the notion of her obscurity?
6. Luisa says she would feel better if someone had plotted against her husband. She has looked up the word envidia—envy—and reads a part of the dictionary entry to Maria: “Unfortunately, this poison is often engendered in the breasts of those who are and who we believe to be our closest friends, in whom we trust; they are far more dangerous than our declared enemies” (61). Luisa later introduces Javier to Maria as “one of Miguel’s best friends” (59). Do you have suspicions of Javier at this point, or only later?
7. The second time Maria meets Javier they are in Madrid’s Natural History Museum, where dead animals preserved in the attitudes of life stare out of their cases. Why is this unusual setting relevant to Javier’s view that the grieving Luisa is holding on to “the image of Miguel, (106)” but that she will eventually assign him “a place in time, both him and his character frozen for ever” (107)? Do you agree with Javier that “the only people who do not fail or let us down are those who are snatched from us”?
8. Maria becomes sexually involved with Javier, and is drawn more deeply into the intrigue surrounding Miguel’s death. Look at the description of Javier on pages 85-86 and discuss what is appealing or provocative about him. How would you characterize Maria’s feelings toward Javier (117-121)? Is she obsessed? In love? Infatuated?
9. After Miguel’s death, Maria expresses the idea that the moment of death changes the identity of the person who dies. Javier is convinced that it’s only a matter of time until Luisa realizes that her husband is gone forever. How does Balzac’s novella Colonel Chabert demonstrate Javier’s view that something fixed and permanent divides the living and the dead—even if, as in Colonel Chabert’s case, the dead return to life (131-140)?
10. One night, some time after she and Javier have become lovers, Maria says, “I found myself wishing or, rather, fantasizing about the possibility that Luisa might die and thus leave the field open for me with Díaz-Varela, since she was doing nothing to occupy that field herself (147). I, for example, could launch an offensive against Luisa behind her back, one so oblique that she wouldn’t be aware of it because she wouldn’t even know that an enemy was stalking her” (151). The novel implies that all human beings are capable of fantasizing about the deaths of people who stand in their way. Do you believe this is true? Is it easy to understand or identify with these thoughts?
11. Maria is the first female narrator in a Marias novel. In an interview in The Paris Review, Marias noted that his female characters were “always seen through the eyes of a male.” In a scene in which Maria and Ruiberriz are talking, Maria has to decide whether she will emerge from the bedroom wearing only her skirt (166-175). Why are her thoughts about her body and her sexuality important in this scene and elsewhere? Why is it effective that the narrator in this novel is a woman?
12. Midway through the novel, Javier’s secret emerges when Maria overhears him talking to Ruiberriz, who was his intermediary with the homeless man who killed Miguel. Her reaction to this new knowledge is complex. Does she now think of Javier as a murderer, or does she think that Javier set up a chain of events that might well not have resulted in Miguel’s death, so he is not a murderer (176-194)?
13. Marias has said that literature is the “filter” through which he thinks and writes: “What I present to the reader comes from my experience and from what I have invented, but it has all been filtered by literature. That is what matters: the filter” (Paris Review interview). Discuss how the line “She should have died hereafter,” from Macbeth and the quote “Yes, a murder, nothing more” from The Three Musketeers, focus the philosophical concerns of the novel (See 107-116, 218-219, 229-230
14. What elements does The Infatuations share with mystery or detective fiction? How is it not at all like those genres? What do you make of the long discursive digressions? Are they always relevant to the larger questions and investigations of the novel?
15. Javier tells Maria, when she asks “what happened” to Colonel Chabert: “What happened is the least of it. It’s a novel, and once you’ve finished a novel, what happened in it is of little importance and soon forgotten. What matters are the possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with, a plot that we recall far more vividly than real events and to which we pay far more attention” (227). Discuss this important statement in terms of your experience of this novel.
16. The entire story is transmitted through the perspective of Maria. Does this call into question her authority or her reliability? What is the effect of being inside a single consciousness throughout the novel? To what degree can the story be read as the projection onto a fictional world of the activity of a novelist’s mind, Maria standing in for Marias?
17. Miguel knew, says Javier, “that the fact we are here at all is entirely thanks to an improbable coming-together of various chance events, and when that coming-together ceases, we cannot really complain.... No one can complain about not having been born or not having been in the world before or not having always been in the world, so why should anyone complain about dying or not being in the world hereafter or not remaining in it forever?” (283). How does Miguel’s philosophy about the contingent nature of human life resonate through the whole novel? Is it an appealing perspective on life and death?
18. Once Javier agreed to do Miguel the favor of arranging his death, he says, “My mind had to start working and plotting like the mind of a criminal” (292). Does his explanation of the circumstances make Javier, in the mind of Maria, any less a murderer? Does she even believe that Miguel was ill? Discuss her statement “Everything that has been said to us resonates and lingers” (295).
19. When Maria sees Javier and Luisa in a restaurant, apparently now married, the novel comes full circle (326-331). She recalls the statement of the lawyer Derville in Colonel Chabert: “Far more crimes go unpunished than punished, not to speak of those we know nothing about or that remain hidden, for there must inevitably be more hidden crimes than crimes that are known about and recorded” (334). What do you think about the resolution of the plot, and Maria’s sense of the story’s ending?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Local Souls
Allan Gurganus, 2013
Liveright Publishing
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780871403797
Summary
With the meteoric success of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, Allan Gurganus placed himself among America’s most original and emotionally engaged storytellers. If his first comic novel mapped the late nineteenth-century South, Local Souls brings the twisted hilarity of Flannery O’Connor kicking into our new century.
Through memorable language and bawdy humor, Gurganus returns to his mythological Falls, North Carolina, home of Last Confederate Widow. This first work in a decade offers three novellas mirroring today’s face-lifted South, a zone revolutionized around freer sexuality, looser family ties, and superior telecommunications, yet it celebrates those locals who have chosen to stay local.
In doing so, Local Souls uncovers certain old habits—adultery, incest, obsession—still very much alive in our New South, a "Winesburg, Ohio" with high-speed Internet.
Wells Tower says of Gurganus, "No living writer knows more about how humans matter to each other." Such ties of love produce hilarious, if wrenching, complications: "Fear Not" gives us a banker's daughter seeking the child she was forced to surrender when barely fifteen, only to find an adult rescuer she might have invented. In "Saints Have Mothers," a beloved high school valedictorian disappears during a trip to Africa, granting her ambitious mother a postponed fame that turns against her. And in a dramatic "Decoy," the doctor-patient friendship between two married men breaks toward desire just as a biblical flood shatters their neighborhood and rearranges their fates.
Gurganus finds fresh pathos in ancient tensions: between marriage and Eros, parenthood and personal fulfillment. He writes about erotic hunger and social embarrassment with Twain's knife-edged glee. By loving Falls, Gurganus dramatizes the passing of Hawthorne’s small-town nation into those Twitter-nourished lives we now expect and relish.
Four decades ago, John Cheever pronounced Allan Gurganus "the most technically gifted and morally responsive writer of his generation." Local Souls confirms Cheever’s prescient faith. It deepens the luster of Gurganus’s reputation for compassion and laughter. His black comedy leaves us with lasting affection for his characters and the aching aftermath of human consequences. Here is a universal work about a village. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 11, 1947
• Where—Rocky Mount, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., Sarah Lawrence College; Iowa
Writers' Workshop
• Awards—Sue Kaufman Prize (American Academy of
Arts and Letters); Lambda Literary Award
• Currently—lives in North Carolina
Allan Gurganus is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose work, which includes Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All (1989) and Local Souls (2013), is often influenced by and set in his native North Carolina.
Gurganus was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. He first trained as a painter, studying at the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He served three years with the United States Navy during the Vietnam War and began writing during his time on the USS Yorktown.
He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College where he studied with Grace Paley. He studied with John Cheever and Stanley Elkin at the University of Iowa in the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Cheever sold Gurganus's short story "Minor Heroism" to The New Yorker without telling Gurganus beforehand.
In addition to later teaching at both Sarah Lawrence and the Iowa Writers' Workshop, he has also taught at Stanford and Duke Universities.
His best known work is his 1989 debut novel, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, which was on the New York Times Best Seller list for eight months. It won the Sue Kaufman Prize from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, and sold over four million copies. It was made into a CBS television play, with Cicely Tyson winning one of its four Emmy Awards as best supporting actress in the role of the freed slave Castalia. The novel was also adapted for a one-woman Broadway play, starring Ellen Burstyn, in 2003.
Gurganus's other works include White People (1990), a collection of short stories and novellas; Plays Well With Others (1997), a novel; The Practical Heart (1993/2001), a collection of four novellas, which won a 2001 Lambda Literary Award in the Gay Men's Fiction category; and Local Souls (2013), a novel. His shorter fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, and Paris Review, in addition to being included in the O. Henry Prize Collection and the Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.
After living in New York City for a number of years, Gurganus returned to North Carolina, where he co-founded the political group Writers Against Jesse Helms and, as a result, appeared as himself in Tim Kirkman's 1998 documentary Dear Jesse. Gurganus has also taken a position against the Iraq War, most notably by citing his Vietnam War experience in an essay published in The New York Times Magazine, "The War at Home," published April 6, 2003, a few weeks after the invasion. Gurganus was also the inaugural guest editor of New Stories From the South, an annual collection of notable fiction by Southern writers published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, in 2006.
He is the recipient of an Ingram Merrill Award and a 2006 Guggenheim fellowship.
In an editorial about the Duke University lacrosse players accused of rape, Gurganus stated, "When the children of privilege feel vividly alive only while victimizing, even torturing, we must all ask why." The players were acquitted of all charges, and later settled with the university for an undisclosed sum. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 11/01/2013.)
Book Reviews
"Decoy" is the most dignified and searching of these novellas. It's got a lot to say about class—the narrator's family has "barely made the broad-jump from clay tobacco fields to red clay courts"—and just as much about the ways communities emotionally expand and contract. It has a soulful pang of heartache, especially over abandonment by close friends.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
It’s been 12 years since Gurganus last published a full-length work—but if there remains any doubt of [Gurganus's] literary greatness…Local Souls should put it to rest forever…[it] is a tour de force in the tradition of Hawthorne. It shows that Gurganus's vast creative and imaginative powers, still rooted in the local, are increasingly universal in scope and effect. The book is an expansive work of love…The prose is taut with the electric charge of internal rhyme, assonance and alliteration. Each touch yields an invigorating shock…Like Chekhov and Cheever before him, Gurganus registers an enormous amount of compassion for the characters he holds to the fire. These local souls may be "fallen," but Gurganus seems well aware that the biblical fall also implies a promise: the chance to earn forgiveness, and perhaps even redemption.
Jamie Quatro - New York Times Book Review
Gurganus unearths Falls's piquant, humanizing secrets. If the gossip seems cruel, it's always meant with affection. "Small towns, being untraveled literalists, do tend to tease a lot," Mr. Gurganus writes. "What big cities might call Sadism little towns name Fun.
Wall Street Journal
Allan Gurganus proves once again that small-town life in the New South can be as tragic and twisted as anything out of an ancient Greek playbook…. The chatty, roundabout storytelling, the wicked humor and sense of the absurd often disguise the gravity of these investigations into life’s tendency to ‘retract its promise overight,’ to ‘become a vale of tears breaking over you in sudden lashing.’ Hidden above the safe confines of the Falls, Zeus readies his lightning bolts.
Gina Webb - Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Occasionally shocking, consistently understated and knowing, Local Souls deploys three related novellas that deal with people who don't fit in. The world of Allan Gurganus' first new work of fiction in a dozen years is both familiar and eccentric…. Just as all-American as the folks Sherwood Anderson brought to life in Winesburg, Ohio nearly a century ago….Giving away the ending would be to give away a secret. Mr. Gurganu—imaginative, kind, even humorous—builds toward that secret so skillfully, our arrival at it becomes a pact with the characters themselves.
Carlo Wolff - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Gurganus [is] fearfully gifted…. The gem of Local Souls is the gorgeous Decoy, in which Gurganus removes the gloves and delivers the literary equivalent of a bare-knuckled knockout. Decoy is so good that you want to lob all sorts of adjectives its way: warm, humane, profound, sagacious, hilarious, nostalgic, and incisive…. The last pages of Local Souls prove once again that there is no writer alive quite like Allan Gurganus.
Laura Albritton - Miami Herald
The first-person voice’s capacity for lifelikeness and oral illusion has been Gurganus’s great Southern storytelling inheritance… Local Souls stays true to its author’s vocal aesthetic.
Thomas Mallon - New Yorker
[A]n astounding testament to Gurganus's narrative vibrancy, faultless plotting, and Everyman/mythic vision…. Of living novelists in English, only Martin Amis and Cormac McCarthy can match Gurganus's pyrotechnical aptitude for language, for forging a verbiage both rapturous and exact. He's categorically incapable of crafting a dull sentence…. [He is] one of the most exciting fiction writers alive.
William Giraldi - Oxford American
"Fear Not" subjects a smalltown golden girl to horrific loss, an unplanned pregnancy, and a lifetime of wondering about the fate of her baby. The protagonist of "Saints Have Mothers" reluctantly sees her luminous, gifted daughter off on a global adventure, and has her worst fears realized.... In "Decoy," a family history gets spun out as a backdrop to the retirement of the town's senior physician.... In these layered, often funny narratives...Gurganus exposes humanity as a strange species.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) In this first work in 12 years, Gurganus offers three luscious, perceptively written pieces, each as rich as any full-length novel and together exploring the depth of our connections.... These pieces are so fresh and real that the reader has the sense of walking through a dissolving plate-glass window straight into the lives of the characters. Highly recommended. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
Vivid language, provocative sentence structure, and metaphors that elevate the reader’s consciousness. [Gurganus] shares with his southern cohorts a delight in discovering the quotidian within lives led under extraordinary, even bizarre circumstances.
Booklist
(Starred review.) A witty and soulful trio of novellas by master storyteller Gurganus who....manages the neat hat trick of blending the stuff of everyday life with Faulkner-ian gothic and Chekhov-ian soul-searching, all told in assured language that resounds, throughout all three novellas... [T]he novellas have a conversational tone and easy manner that are a testimony to the author's craftsmanship. A gem.
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.
How To Be a Good Wife
Emma Chapman, 2013
St. Martin's Press
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250018199
Summary
Emma Chapman is a haunting literary debut about a woman who begins having visions that make her question everything she knows.
Marta and Hector have been married for a long time. Through the good and bad; through raising a son and sending him off to life after university. So long, in fact, that Marta finds it difficult to remember her life before Hector. He has always taken care of her, and she has always done everything she can to be a good wife—as advised by a dog-eared manual given to her by Hector’s aloof mother on their wedding day.
But now, something is changing. Small things seem off. A flash of movement in the corner of her eye, elapsed moments that she can’t recall. Visions of a blonde girl in the darkness that only Marta can see. Perhaps she is starting to remember—or perhaps her mind is playing tricks on her. As Marta’s visions persist and her reality grows more disjointed, it’s unclear if the danger lies in the world around her, or in Marta herself. The girl is growing more real every day, and she wants something. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1985
• Raised—Manchester, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Edinburgh University; M.A., Royal Holloway
• Currently—lives in Jakarta, Indonesia
Emma J. Chapman grew up in Manchester, England. She studied English Literature at the University of Edinburgh, followed by a Masters in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. After university, she travelled solo in Scandinavia, where she learned to camp, bathe in fjords, and carry everything she needed. She is currently living in Perth, Western Australia. How To Be a Good Wife (2013) is her first novel.
Emma wanted to be an actress until she was 16 and acted in a school play. She was terrible. But she did realise that the things she loved about acting (imagining she was somebody else), she could work at in a locked room as a writer instead of in front of an audience as an actress. That way, she could slog quietly until she was good and then everyone would think she was a genius.
After studying English Literature at Edinburgh University, Emma moved to London and did an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway. She also worked part time at Toby Eady Associates literary agency, where she was taught the ropes of publishing by the kindly green-tea-drinking folks there.
After her masters, she moved to Western Australia. From there, she sent Toby Eady Associates her finished novel, and then nearly swallowed her own tongue in anticipation. Luckily, they liked it, and after drinking much champagne, Emma worked on the novel with them for a further two years. (From the publishers and the author's website.)
Book Reviews
This novel surely belongs within that subgenre of Gothic literature associated with the persecuted woman…But How to Be a Good Wife is distinguished from the typical tale of the persecuted woman by its absence of Gothic shadows. Here all is white. The house is spotless; the outside world is blanketed in snow; the sky is cloudless. The effect is to heighten the horror. There is darkness, but it resides within Marta's sick mind. More crucially, Chapman has written Marta's story with a brilliant twist: it can be read either as a descent into insanity or as the tale of a woman severely psychologically traumatized…Chapman's accomplishment is to confine us so closely within poor Marta's nightmare that no certain reading of her experience is possible.
Patrick McGrath - New York Times Book Review
[C]hilling.... Cracks begin to appear in Marta’s formerly comfortable life.... As she examines more closely what’s beneath her family’s habits and some of her own memories, she becomes certain that she has uncovered a terrible dark truth that—if she reveals it—will tear their lives apart. Despite a far-fetched conclusion, Chapman excels at creating tension and suspense.
Publishers Weekly
In an unnamed Scandinavian village, Marta lives a claustrophobic life with her controlling husband, Hector. Her son is grown, her nest empty, and her husband's solution to her increasingly dark and unsettling moods are the little pink pills he forces upon her each day. In an act of rebellion, Marta stops taking the pills and begins to experience startling flashbacks and increasing waves of anger and suspicion. Are they the result of drug withdrawal, or is she remembering another life, before Hector?
Library Journal
[C]lever chiller.... Marta stopped taking her medication after her son left home and is being visited by a series of images—or are they repressed memories?... Although some may find the ambiguous ending frustrating, others will be drawn into this claustrophobic examination of the meaning of marriage. —Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist
A mad housewife learns that her problems may not all be imaginary in Chapman's disquieting debut.... [T]he twist that propels expectations in a whole new direction is masterfully wrought. However, the outcome...will leave readers, particularly feminists and/or victims' advocates, very dissatisfied indeed. Gripping but rather implausible.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What were your first impressions of Marta? Did you like her as a character? Did your impressions of her change throughout the book?
2. What did you think was the significance of the setting of the novel? Why do you think it is specifically unnamed?
3. Hector is an ambiguous character throughout the book. Did your views of him change as the book progressed?
4. Marta can be considered an unreliable narrator. Were there moments in the book when you didn’t trust her? Why?
5. A book Marta was given as a wedding gift left a lasting impression on her. Why do you think she played by the ‘rules’ according to the book?
6. Do you think Marta’s interpretations of events were correct?
7. Can you see things from Hector’s side? Who did you believe?
8. The ending of the novel is ambiguous. Did you think this was the right ending for Marta?
9. The novel examines three generations of women from the same family. Do you think it raises larger questions about what it is to be a woman and to fulfill certain roles?
10. If so, how did you respond to the questions it raised? Do you think the writer has an opinion on how the questions should be answered?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The People in the Trees
Hanya Yanagihara, 2013
Knopf Doubleday
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385536776
Summary
An anthropological adventure story that combines the visceral allure of a thriller with a profound and tragic vision of what happens when cultures collide. It is a book that instantly catapults Hanya Yanagihara into the company of young novelists who really, really matter.
In 1950, a young doctor called Norton Perina signs on with the anthropologist Paul Tallent for an expedition to the remote Micronesian island of Ivu'ivu in search of a rumored lost tribe. They succeed, finding not only that tribe but also a group of forest dwellers they dub "The Dreamers," who turn out to be fantastically long-lived but progressively more senile.
Perina suspects the source of their longevity is a hard-to-find turtle; unable to resist the possibility of eternal life, he kills one and smuggles some meat back to the States. He scientifically proves his thesis, earning worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize, but he soon discovers that its miraculous property comes at a terrible price. As things quickly spiral out of his control, his own demons take hold, with devastating personal consequences. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1974-75
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Raised—in New York City, Baltimore, states of Texas and Hawaii
• Education—B.A., Smith College
• Awards—Man Booker Prize (long-list)
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Hanya Yanagihara is an American novelist and travel writer of Hawaiian ancestry. Her first novel, The People in the Trees, based on the real-life case of the virologist Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, was widely praised as one of the best novels of 2013.
In 2015, her second novel, A Little Life was published, also to highly favorable reviews—and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Yanagihara was also an editor-at-large at Conde Nast Traveler. She is now a deputy editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/1/2015.)
Book Reviews
From the start, [Yanagihara] sets her narrative dial to creepy, and challenges to the extreme the notion that a protagonist needs to be "likable." Yet thanks to her rich, masterly prose, it's hard to turn away from Dr. Norton Perina, her antihero…Provocative and bleak, The People in the Trees might leave readers conflicted. It is exhaustingly inventive and almost defiant in its refusal to offer redemption or solace—but that is arguably one of its virtues. This is perhaps less a novel to love than to admire for its sheer audacity. As for Yanagihara, she is a writer to marvel at.
Carmela Ciudraru - New York Times Book Review
The People in the Trees is a haunting story of moral absolutes confounded by a seemingly empirical understanding of the merciless caprices of nature...A standout novel, a debut as thrilling as it is disturbing.
Wall Street Journal
A work of medical science fiction involving magic turtle meat, pedophilia, a not particularly likable main character, and a convoluted structure—two unreliable narrators—might sound unpromising. But Yanagihara...is like a chef who manages to whip up a divine dish from an unlikely combination of ingredients. Her storytelling is masterful.
Boston Globe
The People in the Trees is a multi-layered novel. It provokes discussions about science, morality and our obsession with youth. But it's also a deeply satisfying adventure story with a horrifying conclusion."
Chicago Tribune
(Starred review.) Driven by Yanagihara's gorgeously complete imaginary ethnography...[and] her brilliantly detestable narrator, this debut novel is compelling on every level—morally, aesthetically, and narratively. Yanagihara balances pulpy adventure tale excitement with serious consideration.... Without making him a simple villain, Yanagihara shows how Perina's extraordinary circumstances allow his smothered weaknesses to blossom horribly.
Publishers Weekly
Haruf made his name with the heartfelt Plainsong, a best seller and a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. The subsequent Eventide, also a best seller, revisited Plainsong's setting, high-plains Holt, CO. Haruf again returns to Holt but with a new cast, among them Dad Lewis, dying of cancer and comforted by his wife and daughter though
Library Journal
Yanagihara does everything she can to establish verisimilitude in this novel, so much so that the reader will be Googling names of characters to see if they're "really real."... Yanagihara presents a cautionary tale about what can happen when Western arrogance meets primeval culture.
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.