The Obituary Writer
Ann Hood, 2013
W.W. Norton & Co.
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393081428
Summary
A sophisticated and suspenseful novel about the poignant lives of two women living in different eras.
On the day John F. Kennedy is inaugurated, Claire, an uncompromising young wife and mother obsessed with the glamour of Jackie O, struggles over the decision of whether to stay in a loveless marriage or follow the man she loves and whose baby she may be carrying.
Decades earlier, in 1919, Vivien Lowe, an obituary writer, is searching for her lover who disappeared in the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. By telling the stories of the dead, Vivien not only helps others cope with their grief but also begins to understand the devastation of her own terrible loss. The surprising connection between Claire and Vivien will change the life of one of them in unexpected and extraordinary ways.
Part literary mystery and part love story, The Obituary Writer examines expectations of marriage and love, the roles of wives and mothers, and the emotions of grief, regret, and hope. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1956
• Where—West Warwick, Rhode Island, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Rhode Island; graduate studies, New York University
• Awards—Pushcart Prize (twice); Best American Spiritual Writing Award; Paul Bowles
Prize for Short Fiction
• Currently—lives in Providence, Rhode Island
Ann Hood is an American novelist and short story writer; she has also written nonfiction. The author of thirteen books, her essays and short stories have appeared in many journals and magazines, including the Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Tin House. Hood is a regular contributor to the New York Times "Home Economics" column.
Hood is the winner of a number of awards: Paul Bowles Prize for Short Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Best American Spiritual Writing Award. She is a faculty member in the MFA in Creative Writing program at The New School in New York City. She lives in Providence with her husband and their children.
Early Years
Hood was born in West Warwick, Rhode Island and earned her BA in English from the University of Rhode Island. After college she worked for the now-defunct airlines TWA as a flight attendant, living in Boston and Saint Louis and later moving to New York City. She attended graduate school at New York University, studying American Literature.
Hood began writing her first novel Somewhere Off The Coast Of Maine in 1983 while working as a flight attendant—and while attending graduate school—writing whenever she could during train rides to JFK airport or in the galleys of the airplane while passengers slept. During a furlough from the airline, she worked at the Spring Street Bookstore in Soho and Tony Roma's while writing Somewhere Off The Coast Of Maine.
Like much of her work, the novel draws upon her own life. Hood says the book began as a series of short stories about three women who went to college together in the 1960s. A year earlier, her older brother, Skip, died in a freak accident and Hood was struggling with how to cope with the loss. At a writer’s conference, Hood was convinced by the writer Nicholas Delbanco that she was really writing a novel, and from there she began to connect the stories. The book was published in 1987.
Hood’s flight attendant career ended in 1986 when TWA went on strike and the flight attendants found themselves soon “replaced.” With more time to devote to writing, her stories and essays began to appear in Mademoiselle, Redbook, Story, Self, Glamour, New Woman, among others.
Personal life
Hood lives with her husband, businessman Lorne Adrain, her teenage son Sam and her daughter Annabelle in Providence, Rhode Island.
On April 18, 2002, Hood's five-year-old daughter, Grace, died from a virulent form of strep. For two years Hood found herself unable to write or even read. She took solace in learning to knit and in knitting groups. She gradually made her way back to her craft, writing short essays about Grace and grief.
To make sense of her own grief, in fall of 2004 Hood began to write her novel The Knitting Circle, about a woman whose five-year-old daughter dies from meningitis. The woman joins a knitting group of others also struggling to heal from loss. Hood’s best-selling memoir Comfort: A Journey Through Grief chronicles her own struggle after her daughter’s sudden death. That memoir was named one of the top ten non-fiction books of 2008 by Entertainment Weekly and was a New York Times Editor's Choice.
The summer after Grace died, Hood and Adrain decided to adopt a child and in 2005 traveled to China, where they adopted Annabelle. Hood’s experience adopting in China became the inspiration for her 2010 novel The Red Thread, which follows a woman struggling with the accidental death of her young daughter. The woman, Maya Lange, begins an adoption agency for Chinese babies.
Work
Hood’s short story "Total Cave Darkness," about an alcoholic woman who runs away with a Protestant minister nine years younger than she is, appeared in the Paris Review in 2000. It is also the opening story in her collection of stories An Ornithologist's Guide To Life. The title story of that collection appeared in Glimmer Train in 2004 and revolves around a young girl who slowly discovers her mother is having an affair with their neighbor. Her stories have also appeared in Tin House, Ploughshares, Good Housekeeping, Story, Five Points, and others.
In addition to Somewhere Off The Coast of Maine, The Knitting Circle, and The Red Thread, Hood has written seven other novels: The Obituary Writer (2013) Waiting To Vanish (1988), Three-Legged Horse (1989), Something Blue (1991), Places To Stay The Night (1993), The Properties of Water (Doubleday), and Ruby (1998).
Hood, in addition to her memoir, has written an addition work of nonfiction: Do Not Go Gentle: My Search For Miracles in a Cynical Time (1999) follows Hood’s travels to Chimayo, New Mexico in search of a miracle cure for her father’s lung cancer. The dirt at El Santuario de Chimayo, a Roman Catholic church, is believed to have healing properties and thousands flock to the site each year. Her father’s tumor did disappear, but he later died from complications from chemotherapy. Hood initially wrote about this experience in an essay for Doubletake magazine. That essay went on to win a Pushcart Prize. Hood’s editor at Picador urged her to turn it into a book. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Pushcart Prize winner Hood (Red Thread) artfully blends two stories that converge in an emotional, poignant ending. Vivien Lowe is an obituary writer in San Francisco obsessed with finding her lover, lost in the 1906 earthquake.... Meanwhile, decades into the future, privileged housewife Claire is bored with her marriage to Peter.... Claire attends the 80th birthday party of her formidable mother-in-law, Birdie. Birdie's illness at the party unites the lives of Vivien and Claire, and their astonishing connection is revealed. Verdict: A well-constructed story.... —Donna Bettencourt, Mesa County Libs., Grand Junction, CO
Library Journal
Connections between an unhappy wife in the Kennedy era and an independent obituarist in early-20th-century California are artfully if predictably spliced in the latest from Hood (The Red Thread, 2010, etc.).... As President John F. Kennedy is inaugurated, [Claire] is both preoccupied with the color of Jackie's outfit and skeptical about her marriage.... In a parallel narrative set on the West Coast in 1919, we meet Vivien Lowe, who, as an obituary writer, has learned to "speak the language of grief" and is in love with a ghost.... A crisis involving Peter's 80-year-old mother, Birdy, leads to the settlement of all the women's fates. Hood's fluent storytelling and empathy will ensure popularity, but her heroines' destinies are devoid of surprises.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The Obituary Writer takes place in two different eras. Describe some of the period details in the novel that help bring these two different eras to life. How has the world changed between 1919 and 1961, and how has it stayed the same? In what ways are Claire and Vivian defined by the eras in which they live?
2. Claire fixates on the inauguration of John F. Kennedy and, in particular, on the glamour of Jackie Kennedy. Why do you think Claire is so interested in Jackie? What does the myth of the Kennedys represent to Claire?
3. What is it about the disappearance of Dougie Daniels that causes Claire to reexamine her own life?
4. What do Claire and Vivian have in common as characters? Who is stronger, and who is weaker? What kind of strength does each possess?
5. Vivian loses a lover. Lotte loses a child. Peter loses his mother. Describe the different ways in which the characters in the novel experience loss.
6. Love takes both women by surprise. What does Claire’s love affair with Miles have in common with Vivian’s affair with David? How do they differ?
7. The “Claire” chapters of the novel all begin with epigraphs from Emily Post. What role do manners, etiquette, and the expectations of society have to play in the novel?
8. What does Vivian have to teach Claire, in the end? What has Vivian’s life taught her, and what wisdom does she impart?
9. Vivian says of grief, “It never really goes away, it just changes shape.” How has Vivian’s grief changed shape over the course of her life?
10. In the end, Claire asks Vivian the same question that Vivian has asked so many strangers: “Tell me about your loved one.” Do both women help each other to move on in the end?
11. In listening to mourners and telling the stories of their loved ones, Vivian finds a way of processing her own terrible loss. In your own life, do you find that sharing stories helps people process emotion and come to terms with grief? Does hearing the stories of others help?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Frances and Bernard
Carlene Bauer, 2013
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
195 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780544105171
Summary
A letter can spark a friendship. . . A friendship can change your life.
In the summer of 1957, Frances and Bernard meet at an artists’ colony. She finds him faintly ridiculous, but talented. He sees her as aloof, but intriguing. Afterward, he writes her a letter. Soon they are immersed in the kind of fast, deep friendship that can take over—and change the course of—our lives.
From points afar, they find their way to New York and, for a few whirling years, each other. The city is a wonderland for young people with dreams: cramped West Village kitchens, rowdy cocktail parties stocked with the sharp-witted and glamorous, taxis that can take you anywhere at all, long talks along the Hudson River as the lights of the Empire State Building blink on above.
Inspired by the lives of Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell, Frances and Bernard imagines, through new characters with charms entirely their own, what else might have happened. It explores the limits of faith, passion, sanity, what it means to be a true friend, and the nature of acceptable sacrifice. In the grandness of the fall, can we love another person so completely that we lose ourselves? How much should we give up for those we love? How do we honor the gifts our loved ones bring and still keep true to our dreams?
In witness to all the wonder of kindred spirits and bittersweet romance, Frances and Bernard is a tribute to the power of friendship and the people who help us discover who we are. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1973
• Where—state of New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Loyala College; M.A., Johns Hopkins University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Carlene Bauer was born in 1973 in New Jersey. She earned an M.A. in Nonfiction Writing from the Johns Hopkins University's Writing Seminars, and has worked in and around New York publishing for this last long while. Her work has been published in the Village Voice, Salon, Elle, New York Times Magazine, and on the website of n + 1. She lives and writes in Brooklyn, and hopes that you don't hold that against her. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
A story of conversion, shattered love and the loss of faith, recalling 20th century masters like Graham Greene and Walker Percy…Frances is refreshingly down-to-earth in her spiritual convictions…Bauer gets right… the shifting balance of literary ambition and emotional need, Yeats’s old choice between perfection of the life or of the work. Bauer is herself a distinctive stylist who can write about Simone Weil or Kierkegaard with wit and charm. A fresh voice thinking seriously about what a religiously committed life might have felt like and perhaps, in our own far-from tranquil period, might feel like again
Christopher Benfey - New York Times Book Review
As Frances and Bernard explore the big questions about faith and a life dedicated to others versus one’s art, their correspondence grows enervatingly self-involved.... The writing has moments of quietly bracing insight, as these two fiercely particular individuals attempt to navigate the other.... It seems a pity that having taken on such potentially rich literary personalities, Ms. Bauer so stringently limits her own scope. The book’s pleasures do not, in the end, compensate for its timidity. Frances and Bernard remains, unlike its protagonists, entirely well behaved.
Claudia La Rocco - New York Times
Bauer…writes with authority and gusto about issues of faith. The prose here is exquisite, winding between narrative momentum and lofty introspection. And she employs the epistolary form nimbly, providing an intimate, uncluttered space for her characters to develop. The most unexpected pleasure of this period love story is spending time in the company of people who are engaged in the edifying pursuit of living as Christians—a good reminder that, regardless of the current upheaval in the church, the big questions are still worth asking.
Teresa Link - Washington Post
Graceful and gem-like …. Through Bauer’s sharp, witty, and elegant prose , [Frances and Bernard] become vibrant and original characters …. These are not your typical lovebirds, but writers with fierce and fine intellects.… We are reminded of the power of correspondence — the flirtation of it, the nervousness, the delicious uncertainty of writing bold things and then waiting days, weeks, or even months for a reply. After finishing this sweet and somber novel, we might sigh and think, "It's a shame we don’t write love letters anymore"— before stopping for a moment to marvel at the subtlety of what Bauer has wrought out of history and a generous imagination, and being thankful that someone still is.
Boston Globe
(3 stars.) Bauer's first novel is a moving tale about kindred spirits… It showcases an era in which literature and intellect were celebrated; its epistolary form lends itself to a delightful exchange of ideas as the protagonists dance with the possibility of love—and face its disappointments.
People
(Starred review.) Frances and Bernard are writers. She’s a novelist who studied at Iowa, Catholic, a bit prim, but tart-tongued. He’s a poet, descended from Puritans but a convert to Catholicism, prone to fits of mania. They meet in the late 1950s in a writer’s colony and become friends. If this sounds like Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell, it should: Frances and Bernard are their fictionalized avatars.... Bauer’s debut novel (after her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl) is well written, engrossing, and succeeds in making Frances and Bernard’s shared interest in religion believable and their relationship funny, sweet, and sad. A lovely surprise.
Publishers Weekly
In the late 1950s, over the course of one long lunch at a writer's workshop, Frances and Bernard begin a journey of love and loss. They banter about writing and the workshop's limitations, and, while falling in love, they struggle with the meaning of religion and the nature of friendship. In the end, their relationship is tested to the limits when Bernard suffers a manic episode.... This remarkable method of storytelling provides snapshots of the events that shape the story. —Joanna M. Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Lib., Providence
Library Journal
[A] debut novel of stunning subtlety, grace, and depth...Bauer’s use of the epistolary form is masterful as she forges a passionately spiritual, creative, and romantic dialogue between characters based on two literary giants famous for their brilliant letters, Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell.... They begin as friends sharing their thoughts and feelings about the church and writing and gradually, cautiously on Frances’ part, venture into love.... Bauer is phenomenally fluent...composing dueling letters of breathtaking wit, seduction, and heartbreak.
Booklist
Debut novelist Bauer pens an epistolary novel whose protagonists lead insular, self-absorbed and very dull lives..... There's no doubt Bauer is well-educated and passionate about her religious views, her love of literature and her characters, but her attempts to create stimulating spiritual and intellectual dialogue feel forced. The characters are too wrapped up in themselves and totally ignore anything outside their narrow personal spheres. How can they not once mention one word about the space race, Elvis, the Beatles, JFK's assassination or Vietnam (just to name a few of the social and political events that occurred) during their 11 years of correspondence? Disappointing.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Authors often quote other authors to create a touchstone that hooks the reader. Bauer quotes Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “So, I have written you a love letter, oh, my God, what have I done!” What questions does this quotation cause you to ask? What have you ever done that would spark a similar reaction?
2. In an interview conducted by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Bauer explained why she chose to write Frances and Bernard in an epistolary format:
After a draft using the third person omniscient, I had the realization that if I wrote the novel in letters, the book would consist of two very strong voices in a struggle and you would feel the struggle more keenly, I hope, because of the intimacy of the form.
Do you agree with Bauer’s rationale? Are letters more personal?
3. While the novel transitions between Frances and Bernard’s letters, the author also develops other characters. What do these other letters allow Bauer to create? How would the story have been different if Bauer had provided only the letters between Frances and Bernard?
4. Bauer’s catalyst for this book was a “What if... ?” notion. Robert Lowell (Bernard) did meet Flannery O’Connor (Frances) at a writing conference; however, Bauer’s novel is fictional except for a few fleeting moments. Bauer has said she “borrowed quite a bit of their temperaments and views.” Knowing that these two authors actually met, does the extrapolation of their love story seem more real and plausible? How much truth did Bauer weave into the letters? Research the life of Lowell and O’Connor. Are there other moments in their lives that add verisimilitude to the fictional account?
5. After Francis and Bernard meet at a writers’ colony, they each tell a friend about their impression of the other. What do you think of Frances’s impression of Bernard? What is Bernard’s first impression of Frances? What do these first impressions foreshadow? How important are first impressions?
6. Bernard’s first letter to Frances is short, but he does ask one profound question: Who is the Holy Spirit to you?” If you had to pick a topic to discuss with someone you would like to know better, what topic would you choose? Why?
7 If this situation had occurred today instead of in the 1950s, how might the novel have been different? The same? What significant developments would alter the pace and mood?
8. In one of his early letters Bernard writes,
In January a man crawls into a cave of hopelessness; he hallucinates sympathies catching fire. Letters are glaciers, null frigates, trapping us where we are in the moment, unable to carry us on toward truth.
What do you think of Bernard’s thought? What paradox is created? How would technology today change this perspective?
9. Bernard and Frances begin an exchange comparing the literature they read as children. What do these titles reveal about them? Compare their lists with what you read as a child. How are the lists different? Why?
10. After seven and a half months, Bernard closes his letter with “Love (may I), Bernard.” Is his declaration made too soon? How long does it take Frances to express her love? What do the timing and format of the declarations say about each character?
11. “I can’t even teach! I had to, when I was at Iowa, but I was not very good at hiding my displeasure at mental sleepiness and mediocrity” (39). Compare past and present ideas about education, students, and learning. How has education changed? Are students better prepared today? Are students more or less interested in learning?
12. After a visit to Frances, Bernard writes a short letter with this final line: “Please do not ever disappear from me” (47). What do you think of Bernard’s plea? Is it sincere? Desperate?
13. Bernard writes,
I can’t stand mysteries. In the same way I can’t stand science fiction. Why pretend we’re somewhere else? Forensics is a feint. Why distract ourselves from the eternal questions with set dressing? Salad dressing (86).
Do you agree with Bernard’s assessment of these types of literature? What type of literature do you think is most rewarding? Why?
14. Bernard tells Francis,
Your face says so much in so little time, you let everything you’re thinking bloom upon your face, and I can’t think of anything else I’d rather watch than you pass through five moods in five minutes. What glorious weather (87).
Would you take these comments as a compliment or an insult? Explain.
15. Claire tells Frances she is the “last stanza of Keat’s ode—Cold Pastoral—when you should be lolling around at the first—Wild Ecstasy (121). Read “Ode to a Grecian Urn” by Keats. What do you think of Claire’s comparison? What is she telling Frances about love? Do you agree?.
16. Why does Frances doubt Bernard’s love for her? Is it something about Frances? Is she correct to be wary about Bernard’s love?
17. How is the theme of unrequited love relevant to the lives of Frances and Bernard? Are there other stories of unrequited love you could compare to Frances and Bernard? How are they similar? Different?
18. Perhaps nothing is more tragic than a love filled with regret. How is love like this for Frances? For Bernard? Is their inability to finally love each other just a matter of timing, or do you think they were never destined to be together?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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The Interestings
Meg Wolitzer, 2013
Penguin Group USA
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594632341
Summary
From bestselling author Meg Wolitzer a dazzling, panoramic novel about what becomes of early talent, and the roles that art, money, and even envy can play in close friendships.
The summer that Nixon resigns, six teenagers at a summer camp for the arts become inseparable. Decades later the bond remains powerful, but so much else has changed. In The Interestings, Wolitzer follows these characters from the height of youth through middle age, as their talents, fortunes, and degrees of satisfaction diverge.
The kind of creativity that is rewarded at age fifteen is not always enough to propel someone through life at age thirty; not everyone can sustain, in adulthood, what seemed so special in adolescence. Jules Jacobson, an aspiring comic actress, eventually resigns herself to a more practical occupation and lifestyle. Her friend Jonah, a gifted musician, stops playing the guitar and becomes an engineer. But Ethan and Ash, Jules’s now-married best friends, become shockingly successful—true to their initial artistic dreams, with the wealth and access that allow those dreams to keep expanding. The friendships endure and even prosper, but also underscore the differences in their fates, in what their talents have become and the shapes their lives have taken.
Wide in scope, ambitious, and populated by complex characters who come together and apart in a changing New York City, The Interestings explores the meaning of talent; the nature of envy; the roles of class, art, money, and power; and how all of it can shift and tilt precipitously over the course of a friendship and a life (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 28. 1959
• Where—Brooklyn, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University
• Awards—National Endowment for the Arts grant, 1994; Best
American Short Stories, 1999; Pushcart Prize; 1998
• Currently—New York, New York
Meg Wolitzer grew up around books. Her mother, Hilma Wolitzer, published two novels while Meg was still in school, and weekly trips to the library were a ritual the entire family looked forward to. Not surprisingly, Meg served as editor for her junior high and high school literary magazines.
She graduated from Brown University in 1981. One year later, she published her debut novel, Sleepwalking, the story of three college girls bonded by an unhealthy fascination with suicidal women poets. It marked the beginning of a successful writing career that shows no sign of slacking.
Over the years, Wolitzer has proven herself a deft chronicler of intense, unconventional relationships, especially among women. She has explored with wit and sensitivity the dynamics of fractured families (This Is Your Life, The Position); the devastating effects of death (Surrender, Dorothy), the challenges of friendship (Friends for Life), and the prospective minefield of gender, identity, and dashed expectations (Hidden Pictures, The Wife, The Ten-Year Nap, The Interestings).
In addition to her bestselling novels, Wolitzer has written a number of screenplays. Her short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize, and she has also taught writing at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and at Skidmore College.
Extras
From a Barnes & Noble interview:
• First of all, I am obsessed with playing Scrabble. It relaxes me between fits of writing, and I play online, in a bizarro world of anonymous, competitive players. It's my version of smoking or drinking—a guilty pleasure. The thing is, I love words, anagrams, wordplay, cryptic crossword puzzles, and anything to do with the language.
• I also love children's books, and feel a great deal of nostalgia for some of them from my own childhood (Harriet the Spy and The Phantom Tollbooth among others) as well as from my children's current lives. I have an idea for a kids' book that I might do someday, though right now my writing schedule is full up.
• Humor is very important to me in life and work. I take pleasure from laughing at movies, and crying at books, and sometimes vice versa. I also have recently learned that I like performing. I think that writers shouldn't get up at a reading and give a dull, chant-like reading from their book. They should perform; they should do what they need to do to keep readers really listening. I've lately had the opportunity to do some performing on public radio, as well as singing with a singer I admire, Suzzy Roche, formerly of the Roches, a great group that started in 1979. Being onstage provides a dose of gratification that most writers never get to experience.
• But mostly, writing a powerful novel—whether funny or serious, or of course both—is my primary goal. When I hear that readers have been affected by something I've written, it's a relief. I finally have come to no longer fear that I'm going to have to go to law school someday....
• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here is her response:
Mrs. Bridge by Evan S. Connell—this is the perfect modern novel. Short, concise, moving, and about a character you come to care about, despite her limitations. It reminds me of life. It takes place over a span of time, and it's hilarious, tragic, and always stirring.
Book Reviews
[The Interestings] soars, primarily because Wolitzer insists on taking our teenage selves seriously and, rather than coldly satirizing them, comes at them with warm humor and adult wisdom.
Elle
You’ll want to be friends with these characters long after you put down the book.
Marie Claire
[A] big, juicy novel.... Wolitzer’s finger is unerringly on the pulse of our social culture.
Readers Digest
In the “nefarious, thoroughly repulsive” summer of 1974, 15-year-old Julie Jacobson, “an outsider and possibly even a freak” from the suburbs, gets a scholarship to an arts camp and falls in with a group of kids—the aptly self-named “Interestings.” Talented, attractive, and from New York City, to Julie they are “like royalty and French movie stars.” There Julie, renamed Jules, finds her place, and Wolitzer her story: the gap between promise and genuine talent, the bonds and strains of long friendships, and the journey from youth to middle age, with all its compromises, secrets, lies, and disparities.... While Wolitzer is adept at switching between past and present, and showing the different fears that dog Jules at different ages, the problem is that the Interestings are never quite as interesting as this 464-page look at them requires them to be.
Publishers Weekly
Wolitzer's latest novel follows a group of creative types from the beginning of their friendship as teenagers through middle age. Hipsters before their time, they dub themselves The Interestings, in an effort at pretentious irony.... Verdict: The novel skips back and forth, revealing information about each member of the group and covering their triumphs and tragedies over the course of the years. Ultimately, the work hits its own ironic note: Julie's successful and creative friends are far more normal than she'd ever realized. This is certain to attract readers of literary and smart women's fiction. —Mara Dabrishus, Ursuline Coll. Lib., Pepper Pike, OH
Library Journal
Wolitzer follows a group of friends from adolescence at an artsy summer camp in 1974 through adulthood and into late-middle age as their lives alternately intersect, diverge and reconnect. Middle-class suburban Julie becomes Jules when a group of more sophisticated kids from Manhattan include her in their clique at Camp Spirit-in-the-Woods in upstate New York.... After this first idyllic summer, the novel cuts to 2009 when Jules, now living a modest middle-class life as a therapist married to a medical technician....tries not to envy her friend's success. Secrets are kept for decades among the six "Interestings"; resentments are nursed; loyalties are tested with mixed results. Ambitious and involving, capturing the zeitgeist of the liberal intelligentsia of the era.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Think about how talent is presented in the book. In your opinion, is it something you are born with or something you work hard to achieve? What is Meg Wolitzer saying about early talent? How is it important to future success? What roles do money and class play in fostering talent? Think about Jules and Ash. How does money influence the trajectories of their lives?
2. Jealousy is referred to in the book as being “I want what you have,” whereas envy is “I want what you have, but I also want to take it away so you can’t have it.” Who is jealous in this book? Who is envious? Can jealousy become envy? How is envy tied up in issues like talent and money?
3. Single parents, lost parents, and absent parents play a role in this novel. In what ways do the families the characters were born into shape their futures? Ash and Goodman are the only characters to come from an intact nuclear family that is able to provide for all their needs. Do you think this is necessarily a good thing for Goodman? What about Ash?
4. Despite the well–quoted sentiment that “you can’t go home again,” Jules tries to return to the place that felt like her spiritual, emotional, and artistic home. Are there circumstances in life in which you can go home again successfully? Is Jules foolish to give up her current life for something much more uncertain? What positive changes does the experience bring?
5. Despite how much she wants to, Jules cannot make herself fall in love with Ethan. Do you wish she were able to? Do you think Jules wishes she could? What about Ethan?
6. Ethan is one of the most noble characters in the book, and yet he has trouble reconciling his son’s condition and lies to Ash to avoid going to Mo’s evaluation. How does Ethan’s ambivalence about Mo change the way you feel about him? How do you feel about Jules’s complicity in his deception?
7. The shift from the seventies to the eighties to the current moment is an important one depicted in the book. What do you think Meg Wolitzer is trying to say about art and how art is sold? How does the commoditization of art change the role of the artist? Was the art of the seventies as pure as it seemed to the creators? The Wunderlichs remain true to an even earlier version of what art should be. What are the positives of that vision? What are its limits?
8. What role does geography play in the book? Think about the different spaces and homes represented: Manhattan, Underhill, Spirit–in–the–Woods. What do they say about the people who live in them? Think about Jules’s own feelings about her mother’s home in Underhill compared with the Wolfs’ home in Manhattan. What do those two spaces mean to her?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat
Edward Kelsey Moore, 20013
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307959928
Summary
Meet Odette, Clarice, and Barbara Jean.
Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat is home away from home for this inseparable Plainview, Indiana, trio. Dubbed “the Supremes” by high school pals in the tumultuous 1960s, they weather life’s storms together for the next four decades. Now, during their most challenging year yet, dutiful, proud, and talented Clarice must struggle to keep up appearances as she deals with her husband’s humiliating infidelities. Beautiful, fragile Barbara Jean is rocked by the tragic reverberations of a youthful love affair. And fearless Odette engages in the most terrifying battle of her life while contending with the idea that she has inherited more than her broad frame from her notorious pot-smoking mother, Dora.
Through marriage, children, happiness, and the blues, these strong, funny women gather each Sunday at the same table at Earl’s diner for delicious food, juicy gossip, occasional tears, and uproarious banter.
With wit and love, style and sublime talent, Edward Kelsey Moore brings together four intertwined love stories, three devoted allies, and two sprightly earthbound spirits in a big-hearted debut novel that embraces the lives of people you will never forget. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1960-61
• Where—state of Indiana, USA
• Education—B.M., Indiana University; M.M., State
University of New York-Stony Brook
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois
Edward Kelsey Moore is an American musician and author. He received a Bachelor of Music degree from Indiana University, and a Master of Music degree from the State University of New York at Stony Brook; his teachers included renowned cellists Janos Starker and Bernard Greenhouse.
Music career
For more than two decades,Moore has been a professional musician performing with a number of midwestern orchestras, including the Chicago Sinfonietta, the Chicago Philharmonic, and the Joffrey Ballet Orchestra. He is also principal cellist of the New Black Music Repertory Ensemble. He has played on many recordings, and toured nationally and internationally. In addition to performing, he has been a popular professor of music, training and nurturing a new generation of cello players.
Writing career
During Moore's high school years, and onward into college, he experimented with writing short stories. As he finished his education, he set writing aside and focused on building a career in music. Many years later, as a member of a string quartet, Edward was hired to perform at a reception for the winners of a local writing contest. As he played background music Edward considered: "I could have sent in a story..." It was an inspiring event and within a few weeks he began writing again.
His short fiction has been published in many literary magazines including Indiana Review, African American Review, and Inkwell. His short story "Grandma and the Elusive Fifth Crucifix" was selected as an audience favorite from the Stories on Stage series produced by WBEZ in Chicago. It was broadcast locally, and over National Public Radio. The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat is Moore's debut novel, and he is currently writing his second book. (From the author's website.)
Read interview at BookPage.
Book Reviews
Edward Kelsey Moore knows how to write a terrific, complex, believable, and always intriguing story.
Zetta Brown - New York Journal of Books
Funny and tenderhearted...Moore expertly combines tragedy and comedy in a way that feels fluid and natural, creating a world that is internally consistent and rich.... Perhaps the most remarkable quality of The Supremes is love—the author’s love for his characters, even the most flawed, shines from every page.
Ilana Teitelbaum - Shelf Awareness
The indefatigable trio of Barbara Jean, Clarice, and Odette (known as "The Supremes" since high school) churns the small community of Plainview, Indiana into a Southern-fried tailspin this debut from Moore, a professional cellist. Each of the central characters brings unique challenges to the tables at Earl’s diner: Odette battles cancer while her pothead mother communicates with famous ghosts; Clarice tries to salvage a crumbling marriage with her cheating husband; and beautiful Barbara Jean, who married for money, drinks to forget a youthful affair and her dead son. In a booth at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat, a short walk from Calvary Baptist Church, these women lay bare their passions, shortfalls, and dramas.... Moore’s take on this rowdy troupe of outspoken, lovable women has its own distinctive pluck.
Publishers Weekly
In the mid-Sixties, three black teenage friends—Odette, Clarice, and Barbara Jean—start meeting at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat, the first black-owned business in Plainview, IN. Watched over by Earl, they keep meeting there for 40 years. Comparisons to The Help, Waiting To Exhale, and Fried Green Tomatoes....
Library Journal
[T]hree close friends from Plainview, Ind., who, from their adolescence to their maturity, meet to gossip and consolidate their friendship at a local eatery....and they began calling themselves—and being called by others—the Supremes. The novel opens some 40 years after their salad days.... Through both Odette's narrative and a more neutral third-person perspective, we learn of the trio's personal problems and the rise and fall of their relationships. .... Throughout the Supremes' intertwined stories is one constant—meeting and eating at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat, now run by his son Little Earl, a place where relationships are forged, scandals are aired and copious amounts of chicken are consumed. A novel of strong women, evocative memories and deep friendship.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. According to the author...
The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat is rooted in the fond memories I have of a childhood spent eavesdropping on the women of my family as they talked at family gatherings. Even when I was too young to fully understand the often very adult subject matter of their conversations, I was struck by how quickly the topics veered from heartbreakingly tragic to wildly hilarious.... My intention in writing The Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat was to celebrate the joy of true friendship and to invite readers to remember the smart, funny and strong women in their lives.
Do you think Eward Kelsey Moore has accomplished what he set out to do? Does he, a man, convey the feelings of women accurately and convincingly? In what ways is he especially knowing about women’s feelings?
2. Odette was born in a sycamore tree. Barbara Jean was born on the wrong side of the tracks. Clarice was the first black baby to be born in an all-white hospital. How do the circumstances of each woman’s birth shape her choices as adult? Their interactions with one another? Their relationships with their husbands?
3. When things get tough for the Supremes, they often see the funny side of the worst moments. Moore has a lot of fun with cousin Veronica and her donut-eating daughter. In what other instances do the Supremes use humor to help them survive?
4. Odette, Clarice, and Barbara Jean are best friends, but they’re quite different. What is a defining moment in each of their lives?
5. Commenting on “the tender considerations that came with being a member of the Supremes,” Odette says: “We overlooked each other’s flaws and treated each other well, even when we didn’t deserve it” (p. 37). What other qualities make the friendship among the three women so extraordinary? In what ways do they help one another?
6. The chapters alternate between Odette’s voice and an omniscient third-person narrator. What is the effect of this in storytelling? Why does Moore choose Odette as a narrator rather than Clarice or Barbara Jean?
7. Ghosts appear throughout the novel. What does Odette’s mother’s voice add to the story? What kind of personality comes through? In what ways does she represent a voice of wisdom, and can this be helpful or aggravating to Odette?
8. One of Dora Jackson’s beliefs is that “what we call miracles is just what’s supposed to happen. We either go with it or stand in its way” (p.296). What seemingly miraculous events occur in the novel, and why do some characters choose to “go with it” and others “stand in [their] way”?
9. Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat is the first black-owned restaurant in Plainview, Indiana. What role does place play in the novel, and how does the diner shape the lives of the main characters?
10. The Supremes grew up in tumultuous times. How was each one of them affected by the major social changes for African Americans, as well as for women, that occurred over the course of their lives?
11. How are the men who love the Supremes—James, Richmond, Lester, and Chick—each a reflection of the woman he loves? And what does each husband give to the woman in his life that she treasures, despite his failings?
12. Why does Clarice decide not to move back in with Richmond, even after he feels they’ve patched things up? What other changes do you see in Clarice after her separation from her husband, specifically in her relationship with music and religion? Do you think she will follow her dream as a musician?
13. Do you think that after a life of hard knocks, Barbara Jean will finally find happiness with Chick? Or is she destined for more tough times ahead?
14. Whether alive or dead (or a ghost), the mothers of the Supremes play a major role in their daughters’ lives. As the Supremes grow older, how do their mothers continue to exert an influence on their adult lives? Who is hurt most by it? Who is helped by it? Who is most like her mother as she gets older?
15. Odette, Clarice, and Barbara Jean each attend three very different churches. In what ways did growing up in these particular churches help to shape them into women they ultimately became?
And the Mountains Echoed
Khaled Hosseini, 2013
Penguing Group USA
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594632389
Summary
Khaled Hosseini, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, has written a new novel about how we love, how we take care of one another, and how the choices we make resonate through generations.
In this tale revolving around not just parents and children but brothers and sisters, cousins and caretakers, Hosseini explores the many ways in which families nurture, wound, betray, honor, and sacrifice for one another; and how often we are surprised by the actions of those closest to us, at the times that matter most.
Following its characters and the ramifications of their lives and choices and loves around the globe—from Kabul to Paris to San Francisco to the Greek island of Tinos—the story expands gradually outward, becoming more emotionally complex and powerful with each turning page. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 04, 1965
• Where—Kabul, Afghanistan
• Education—B.S., Santa Clara University; M.D., University
of California, San Diego School of Medicine
• Currently—lives in northern California
Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1965. His father was a diplomat with the Afghan Foreign Ministry and his mother taught Farsi and History at a large high school in Kabul. In 1970, the Foreign Ministry sent his family to Tehran, where his father worked for the Afghan embassy. They lived in Tehran until 1973, at which point they returned to Kabul.
In July of 1973, on the night Hosseini’s youngest brother was born, the Afghan king, Zahir Shah, was overthrown in a bloodless coup by the king’s cousin, Daoud Khan. At the time, Hosseini was in fourth grade and was already drawn to poetry and prose; he read a great deal of Persian poetry as well as Farsi translations of novels ranging from Alice in Wonderland to Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer series.
In 1976, the Afghan Foreign Ministry once again relocated the Hosseini family, this time to Paris. They were ready to return to Kabul in 1980, but by then Afghanistan had already witnessed a bloody communist coup and the invasion of the Soviet army. The Hosseinis sought and were granted political asylum in the United States. In September of 1980, Hosseini’s family moved to San Jose, California. They lived on welfare and food stamps for a short while, as they had lost all of their property in Afghanistan. His father took multiple jobs and managed to get his family off welfare.
Hosseini graduated from high school in 1984 and enrolled at Santa Clara University where he earned a bachelor’s degree in Biology in 1988. The following year, he entered the University of California-San Diego’s School of Medicine, where he earned a Medical Degree in 1993. He completed his residency at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles and began practicing Internal Medicine in 1996. His first love, however, has always been writing.
In 2003, Hosseini published The Kite Runner, which became a runaway bestseller and film in 2007. He followed up with his second novel, A Thousand Splendid Suns in 2007, also a bestseller. His third novel, And the Mountians Echoed, was published in 2013.
Hosseini has vivid, and fond, memories of peaceful pre-Soviet era Afghanistan, as well as of his personal experiences with Afghan Hazaras. One Hazara in particular was a thirty-year-old man named Hossein Khan, who worked for the Hosseinis when they were living in Iran. When Hosseini was in the third grade, he taught Khan to read and write. Though his relationship with Hossein Khan was brief and rather formal, Hosseini always remembered the fondness that developed between them.
In 2006, Hosseini was named a goodwill envoy to the UNHCR, The United Nations Refugee Agency. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Extras
From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview:
• During his years in the U.S., Hosseini has soaked in more than his share of American culture. He professes to be a fan of such U.S. institutions as the music of Bruce Springsteen and football. Still, he admits that he simply cannot appreciate baseball, saying, "I think that to fully appreciate baseball, it helps to have been born in the U.S."
• When it comes to chickens, Hosseini is a chicken. "I'm terrified of chickens," the writer confesses. "Absolutely petrified. This intense and irrational fear is, I believe, caused by the memory of a black hen we owned in Kabul when I was a child. She used to peck her own chicks to death as soon as the eggs hatched."
• When Hosseini isn't writing or tending to one of his patients, he enjoys games of no-limits Texas hold 'em poker with his brother and friends.
• When asked what book most influenced him, here is what he had to say:
I remember reading The Grapes of Wrath in high school in 1983. My family had immigrated to the U.S. three years before, and I had spent the better part of the first two years learning English. John Steinbeck's book was the first book I read in English where I had an "Aha!" moment, namely in the famed turtle chapter. For some reason, I identified with the disenfranchised farm workers in that novel—I suppose in one sense, they reminded me of my own country's traumatized people. And indeed, when I went back to Afghanistan in 2003, I met people with tremendous pride and dignity under some very bleak conditions; I suspect I met a few Ma Joads and Tom Joads in Kabul.
Book Reviews
Hosseini’s third novel (after A Thousand Splendid Suns) follows a close-knit but oft-separated Afghan family through love, wars, and losses more painful than death. The story opens in 1952 in the village of Shadbagh, outside of Kabul, as a laborer, Kaboor, relates a haunting parable of triumph and loss to his son, Abdullah. The novel’s core, however, is the sale for adoption of the Kaboor’s three-year-old daughter, Pari, to the wealthy poet Nila Wahdati and her husband, Suleiman, by Pari’s step-uncle Nabi. The split is particularly difficult for Abdullah, who took care of his sister after their mother’s death. Once Suleiman has a stroke, Nila leaves him to Nabi’s care and takes Pari to live in Paris. Much later, during the U.S. occupation, the dying Nabi makes Markos, a Greek plastic surgeon now renting the Wahdati house, promise to find Pari and give her a letter containing the truth. The beautiful writing, full of universal truths of loss and identity, makes each section a jewel, even if the bigger picture, which eventually expands to include Pari’s life in France, sometimes feels disjointed. Still, Hosseini’s eye for detail and emotional geography makes this a haunting read.
Publishers Weekly
This bittersweet family saga spans six decades and transports readers from Afghanistan to France, Greece, and the United States. Hosseini weaves a gorgeous tapestry of disparate characters joined by threads of blood and fate.... Each character tells his or her version of the same story of selfishness and selflessness, acceptance and forgiveness, but most important, of love in all its complex iterations. Verdict: In this uplifting and deeply satisfying book, Hosseini displays an optimism not so obvious in his previous works. Readers will be clamoring for it. —Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Estero, FL
Library Journal
...explore[s] the effect of the Afghan diaspora on identity. It begins powerfully in 1952. Saboor is a dirt-poor day laborer in a village two days walk from Kabul. His first wife died giving birth to their daughter Pari.... Saboor's brother-in-law Nabi is a cook/chauffeur for a wealthy, childless couple in Kabul; he helps arrange the sale of Pari to the couple.... The drama does nothing to prepare us for the coming leaps in time and place.... The stories spill from Hosseini's bountiful imagination, but they compete against each other, denying the novel a catalyst; the result is a bloated, unwieldy work.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. And the Mountains Echoed introduces us to Saboor and his children Abdullah and Pari, and the shocking, heartbreaking event that divides them. From there, the book branches off to include multiple other characters and storylines before circling back to Abdullah and Pari. How do each of the other characters relate back to the original story? What themes is the author exploring by having these stories counterpoint one another?
2. The novel begins with a tale of extraordinary sacrifice that has ramifications through generations of families. What do you think of Saboor's decision to let the adoption take place? How are Nila and Nabi implicated in Saboor's decision? What do you think of their motives? Who do you think is the most pure or best intended of the three adults? Ultimately, do you think Pari would have had a happier life if she had stayed with her birth family?
3. Think of other sacrifices that are made throughout the book. Are there certain choices that are easier than others? Is Saboor's sacrifice when he allows Pari to be adopted easier or more difficult than Parwana's sacrifice of her sister? How are they similar and how are they different? Who else makes sacrifices in the book? What do you think the author is saying about the nature of the decisions we make in our lives and the ways in which they affect others?
4. "Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, / there is a field. I'll meet you there." The author chose this thirteenth-century Rumi poem as the epigraph for the book. Discuss the novel in light of this poem. What do you think he is saying about rightdoing and wrongdoing in the lives of his characters, or in the world?
5. The book raises many deep questions about the wavering line between right and wrong, and whether it is possible to be purely "good"—or purely "bad." What do you think after reading the novel: Are good intentions enough to create good deeds? Can positive actions come from selfish motivations? Can bad come from positive intent? How do you think this novel would define a good person? How would you define one?
6. Discuss the question of wrongdoing and rightdoing in the context of the different characters and their major dilemmas in the book : Saboor and his daughter Pari; Parwana and her sister, Masooma; the expats, Idris and Timur, and the injured girl, Roshi; Adel, his warlord father, and their interactions with Gholam and his father (and Abdullah's half brother), Iqbal; Thalia and her mother. Do any of them regret the things they have done? What impact does it have on them?
7. The overlapping relationships of the different characters are complex and reflective of real life. Discuss the connections between the different characters, how they are made, grow, and are sustained. Consider all the ways in which an event in one of the families in the book can resonate in the lives of so many other characters. Can you name some examples?
8. Saboor's bedtime story to his children opens the book. To what degree does this story help justify Saboor's heart-wrenching act in the next chapter? In what ways do other characters in the novel use storytelling to help justify or interpret their own actions? Think about your own experiences. In what ways do you use stories to explain your own past?
9. Two homes form twin focal points for the novel: the family home of Saboor, Abdullah, and Pari—and later Iqbal and Gholam—in Shadbagh; and the grand house initially owned by Suleiman in Kabul. Compare the homes and the roles they play in the novel. Who has claims to each house? What are those claims based on? How do the questions of ownership complicate how the characters relate to one another?
10. The old oak tree in Shadbagh plays an important role for many different characters (Parwana, Masooma, Saboor, Abdullah, and Pari) during its life. What is its significance in the story? What do its branches represent? Why do you think Saboor cuts it down? How does its stump come back as an important landmark later on?
11. In addition to all of the important family relationships in the book, there are also many nongenetic bonds between characters, some of them just as strong. Discuss some of these specific relationships and what needs they fill. What are the differences between these family and nonfamily bonds? What do you think the author is trying to say about the presence of these relationships in our lives?
12. And the Mountains Echoed begins in Afghanistan, moves to Europe and Greece, and ends in California, gradually widening its perspective. What do you think the author was trying to accomplish by including so many different settings and nationalities? What elements of the characters' different experiences would you say are universal? Do you think the characters themselves would see it that way?
13. Discuss the title, And the Mountains Echoed, and why you think it was chosen. Can you find examples of echoes or recurrences in the plot? In the structure of the storytelling?
(Questions issued by publisher.)