Lush Life
Richard Price, 2008
Macmillan Picador
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312428228
Summary
So, what do you do?” Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter.... But now he’s thirty-five years old and he’s still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be.
What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, he wouldn’t say tending bar. He was going places—until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric one night and pulled a gun. At least, that’s Eric’s version. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1949
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Cornell University; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Gotham Award, 1991
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Richard Price is an American novelist and screenwriter, known for the books The Wanderers (1974), Clockers (1992), Lush Life (2008), and The Whites (2015, writing under the pen name of Harry Brandt).
Early life
A self-described "middle class Jewish kid," Price was born in the Bronx, New York City and grew up in a housing project in the northeast Bronx. He graduated from the Bronx High School of Science in 1967 and obtained a B.A. from Cornell University and an MFA from Columbia University. He also did graduate work at Stanford University.
He has taught writing at Columbia, Yale University, and New York University. He was one of the first people interviewed on the NPR show Fresh Air when it began airing nationally in 1987. In 1999, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, receiving the academy's Award in Literature that year.
Novels
Price's novels explore late 20th century urban America in a gritty, realistic manner that has brought him considerable literary acclaim. Several of his novels are set in a fictional northern New Jersey city called Dempsy. In his review of Lush Life (2008), Walter Kirn compared Price to Raymond Chandler and Saul Bellow.
Price's first novel was The Wanderers (1974), a coming-of-age story set in the Bronx in 1962, written when Price was 24 years old. It was adapted into a film in 1979, with a screenplay by Rose and Philip Kaufman and directed by the latter.
Clockers (1992), nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, was praised for its humor, suspense, dialogue, and character development. In 1995, it was made into a film directed by Spike Lee; Price and Lee shared writing credits for the screenplay.
Screen plays
Price has written numerous screenplays including The Color of Money (1986), for which he was nominated for an Oscar, Life Lessons (the Martin Scorsese segment of New York Stories) (1989), Sea of Love (1989), Mad Dog and Glory (1993), Ransom (1996), and Shaft (2000).
He also wrote for the HBO series The Wire. Price won the Writers Guild of America Award award for Best Dramatic Series at the February 2008 ceremony for his work on the fifth season of that series. He wrote the screenplay for the 2015 film Child 44. He is often cast in cameo roles in the films he writes. His eight part HBO mini series CRIME began filming in Sept. 2014
Price did uncredited work on the film American Gangster, wrote and conceptualized the 18-minute film surrounding Michael Jackson's "Bad" video.
Other
He has published articles in the New York Times, Esquire, The New Yorker, Village Voice, Rolling Stone and others.
In July 2010, a group art show inspired by Lush Life was held in nine galleries in New York City.
Personal life
Price lives in Harlem in New York City, and is married to the journalist Lorraine Adams. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/22/2015.)
Book Reviews
The hard, daily slog of police work, made up not of highlight-reel discoveries and arrests, but of the grinding, old-school, shoe-leather following of leads; the glitter, aspirational energy and spiritual emptiness of the "Bohèmers'" world of swank bars and trendy restaurants; the narrow, unforgiving routine of life in the projects, where drug dealing seems like one of the few ways out of a future of small-time "mouse plays"—all these disparate worlds are captured by Mr. Price here with a pitch-perfect blend of swagger and compassion. He knows how these tectonic plates slide and crash up against one another, and he also knows how the six degrees of separation between his characters can instantly collapse into one, when a random act of violence or kindness brings players from these worlds together. He depicts his characters' daily lives with such energy, such nuance and such keen psychological radar that he makes it all come alive to the reader—a visceral, heart-thumping portrait of New York City and some of its residents, complete with soundtrack, immortalized in this dazzling prose movie of a novel.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Raymond Chandler is peeping out from Price's skull, as well he should be, given such gloomy doings…one detects Saul Bellow's vision, too. Price is a builder, a drafter of vast blueprints, and though the Masonic keystone of his novel is a box-shaped N.Y.P.D. office, he stacks whole slabs of city on top of it and excavates colossal spaces beneath it. He doesn't just present a slice of life, he piles life high and deep. Time too.
Walter Kirn - New York Times Book Review
A vivid study of contemporary urban landscape. Price's knowledge of his Lower East Side locale is positively synoptic, from his take on its tenements, haunted by the ghosts of the Jewish dead and now crammed with poor Asian laborers, to the posh clubs and restaurants, where those inclined can drink "a bottle of $250 Johnnie Walker Blue Label" or catch "a midnight puppet porno show." In this "Candyland of a neighborhood," where kids from all over the nation come to "walk around starring in the movie of their lives," it is hardly surprising that an ambitious suburban boy believes he can front up to armed muggers and live to write a treatment about it. Price's ear for dialogue is equally sharp.... In the end, Lush Life is most effective as a study of sudden crime and its lingering aftermath.
Stephen Amidon - Washington Post
(Audio version.) With a perfect ear for dialogue, Bobby Cannavale sounds like he grew up on the same patch of New York's Lower East Side that Price so effectively captures. It's a neighborhood in the midst of gentrification.... He adds dimension and surprisingly subtle touches to all of Price's already rich characters.
Publishers Weekly
(Audio version.) The whodunit part of the book contains enough twists and turns to hold listeners' interest. More powerful are Price's descriptions of the different neighborhoods of Manhattan, making the city as much a character as any human in the story.
Stephen L. Hupp - Library Journal
Price tells [his characters'] stories in a complex structure of juxtaposed scenes that ratchets up the tension. The only thing even close to a flaw in this book is its plot's surface resemblance to that of Clockers. But this time Price digs deeper, and the pain is sharper. There oughta be a law requiring Richard Price to publish more frequently. Because nobody does it better. Really. No time, no way.
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 help get a discussion started for Lush Life:
1. How sympathetic a character is Eric Cash? How would you describe him? Why does he dislike Ike?
2. Once exonerated, why does Cash refuse to help Matty Clark identify the killers? Given his treatment at the hands of the police, is his refusal justified, self-indulgent, cowardly, self-pitying... or what?
3. Talk about the community itself. The book opens with Cash feeling a sense of connectedness to the previous denizens, the Jewish immigrants who settled the neighborhood at the turn of the 20th century and then moved on. There are also under-ground cellars which contain relics of previous lives. Talk about the kind people who populate the neighborhood now— the Bohemer's, the project kids, the drug dealers, and the police. Is there even a "community" or simply disconnected people who walk the same sidewalks?
4. Cash says he feels like everyone he knows on the lower East side "went to the same...art camp or something." What does he mean?
5. What about the memorial service Steven Boulware puts on? Is it an appropriate mourning, a brilliant celebration of Ike's life...or self-dramatization of the part of the participants? How did it affect Ike's family?
6. Talk about Billy, Ike's father. Do you find him sympathetic or irritating or a brave survivor? And what's going on between Matty Clark and Billy's wife?
7. How do you feel about Matty Clark. Is he the book's hero? What about his two sons?
8. Do you find the ending satisfying? Is anything resolved? Should it be?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Prince of Tides
Pat Conroy, 1986
Random House
688 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780553268881
Summary
Pat Conroy has created a huge, brash thunderstorm of a novel, stinging with honesty and resounding with drama. Spanning forty years, this is the story of turbulent Tom Wingo, his gifted and troubled twin sister, Savannah, and their struggle to triumph over the dark and tragic legacy of the extraordinary family into which they were born.
Filled with the vanishing beauty of the South Carolina Low Country as well as the dusty glitter of New York City, The Prince of Tides is Pat Conroy at his very best. (From the publisher.)
Barbra Streisand directed and starred in the 1991 version of this film, along with Nick Nolte and Blythe Danner.
Author Bio
• Birth—October 26, 1945
• Where—Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Education—B.A., The Citadel
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California, and Fripp
IslandSouth, Carolina
Pat Conroy was born in Atlanta, Georgia, to a young career military officer from Chicago and a Southern beauty from Alabama, whom Pat often credits for his love of language. He was the first of seven children.
His father was a violent and abusive man, a man whose biggest mistake, Conroy once said, was allowing a novelist to grow up in his home, a novelist "who remembered every single violent act.... My father's violence is the central fact of my art and my life." Since the family had to move many times to different military bases around the South, Pat changed schools frequently, finally attending the Citadel Military Academy in Charleston, South Carolina, upon his father's insistence. While still a student, he wrote and then published his first book, The Boo, a tribute to a beloved teacher.
After graduation, Conroy taught English in Beaufort, where he met and married a young woman with two children, a widow of the Vietnam War. He then accepted a job teaching underprivileged children in a one-room schoolhouse on Daufuskie Island, a remote island off the South Carolina shore. After a year, Pat was fired for his unconventional teaching practices—such as his unwillingness to allow corporal punishment of his students—and for his general lack of respect for the school's administration. Conroy evened the score when he exposed the racism and appalling conditions his students endured with the publication of The Water is Wide in 1972. The book won Conroy a humanitarian award from the National Education Association and was made into the feature film Conrack, starring Jon Voight.
Writings
Following the birth of a daughter, the Conroys moved to Atlanta, where Pat wrote his novel, The Great Santini, published in 1976. This autobiographical work, later made into a powerful film starring Robert Duvall, explored the conflicts of his childhood, particularly his confusion over his love and loyalty to an abusive and often dangerous father.
The publication of a book that so painfully exposed his family's secret brought Conroy to a period of tremendous personal desolation. This crisis resulted not only in his divorce but the divorce of his parents; his mother presented a copy of The Great Santini to the judge as "evidence" in divorce proceedings against his father.
The Citadel became the subject of his next novel, The Lords of Discipline, published in 1980. The novel exposed the school's harsh military discipline, racism and sexism. This book, too, was made into a feature film.
Pat remarried and moved from Atlanta to Rome where he began The Prince of Tides which, when published in 1986, became his most successful book. Reviewers immediately acknowledged Conroy as a master storyteller and a poetic and gifted prose stylist. This novel has become one of the most beloved novels of modern time—with over five million copies in print, it has earned Conroy an international reputation. The Prince of Tides was made into a highly successful feature film directed by Barbra Streisand, who also starred in the film opposite Nick Nolte, whose brilliant performance won him an Oscar nomination.
Beach Music (1995), Conroy's sixth book, was the story of Jack McCall, an American who moves to Rome to escape the trauma and painful memory of his young wife's suicidal leap off a bridge in South Carolina. The story took place in South Carolina and Rome, and also reached back in time to the Holocaust and the Vietnam War. This book, too, was a tremendous international bestseller.
While on tour for Beach Music, members of Conroy's Citadel basketball team began appearing, one by one, at his book signings around the country. When his then-wife served him divorce papers while he was still on the road, Conroy realized that his team members had come back into his life just when he needed them most. And so he began reconstructing his senior year, his last year as an athlete, and the 21 basketball games that changed his life. The result of these recollections, along with flashbacks of his childhood and insights into his early aspirations as a writer, is My Losing Season, Conroy's seventh book and his first work of nonfiction since The Water is Wide.
South of Broad, published in 2009, 14 years after Beach Music, tells the story of friendships, first formed in high school, that span two decades.
He currently lives in Fripp Island, South Carolina with his wife, the novelist Cassandra King. (Adapted from the author's website and Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
A brilliant novel that ultimately affirms life, hope and the belief that one's future need not be contaminated by a monstrous past.
Chicago Tribune
A big sprawling saga of a novel, the kind Steinbeck used to write, the kind John Irving keeps writing, the kind you can hole up with and spend some days with and put down feeling that you've emerged from a terrible, wonderful spell.
San Francisco Chronicle
A masterpiece than can compare with Steinbeck's East Of Eden.... Some books make you laugh; some make you cry; some make you think. The Prince Of Tides is a rarity: It does all three.
Detroit Free Press
A literary gem.... The Prince of Tides is in the best tradition of novel writing. It is an engrossing story of unforgettable characters.
Pittsburgh Press
For sheer storytelling finesse, Conroy will have few rivals this season. His fourth novel is a seductive narrative, told with bravado flourishes, portentous foreshadowing, sardonic humor and eloquent turns of phrase. Like The Great Santini, it is the story of a destructive family relationship wherein a violent father abuses his wife and children. Henry Wingo is a shrimper who fishes the seas off the South Carolina coast and regularly squanders what little money he amasses in farcical business schemes; his beautiful wife, Lila, is both his victim and a manipulative and guilt-inflicting mother. The story is narrated by one of the children, Tom Wingo, a former high school teacher and coach, now out of work after a nervous breakdown. Tom alternately recalls his growing-up years on isolated Melrose Island, then switches to the present in Manhattan, where his twin sister and renowned poet, Savannah, is recovering from a suicide attempt. One secret at the heart of this tale is the fate of their older brother Luke; we know he is dead, but the circumstances are slowly revealed. Also kept veiled is "what happened on the island that day,'' a grisly scene of horror, rape and carnage that eventually explains much of the sorrow, pain and emotional alienation endured by the Wingo siblings. Conroy deftly manages a large cast of characters and a convoluted plot, although he dangerously undermines credibility through a device by which Tom tells the Wingo family saga to Savannah's psychiatrist. Some readers may find here a pale replica of Robert Penn Warren's powerful evocation of the Southern myth; others may see resemblances to John Irving's baroque imaginings. Most, however, will be swept along by Conroy's felicitous, often poetic prose, his ironic comments on the nature of man and society, his passion for the marshland country of the South and his skill with narrative.
Publishers Weekly
Savannah Wingo, a successful feminist poet who has suffered from hallucinations and suicidal tendencies since childhood, has never been able to reconcile her life in New York with her early South Carolina tidewater heritage. Her suicide attempt brings her twin brother, Tom, to New York, where he spends the next few months, at the request of Savannah's psychiatrist, helping to reconstruct and analyze her early life. In beautifully contrasting memories which play childhood fears against the joys and wonders of being alive, Tom creates and communicates the all-consuming sense of family which is Savannah's major strength as a poet and her tragic flaw as a human being. Conroy has achieved a penetrating vision of the Southern psyche in this enormous novel of power and emotion. —Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
Library Journal
(Young Adult) In order to aid a psychiatrist who is treating his psychotic sister, Tom Wingo arrives in Manhattan and describes figures from his youth, among them an abusive father, a mother obsessed with being accepted by Colleton's tawdry elite, eccentric grandparents, stolid brother Luke, and sensitive, poet-sister Savannah. Despite the book's length, scenes such as Grandmother Tolitha's visit to Ogletree's funeral home to try out coffins, Grandfather's yearly re-enactment of the stations of the Cross, Mrs. Wingo's passive-aggressive retaliation by serving her husband dog food, Luke's Rambo-like attempt to keep Colleton from becoming a nuclear plant site, and a bloody football game with the team's first black player deserve students' attention. While Conroy's skills at characterization and storytelling have made the book popular, his writing style may place it among modern classics. He adds enough detail so that readers can smell the salty low-country marsh, see the regal porpoise Snow against the dark ocean, and taste Mrs. Wingo's gourmet cooking and doctored dog food. The story is wholly Tom's; Conroy resists the temptation to include the vantage points of other characters. It is the reluctance of Tom to tell all, to recount rather than recreate his family's past, and to face up to the Wingos' mutual rejections that maintain the tension just below the story's surface. It is Tom's coming clean about his past that lays bare the truth and elevates Prince of Tides above a scintillating best seller. —Alice Conlon, Univ. of Houston
School Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. In the prologue Pat Conroy sets up many of the novel’s themes: his characters’ love of the Low Country and the South; the power Lila Wingo had over her children, who all adored her; their love of the natural world that shaped all three of their futures. In the midst of this idyllic piece of glorious signature Conroy writing, what signals does he give to his readers about the darkness that is to come in this novel?
2. The novel begins when Tom Wingo, a recently fired teacher and coach, married to a successful physician, and father of three, receives a call from his obviously manipulative mother asking him to go to New York to help his twin sister, Savannah, who has once again attempted suicide. His three young daughters had just expressed embarrassment that he, unlike their friends’ fathers, stays home and cooks meals while it is their mother who goes to work. What other event takes place before he leaves that makes him feel a failure, what he calls “a mediocre man”?
3. When Tom appears to be teasing his young daughters, he tells them that there is only one rule of life they must follow: “Never listen to what your parents say. Parents were put on earth for the sole purpose of making their children miserable. It is one of God’s most important laws.... Both Mama and I are screwing you up. If we knew how we were doing it we would stop because we adore you. But we’re parents and we can’t help it.... We are your enemies.” Are there any examples of good parenting in this novel that would argue against this warning?
4. Pat Conroy willingly admits that his novels are informed to a great degree by his life experiences. The Great Santini was about growing up as the son of a physically violent and abusive Marine fighter pilot. “I created a boy named Ben Meechum and gave him my story,” says Conroy. In The Lords of Discipline he took on his military college, The Citadel, in a book that resulted in a twenty-years-plus feud between the author and his school, which was only recently resolved. In writing The Prince of Tides Conroy attempts to come to terms with his childhood and with the realization that his mother may well have been the more powerful parent and the source behind the self-deception and family secrets that crippled her children. And yet he says in the novel, “In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.” Do you believe him when he says this?
5. The Prince of Tides is filled with stories of transformation, for example, his father’s wartime conversion to Catholicism, his sister Savannah’s becoming a New Yorker. Can you name others?
6. The idea of twins has deep roots in literature, from Romulus and Remus in mythology, to Jacob and Esau in the Bible, to the twins in the more recent novel The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. Can you think of other examples in literature? How are Tom and Savannah alike? How are they different?
7. When Tom first encounters Dr. Lowenstein, his sister’s psychiatrist, he is belligerent both to her and in his attitude toward the entire city of New York. Why, do you think, is he so suspicious? Do you feel she acted in the best interests of Savannah by involving her brother in her therapy? Tom is a teacher and Lowenstein is a psychoanalyst. In the end they help each other in ways they might never have predicted. Are the tools or the impulses that create teacher-coaches and therapists similar? How are they different? Does their relationship have anything to say about class issues? Give other examples of problems of communication brought about by class differences.
8. What psychological tools besides denial does Tom use to distance himself from pain?
9. Why, do you feel, does Pat Conroy use flashbacks throughout the novel? Do you find this technique helpful to you as a reader?
10. One might say that the truest example of integrity seems to be exemplified in the character of Luke, the older brother. Do you agree? Why or why not?
11. The natural world is clearly revered by Conroy. Can you find passages about nature that exemplify his power as a writer?
12. Give examples of how Pat Conroy uses animals to advance the plot.
13. Questions are raised regarding the price of gender throughout the novel. For instance, how does Lila treat Savannah differently from her sons? How does Savannah deal with the family’s secrets as opposed to the way her brothers deal with them?
14. Do you think there is such a thing as a southern novel? Is The Prince of Tides a southern novel? If so, what does that mean to you?
15. Who is the Prince of Tides?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Troubles
J.G. Farrell, 1970
New York Review of Books
459 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781590170182
Summary
Winner, 2010 Lost Booker Prize
1919: After surviving the Great War, Major Brendan Archer makes his way to Ireland, hoping to discover whether he is indeed betrothed to Angela Spencer, whose Anglo-Irish family owns the once-aptly-named Majestic Hotel in Kilnalough. But his fiancee is strangely altered and her family's fortunes have suffered a spectacular decline.
The hotel's hundreds of rooms are disintegrating on a grand scale; its few remaining guests thrive on rumors and games of whist; herds of cats have taken over the Imperial Bar and the upper stories; bamboo shoots threaten the foundations; and piglets frolic in the squash court. Meanwhile, the Major is captivated by the beautiful and bitter Sarah Devlin.
As housekeeping disasters force him from room to room, outside the order of the British Empire also totters: there is unrest in the East, and in Ireland itself the mounting violence of "the troubles." (From the publisher.)
This is the first book in Farrell's Empire Trilogy; the second is The Siege of Krishnapur (1970) and the third is The Singapore Grip (1978).
Author Bio
• Birth—January 25, 1935
• Where—Liverpool, England, UK
• Death—August 11, 1979
• Where—Bantry Bay, County Cork, Ireland
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Booker Prize; Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Lost Man Booker Prize
James Gordon Farrell was a Liverpool-born novelist of Irish descent. He gained prominence for a series of novels known as the Empire Trilogy (Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur and The Singapore Grip), which deal with the political and human consequences of British colonial rule.
Farrell's career abruptly ended when he drowned in Ireland at the age of 44, swept to his death in a storm. "Had he not sadly died so young,” Salman Rushdie said in 2008, "there is no question that he would today be one of the really major novelists of the English language. The three novels that he did leave are all in their different way extraordinary."
Troubles received the 1971 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and The Siege of Krishnapur received the 1973 Booker Prize. In 2010 Troubles was retrospectively awarded the Lost Man Booker Prize, created to recognise works published in 1970. Troubles and its fellow shortlisted works had not been open for consideration that year due to a change in the eligibility rules.
Early life and education
Farrell, born in Liverpool into a family of Anglo-Irish background, was the second of three sons. His father, William Farrell, had worked as an accountant in Bengal, and in 1929 he married Prudence Josephine Russell, a former receptionist and secretary to a doctor. From the age of 12 he attended Rossall public school in Lancashire.
After World War II, the Farrells moved to Dublin, and from this point on Farrell spent much time in Ireland: this, perhaps combined with the popularity of Troubles, leads many to treat him as an Irish writer. After leaving Rossall, he taught in Dublin and also worked for some time on Distant Early Warning Line in the Canadian Arctic.
In 1956, he went to study at Brasenose College, Oxford; while there he contracted polio. This would leave him partially crippled, and the disease would be prominent in his works. In 1960 he left Oxford with Third-class honours in French and Spanish and went to live in France, where he taught at a lycee.
Early works
Farrell published his first novel, A Man From Elsewhere, in 1963. Set in France, it shows the clear influence of French existentialism. The story follows Sayer, who is a journalist for a communist paper, as he tries to find skeletons in Regan's closet. Regan is a dying novelist who is about to be awarded an important Catholic literary prize. The book mimics the fight between the two leaders of French existentialism: Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. The two argue about existentialism: the position that murder can be vindicated as an expedient in overthrowing tyranny (Sartre) versus the stance that there are no ends that justify unjust means (Camus). Bernard Bergonzi reviewed it in the New Statesman in the 20 September 1963 issue and said, "Many first novels are excessively autobiographical, but A Man from Elsewhere suffers from the opposite fault of being a cerebral construct, dreamed up out of literature and the contemporary French cinema." Farrell himself came to dislike the book.
Two years after this came The Lung, in which Farrell returned to his real-life trauma of less than a decade earlier: the main character Martin Sands contracts polio and has to spend a long period in hospital. It has been noted that it is somewhat modelled after Farrell, but it is modelled more after Geoffrey Firmin from Malcolm Lowry 1947 novel, Under the Volcano. The anonymous reviewer for The Observer wrote that "Mr. Farrell gives the pleasantly solid impression of really having something to write about" and one for The Times Literary Supplement that "Mr. Farrell's is an effective, potent brew, compounded of desperation and a certain wild hilarity."
In 1967, he published A Girl in the Head. The protagonist, the impoverished Polish count Boris Slattery, lives in the fictional English seaside town of Maidenhair Bay, in the house of the Dongeon family (which is believed to be modeled after V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas). His marriage to Flower Dongeon is decaying. His companion is Dr. Cohen, who is a dying alcoholic. Boris also has sex with an underaged teenager, June Furlough. He also fantasizes about Ines, a Swedish summer guest, who is the "girl in the head." Boris is believed to be modeled after Humbert Humbert in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Like its two predecessors, the book met only middling critical and public reaction.
Empire Trilogy
Troubles (1970) tells the comic yet melancholy tale of an English Major, Brendan Archer, who in 1919 goes to County Wexford in Ireland to meet the woman he believes he may be engaged to marry. From the crumbling Majestic Hotel at Kilnalough, he watches Ireland's fight for independence from Britain. Farrell started writing this book while on a Harkness Fellowship in the United States and finished it in a tiny flat in Knightsbridge, London. He won a Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize for the novel, and with the prize money travelled to India to research his next novel.
Farrell's next book The Siege of Krishnapur (1973) and his last completed work The Singapore Grip (1978) both continue his story of the collapse of British colonial power. The former deals with the Indian Rebellion of 1857. Inspired by historical events such as the sieges of Cawnpore and Lucknow, the novel is set in the fictional town of Krishnapur, where a besieged British garrison succeeds in holding out for four months against an army of native sepoys, in the face of enormous suffering, before being relieved.
The third of the novels, The Singapore Grip, centres upon the Japanese capture of the British colonial city of Singapore in 1942, while also exploring at some length the economics and ethics of colonialism at the time, as well as the economic relationship between developed and Third World countries at the time that Farrell was writing.
The three novels are in general linked only thematically, although Archer, a character in Troubles, reappears in The Singapore Grip. The protagonist of Farrell's unfinished novel, The Hill Station, is Dr McNab, introduced in The Siege of Krishnapur; this novel and its accompanying notes make the series a quartet.
When The Siege of Krishnapur won the Booker Prize in 1973, Farrell used his acceptance speech to attack the sponsors, the Booker Group, for their business involvement in the agricultural sector in the Third World. In this vein, some readers have found Farrell's critique of colonialism and capitalism in his subsequent novel The Singapore Grip to be heavy-handed, although those new to the book after the crash of 2008 might not find it so.
Death
In 1979, Farrell decided to quit London to take up residence on the Sheep's Head peninsula in southwestern Ireland. A few months later he was found drowned on the coast of Bantry Bay, after falling in from rocks while angling. He was 44.
He is buried in the cemetery of St. James's Church of Ireland in Durrus. The manuscript library at Trinity College, Dublin holds his papers: Papers of James Gordon Farrell (1935–1979). TCD MSS 9128-60.
Legacy
Ronald Binns described Farrell's colonial novels as "probably the most ambitious literary project conceived and executed by any British novelist in the 1970s."
In the 1984 novel Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie, Vinnie Miner, the protagonist, reads a Farrell novel on her flight from New York to London. In the 1991 novel The Gates of Ivory by Margaret Drabble, the writer Stephen Cox is modelled on Farrell.
Charles Sturridge scripted a film version of Troubles made for British television in 1988 and directed by Christopher Morahan.
Quotes
Farrell said to George Brock in an interview for The Observer Magazine, "the really interesting thing that's happened during my lifetime has been the decline of the British Empire." (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/12/2015.)
Book Reviews
Remarkable.... Mr. Farrell deserves high praise for this novel. It is subtly modulated, richly textured, sad, funny, and altogether memorable.
Times Literary Supplement (UK)
Farrell wrote superbly; all his books had a quality that hallmarks great literary talent—he could “do” texture. This album—which is what Troubles feels like—records the same Anglo-Irish as Elizabeth Bowen knew and belonged to. As with Bowen, this feels like the real thing (which is all a novel has to do). Always judge a writer by his grasp of what he doesn’t know: Farrell died young yet his old people are almost his best creations.
Frank Delaney - The Guardian (UK)
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 Troubles:
1. Why does Edward Spencer want his tenants to sign the loyalty oath to the King? Why do the tenants refuse?
2. Why does Farrell use the hotel as the setting for his novel? What is the irony behind the name of the hotel...and in what way does it serve as a metaphor?
3. What is the cause of the hotel's increasing dilapidation...and why do its residents remain? As Farrell's descriptions of the hotel began to pile up, one after the other, does it elicit in you a sense of claustrophobia?
4. One reviewer says that the "decrepitude of the Majestic offers Farrell unlimited opportunities to indulge his formidable gifts of description and wry humor." Take a few moments to pick out some passages that demonstrate those descriptive and humorous gifts. How about the Palm Court...or the Imperial Bar? The peacocks...or cats? Or the Major switching from one room to another?
5. What about Angela Spencer, Major Archer's fiancee? What do you think of her? And how 'bout that Sarah Devlin? Discuss thoroughly...and defend your answer!
6. What attitude do the Protestants take vis-a-vis Sinn Fein and the killings? How do those in the hotel view the Irish people in general?
7. What is the significance of the shooting of the Majestic's cats...and Edward's shooting his beloved dog? What do the shootings foreshadow?
8. What do you come to learn about the effects of the 1916 Easter Rebellion and disturbances at the Peace Day Parade in Dublin? Do those events and others justify the actions of Sinn Fein? Or do the actions of Sinn Fein simply encourage reprisals on the part of the British? Can revenge killing be justified—on either side?
9. Farrell incorporates news stories into his novel. What is their purpose...what do they convey? Did you enjoy the tecnhique...or find it disruptive to the flow of the narrative?
10. How does Farrell's work present colonialism. Is his presentation fair...or biased? Were the effects of colonialism always negative; were there ever benefits?
11. As a writer does Farrell create sympathy with one side of the Irish conflict over the other? Or does he portray both sides in a compassionate, although perhaps satiric (even absurd), manner. Did you find yourself sympathsizing with the Anglo-aristocracy driven out of their homes, as well as with the oppressed Irish people?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
Seth Grahame-Smith, 2009 / Jane Austen, 1813
Quirk Publishing
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594743344
Summary
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.
So begins Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, an expanded edition of the beloved Jane Austen novel featuring all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie mayhem.
As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy.
What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh—eating undead. Can she vanquish the spawn of Satan? And overcome the social prejudices of the class-conscious landed gentry?
Complete with romance, heartbreak, swordfights, cannibalism, and thousands of rotting corpses, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies transforms a masterpiece of world literature into something you'd actually want to read. (From the publisher.)
See the 2016 film version with Lily James and Sam Riley.
Listen to our Movies Meet Book Club Podcast as Hollister and O'Toole discuss the movie and book.
Author Bio
• Birth—December 16, 1775
• Where—Steventon in Hampshire, UK
• Death—July 18, 1817
• Where—Winchester, Hampshire
• Education—taught at home by her father
Jane Austen's delightful, carefully wrought novels of manners remain surprisingly relevant, nearly 200 years after they were first published. Her novels—Pride and Prejudice and Emma among them—are those rare books that offer us a glimpse at the mores of a specific period while addressing the complexities of love, honor, and responsibility that still intrigue us today. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Read more about Jane Austen on our Prejudice Reading Guide.
_______________
Seth Grahame-Smith is an American author and film producer, best known for his 2009 novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. He lives in Los Angeles, California, USA.
Grahame-Smith's first widely published book was the nonfiction The Big Book of Porn: A Penetrating Look at the World of Dirty Movies, a look at the history of the erotic art form, which was published in 2005. The next year, Grahame-Smith published The Spider-Man Handbook: The Ultimate Training Manual, an examination of Marvel Comics' Spider-man, with an introduction by Stan Lee. In 2007, Grahame-Smith wrote How to Survive a Horror Movie: All the Skills to Dodge the Kills, a tongue-in-cheek guide to help readers escape situations most often shown in horror films. The book's introduction was written by horror film director Wes Craven. The next year, Grahame-Smith wrote the satirical Pardon My President: Fold-and-Mail Apologies for 8 Years, a collection of letters penned by Grahame-Smith addressed to various parties in order to apologize for the wrongs they had suffered under the administration of George W. Bush.
Grahame-Smith received the idea for a mash-up of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice with elements of the zombie genre from his editor at Quirk Books, Jason Rekulak, who had been wanting to make a book of the type for quite some time. Grahame-Smith, enamored with the idea, began working on the novel, first by reading Pride and Prejudice and then by meticulously plotting out where to insert the zombie elements, a process he has described as similar to microsurgery. Though the publishing company was initially reluctant to publish the book in fear of alienating possible fans of the books, the book was eventually published in 2009 in hopes of selling several thousand copies and breaking even, as had been done with Grahame-Smith's previous two books. However, once the cover and title of the book began circling around the internet, the book's popularity grew, eventually to the point where it became a New York Times bestseller.
Due to the success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Grahame-Smith has been contracted to write two follow-up books, one of which is reported to be titled Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
He'll make his debut as a comic book writer on Marvel Zombies Return: Hulk with artist Richard Elson.
Grahame-Smith has been a producer of several films and television shows. In 2001, he was the coordinating producer on two episodes of History's Mysteries. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
This may be the most wacky by-product of the busy Jane Austen fan-fiction industry—at least among the spin-offs and pastiches that have made it into print.... Is nothing sacred? —Mary Ellen Quinn
Booklist
Austen's England is overrun with "unmentionables." Etiquette and polite society still reign, but they do become strained when, for example, the ball at Netherfield is interrupted by an attack on the household staff. In this parody, Grahame-Smith maintains the structure and language of the original while strategically inserting zombies into the story. The surprise is how little changes. Elizabeth Bennett is still known for her beauty and intelligence. Here, she is also known for her expertise in the "deadly arts," abilities that only make her a less-desirable marriage partner. There is the constant physical peril that echoes the menace underlying the original. In addition to a life of homeless spinsterhood, the sisters fear having their brains eaten, or being bitten and turned into zombies themselves (a fate to which one character does unfortunately fall prey). The unmentionables also magnify the satirical aspects of the story. A few key arguments, such as the final confrontation between Elizabeth and Lady Catherine, become all-out brawls to the death. (Lady Catherine is famous for her fighting skills and army of ninjas.) And of course Darcy is a renowned swordsman, known for his gentlemanly ferocity. The concept alone is worth a chuckle. The undead are popular at the moment, and teens will be attracted to this clever version of a frequently assigned classic. However, they should be prepared for a somewhat slow read. The author has not accelerated the pace or created suspense in this mashup. —Angela Carstensen, Convent of the Sacred Heart, New York City
Library Journal
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 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies:
1. First of all, you will want to read Jane's original—uh, the one without the Zombies? If you haven't read it, skip it. There's no point in going any further.
2. Okay, having read the original (see #1), what would you say is different in this "expanded" version? Be precise.
3. Which is the greater peril in this work—the social stigma and financial ruin of remaining a spinster...or having your brains eaten out? Why? Which would be the greater threat today? Why, again?
4. Discuss the way in which class difference determines one's protection against zombies? Does Lady Catherine de Bourgh have greater protection than the Bennett family? Are there parallels to today's call for health care reform? Defend your answer.
5. Why is Elizabeth considered a less-than-desirable marriage partner? How does that change when Mr. Darcy appears on the scene? Why does he find Elizabeth attractive?
6. Why does Charlotte (really) marry Mr. Collins?
7. Where do these Zombies come from? Why are they here? Do you think zombies still exist?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Light Fell
Evan Fallenberg, 2007
Soho Press
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781569475362
Summary
Twenty years have passed since Joseph left his family and his religious Israeli community when he fell in love with a man, the brilliant rabbi Yoel Rosenzweig. Now, for his fiftieth birthday, Joseph is preparing to have his five sons and the daughter-in-law he has never met spend the Sabbath with him in his Tel Aviv penthouse. This will be the first time he and his sons will have all been together in nearly two decades.
Awarded the 2009 Stonewall Prize for Fiction, the first and most enduring award for GLBT books, sponsored by the American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered Round Table. (From the publisher.)
More
The sumptuous meal Joseph Licht prepares in his Tel Aviv beachfront penthouse is even better organized than his customary elegant dinner parties, but then his guests are more special than usual: in honor of his own fiftieth birthday, Joseph will host his five grown sons and his new daughter-in-law for the entire Sabbath.
It is the first time the family will be reunited in twenty years, since the day Joseph left behind his entire life—wife Rebecca, sons, father, the religious moshav where he grew up—in favor of a riveting affair with his soulmate, illui Yoel Rosenzweig, the genius rabbi of his generation. Their love affair has long since ended, but its echoes reverberate over twenty years and into the lives of Joseph, Rebecca, and their sons in ways none of them could have predicted. In this novel of desire and need, of choices and consequences, no one is unaffected. (From the author's website.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Cleveland, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Georgetown University; M.F.A., Vermont
College
• Awards—Stonewall Prize for Fiction
• Currently—lives in Israel
Evan Fallenberg the author or two books: Light Fell (2008) and When We Danced on Water (2011).
Fallenberg's recent translations include Ron Leshem's Beaufort, Batya Gur's Murder in Jerusalem, Alon Hilu's Death of a Monk and The House of Dajani, and Meir Shalev's A Pigeon and a Boy, winner of the 2007 National Jewish Book Award for fiction and a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize. Fallenberg is an instructor in the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University and heads his own Studio for Writers (and Readers) of English in the garden of his home. The recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship, Fallenberg is the father of two sons.
Fallenberg is a native of Cleveland, Ohio, a graduate of Georgetown University and the MFA program in creative writing at Vermont College. He has lived in Israel since 1985, where he writes, translates and teaches. His first novel, Light Fell, won the American Library Association's Barbara Gittings Stonewall Book Award for Literature and the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction, and was shortlisted for the National Jewish Book Award in fiction and a Lambda Literary Award for Debut Fiction
Book Reviews
When literature professor Joseph Licht invites his five adult sons to celebrate his 50th birthday in 1996 Tel Aviv, he hopes to win his boys' love and forgiveness by plying them with their favorite foods. From that opening in Fallenberg's ambitious debut, Joseph's life unfolds in retrospect: 20 years earlier, as a married father of five, Joseph discovers he is gay as he falls in love with a charismatic, and married, rabbi. The rabbi kills himself not long after he and Joseph start their affair, and a crushed Joseph, in one fell swoop, jettisons his marriage and adherence to Modern Orthodox Judaism. The familial repercussions are myriad and extreme, leaving Joseph's wife bereft and his sons with issues that range from low self-esteem and lack of trust to fanatical nationalism and religiosity. While Joseph and the rabbi's lovemaking is sentimentalized, and Joseph's and one son's homosexual awakenings seem abrupt, Fallenberg's descriptions of Israeli life, from the rural and academic arenas to the gay milieu, are credible and absorbing. The book adroitly sketches the heartfelt struggles of a sympathetic cast.
Publishers Weekly
Fallenberg (creative writing, Bar-Ilan Univ., Israel), who has translated the works of several renowned Israeli authors, presents his first novel, which takes place in 1996 Tel Aviv on the eve of literature professor Joseph Licht's 50th birthday. As Joseph prepares to reunite with his five sons for the first time in 20 years since he left their mother for a prominent male rabbi, flashbacks enlighten us as to the circumstances of his choice as well as to the characters of his sons, who serve as a bizarre microcosm of Israeli society, ranging from the completely secular to the ultra-Orthodox. After so much buildup, the denouement feels somewhat rushed, and several characters are little more than stereotypes. But Joseph's story, in which he eventually realizes his desires, is a compelling one. Recommended for general fiction collections.
Alicia Korenman - Library Journal
Fallenberg’s smoothly flowing observations of father-son bonds and of love of many kinds resonates on many levels.
Booklist
Love between men-fathers and sons, as well as lovers-binds a sensitive first novel of family reconciliation. Israeli academic Joseph Licht, married with five sons, is shocked to encounter a kindred soul when he meets "young Torah genius" Rabbi Yoel Rosenzweig. The intensity of their love affair compels Licht to forsake his wife Rebecca and their children at the moshav and move to a small apartment in Tel Aviv. But almost immediately Yoel commits suicide. These facts are 20 years in the past when the book opens, on Licht's 50th birthday, as he prepares a meal to which his five sons are invited, coming together for the first time in two decades. Licht has weathered many difficult years since Yoel's death, finally finding happiness with rich Pepe, a crude (but loving) hedonist, in contrast with Yoel's eloquent intellectualism. The father's departure affected his sons differently-Ethan, the army officer, learned to take responsibility early, while Gideon, the ultra-Orthodox Jew, rejects his father's homosexuality as the sin of all sins. After the elaborate meal, Licht unburdens himself, offering the boys his side of the story. Angry eldest son Daniel counters with his account of saving Rebecca from a suicide attempt. But the next day brings a confession, a paternal reprimand, a long-lost suicide note and finally a frank conversation with Daniel that reopens the door to Licht's role in his family's life. Intelligent craftsmanship confined within a theatrical, excessively tidy format.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Which character did you care about most in the story? Which one did you care about least? Why?
2. Did your attitude toward Joseph, Yoel, or Rebecca change as you got to know them? In what ways?
3. Do you think it significant that Joseph’s children were all boys? Do you think a girl might have reacted differently?
4. Near the end of the book, Joseph says, “I made a choice—the most awful, terrifying, sobering choice of my life.” Did he make a well thought out choice when he left home, or did his attraction for Yoel blind him to the consequences and propel him into a course of action he could never have envisaged previously? What choices were made by other characters in the story, and what might this tell us about the role of choice in our own lives?
5. Rebecca seems to have accepted her situation. Could things have turned out differently if she had lashed out instead of nurturing the “snake” inside her?
6. If Joseph had decided to go back to his family after Yoel died—“while we’ll still have you,” as his father said—do you think he could have resumed his former life?
7. On page 50, Yoel says, “…the doubts will creep in, and the guilt. And the guilt will last until the next time we meet, when we have begun to wonder, begun to know, in our separate prisons, that we have crossed a dangerous boundary into a country that demands too much of citizens like us—shame and abhorrence followed by complete repentance, or the shattering of our lives as we know them.” Joseph replies, “Can’t we love one another and God?” Do you think Joseph was naïve in thinking this? Did he truly believe it? How does this reflect their different attitudes to their relationship?
8. Joseph goes to visit Yoel’s widow, assuming she doesn’t know who he is and without even knowing what he's going to say to her. She greets him with the words, “My husband’s lover and assassin,” curses him, and throws him out. Yet Joseph feels“mischievous and daring” when he leaves. Why would this encounter have such an effect on him?
9. Yoel’s conflict is reflected in the way he regards their relationship: on the one hand he considers it “self-interested and hedonistic,” yet in the long letter he wrote to Joseph, treasured through all those years, he says, “It was His intention that we know each other in order to know Him, that our spiritual and physical love is the love He feels for all creation.” What was Joseph’s greatest conflict, both when he left home and in the years that followed?
10. At the “birthday dinner,” Joseph feels he must make the boys “see the unfolding of events through his eyes.” How successful is he in this? Is Joseph trying to convince them that his leaving was actually in their best interests at the time? How does each of the boys come to terms with what Joseph tells them?
11. What role does memory play in the unraveling of the story—Joseph’s memories of his boys as children; his memories of his meetings with Yoel; Daniel’s vivid memory of his mother’s “suicide attempt,” as opposed to his total lack of recollection of their outings with their father; Rebecca’s memories of their family life and of her reaction to Joseph’s leaving?
12. At the end of the book, Joseph says to Daniel, “Sometimes you just have to let go.” What do you think he means?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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