Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald
Therese Anne Fowler, 2013
St. Martin's Press
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250028655
Summary
I wish I could tell everyone who thinks we’re ruined, Look closer...and you’ll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed.
When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama.
Before long, the “ungettable” Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn’t wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed.
But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner’s, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and take the rest as it comes.
What comes, here at the dawn of the Jazz Age, is unimagined attention and success and celebrity that will make Scott and Zelda legends in their own time.
Everyone wants to meet the dashing young author of the scandalous novel—and his witty, perhaps even more scandalous wife. Zelda bobs her hair, adopts daring new fashions, and revels in this wild new world. Each place they go becomes a playground: New York City, Long Island, Hollywood, Paris, and the French Riviera—where they join the endless party of the glamorous, sometimes doomed Lost Generation that includes Ernest Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Gertrude Stein.
Everything seems new and possible.
Troubles, at first, seem to fade like morning mist. But not even Jay Gatsby’s parties go on forever. Who is Zelda, other than the wife of a famous—sometimes infamous—husband?
How can she forge her own identity while fighting her demons and Scott’s, too? With brilliant insight and imagination, Therese Anne Fowler brings us Zelda’s irresistible story as she herself might have told it. (From the publisher.)
Read an Excerpt.
Author Bio
• Birth—April 22, 1967
• Raised—Milan, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., M.F.A., North Carolina State University
• Currently—lives in Wake Forest, North Carolina
Therese Anne Fowler (pronounced ta-reece) is the author of severl books, including: A Good Neighborhood (2020), A Well Behaved Woman: A Novel of the Vanderbilts 2018),and Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (2013).
Fowler is the third child and only daughter of a couple who raised their children in Milan, Illinois. An avowed tomboy, Therese thwarted her grandmother’s determined attempts to dress her in frills—and, to further her point, insisted on playing baseball despite her town having a perfectly good girls’ softball league.
A
Thanks to the implementation of Title IX legislation and her father’s willingness to fight on her behalf, Therese became one of the first girls in the U.S. to play Little League baseball.
Her passion for baseball was exceeded only by her love of books. A reader since age four, she often abused her library privileges by keeping favorite books out just a little too long. When domestic troubles led to unpleasant upheaval during her adolescence, the Rock Island Public Library became her refuge. With no grounding in Literature per se, she made no distinction between the classics and modern fiction. Little Women was as valued as The Dead Zone. A story’s ability to transport her, affect her, was the only relevant matter.
Therese married at eighteen, becoming soon afterward a military spouse (officially referred to at the time as a "dependent spouse"). With customary spirit, she followed her then-husband to Texas, then to Clark Air Base in the Philippines—where, because of politics, very few military spouses could find employment. Again, books came to her rescue as the base library became her home-away-from-home and writers such as Jean Auel, Sidney Sheldon, and Margaret Atwood brought respite from boredom and heat.
Her own foray into writing came years later, after a divorce, single parenthood, enrollment in college, and remarriage. A chance opportunity during the final semester of her undergrad program led to her writing her first short story, and she was hooked.
Having won an essay contest in third grade and seen her writing praised by teachers ever since, she knew she could put words on paper reasonably well. This story, however, was her first real attempt at fiction. Her professor told her she had a knack for it, thus giving her the permission to try she hadn’t known she was waiting for.
After an intensive five-year stint that included one iffy-but-completed novel followed by graduate school, some short-fiction awards, an MFA in creative writing, teaching undergraduates creative writing, and a second completed novel that led to literary representation, Therese was on the path to a writing career. It would take more writing (some of which is published) and a great deal more reading, though, before she began to grasp Literature properly–experience proving to be the best teacher.
Therese has two grown sons and two nearly grown stepsons. She currently lives in North Carolina with her husband. (Adapted from the author's website. Retrieved 2/28/2020.)
Book Reviews
With lyrical prose, Fowler's Z beautifully portrays the frenzied lives of, and complicated relationship between, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald...This is a novel that will open readers' minds to the life of an often misunderstood woman—one not easily forgotten.
RT Book Reviews
Jazz Age legends F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald come into focus in Fowler’s rich debut.... Fowler is a close study of their famously tumultuous relationship, sparing no detail by following the Fitzgeralds through the less glamorous parts of their lives and the more obscure moments of history, including Zelda’s obsession with ballet and the strained relationship she had with their daughter, Scottie. Most consistently, Zelda is worried about money, her husband’s alcoholism and lack of productivity, and her own desire for recognition. Although obviously well researched, Zelda, who splashed in the Union Square fountain and sat atop taxi cabs, doesn’t have, in Fowler’s hands, the edge that history suggests. Fowler portrays a softer, more anxious Zelda, but loveable nonetheless, whose world is one of textured sensuality.
Publishers Weekly
Fowler won an LJ star for her 2008 debut, Souvenir, then settled comfortably into fraught contemporary relationship territory. Here she does something entirely different, reimagining the tumultuous life of Zelda Fitzgerald. A big burst of publisher enthusiasm for this book.
Library Journal
If you’re looking for dishy tales of crazy Zelda and drunken Scott, this isn’t your book. You get some of that, certainly, but Fowler, through meticulous research, has crafted a Zelda you might not expect: She’s complex, confused, ambitious, impulsive—and naive.
BookPage
(Starred review.) Fowler’s Zelda is all we would expect and more…once she meets the handsome Scott, her life takes off on an arc of indulgence and decadence that still causes us to shake our heads in wonder…soirées with Picasso and his mistress, with Cole Porter and his wife, with Gerald and Sara Murphy, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Ezra Pound and Jean Cocteau. Scott’s friendship with Hemingway verges on a love affair—at least it’s close enough to one to make Zelda jealous. Ultimately, both of these tragic, pathetic and grand characters are torn apart by their inability to love or leave each other. Fowler has given us a lovely, sad and compulsively readable book.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Many accounts of both Scott and Zelda contend that Zelda wouldn’t marry Scott unless he was well off—a view they themselves encouraged in the early years of their marriage. How does this play into the flapper image Zelda embodied in the ‘20s? Overall, was it harmful or beneficial to her?
2. How much of Scott’s success is owed to Zelda’s manufactured breakup with him in 1919?
3. The first time Zelda thinks she may be pregnant she refuses to pursue an abortion. Why, then, does she choose differently later on?
4. Why does Zelda have so little regard for her parents’ views and the standards by which she was raised?
5. Is Scott’s alcohol abuse a cause or a result of the life he and Zelda led and the troubles they experienced?
6. How legitimate was it for Scott and his agent, Harold Ober, to sell Zelda’s short stories under a joint by-line?
7. Which of Zelda’s talents do you feel was her truest calling?
8. How do you feel about Scott’s insistence on hiring strict nannies to care for Scottie? What benefit, or harm, may have come from this?
9. Modern psychiatrists have said that Zelda was probably troubled not with schizophrenia in its current definition but with bipolar disorder, which is characterized by dramatic mood swings and the behaviors that sometimes result. Where do you see evidence of Zelda’s illness in the years before her breakdown in early 1930? How much, if any, of her vibrant personality might be tied to the disorder?
10. What does it say about Scott that he was so highly involved in Zelda’s care during her episodes of hospitalization?
11. Why does Zelda tolerate Scott’s infatuation with actress Lois Moran and, later, columnist Sheilah Graham?
12. When Zelda says Ernest Hemingway is to blame for the disaster she and Scott made of their lives, what exactly does she mean? What might have been different for them if Hemingway hadn’t been Scott’s close friend?
13. Ernest Hemingway’s sexuality has been the subject of scrutiny by literary scholars and curious readers alike. In what ways was Zelda’s fear about the nature of Scott’s friendship with Hemingway justified?
14. Owing greatly to Ernest Hemingway’s account of her in A Moveable Feast (1964), Zelda has been seen as “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s crazy wife.” Why do you think Hemingway wrote so spitefully about her and so critically about Scott so many years after both their deaths?
15. Scott made almost all his money writing for the popular magazines (“the slicks”) and from the movie industry—and making money was essential for the lifestyle he wanted to lead. Why, then, was he forever struggling to impress the critics with more serious work?
16. Alcohol abuse and infidelity were seen as common and acceptable during the Jazz Age and among the expatriates especially. How much have views changed since then?
17. How do Sara and Gerald Murphy influence Zelda? What about Zelda’s friend Sara Haardt Mencken?
18. Despite her evolving interests and ambitions, Zelda never saw herself as a feminist. How might that view have affected her choices, both as a young woman and then later, when she aspired to dance professionally?
19. In what ways would the Fitzgeralds’ public and private lives have been different if they’d lived in the 1960s? 1980s? Today?
20. The Great Gatsby is often said to have been modeled on the Fitzgeralds’ time in Great Neck (Long Island), New York, with Gatsby’s love for Daisy inspired by Zelda’s affair with Edouard Jozan. Where in Z do you see evidence of this?
21. Scott turns Zelda’s affair with Jozan into another Fitzgerald tale. What does this say about him? What does it say about Zelda that she allows it?
22. Though Zelda spends most of her adult life away from her family and the South, she doesn’t escape their influences. Where do you see this most vividly?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Rage is Back
Adam Mansbach, 2013
Penguin Group USA
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780670026128
Summary
Welcome to the Great American Graffiti Novel
Number one New York Times bestselling author Adam Mansbach returns with a blockbuster tale of revenge, redemption, and the world’s most beautiful crime. Dondi Vance is the son of two famous graffiti artists from New York City’s “golden era” of subway bombing. Recently kicked out of his prestigious prep school for selling weed—and his mother’s Brooklyn apartment for losing his scholarship— he’s couch-surfing his way through life, compulsively immune to rumors that his long-lost father, Billy Rage, has returned after sixteen years on the lam.
But Dondi’s old man really is back—what’s left of him, that is. A wizened shell of his former self, Billy is still reeling from a psychic attack by an angry sha-man in the Amazon basin when Dondi finds him at the top of a pseudo-magical staircase in DUMBO. The uneasy reunion comes just in time: Anastacio Bracken, the transit cop who ruined Billy’s life and shattered his crew back in 1987, is running for mayor. Only by rallying the forgotten writers of the eighties for an epic, game-changing mission can Billy and Dondi bring Bracken down.
In this mind-bending journey through a subterranean world of epic heroes, villains, and eccentrics, Adam Mansbach balances an intricately plotted, high-stakes caper with a wildly inventive tale of time travel and shamanism, prodigal fathers and sons, and the hilariously intertwined realms of art, crime, and spirituality. Moving throughout New York City’s unseen communities, from the tunnel camps of the Mole People to the drug dens of Crown Heights, Rage Is Back is a kaleidoscopic tour de force from a writer at the top of his game. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Adam Mansbach is an American author, and has previously been a visiting writer and professor of literature at Rutgers University-Camden, with their New Voices Visiting Writers program (2009-2011). Mansbach wrote the "children's book for adults" Go the Fuck to Sleep. Other books Mansbach has written include Angry Black White Boy and The End of the Jews (for which he won the California Book Award for fiction in 2008). He lives in Berkeley, California and co-hosted a radio show, "Father Figures."(From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Rage Is Back is uneven, flashing bits of brilliance like a beautifully burned train clacking over a few minutes of elevated rail only to vanish into a labyrinth of digressions and affectations.... Whatever promise this plot may have held is undermined by a sort of literary attention deficit disorder. Mansbach’s characters tend to be as thin as rolling papers, and people and plot points alike are dropped and forgotten for little reason. Even Bracken, the chief villain, barely appears in the book.... Mansbach can write with real talent, maybe crazy talent. He ought to trust himself and put it up there for all of us to see.
Kevin Baker - New York Times Book Review
The novel...has a wild-style collage form that also ties in plot points involving a hallucinogenic vision-quest, the so-called "mole people" said to live in the city's tunnels, and time travel, because why not? Such a surfeit seems inspired by Jonathan Lethem's Brooklyn-centric magic realism, but it needlessly clutters up the story. At the center of Mr. Mansbach's paean to graffiti art should be Dondi's reconciliation with his father, but their relationship gets painted over with all the embellishments.
Wall Street Journal
Mansbach has clearly had a play date with Michael Chabon and Junot Diaz, and his fresh, witty novel is one that hip readers will relish once the kids have finally, mercifully, nodded off. Laced with zaniness and cultural bling, it's a nostalgic tribute to the glory days of street art, back when New York City had character, when those bubbly letters shouted from rambling subway cars and people loved to spot their favorite artists…What's more, it's invigorating to find a white writer willing to crash the color barrier…In the sweet and obscene voice of mixed-race Dondi, Mansbach has created a sharp commentator on the persistent nervousness of our integrated society.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Mansbach’s wild ride will likely earn cult-classic status—and deservedly so.... In Dondi, Mansbach has created an unforgettable narrator who combines elements of Holden Caulfield, Oscar Wao, and even a hint of Ignatius J. Reilly.
Eric Liebetrau - Boston Globe
A hilarious revenge thriller...[that reads] something like watching a Quentin Tarantino film or listening to a Wu-Tang Clan album—perhaps simultaneously. This is a great thing.... Rage Is Back has humor and horror and humanity and is altogether fresh.
Kevin Coval - Chicago Tribune
A rollicking, frenetic and hilarious jaunt through the (literal and figurative) New York City underworld...[that] does for graffiti what Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay did for comic books.... [Rage is Back] mashes up disparate linguistic registers with an effortlessness that brings to mind Junot Diaz’s perennial narrator, Junior.... Beneath all the weed and spray paint, it’s a warmhearted story about a son searching for his father and for himself, a trip through the past and present of an American art form.
David Lukas - San Francisco Chronicle
A muscular ode to New York City’s 1980s art underground.... Combines a poet's touch with the wild sparks of a subway train speeding through a graffiti-splashed tunnel.
Elle
In this slick, outlandish novel by bestselling author Mansbach (Go the F**k to Sleep), 18-year-old biracial Kilroy Dondi Vance, a “lightskinned cat,” is expelled from a New York City private academy for peddling hydroponic marijuana. Sixteen years earlier, in 1989, Dondi’s white father, Billy Rage, a popular graffiti artist, had a violent encounter with NYPD’s Vandal Squad, led by Anastacio Bracken....[and] fled to Mexico. Now, in 2005, Dondi finds Billy back in town... [and] resolves to bring [Bracken] down via a new graffiti campaign. Though Dondi’s voice, a combination of sophistication and raw urban slang, feels at time forced, Mansbach’s novel is a fun and exciting read.
Publishers Weekly
Mansbach was minding his own business as a respected novelist, poet, and essayist when he pulled an extraordinary coup by writing the No. 1 New York Times best-selling Go the F**k To Sleep. Biracial Brooklynite Kilroy Dondi Vance, pot dealer and prep school scholarship student, is the son of renowned graffiti writer Billy Rage—back in town to challenge his old nemesis, Metropolitan Transit Authority chief Anastacio Bracken, who's running for mayor.
Library Journal
Mansbach (Seriously, Just Go To Sleep, 2012, etc.) returns to fictionalizing the untidy corners of the New York City culture wars. Our admittedly unreliable narrator is Dondi Vance, a biracial scholarship student and part-time hydro dealer.... [H]is papa, Billy Rage, the city's most infamous graffiti artist, vanished in 1989 after his best friend's murder. Now everyone on the scene is clashing with Billy's nemesis, corrupt transit authority bureaucrat Anastacio Bracken. As a narrator, Dondi wields a fantastic but implausible voice that is electric with rhythm, riddled with bullshit and wise beyond its years.... Dondi's story proves thrilling: The book is peppered with grandfatherly revolutionaries, slang-slinging young bloods and an army of paint-wielding ninjas who unite with military precision on an ambitious plan to graffiti-bomb every single train car on the MTA.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What was your opinion of graffiti before reading this book? Has your opinion changed in any way?
2. Some artists such as Banksy and Shepard Fairey use the medium of graffiti to create work that is considered “high art” and respected by critics and the public. Fairey’s portrait of Obama, for example, was used in the 2008 presidential campaign. If you’re unfamiliar with their work, take a moment to look it up. What do you think of it? Why is their graffiti treated differently from the type of work described by Mansbach?
3. Dondi strains against the rules of society in ways both large and small. Have you ever broken the law? Challenged authority? Rebelled against the expectations placed on you by parents?
4. Rage Is Back plays with the typical narrative form. The majority of chapter 8 is taken up by Theo Polhemus’s short story, and Cloud 9 narrates chapter 10. How did this affect your engagement with the story? Why did Mansbach do this?
5. Dondi says that “rupture is...hardwired into everything my parents’ generation of New Yorkers built” (page 229). What does he mean?
6. Many of the characters are more sympathetic than one might expect; some are darker than they first seem. Which characters did you respond to in ways that surprised you?
7. Dondi struggles to understand his father. Do you believe that Billy is a good man? Explain.
8. Although Bracken is the dark counterpart to Billy’s hero, he appears very few times in the novel. What were his motives in pursuing graffiti artists in general, and Billy in particular? Was there something otherworldly in the tunnels that influenced his behavior?
9. On page 274, Dondi admits that he wants to be recognized as the kind of person who is “pointed at, whispered about.” How does this play into his feelings toward his father, who is just such a person?
10. Karen is the only prominent female character, but she more than holds her own against all the male graffiti artists. What was your response to her? At one point, Dondi mentions that she had a psychotic break due to exhaustion from worrying about his health. Is the resulting psychological imbalance demonstrated in the course of the book?
11. What if Billy Rage had stayed in New York after the death of Amuse? Would Dondi and Karen have benefited from his presence in their lives?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
In the King's Arms
Sonia Taitz, 2011
McWitty Press
230 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780975561867
Summary
Lily Taub is the brilliant, beautiful and headstrong American daughter of Holocaust survivors. Seeking relief from their traumatized world, Lily escapes to Oxford University, where she meets Julian Aiken—black sheep of an aristocratic English family.
When Lily is invited to the family’s ancestral home over Christmas vacation, her deepening romance with young Julian is crossed by a shocking accident that affects them all. Julian must face the harsh disapproval of his anti-Semitic family, who consider Lily a destructive force, not only in Julian’s life, but to their own sense of order.
In the King's Arms is a lyrical, literary novel about the healing possibility of love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1950s
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College/Columbia University;
J.D., Yale University; M.Phil, Oxford University
• Awards—Lord Bullock Prize (at Oxford)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Sonia Taitz is a graduate of Barnard College/Columbia University (Phi Beta Kappa; summa cum laude), Yale Law School, and Oxford University, where she was granted an M.Phil in English literature.
She has written extensively for the New York Times and New York Observer, where she held a column, and is also a columnist for Psychology Today and Huffington Post.
Her first book, Mothering Heights, was highlighted in O Magazine and featured in a PBS special on love; In The King's Arms, a novel published in 2011, was praised by the New York Times Book Review, ForeWord Reviews (which placed the author in the ranks of “the best poets, playwrights, and novelists), and Jewish Book World, the publication of the Jewish Book Council. In the King's Arms as also nominated for the Sami Rohr Prize.
Sonia Taitz’s new memoir, The Watchmaker's Daughter, depicts her life as the American child of European concentration camp survivors, and her efforts—through education, travel, and a controversial romance—to bridge past and future. The Watchmaker's Daughter has been praised by People magazine, Jerusalem Report, Vanity Fair, and Readers’ Digest, which placed it on the “Can’t Miss” list. The book has been nominated by the ALA for the Sophie Brody Medal, and listed by ForeWord Magazine as one of the year’s “Best Memoirs.” (From the author.)
Book Reviews
In this beguiling first novel, Taitz interweaves Lily's comical fish-out-of-water mating dance with her family's grim and discomfiting Holocaust chronicles. Improbably, the mix works.
Jan Stuart - New York Times Book Review
Mid-1970s London may be thirty years post-war, but New Yorker Lily Taub, who embarks for graduate studies at Oxford University, can't seem to neatly cover the territory between the Europe her Holocuast survivor parents remember&mdashand burned into her own consciousness&mdash and the bright, shining new world she longs to prove exists, and to inhabit....This novel is richly embroidered, each page a highly polished prose gem, rendered with a loving literary hand, a gift to readers, a mitzvah.
Lisa Romeo - ForeWord Reviews
Sonia Taitz weaves a witty, literate, and heartfelt story filled with engaging characters and relationships. The reader is moved by and invested in Lily’s realization of who she is, where she comes from, and her hopes for a more tolerant and healed world.
Renita Last - Jewish Book Council Review
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.
A Tale for the Time Being
Ruth Ozeki, 2013
Viking Adult
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143124870
Summary
Amid the garish neon glare of a district of Tokyo known as Akiba Electric Town, sixteen–year–old Naoko Yasutani pours out her thoughts into a diary.
She is drinking coffee in a cafe where the waitresses dress like French maids and a greasy–looking patron gazes at her with dubious intent. The setting is hardly ordinary, but Nao, as she is called, is not an ordinary girl.
Humbled by poverty since her father lost his high–income tech job in Silicon Valley and had to move the family back to Japan, Nao has been bullied mercilessly in school. Seemingly unmanned by his professional failure, her father, Haruki, has attempted suicide.
Nao herself regards her diary as a protracted suicide note—but one she will not finish until she has committed to its pages the life story of her 104-year-old great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun named Jiko.
Years later on the other side of the Pacific, shielded from damage by a freezer bag and a Hello Kitty lunchbox, Nao’s diary washes up on the shore of British Columbia and falls into the hands of a writer named Ruth, who becomes captivated by Nao’s revelations.
s Ruth’s fascination grows, however, so does her sense of dread: Has Nao followed through on her suicidal pledge? If not, is there still time to save her? Or has Nao survived her bout with adolescent angst, only to be swept away to her death by the cataclysmic tsunami of March 2011?
Moved to compassion by the young girl’s words, Ruth ransacks the Internet for a trace of Naoko Yasutani or her father. She finds almost nothing there, but the mystery deepens when she discovers a second document in the same packet: a collection of letters from Haruki’s uncle, Jiko’s son, who was conscripted against his will in 1943 to serve the Emperor as a kamikaze pilot. Slowly Ruth pulls the pieces of the mystery together, learning about the lives of an extraordinary family whose history is both inspirational and tragic.
Day by day, in her quest to save a girl she has never met, Ruth begins to acquire the wisdom that just might save herself. And above all the mystery and drama stands the presiding spirit of great–grandmother Jiko, an Eastern saint whose prayers and paradoxes point the way to a more settled sense of self.
Unflinching in its portrayal of the deep conflicts in Japanese culture, equally incisive in its assessments of the West, A Tale for the Time Being exposes a world on the edge of catastrophe. Simultaneously, with exquisite delicacy and an intimate sense of human motivation, it reveals its characters as kind, compassionate, and worthy of deliverance from the evils we do to ourselves and to one another.
Ever mindful of the small, A Tale for the Time Being also contemplates the large: quantum mechanics, Zen meditation, computer science, climate change, and the nature of being all pass beneath the author’s thoughtful gaze. A novel about both the near–impossibility and the necessity of communication, A Tale for the Time Being communicates a love of life in all its complex beauty. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 12, 1956
• Where—New Haven, Connecticut, USA
• Education—Smith College; Hara University
• Awards—Kiriyama Prize; American Book Award
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York, and British Columbia
Ruth Ozeki is a Canadian-American novelist, filmmaker and Zen Buddhist priest. She worked in commercial television and media production for over a decade and made several independent films before turning to writing fiction.
She was born in New Haven, Connecticut of American father and a Japanese mother. She studied English and Asian Studies at Smith College and traveled extensively in Asia. She received a Japanese Ministry of Education Fellowship to do graduate work in classical Japanese literature at Nara University. During her years in Japan, she worked in Kyoto’s entertainment or “water” district as a bar hostess, studied flower arrangement as well as Noh drama and mask carving, founded a language school, and taught in the English Department at Kyoto Sangyo University.
Film and novels
Ozeki returned to New York in 1985 and began a film career as an art director, designing sets and props for low budget horror movies. She switched to television production, and after several years directing documentary-style programs for a Japanese company, she started making her own films. Body of Correspondence (1994) won the New Visions Award at the San Francisco Film Festival and was aired on PBS. Halving the Bones (1995), an award-winning autobiographical film, tells the story of Ozeki’s journey as she brings her grandmother’s remains home from Japan. It has been screened at the Sundance Film Festival, the Museum of Modern Art, the Montreal World Film Festival, and the Margaret Mead Film Festival, among others. Ozeki’s films, now in educational distribution, are shown at universities, museums and arts venues around the world.
Ozeki’s two earlier novels, My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2003), were both recognized as Notable Books by The New York Times.
Ozeki currently divides her time between New York City and British Columbia, where she writes, knits socks, and raises ducks with her husband, artist Oliver Kellhammer. She practices Zen Buddhism with Zoketsu Norman Fischer, and is the editor of the Everyday Zen website. She was ordained as a priest in June, 2010. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
As contemporary as a Japanese teenager's slang but as ageless as a Zen koan, Ruth Ozeki's new novel combines great storytelling with a probing investigation into the purpose of existence. From the first page of A Tale for the Time Being, Ozeki plunges us into a tantalizing narration that brandishes mysteries to be solved and ideas to be explored…Ozeki's profound affection for her characters, which warmed her earlier novels…makes A Tale for the Time Being as emotionally engaging as it is intellectually provocative.
Wendy Smith - Washington Post
Masterfully woven.... Entwining Japanese language with WWII history, pop culture with Proust, Zen with quantum mechanics, Ozeki alternates between the voices of two women to produce a spellbinding tale.
O Magazine
Forget the proverbial message in a bottle: This Tale fractures clichés as it affirms the lifesaving power of words.... As Ozeki explores the ties between reader and writer, she offers a lesson in redemption that reinforces the pricelessness of the here and now.
Elle
A powerful yarn of fate and parallel lives.
Good Housekeeping
Ozeki weaves together Nao’s adolescent yearnings with Ruth’s contemplative digressions, adding bits of Zen wisdom, as well as questions about agency, creativity, life, death, and human connections along the way. A Tale for the Time Being is a dreamy, spiritual investigation of how to gracefully meet the waves of time, which, in the end, come for us all.”
Daily Beast
As we read Nao’s story and the story of Ozeki’s reading of it, as we go back and forth between the text and the notes, time expands for us. It opens up onto something resembling narrative eternity...page after page, slowly unfolding. And what a beautiful effect that is for a novel to create.”
Alan Cheuse - NPR
Ozeki’s absorbing third novel (after All Over Creation) is an extended meditation on writing, time, and people in time: “time beings.” Nao Yasutani is a Japanese schoolgirl who plans to “drop out of time”—to kill herself as a way of escaping her dreary life. First, though, she intends to write in her diary the life story of her great-grandmother Jiko, a Zen Buddhist nun.... [T]he diary eventually washes up on the shore of Canada’s Vancouver Island, where a novelist called Ruth lives.... Nao’s winsome voice contrasts with Ruth’s intellectual ponderings to make up a lyrical disquisition on writing’s power to transcend time and place. This tale from Ozeki, a Zen Buddhist priest, is sure to please anyone who values a good story broadened with intellectual vigor.
Publishers Weekly
In Tokyo, shy, bullied 16-year-old Nao determines to end it all—but not before chronicling the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun. After the 2011 tsunami, a novelist named Ruth opens a Hello Kitty lunchbox that's fetched up on a remote island off North America's coast and is immediately drawn into the story of Nao and her ancestor. Ozeki lives part-time in British Columbia and was recently ordained a Buddhist nun, so in some ways she's writing close to home. But here's betting that this award-winning novelist (My Year of Meats), also honored for her work in film, will take her narrative to the next level while remaining engagingly accessible; the best-selling Meats was translated into 11 languages and sold in 14 countries. Sales rep enthusiasm, too.
Library Journal
(Starred reviw.) An intriguing, even beautiful narrative remarkable for its unusual but attentively structured plot.... We go from one story line to the other, back and forth across the Pacific, but the reader never loses place or interest.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Ozeki's magnificent third novel (All Over Creation, 2003, etc.) brings together a Japanese girl's diary and a transplanted American novelist to meditate on everything from bullying to the nature of conscience and the meaning of life. On the beach of an island off British Columbia's coast, Ruth finds a Hello Kitty lunchbox containing a stack of letters and a red book. The book contains 16-year-old Nao's diary.... [Ruth] plunges into Nao's diary... [and] the book's extended climax...transcends bitter anguish to achieve heartbreaking poignancy as both Nao and Ruth discover what it truly means to be "a time being." ... The novel's seamless web of language, metaphor and meaning can't be disentangled from its powerful emotional impact: These are characters we care for deeply, imparting vital life lessons through the magic of storytelling. A masterpiece, pure and simple.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. A Tale for the Time Being begins with Ozeki’s first–person narrator expressing deep curiosity about the unknown person who might be reading her narrative. How did you respond to this opening and its unusual focus on the circumstances of the reader?
2. How does Ozeki seem to view the relationship between a writer and her reader? What do they owe each other? How must they combine in order to, in Nao’s phrase, “make magic”?
3. Though we may feel for her in her struggles and suffering, Nao is no angel. She is extremely harsh toward her father, and, given the opportunity, she tyrannizes over her hapless schoolmate Daisuke. Does Ozeki sacrifice some of the sympathy that we might otherwise feel for Nao? What does Ozeki’s novel gain by making Nao less appealing than she might be?
4. More than once in A Tale for the Time Being, a character’s dream appears to exert physical influence on actual life. Does this phenomenon weaken the novel by detracting from its realism, or does it strengthen the book by adding force to its spiritual or metaphysical dimension?
5. Is there a way in which Nao and Ruth form two halves of the same character?
6. A Tale for the Time Being expresses deep concern about the environment, whether the issue is global warming, nuclear power, or the massive accretions of garbage in the Pacific Ocean. How do Ozeki’s observations about the environment affect the mood of her novel, and how do her characters respond to life on a contaminated planet?
7. Suicide, whether in the form of Haruki #1’s kamikaze mission or the contemplated suicides of Haruki #2 and Nao, hangs heavily over A Tale for the Time Being. Nevertheless, Ozeki’s story manages to affirm life. How does Ozeki use suicide as a means to illustrate the value of life?
8. Jiko’s daily religious observances include prayers for even the most mundane activities, from washing one’s feet to visiting the toilet. How did you respond to all of these spiritual gestures? Do they seem merely absurd, or do they foster a deeper appreciation of the world? Have your own religious ideas or spiritual practices been influenced by readingA Tale for the Time Being?
9. Responding to the ill treatment that Nao reports in her diary, Ruth’s husband Oliver observes, “We live in a bully culture” (121). Is he right? What responses to society’s bullying does A Tale for the Time Being suggest? Are they likely to be effective?
10. Haruki #1 cites a Zen master for the idea that “a single moment is all we need to establish our human will and attain truth” (324). What kind of enlightenment is Ozeki calling for in A Tale for the Time Being? Is it really available to everyone? Would you try to achieve it if you could? Why or why not?
11. Imagine that you had a notebook like Nao’s diary and you wanted to communicate with an unknown reader as she does. What would you write about? Would you be as honest as Nao is with us? What are the benefits and risks of writing such a document?
12. Ozeki makes many references to scientific concepts like quantum mechanics and the paradox of Schrodinger’s cat. What role do these musings play in the novel? Do they add an important dimension, or are they mostly confusing?
13. What lessons does Jiko try to teach Nao to develop her “supapawa”? Are they the same that you would try to impart to a troubled teenaged girl? How else might you approach Nao’s depression and other problems?
14. Even after receiving these lessons, Nao does not change completely. Indeed, she gets in even worse trouble after the summer at her great–grandmother’s temple. What more does she need to learn before she can do something positive with her life?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Accursed
Joyce Carol Oates, 2013
HarperCollins
669 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062231703
Summary
A major historical novel from "one of the great artistic forces of our time" (The Nation)—an eerie, unforgettable story of possession, power, and loss in early-twentieth-century Princeton, a cultural crossroads of the powerful and the damned.
Princeton, New Jersey, at the turn of the twentieth century: a tranquil place to raise a family, a genteel town for genteel souls. But something dark and dangerous lurks at the edges of the town, corrupting and infecting its residents. Vampires and ghosts haunt the dreams of the innocent. A powerful curse besets the elite families of Princeton; their daughters begin disappearing. A young bride on the verge of the altar is seduced and abducted by a dangerously compelling man–a shape-shifting, vaguely European prince who might just be the devil, and who spreads his curse upon a richly deserving community of white Anglo-Saxon privilege. And in the Pine Barrens that border the town, a lush and terrifying underworld opens up.
When the bride's brother sets out against all odds to find her, his path will cross those of Princeton's most formidable people, from Grover Cleveland, fresh out of his second term in the White House and retired to town for a quieter life, to soon-to-be commander in chief Woodrow Wilson, president of the university and a complex individual obsessed to the point of madness with his need to retain power; from the young Socialist idealist Upton Sinclair to his charismatic comrade Jack London, and the most famous writer of the era, Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain–all plagued by "accursed" visions.
An utterly fresh work from Oates, The Accursed marks new territory for the masterful writer. Narrated with her unmistakable psychological insight, it combines beautifully transporting historical detail with chilling supernatural elements to stunning effect. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 16, 1938
• Where—Lockport, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Syracuse Univ.; M.A., Univ. of Wisconsin
• Awards—National Book Award for Them, 1970; 14 O. Henry
Awards; six Pushcart Prizes
• Currently—lives in Princeton, New Jersey
Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most influential and important storytellers in the literary world. She has often used her supreme narrative skills to examine the dark side of middle-class Americana, and her oeuvre includes some of the finest examples of modern essays, plays, criticism, and fiction from a vast array of genres. She is still publishing with a speed and consistency of quality nearly unheard of in contemporary literature.
A born storyteller, Oates has been spinning yarns since she was a little girl too young to even write. Instead, she would communicate her stories through drawings and paintings. When she received her very first typewriter at the age of 14, her creative floodgates opened with a torrent. She says she wrote "novel after novel" throughout high school and college— a prolificacy that has continued unabated throughout a professional career that began in 1963 with her first short story collection, By the North Gate.
Oates's breakthrough occurred in 1969 with the publication of Them, a National Book Award winner that established her as a force to be reckoned with. Since that auspicious beginning, she has been nominated for nearly every major literary honor—from the PEN/Faulkner Award to the Pulitzer Prize—and her fiction turns up with regularity on the New York Times annual list of Notable Books.
On average Oates publishes at least one novel, essay anthology, or story collection a year (during the 1970s, she produced at the astonishing rate of two or three books a year!). And although her fiction often exposes the darker side of America's brightest facades—familial unrest, sexual violence, the death of innocence—she has also made successful forays into Gothic novels, suspense, fantasy, and children's literature. As novelist John Barth once remarked, "Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map."
Where she finds the time for it no one knows, but Oates manages to combine her ambitious, prolific writing career with teaching: first at the University of Windsor in Canada, then (from 1978 on), at Princeton University in New Jersey. For all her success and fame, her daily routine of teaching and writing has changed very little, and her commitment to literature as a transcendent human activity remains steadfast.
Extras
• When not writing, Oates likes to take in a fight. "Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost," she says in highbrow fashion of the lowbrow sport.
• Oates's Black Water, which is a thinly veiled account of Ted Kennedy's car crash in Chappaquiddick, was produced as an opera in the 1990s. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Praise for Oates from the UK
• One of the female frontrunners for the title of Great American Novelist.— Maggie Gee, Sunday Times
• A writer of extraordinary strengths...she has dealt consistently with what is probably the great American theme— the quest for the creation of self...Her great subject, naturally, is love.—Ian Sansom, Guardian
• Her prose is peerless and her ability to make you think as she re-invents genres is unique. Few writers move so effortlessly from the gothic tale to the psychological thriller to the epic family saga to the lyrical novella. Even fewer authors can so compellingly and entertainingly tell a story.—Jackie McGlone, Scotland on Sunday
• Novelists such as John Updike, Philip Roth, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer slug it out for the title of the Great American Novelist. But maybe they're wrong. Maybe, just maybe, the Great American Novelist is a woman. —The Herald
Book Reviews
Some novels are almost impossible to review, either because they're deeply ambiguous or because they contain big surprises the reviewer doesn't wish to give away. In the case of The Accursed, both strictures apply. What I wish I could say is simply this: "Joyce Carol Oates has written what may be the world's first postmodern Gothic novel: E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime set in Dracula's castle. It's dense, challenging, problematic, horrifying, funny, prolix and full of crazy people. You should read it. I wish I could tell you more.... The book is too long, but what classic Gothic isn’t? It sprawls, there’s no identifiable protagonist or unity of scene, and yet these many loosely wrapped Tales of Princeton are feverishly entertaining. Oates’s hypnotic prose has never been better displayed than it is in the book’s final fabulism.... I could tell you who wins...but it’s a secret.
Stephen King - New York Times Book Review
The Accursed is…spectacular—a coalescence of history, horror and social satire that whirls around for almost 700 mesmerizing pages…The delights of this macabre novel gather thick as ghouls at midnight in the cemetery. I've never been so aware of Oates's weird comedy…With its vast scope, its mingling of comic and tragic tones, its omnivorous gorging on American literature, and especially its complex reflection on the major themes of our history, The Accursed is the kind of outrageous masterpiece only Joyce Carol Oates could create.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
The Accursed is a unique, vast multilayered narrative; a genre bending beast of a book, utterly startling from start to finish, compulsive and engaging, the writing crackling with energy and wit. This is an elaborately conceived work.
New York Review of Books
Oates’ atmospheric prose beautifully captures the flavor of gothic fiction.... In Oates’ hands, this supernatural tale becomes a meditation on the perils of parochial thinking. It demands we think—with monsters—about our failure to face the darkest truths about ourselves and the choices we’ve made.
NPR
(A 4-star review.) A brilliant Gothic mystery that has the punch of historical fiction. Currents of race, class and academic intrigue swirl under the surface, but it’s the demonic curse that propels the action... Oates casts a powerful spell. You’ll close The Accursed and want to start it all over again.
People
(Starred review. ) [A] thrilling tale in the best gothic tradition, a lesson in master craftsmanship. Distilled, the plot is about a 14-month curse manifesting in Princeton, N.J., from 1905 to 1906, affecting the town's elite, including the prominent Slades of Crosswicks and Woodrow Wilson, the president of Princeton University. After Annabel Slade is strangely drawn out of the church during her wedding, an escalating series of violence and madness based in secrets and hypocrisy is unleashed in the community. This story has vampires, demons, angels, murder, lynching, beatings, rape, sex, parallel worlds.... The story sprawls, reaches, demands, tears, and shrieks in homage to the traditional gothic, yet with fresh, surprising twists and turns.
Publishers Weekly
Historical fiction with a spooky Oatesian twist: at the turn of the 20th century, strange things start happening in peaceful, polished Princeton, NJ. Folks dream about vampires, the daughters of the town's classiest families start vanishing, and a bride-to-be runs away with a vaguely menacing European, presumably a prince and possibly the Devil. As her brother gives chase, he encounters characters from former President Grover Cleveland and future President Woodrow Wilson to authors like Upton Sinclair, all cursed with dark visions. Do these visions hint at personal or collective anguish?
Library Journal
A lush, arch, and blistering fusion of historical fact, supernatural mystery, and devilish social commentary... A diabolically enthralling and subversive literary mash-up.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Oates finishes up a big novel begun years before—and it's a keeper. If the devil were to come for a visit...where would he turn up first?.... Princeton, N.J., long Oates' domicile, ...on "the disastrous morning of Annabel Slade's wedding." No slashing ensues, no pea-green vomiting; instead, the good citizens of Princeton steadily turn inward and against each other, the veneer of civilization swiftly flaking off on the edge of the wilderness within us.... It just could be that the devil's civilization is superior to that of America.... The Curse is the one of past crimes meeting the future, perhaps; it is as much psychological as real, though Oates takes pains to invest plenty of reality in it. Carefully and densely plotted...it requires some work and has a wintry feel to it, it's oddly entertaining, as a good supernatural yarn should be.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also, consider these LitLovers talking points to get a discussion started for The Accursed:
1. How would you define The Accursed? Is it a vampire story, social commentary, satire, fictional history, gothic tale? What elements of those different genres can you identify in this book?
2. M.W. van Dyck, II is The Accursed's intrusive narrator—interjecting frequently, inserting digressive footnotes, and passing judgment. Is he a reliable narrator—are we to take his word for events in the book? Or are we meant to be skeptical? How would you describe him?
3. How are we to view the events that take place in this novel? Are we to suppose that they "happen" to the fictional characters in the course of the story? Or are we to gather they are the result of the characters' subconscious? Are they dreams? In other words, is this realistic fiction...or fantasy?
4. What is the Curse? What is its foundation? What, metaphorically, is Oates suggesting by the Curse? Who is cursed...and why?
5. The Accursed asks us to ponder the nature of evil? What is "evil" in the scope of the novel? Which of the book's characters are evil? What do you consider evil? Who or what are our real life demons? Are they personal demons or collective (societal)?
6. Follow-up to Questions 5 & 6: Talk about Winslow Slade. What did you think of him initially...and what did you come to understand about him by the novel's end, particularly in light of his final sermon?
7. Discuss the era's attitudes toward—and treatment of—women, African Americans, Jews, workers, and immigrants? Were you shocked at those private and public utterances—views held at the turn of the 20th-century (not so terribly distant from our own time), even by prominent people, whom we admire to this day?
8. Socialism, much "accursed" in American history, even in this day, is a prominent subject in The Accursed. What does it have to do with events of the novel? In other words, why does Oates spend so much ink writing about the socialist movement? Is she sympathetic or opposed to it? What is your understanding of socialism and its vilification?
9. Is there a hero in The Accursed? Are there more than one? Whom do you find admirable? What characters, male or female, if any, do you come to care about in this book?
10. Talk about the women—in particular Adelaide Burr, Annabel Slade, Wilhelmina Burr, Mrs. Peck. What do you think of them?
11. Speaking of Mrs. Peck—what do you think of her offer to Woodrow Wilson—and his refusal? Why does he refuse her help? Who is Mrs. Peck?
12. How are the various historical figures presented in this book—Woodrow Wilson, Grover Cleveland, Upton Sinclair, Mark Twain, Jack London, and Teddy Roosevelt? Is Oates's treatment of them at variance with what you might have expected?
13. Reviewers cite the book's frequent humor. What parts of this book do you find funny?
14. This is a very "literary" book, with references and parallels to literature: Emily Dickinson, Sherlock Holmes, Grimms Brothers fairly tales, Edgar Allan Poe, and Bram Stoker, to name a few. Can you identify some of them? Why might the author incorporate so many allusions into her work?
15. In the chapter "Ratiocination Our Salvation," Josiah Slade and Pearce van Dyck debate the use of Sherlock Holmes's method of observation and logic to solve the mystery of the Crosswick Curse. For van Dyck, Holmes's ratiocination is "the solution to our human folly; for young Slade, Holmes is merely fiction...and the so-called "puzzles [come] with ready-made solutions" from Conan Doyle. "They're not true mysteries," Slade argues. Van Dyck counters, "But I think they are. They are the distillations of the sprawling, messy, impenetrable mysteries that surround us." Later in the novel, however, Slade begins to think more seriously about van Dyck's approach.
Here's the discussion question: Do life's mysteries have logical solutions—does Joyce Carol Oates believe they do? What does her novel suggest? What do you think? Is all of life open to reason and logic? Or are there life events too mysterious to be explained by human understanding? (See our LitCourse 2 on the history of the novel and realistic fiction. It includes a Holmes short story for it's course reading.)
16. Could this book have used a tougher editor?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)