The Dry Grass of August
Anna Jean Mayhew, 2011
Kensington Publishing
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780758254092
Summary
In this beautifully written debut, Anna Jean Mayhew offers a riveting depiction of Southern life in the throes of segregation, what it will mean for a young girl on her way to adulthood--and for the woman who means the world to her. . .
On a scorching day in August 1954, thirteen-year-old Jubie Watts leaves Charlotte, North Carolina, with her family for a Florida vacation. Crammed into the Packard along with Jubie are her three siblings, her mother, and the family's black maid, Mary Luther. For as long as Jubie can remember, Mary has been there—cooking, cleaning, compensating for her father's rages and her mother's benign neglect, and loving Jubie unconditionally.
Bright and curious, Jubie takes note of the anti-integration signs they pass, and of the racial tension that builds as they journey further south. But she could never have predicted the shocking turn their trip will take. Now, in the wake of tragedy, Jubie must confront her parents' failings and limitations, decide where her own convictions lie, and make the tumultuous leap to independence. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Anna Jean (A.J.) Mayhew, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, has never lived outside the state, although she often travels to Europe with her Swiss-born husband.
Much of A.J.’s work reflects her vivid memories of growing up in the segregated South. A.J. has been a member of the same writing group since 1987, is a writer-in-residence at The Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities, and is a former member of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers' Network. The Dry Grass of August is her first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
A girl comes of age in the tumultuous 1950s South in Mayhew's strong debut. When 13-year-old Jubie Watts goes on a Florida vacation with her family in 1954, Mary, the family's black maid who's closer to Jubie than her own mother, comes along, and though the family lives in North Carolina, Jubie notices the changing way Mary's received the further south they travel. After a tragedy befalls the family, Jubie's eyes are opened to the harsh realities of racism and the importance for standing up for one's beliefs—though this does little to help her when her father's failures in business and marriage lead to the family falling apart. In Jubie, Mayhew gives readers a compelling and insightful protagonist, balancing Jubie's adolescence with a racially charged plot and other developments that are beyond her years. Despite a crush of perhaps unwarranted late-book suffering, Mayhew keeps the story taut, thoughtful, and complex, elevating it from the throng of coming-of-age books.
Publishers Weekly
[O]nce you’ve experienced The Dry Grass of August, you’ll swiftly see that Anna Jean Mayhew’s debut novel deserves all the early praise it’s getting.
Bookpage
Through immediate first-person narration, this first novel gets the prejudice and cruelty in daily life exactly right. We feel the horrible normality of not regarding anyone black as a person ("all coloreds look alike"), and we see where blatant racism leads. Because the novel is totally true to Jubie's point of view, it generates gripping drama as we watch her reach beyond authority to question law and order. —Hazel Rochman
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. What do you think about Paula’s decision to take Mary on the trip, given the antipathy in the deep south post Brown v. Board?
2. Why does Puddin so often try to hide or run away? What does her behavior say about the family?
3. Why didn’t Paula try to stop Bill from beating Jubie?
4. Is Uncle Taylor a racist?
5. Why did the clown at Joyland by the Sea give Jubie a rose?
6. If you’d been Paula (or Bill) what would you have done when Cordelia failed to appear for dinner? How could they have handled that differently?
7. Why does Paula take Bill back after his affair with her brother’s wife?
8. Did Bill and Paula act responsibly as parents when they allowed Jubie and Stell to go with Mary to the Daddy Grace parade in Charlotte? The tent meeting in Claxton?
9. Why didn’t Paula punish Jubie for stealing the Packard to go to Mary’s Funeral?
10. What drove Stamos to suicide?
11. Which major character changes the most? The least?
12. Which character in the book did you identify with the most? The least?
13. If you could interview Jubie, what would you ask her? What about Mary? Paula? Bill? Stell?
14. If Bill died at the end of the book, what would his obituary say if Paula wrote it? If Stell wrote it? If Jubie wrote it?
15. Given that there’s little hope for Jubie and Leesum to be friends in 1954, what would it be like for them if they met again today?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Tortilla Flat
John Steinbeck, 1935
Penguin Group USA
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780140042405
In Brief
Adopting the structure and themes of Arthurian legend, John Steinbeck creates a "Camelot" on a shabby hillside above Monterey on the California coast and peoples it with a colorful band of knights. As he chronicles the thoughts and emotions, temptations and lusts of the "knights", Steinbeck spins a tale as compelling as the famous legends of the Round Table
The story surrounds a group of young jobless men of Mexican descent living on a hilltop in Monterey, California. Kind natured and loyal to one another, they disregard convention, revelling in their idyllic world of poverty. With the advent of World War I, they enlist in a fevor of drunken patriotism, though none of them find their way into combat. They return to Monterey to learn that Danny has been left two houses by his grandfather, which he shares with the group. Thus begin the "adventures," most of which center around acquiring money.
Eventually, Danny, now the leader, becomes disenchanted, and the story takes on darker tones as he attempts to recapture the pleasures of his youth and freedom from responsibility of ownership. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 27, 1902
• Where—Salinas, California USA
• Death—December 20, 1968
• Where—New York, NY
• Education—Studied marine biology at Stanford University,
1919-25
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, 1940;
Nobel Prize, 1962.
John Ernst Steinbeck, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner, was born in Salinas, California February 27, 1902. His father, John Steinbeck, served as Monterey County Treasurer for many years. His mother, Olive Hamilton, was a former schoolteacher who developed in him a love of literature. Young Steinbeck came to know the Salinas Valley well, working as a hired hand on nearby ranches in Monterey County.
In 1919, he graduated from Salinas High School as president of his class and entered Stanford University majoring in English. Stanford did not claim his undivided attention. During this time he attended only sporadically while working at a variety jobs including on with the Big Sur highway project, and one at Spreckels Sugar Company near Salinas.
Steinbeck left Stanford permanently in 1925 to pursue a career in writing in New York City. He was unsuccessful and returned, disappointed, to California the following year. Though his first novel, Cup of Gold, was published in 1929, it attracted little literary attention. Two subsequent novels, The Pastures of Heaven and To A God Unknown, met the same fate.
After moving to the Monterey Peninsula in 1930, Steinbeck and his new wife, Carol Henning, made their home in Pacific Grove. Here, not far from famed Cannery Row, heart of the California sardine industry, Steinbeck found material he would later use for two more works, Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row.
With Tortilla Flat (1935), Steinbeck's career took a decidedly positive turn, receiving the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal. He felt encouraged to continue writing, relying on extensive research and personal observation of the human drama for his stories. In 1937, Of Mice and Men was published. Two years later, the novel was produced on Broadway and made into a movie. In 1940, Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Grapes of Wrath, bringing to public attention the plight of dispossessed farmers.
After Steinbeck and Henning divorced in 1942, he married Gwyndolyn Conger. The couple moved to New York City and had two sons, Thomas and two years later, John. During the war years, Steinbeck served as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. Some of his dispatches reappeared in Once There Was A War. In 1945, Steinbeck published Cannery Row and continued to write prolifically, producing plays, short stories and film scripts. In 1950, he married Elaine Anderson Scott and they remained together until his death.
Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 "for his realistic as well as imaginative writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humor and keen social perception." In his acceptance speech, Steinbeck summarized what he sought to achieve through his works:
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.... Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity of greatness of heart and spirit—gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature...
Steinbeck remained a private person, shunning publicity and moving frequently in his search for privacy. He died on December 20, 1968 in New York City, where he and his family made a home. But his final resting place was the valley he had written about with such passion. At his request, his ashes were interred in the Garden of Memories cemetery in Salinas. He is survived by his son, Thomas. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble, courtesy of the National Steinbeck Center
Book Reviews
(Older books have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Steinbeck writes with affection about the group that gradually accumulates in Danny's...little wood shacken shack. "The Paisanos," he says, "are clean of commercialism, free of the complicated system of American business, and, having nothing that can be stolen, exploited or mortgaged, that system has not attacked them very vigorously." Mr. Steinbeck tells a number of first-rate stories in his history of Danny's house. He has a gift for drollery...but we doubt if life in Tortilla Flat is as insouciant and pleasant and amusing as Mr. Steinbeck has made it seem.
Fred T. Marsh - New York Times, 10/2/1935
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 help get a discussion started for Tortilla Flat:
1. To what extent do you admire or disapprove of the Paisanos and their way of life?
2. What might Steinbeck have been getting at? Does he portray the Paisanos as heroes...or not? (Read Steinbeck's preface.) To what degree is this story a commentary on society's materialism?
3. Disucss the character of each of the Paisanos: Danny, Pilon, Pablo, the Pirate, Jesus Maria, and Big Joe. How does each contribute to the overall group—what qualities does each bring to the others? Do you identify with any character—or any of their qualities?
4. At one point, Pilon stops to watch sea gulls soaring in the sky above him. He becomes immersed in the moment and in the appreciation of beauty. Think there might be some sort of thematic concern here? Any ideas?
5. What is at the root of Danny's disenchantment? What motivates him? Do you think he's a tragic figure? Or a martyr of sorts?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Pope Joan
Donna Woolfolk Cross, 1996
Crown Publishing
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307452368
Summary
For a thousand years men have denied her existence—Pope Joan, the woman who disguised herself as a man and rose to rule Christianity for two years. Now this compelling novel animates the legend with a portrait of an unforgettable woman who struggles against restrictions her soul cannot accept.
When her older brother dies in a Viking attack, the brilliant young Joan assumes his identity and enters a Benedictine monastery where, as Brother John Anglicus, she distinguishes herself as a scholar and healer.
Eventually drawn to Rome, she soon becomes enmeshed in a dangerous mix of powerful passion and explosive politics that threatens her life even as it elevates her to the highest throne in the Western world. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1947
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A., University of Pennsylvania; M.A., University
of California, Los Angeles
• Currently—N/A
Donna Woolfolk Cross graduated cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Pennsylvania in 1969 with a B.A. in English. She moved to London, England, after graduation and worked as an editorial assistant for a small publishing house on Fleet Street, W.H. Allen and Company. Upon her return to the United States, Cross worked at Young and Rubicam, a Madison Avenue advertising firm, before going on to graduate school at UCLA where she earned a master's degree in Literature and Writing in 1972. (From the publisher.)
See interesting New York Times article, 5/28/2001, about how Cross has been reaching out to book clubs on her own (bypassing publishers) to talk about Pope Joan. Also see her Pope Joan website.
Book Reviews
Engaging.... Pope Joan has all the elements: love, sex, violence, duplicity, and long-buried secrets.
Los Angeles Times Book Review
Cross makes an excellent, entertaining case in her work of historical fiction that, in the Dark Ages, a woman sat on the papal throne for two years. Born in Ingelheim in A.D. 814 to a tyrannical English canon and the once-heathen Saxon he made his wife, Joan shows intelligence and persistence from an early age. One of her two older brothers teaches her to read and write, and her education is furthered by a Greek scholar who instructs her in languages and the classics. Her mother, however, sings her the songs of her pagan gods, creating a dichotomy within her daughter that will last throughout her life. The Greek scholar arranges for the continuation of her education at the palace school of the Lord Bishop of Dorstadt, where she meets the red-haired knight Gerold, who is to become the love of her life. After a savage attack by Norsemen destroys the village, Joan adopts the identity of her older brother, slain in the raid, and makes her way to Fulda, to become the learned scholar and healer Brother John Anglicus. After surviving the plague, Joan goes to Rome, where her wisdom and medical skills gain her entrance into papal circles. Lavishly plotted, the book brims with fairs, weddings and stupendous banquets, famine, plague and brutal battles. Joan is always central to the vivid action as she wars with the two sides of herself, "mind and heart, faith and doubt, will and desire." Ultimately, though she leads a man's life, Joan dies a woman's death, losing her life in childbirth. In this colorful, richly imagined novel, Cross ably inspires a suspension of disbelief, pulling off the improbable feat of writing a romance starring a pregnant pope.
Publishers Weekly
Cross's first novel, based on the life of the controversial historical figure Pope Joan, is a fascinating and moving account of a woman's determination to learn despite the opposition of family and society. Born in 9th-century Frankland, Joan demonstrates her brilliance early but must hide her learning from her missionary father, who considers the education of women sacrilegious and dangerous. Tutored first by her older brother and then a Greek scholar, Joan eventually secures a place at the schola in Dorstadt. To protect herself after a Viking raid, Joan dons her dead brother's clothing and assumes a man's identity. Suddenly the intelligence that once brought her ridicule and punishment results in respect and authority. From the monastery in Fulda to Vatican politics in Rome, Joan eventually secures the church's highest office. Cross vividly creates the 9th-century world, fraught with dangers from Vikings and Saracens, bloody warfare between brothers for political power, and palace intrigue for political favors. Above all, she brings to life a brilliant, compassionate woman who has to deny her gender to satisfy her desire for learning. Highly recommended. —Kathy Piehl, Mankato State Univ., Minn.
Library Journal
A longstanding tradition has insisted that there was a female Pope in the ninth century. The author's version of that story imagines Joan as the daughter of a village canon. Singled out for tutoring by a wise Greek, she learns quickly, but her father sees her knowledge as an abomination and blocks further progress. She runs away to join her brother at school, but is reviled by fellow students and her schoolmaster alike, even though she has the support of Gerold, the local count. Gerold falls in love with her, so his wife plots to marry her off while he is away; a Viking raid intervenes, however, leaving Joan the sole survivor. Determined never again to be betrayed by being female, she dresses as a man and enters a Benedictine monastery, where her aptitude for learning and healing propels her rapidly into the priesthood. Years pass; Joan makes a remarkable recovery from the plague and decides to go to Rome. There, she saves the life of Pope Sergius, and in her new role as papal physician again meets Gerold, rekindling the spark between them. When Sergius dies, and intrigue leads to the poisoning of his successor, Joan is elected Pope as the people's choice. Together, she and Gerold work to help the poor, but when a flood gives them the opportunity to be truly alone, passion reasserts itself. Joan learns that she is pregnant just as plotters act against her, leaving a bloody finale to be played out on the streets of Rome. No lack of action here, but also not much food for thought. Still, what seems a too facile rendering of a complex story might certainly appeal as light summer reading.
School Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. Donna Woolfolk Cross wrote the story of Pope Joan as a work of fiction. Do you think there really was a Pope Joan?
2. How important is it that Pope Joan actually existed? Are there lessons to be learned from this story whether it's true or not? What do you think those lessons are?
3. One reviewer said, "After finishing Donna Cross' novelization of Joan's life, one may want her to be a real person, only because it is so gratifying to read about those rare heroes whose strength of vision enables them to ignore the almost overpowering messages of their own historical periods." In contrast, a professor of history said, "I think we shouldn't even think about [Pope Joan] at all. It's bunk." Referring to Joan's pregnancy, the professor also said, "The whole point of the story is 'If you let a woman in as pope, she'll goof up.' The story was invented for the purpose of saying, 'Women can't be trusted.'" Which interpretation do you agree with? Why?
4. Many priests and nuns, in recent years, have urged the Vatican to ease restrictions on how far women may advance in the Church hierarchy. Women, they say, should be allowed to be ordained as priests. What are the implications of Pope Joan's story with regard to the limitations placed on women by the Church?
5. One reviewer wrote, "Pope Joan—is a reminder that some things never change, only the stage and the players do." Although the position of women in society haschanged dramatically since the middle ages, do you feel there are similarities between the way women live in various societies today and the way they lived in society then?
6. According to the author, Joan's story was universally known and accepted until the seventeenth century. Why do you think that changed?
7. Why do you think medieval society considered it unnatural and a sin for women to educate themselves or be educated?
8. Why might medieval society have believed so strongly that education hampered a woman's ability to bear children? What purpose might that belief have served?
9. One reviewer wrote, "Joan's ascendancy might not have been unusual in political spheres—many females in ancient and medieval times attained absolute or shared power. Joan earned disapproval because her intelligence and competence challenged prevailing male opinion that women lacked the ability for scholarly or clerical pursuits." Were there other females of ancient or medieval times who challenged this prevailing opinion? Do their stories give you insight into Joan's?
10. What other strong female characters have you encountered in books? What are the similarities and differences between those characters and Joan?
11. Did Joan make the right choice at that moment when she decided to disguise herself as her dead brother following the Viking attack? What would her life have been like had she chosen differently?
12. What do we learn about medieval medicine, and the logic of the learned medieval mind, in Pope Joan?
13. What happens to Joan when she tries to improve the lives of women and the poor? Why do you think Church and civic leaders were so resistant to such improvements?
14. Discuss the inner conflicts Joan faces—between the pagan beliefs taught by her mother and the Christian beliefs she learns from religious instructors; between her mind and her heart; between faith and doubt. How do these conflicts affect the decisions she makes? Does she ever truly resolve those inner conflicts?
15. Do you think Joan's secret would ever have been discovered had she not miscarried during the Papal procession or had she not become pregnant?
16. According to one reviewer, "Joan has the kind of vices—stubbornness and outspokenness, for example—that turn out to be virtues." Do you agree? If so, why? If not, why not?
(Questions issued by publishers.)
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The Tortilla Curtain
T.C. Boyle, 1995
Penguin Group USA
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780140238280
Summary
Men and women with brown faces and strong backs who risk everything to cross the Mexican border and invade the American Dream are the Okies of the 1990s. Two of them, Candido and America Rincon, have come to Southern California and are living in a makeshift camp deep in a ravine, fighting off starvation.
At the top of Topanga Canyon, Los Angeles liberals Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher lead an ordered sushi-and-recycling existence in a newly gated hilltop community: he a sensitive nature writer, she an obsessive realtor. And from the moment a freak accident brings Candido and Delaney into intimate contact, the two couples and their opposing worlds gradually intersect in what becomes a tragicomedy of error and misunderstanding. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 2, 1948
• Where—Peekskill, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., State University of New York at Potsdam; Ph.D., Iowa University
• Awards—PEN/Faulkner Award, 1998
• Currently—lives near Santa Barbara, California
T. Coraghessan Boyle (kuh-RAGG-issun) received his doctorate in nineteenth-century English literature from the University of Iowa in 1977. Since 1977, Boyle has taught creative writing at the University of Southern California. While in college, Boyle exchanged his middle name, John, for the unusual Coraghessan (kuh-RAGG-issun), the name of one of his Irish ancestors.
Boyle is the author of Descent of Man (1979), Water Music (1982), Budding Prospects (1984), Greasy Lake (1985), World's End (1987, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction), If the River Was Whiskey (1989), East Is East (1990), The Road to Wellville (1993), which was made into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins, and Without a Hero (1994). His work has appeared in major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, Paris Review, and Atlantic Monthly. Boyle lives with his wife, Karen, and their three children near Santa Barbara, California, in a house designed in 1909 by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
More
In the interest of time and space, it might be easier to note the writers that T. C. Boyle isn't compared to. But let's give the reverse a try: Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Evelyn Waugh, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Kingsley Amis, Thomas Berger, Robert Coover, Lorrie Moore, Stanley Elkin, Tom Robbins, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Don DeLillo, Flannery O'Connor. Oh, let's not forget F. Lee Bailey. And Dr. Seuss.
Boyle, widely admired for his acrobatic verbal skill, wild narratives and quirky characters (in one short story, he imagines a love affair between Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev's wife), has dazzled critics since his first novel in 1981.
Consider this example, from Larry McCaffery in a 1985 article for the New York Times:
Beneath its surface play, erudition and sheer storytelling power, his fiction also presents a disturbing and convincing critique of an American society so jaded with sensationalized images and plasticized excess that nothing stirs its spirit anymore.... It is into this world that Mr. Boyle projects his heroes, who are typically lusty, exuberant dreamers whose wildly inflated ambitions lead them into a series of hilarious, often disastrous adventures.
But as much as critics will bow at his linguistic gifts, some also knock him for resting on them a bit too heavily, hinting that the impressive showmanship attempts to hide a shortage of depth and substance. Craig Seligman, writing in the New Republic in 1993, pointed out that...
Boyle loves a mess. He loves chaos. He loves marshes and jungles, and he loves the jungle of language: luxuriant sentences overgrown with lianas of lists, sesquipedalian words hanging down like rare fruits. For all its exoticism, though, his prose is lucid to the point of transparency. It doesn't require much deeper concentration than a good newspaper (though it does require a dictionary).
Reviewing The Tortilla Curtain in 1995, New York Times critic Scott Spencer scratched his head over why Boyle had invited readers along for this particular ride:
Mr. Boyle's fictional strategy is puzzling. Why are we being asked to follow the fates of characters for whom he clearly feels such contempt? Not surprisingly, this is ultimately off-putting. Perhaps Mr. Boyle has received too much praise for his zany sense of humor; in this book, that wit often seems merely a maddening volley of cheap shots. It's like living next door to a gun nut who spends all day and half the night shooting at beer bottles.
Growing up, Boyle had no aspirations to be a writer. It wasn't until his studies at State University of New York, where he as a music student, that he bumped into his muse. "I went there to be a music major but found I really couldn't hack that at the age of 17," he told The Writer in 1999. "I just started to read outside my classes—literature and history. I wound up being a history and English major; when I wandered into a creative writing class as a junior, I realized that writing was what I could do."
He then started teaching, in part to avoid getting drafted into the Vietnam War, and later applied to the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop.
After a collection of short stories in 1979, he released his first novel, Water Music, called "pitiless and brilliant" by the New Republic, and has shuttled back and forth between novels and short stories, all known for their explosions of character imagination. Mr. Boyle's literary sensibility...thrives on excess, profusion, pushing past the limits of good taste to comic extremes," McCaffery wrote in his 1985 New York Times piece. "He is a master of rendering the grotesque details of the rot, decay and sleaze of a society up to its ears in K Mart oil cans, Kitty Litter and the rusted skeletons of abandoned cars and refrigerators."
In his review of Drop City, the 2003 novel set in California commune that won Boyle a National Book Award nomination, Dwight Garner joins the chorus of critical acclaim over the years—"Boyle has always been a fiendishly talented writer"—but he also acknowledges some of the criticism that Boyle has faced in these same years:
The rap against Boyle's work has long been that he's a sort of madcap predator drone, raining down hard nuggets of contempt, sarcasm and bitter humor on the poor men and women in his books while rarely giving us characters we're actually persuaded to feel anything about. This is partly a bum rap—and I'd hate to knock contempt, sarcasm and bitter humor—but there's enough truth in it that it's a joy to find, in Drop City that Boyle gives us a lot more than simply a line of bong-addled innocents led to slaughter.
But perhaps the neatest summary of Boyle's work would be from Lorrie Moore, one of the novelists to which he has been compared. In a 1994 New York Times review of Boyle's short story collection Without a Hero, she praised Boyle's "astonishing and characteristic verve, his unaverted gaze, his fascination with everything lunatic and queasy." She continues...
God knows, Mr. Boyle can write like an angel, if at times a caustic, gum-chewing one. And in this strong, varied collection maybe we have what we'd hope to find in heaven itself (by the time we begged our way there): no lessening of brilliance, plus a couple of laughs to mitigate all that high and distant sighing over what goes on below."
Extras
• Boyle changed his middle name from John to Coraghessan ( "kuh-RAGG-issun") when he was 17.
• He is known almost as much for his ego as his writing. "Each book I put out, I think, 'Goodbye, Updike and Mailer, forget it," the New Republic quoted him as saying. "I joke at Viking that I'm going to make them forget the name of Stephen King forever, I'm going to sell so many copies.
• Boyle's philosophy on reading and writing, as told to The Writer: "Good literature is a living, brilliant, great thing that speaks to you on an individual and personal level. You're the reader. I think the essence of it is telling a story. It's entertainment. It's not something to be taught in a classroom, necessarily. To be alive and be good, it has to be a good story that grabs you by the nose and doesn't let you go till The End." (From Barnes and Noble)
Book Reviews
In The Tortilla Curtain, Mr. Boyle deftly portrays Los Angeles's Topanga Canyon, catching both its privileged society and its underlying geological and ecological instability. But while the book has heft, its story is slight, and not unfamiliar.... The Tortilla Curtain is a political novel for an age that has come to distrust not only politicians but political solutions, a modernist muckraking novel by an author who sees the muck not only in class structure and prejudice but in the souls of human beings. Yet where the socially engaged novel once offered critique, Mr. Boyle provides contempt.... [But] contempt is a dangerous emotion, luring us into believing that we understand more than we do.
Scott Spencer - New York Times Book Review
This highly engaging story subtly plays on our consciences, forcing us to form, confirm, or dispute social, political, and moral viewpoints. This is a profound and tragic tale, one that exposes not only a failed American Dream, but a failing America.
Janet St. John - Booklist
The inestimably gifted Boyle (The Road to Wellville, 1993, etc.) puts on a preacher's gown and mounts the pulpit to proclaim a hellfire sermon against bigotry and greed—in this rather wan updating of The Grapes of Wrath. If Boyle is to be believed, Los Angeles County has gradually evolved into a kind of minimum-security prison, with the prosperous Anglos living in fear of their lives behind the walls of their suburban security compounds. Delaney and Kyra Mossbacher moved as far from the city as they could, and settled in a tastefully "authentic" tract development just above Topanga Canyon. Au courant to a fault, Kyra brings home the bacon as a hot-shot real estate agent, while Delaney stands in as Mr. Mom—cooking their lowfat meals, seeing after their pets and their son, and writing a monthly column for a nature magazine. Below them, in the Canyon itself, Candido and America Ricon have crossed the Mexican border illegally and seek refuge of their own in the makeshift camp they've erected. Candido meets Delaney at the beginning of the story when Delaney runs him down with his car, and this pretty much establishes the tone of their relations throughout. Candido, as hapless as his namesake in Voltaire, wants only to work and look after his pregnant wife, but he's thwarted on every side by an exasperated white society with no room for him. Implausible circumstances keep bringing Delaney and Candido back to each other, and the tension that builds between them becomes an image of the ferocity that smolders within the city around them—exploding in an apocalyptic climax that combines a brushfire and a riot, with an earthquake thrown in for good measure. A morality play too obvious to be swallowed whole: Boyle's first real lemon so far.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
(Below you'll find discussion questions, as well as background information on US immigration; both are provided by Penguin Group USA, publishers.)
1. At the beginning of the story, Delaney accidentally hits Candido with his car. "For a long moment, they stood there, examining each other, unwitting perpetrator and unwitting victim." How does this encounter set the tone for the events that follow? Does it come full circle in the final scene?
2. The novel is forged on the cultural, social, and financial differences between the Mossbachers and the Rincóns. It alternates between the two couples' points of view, allowing the reader to enter the lives of both families. How does this technique propel the story? Do you feel that you got to know each of the couples equally well? Was the author fair in his portrayal of each of the couples? Is he too harsh in his portrayal of the Mossbachers, as one reviewer suggested?
3. Candido and America crossed the border in search of a better life for themselves and their unborn child. They do not ask for much and are willing to work hard, yet they are constantly met with resistance and failure. There are numerous references to Candido's bad luck. Is he unlucky? Is there anything he could have done to have changed his luck? What does this story say about the American dream?
4. The symbol of the coyote appears throughout the novel and represents illegal Mexican immigrants. In his nature column, Delaney writes, "The coyote is not to blame—he is only trying to survive, to make a living, to take advantage of the opportunities available to him." He concludes the same column by writing, "The coyotes keep coming, breeding up to fill in the gaps, moving in where the living is easy. They are cunning, versatile, hungry and unstoppable." How do these passages reflect Delaney's mixed feelings about illegal immigrants? Is he a hypocrite? As the novel progresses, Delaney's humanistic beliefs give way to racism and resentment, and he directs his rage at all illegal immigrants onto Cándido. When confronted with evidence that Candido is not the vandal at Arroyo Blanco, he destroys it. Why does Delaney need to believe that the vandal is Cándido? How does Delaney evolve from being a "liberal humanist" to a racist?
5. Boundaries—both real and imagined—play a large role in the novel, especially the front gate at Arroyo Blanco Estates. In what other instances do boundaries appear and what do they represent? What roles do the different characters play in constructing these boundaries?
6. In a recent interview Boyle stated, "If it's satire, it has to bite somebody, has to have teeth in it, otherwise it's useless." How does satire affect The Tortilla Curtain and the telling of the story? Is it a successful technique?
7. The novel concludes with Delaney confronting Candido with a gun, followed by a mud slide. In an almost simultaneous moment, Candido realizes his baby is missing and reaches down to offer Delaney a hand. One is a frightening image and the other an act of generosity. How do these contrasting images play off one another? Did the conclusion leave you with a feeling of hope or despair?
8. During an argument with Jack Jardine, Delaney makes the following statement: "Do you realize what you're saying? Immigrants are the lifeblood of this country—and neither of us would be standing here today if it wasn't." In another instance, Jack says to Delaney, "What do you expect, when all you bleeding hearts want to invite the whole world in here to feed at our trough without a thought as to who's going to pay for it, as if the American taxpayer was like Jesus Christ with his loaves and fishes." How do these two sentiments play out in the novel and in the larger issue of immigration?
9. The author stated in the Conversation section of this guide that he feels it is a novelist's job to inhabit people of other races and sexes, for his own understanding of an issue as well as for the reader's. Did The Tortilla Curtain help you to better understand the issue of immigration and the people involved?
10. The author does not offer a solution to the problem of illegal immigration, for which he was praised by several reviewers. Do you think he should have offered a solution?
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Background on U.S. and Immigration
The debate over immigration continues to escalate across the nation, particularly in California, and this sampling of quotations and statistics from various newspapers and magazines sheds light on the issue.
• History suggests that those who truly yearn to come to America and stay will find a way to do it. (Newsweek, August 9, 1993).
• In November 1994, California passed by a 59% to 41% vote Proposition 187, a bill that denies certain social privileges, mainly welfare, public schooling, and non-emergency medical care, to illegal immigrants. (The New York Times, November 11, 1994)
• California hosts about 40% of the nation's estimated 3.4 million illegal immigrants. (Time, November 21, 1994).
• "All Americans...are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country.... We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it." (President Clinton, "We Heard America Shouting," Address to Joint Session of Congress, January 25, 1995).
• "Our immigration policy is a measure of who we are as a people. I believe we are a people who draw strength from our diversity and meet our challenges head on. I believe we want and deserve immigration laws that favor those who play by the rules." (Bill Bradley, former U.S. Senator, New Jersey, The New Jersey Record, June 8, 1995).
• About 800,000 people follow the rules and enter the United States legally as immigrants each year. An additional 200,000 to 300,000 come to the country illegally. (San Francisco Chronicle, December 5, 1995).
• Half of illegal immigrants do not cross the borders unlawfully—they enter legally and overstay their visas. (San Francisco Chronicle, March 18, 1996)
(Questions and Background issued by publisher.)
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Clair DeWitt and the City of the Dead
Sara Gran, 2011
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780547428499
Summary
Claire DeWitt is not your average private investigator. She has brilliant deductive skills and is an ace at discovering evidence. But Claire also uses her dreams, omens, and mind-expanding herbs to help her solve mysteries, and relies on Détection — the only book published by the late, great, and mysterious French detective Jacques Silette.
The tattooed, pot-smoking Claire has just arrived in post-Katrina New Orleans, the city she’s avoided since her mentor, Silette’s student Constance Darling, was murdered there. Claire is investigating the disappearance of Vic Willing, a prosecutor known for winning convictions in a homicide- plagued city. Has an angry criminal enacted revenge on Vic? Or did he use the storm as a means to disappear? Claire follows the clues, finding old friends and making new enemies—foremost among them Andray Fairview, a young gang member who just might hold the key to the mystery.
Littered with memories of Claire’s years as a girl detective in 1980s Brooklyn, Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead is a knockout start to a bracingly original new series. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 2, 1971
• Where—Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Tufts University
• Currently—lives in Northern California
Sara Gran is the author of the novels Dope, Come Closer, Saturn's Return to New York, and the Claire DeWitt detective series (2011). Her work has been published in over a dozen countries in nearly fifteen languages.
Born in Brooklyn in 1971, Ms. Gran lived in Brooklyn until 2004. Since then she has traveled widely and lived throughout the US including Miami and New Orleans. She now resides in the state of California.
Before making a living as a writer, Ms. Gran had many jobs, primarily with books, working at Manhattan bookstores like Shakespeare & Co, The Strand, and Housing Works, and selling used & rare books on her own. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[T]he exotic person of Claire DeWitt [is] a supremely confident detective who reads the clues she finds in dreams, the I Ching and scraps of garbage that float up from the street. ... Claire prowls the darkest corners of [New Orleans], eyes wide open to the suffering and despair of its shell-shocked residents. Claire is a charmer, but there’s nothing cute about her paranormal visions of a city living in torment.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Times
(Starred review.) As brash and bold as Sherlock Holmes himself, Claire DeWitt arrives in still-chaotic New Orleans 18 months after Katrina. She's been hired to investigate the disappearance of Vic Willing, a local prosecutor, who's not been heard from since the hurricane. Claire surprises the local gangtsa set with her unique bravado. One of them, Andray, is compelled to help her tap into the darkness of Katrina's aftermath. From there, Claire finds her answers. Mentored and deeply inspired by a famous French detective, the I Ching, and profoundly illuminating dreams, a complex Claire leads us into her own nightmares as well. Verdict: This is not to be missed—Claire is a moody, hip, and meticulous investigator. Gran (Dope; Come Closer) builds an addictive sense of anticipation with a fantastical frame. Alternately gritty and dreamy, this would appeal to those who liked Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist and readers of Charlie Huston (e.g., The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death). Highly recommended.
Library Journal
If there isn’t yet a subgenre called funky noir, this wacky PI novel could be a fragrant first...lots of fun.
Booklist
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 help get a discussion started for Clair DeWitt and the City of the Dead:
1. How would you describe Claire DeWitt? Do you find her endearing...or frustrating and irritating? What kind of emotional baggage does she carry around with her?
2. Talk about Claire's unorthodox detection methods—her use of dreams, omens and the I-Ching? How does drug use, according to Claire, enhance her investigatory powers? Talk about some of the clues Claire uncovers—the business card, for one. Could you follow her reasoning or intuitions? Did they make sense to you?
3. Silette's Detection claims that detective work has more to do with introspection into the detective's own life than with standard investigatory procedures. Is that true? How does the statement relate to Claire DeWitt? How does her investigation into Vic Willing's disappearance become an investigation into her own psyche?
4. More from Stilette's Detection: "The client already knows the solution to his mystery. But he doesn't want to know. He doesn't hire a detective to solve his mystery He hires a detective to prove that his mystery can't be solved." How is this passage from Detection relevant to the mystery at hand? Are there other passages in Detection that struck you?
5. Are Claire's frequent references to Detection—and its philosophical commentary—illuminating? Or are they distracting and overly digressive?
6. What did you make of Claire's relationship with Andray and Terrell? Like Claire, were you suspicious of Andray as the possible murderer?
7. New Orleans might be considered a character in its own right. Why would Gran have decided to use the city, post-Katrina, as a setting for her mystery? In what way is the city significant—thematically and atmospherically—as a backdrop for the story? What have you learned about New Orleans that you were previously unaware of?
8. Were you able to follow the novel's structure as it jumped back and forth from Claire's past to the present? At what point did the various elements begin to pull together for you?
9. Is the clue that ultimately breaks the case plausible? Or does it require too large a leap in logic to be credible?
10. Overall, what are your impressions of Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead? Is it a compelling read? A despressing one? Does it deliver as a suspenseful, engaging murder mystery? Or did it fail to get off the ground for you? Will you be following new books as they appear in the series?
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