The Lost Symbol
Dan Brown, 2009
Knopf Doubleday
528 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400079148
Summary
In this stunning follow-up to the global phenomenon The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown demonstrates once again why he is the world's most popular thriller writer. The Lost Symbol is a masterstroke of storytelling—a deadly race through a real-world labyrinth of codes, secrets, and unseen truths, all under the watchful eye of Brown's most terrifying villain to date. Set within the hidden chambers, tunnels, and temples of Washington, D.C., The Lost Symbol accelerates through a startling landscape toward an unthinkable finale.
As the story opens, Harvard symbologist Robert Langdon is summoned unexpectedly to deliver an evening lecture in the U.S. Capitol Building. Within minutes of his arrival, however, the night takes a bizarre turn. A disturbing object—artfully encoded with five symbols—is discovered in the Capitol Building. Langdon recognizes the object as an ancient invitation ... one meant to usher its recipient into a long-lost world of esoteric wisdom.
When Langdon's beloved mentor, Peter Solomon—a prominent Mason and philanthropist —is brutally kidnapped, Langdon realizes his only hope of saving Peter is to accept this mystical invitation and follow wherever it leads him. Langdon is instantly plunged into a clandestine world of Masonic secrets, hidden history, and never-before-seen locations—all of which seem to be dragging him toward a single, inconceivable truth.
As the world discovered in The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons, Dan Brown's novels are brilliant tapestries of veiled histories, arcane symbols, and enigmatic codes. In this new novel, he again challenges readers with an intelligent, lightning-paced story that offers surprises at every turn. The Lost Symbol is exactly what Brown's fans have been waiting for his most thrilling novel yet. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 22, 1964
• Where—Exeter, New Hampshire
• Education—B.A., Amherst College; University
of Seville, Spain
• Currently—lives in New England
Novelist Dan Brown may not have invented the literary thriller, but his groundbreaking tour de force The Da Vinci Code—with its irresistible mix of religion, history, art, and science—is the gold standard for a flourishing genre.
Born in Exeter, New Hampshire in 1964, Brown attended Phillips Exeter Academy (where his father taught), and graduated from Amherst with a double major in Spanish and English. After college he supported himself through teaching and enjoyed moderate success as a musician and songwriter.
Brown credits Sidney Sheldon with jump-starting his literary career. Up until 1994, his reading tastes were focused sharply on the classics. Then, on vacation in Tahiti, he stumbled on a paperback copy of Sheldon's novel The Doomsday Conspiracy. By the time he finished the book, he had decided he could do as well. There and then, he determined to try his hand at writing. His first attempt was a pseudonymously written self-help book for women co-written with his future wife Blythe Newlon. Then, in 1998, he published his first novel, Digital Fortress—followed in swift succession by Angels and Demons, Deception Point, The Lost Symbol, and most recently Inferno.
Then, in 2003, Brown hit the jackpot with his fourth novel, a compulsively readable thriller about a Harvard symbiologist who stumbles on an ancient conspiracy in the wake of a shocking murder in the Louvre. Combining elements from the fields of art, science, and religion, The Da Vinci Code became the biggest bestseller in publishing history, inspiring a big-budget movie adaptation and fueling interest in Brown's back list.
In addition, The Da Vinci Code became the subject of raging controversy, inspiring a spate of books by scholars and theologians who disputed several of the book's claims and accused Brown of distorting and misrepresenting religious history. The author, whose views on the subject are stated clearly on his website, remains unperturbed by the debate, proclaiming that all dialogue, even the most contentious, is powerful, positive, and healthy.
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Brown revealed the inspiration for his labyrinthine thriller during a writer's address in Concord, New Hampshire. "I was studying art history at the University of Seville (in Spain), and one morning our professor started class in a most unusual way. He showed us a slide of Da Vinci's famous painting "The Last Supper"... I had seen the painting many times, yet somehow I had never seen the strange anomalies that the professor began pointing out: a hand clutching a dagger, a disciple making a threatening gesture across the neck of another... and much to my surprise, a very obvious omission, the apparent absence on the table of the cup of Christ... The one physical object that in many ways defines that moment in history, Leonardo Da Vinci chose to omit." According to Brown, this reintroduction to an ancient masterpiece was merely "the tip of the ice burg." What followed was an in-depth explanation of clues apparent in Da Vinci's painting and his association with the Priory of Sion that set Brown on a path toward bringing The Da Vinci Code into existence.
If only all writers could enjoy this kind of success: in early 2004, all four of Brown's novels were on the New York Times Bestseller List in a single week!
Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:
• If I'm not at my desk by 4:00 a.m., I feel like I'm missing my most productive hours. In addition to starting early, I keep an antique hourglass on my desk and every hour break briefly to do push-ups, sit-ups, and some quick stretches. I find this helps keep the blood—and ideas—flowing.
• I'm also a big fan of gravity boots. Hanging upside down seems to help me solve plot challenges by shifting my entire perspective.
• When asked what book most influenced his career as a writer, here is his response:
Until I graduated from college, I had read almost no modern commercial fiction at all (having focused primarily on the "classics" in school). In 1994, while vacationing in Tahiti, I found an old copy of Sydney Sheldon's Doomsday Conspiracy on the beach. I read the first page...and then the next...and then the next. Several hours later, I finished the book and thought, Hey, I can do that. Upon my return, I began work on my first novel—Digital Fortress—which was published in 1996.
(Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Within this book's hermetically sealed universe, characters' motivations don't really have to make sense; they just have to generate the nonstop momentum that makes The Lost Symbol impossible to put down.... [The novel] manages to take a twisting, turning route through many such aspects of the occult even as it heads for a final secret that is surprising for a strange reason: It's unsurprising. It also amounts to an affirmation of faith. In the end it is Mr. Brown's sweet optimism, even more than Langdon's sleuthing and explicating, that may amaze his readers most.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
As a thriller, The Lost Symbol is exciting, although readers of The Da Vinci Code will notice that some of the same stock characters and creaky plot devices pop up.
Wall Street Journal
Writers envious of Brown's sales (who wouldn't be?) have devoted much ink to his deficiencies as a stylist. These are still in place.... So is Brown's habit of turning characters into docents. But so, too, is his knack for packing huge amounts of information...into an ever-accelerating narrative. Call it Brownian motion: a comet-tail ride of short paragraphs, short chapters, beautifully spaced reveals and, in the case of The Lost Symbol, a socko unveiling of the killer's true identity
Louis Bayard - Washington Post
The wait is over. The Lost Symbol is here—and you don't have to be a Freemason to enjoy it.... Thrilling and entertaining. Like the experience on a roller coaster.
Los Angeles Times
After scores of Da Vinci Code knockoffs, spinoffs, copies and caricatures, Brown has had the stroke of brilliance to set his breakneck new thriller not in some far-off exotic locale, but right here in our own backyard. Everyone off the bus, and welcome to a Washington, D.C., they never told you about on your school trip when you were a kid, a place steeped in Masonic history that, once revealed, points to a dark, ancient conspiracy that threatens not only America but the world itself. Returning hero Robert Langdon comes to Washington to give a lecture at the behest of his old mentor, Peter Solomon. When he arrives at the U.S. Capitol for his lecture, he finds, instead of an audience, Peter's severed hand mounted on a wooden base, fingers pointing skyward to the Rotunda ceiling fresco of George Washington dressed in white robes, ascending to heaven. Langdon teases out a plethora of clues from the tattooed hand that point toward a secret portal through which an intrepid seeker will find the wisdom known as the Ancient Mysteries, or the lost wisdom of the ages. A villain known as Mal'akh, a steroid-swollen, fantastically tattooed, muscle-bodied madman, wants to locate the wisdom so he can rule the world. Mal'akh has captured Peter and promises to kill him if Langdon doesn't agree to help find the portal. Joining Langdon in his search is Peter's younger sister, Kathleen, who has been conducting experiments in a secret museum. This is just the kickoff for a deadly chase that careens back and forth, across, above and below the nation's capital, darting from revelation to revelation, pausing only to explain some piece of wondrous, historical esoterica. Jealous thriller writerswill despair, doubters and nay-sayers will be proved wrong, and readers will rejoice: Dan Brown has done it again.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. How familiar were you with Freemasonry before reading the novel? How did your impressions of the organization shift throughout the book, from the chilling prologue to Peter Solomon's philosophical comments near the end?
2. How do Peter Solomon's students (including Robert) reconcile their admiration for him with the knowledge that he is a Mason? Did it surprise you to learn about well-known American historical figures who were Masons and to read about scientists who were intrigued by mysticism and other occult belief systems?
3. Discuss the novel's grand theme of architecture. How did The Lost Symbol change the way you think about the way buildings are designed and the intention of their architects (creators)? What most surprised you about the tributes to the past—and visions of the future—that are captured in the landmarks of Washington, D.C.?
4. Mal'akh considers the polarity of angels and demons noting that "the guardian angel who conquered your enemy in battle was perceived by your enemy as a demon destroyer." What does this indicate about Mal'akh's perception of himself in the world? How can his evil nature be explained? Why is he only able to consider his own suffering, while relishing the suffering of others?
5. How did you react to Katherine Solomon's work in Noetic Science? What motivates her to investigate the tangible aspects of the human soul (attempting to weigh it, even)? How would it change the world if there were more tangible evidence of the spiritual world? How is Katherine Solomon's perception of science different from Robert Langdon's?
6. At the heart of the novel is a quest to unlock wisdom, and the need to keep it "locked" because it can be used for destructive purposes. Do you believe that freedom of knowledge (Wikipedia, a world wide web) is a blessing or a curse?
7. The novel's epigraph, from Manly Hall's The Secret Teachings of All Ages, encourages readers to become aware of the meaning of the world. What mysteries about the world, and life, do you think are the most important ones to explore?
8. How did Mal'akh amass enough power to turn his personal plot into a national security threat? What does his rise to power indicate about the potential of mind over body and a human being's ability to play a variety of roles for unsuspecting audiences?
9. The final chapter raises intriguing questions about the possibility of a multi-faceted God and the potential to find God in all of humanity. Can there be a universal definition of enlightenment?
10. While interpreting the Masonic Pyramid's final inscription, Robert Langdon tries to bring order out of chaos by interpreting each symbol as a metaphor. Peter Solomon instructs him to be literal and accept the inscription as a true map. What does this exchange say about the best way to interpret all sacred messages?
11. What truths do Katherine Solomon and Robert Langdon experience in the epilogue, at sunrise, atop America's ultimate symbol? From your perspective, what does the Capitol symbolize?
12. What does The Lost Symbol indicate about the power of the Word—both ancient texts and bestselling twenty-first-century novels?
13. What common thread runs through this and each of Dan Brown's previous works? What makes The Lost Symbol unique? How has Robert Langdon's perspective changed from Angels & Demons and The Da Vinci Code?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier, 1938
HarperCollins
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780380778553
Summary
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.
So the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter remembered the chilling events that led her down the turning drive past ther beeches, white and naked, to the isolated gray stone manse on the windswept Cornish coast.
With a husband she barely knew, the young bride arrived at this immense estate, only to be inexorably drawn into the life of the first Mrs. de Winter, the beautiful Rebecca, dead but never forgotten...her suite of rooms never touched, her clothes ready to be worn, her servant— the sinister Mrs. Danvers—still loyal.
And as an eerie presentiment of evil tightened around her heart, the second Mrs. de Winter began her search for the real fate of Rebecca...for the secrets of Manderley. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 13, 1907
• Where—London, England, UK
• Death—April 19, 1989
• Where—Cornwall, England
• Education—finishing school near Paris
• Recognition—Dame of the British Empire (DBE)
Daphne du Maurier, who was born in 1907, was the second daughter of the famous actor and theatre manager-producer, Sir Gerald du Maurier, and granddaughter of George du Maurier, the much-loved Punch artist who also created the character of Svengali in the novel Trilby.
After being educated at home with her sisters, and then in Paris, she began writing short stories and articles in 1928, and in 1931 her first novel, The Loving Spirit, was published. Two others followed. Her reputation was established with her frank biography of her father, Gerald: A Portrait, and her Cornish novel, Jamaica Inn. When Rebecca came out in 1938 she suddenly found herself to her great surprise, one of the most popular authors of the day. The book went into thirty-nine English impressions in the next twenty years and has been translated into more than twenty languages.
There were fourteen other novels, nearly all bestsellers. These include Frenchman's Creek (1941), Hungry Hill (1943), My Cousin Rachel (1951), Mary Anne (1954), The Scapegoat (1957), The Glass-Blowers (1963), The Flight of the Falcon (1965) and The House on the Strand (1969).
Besides her novels she published a number of volumes of short stories, Come Wind, Come Weather (1941), Kiss Me Again, Stranger (1952), The Breaking Point (1959), Not After Midnight (1971), Don't Look Now and Other Stories (1971), The Rendezvous and Other Stories (1980) and two plays—The Years Between (1945) and September Tide (1948).
She also wrote an account of her relations in the last century, The du Mauriers, and a biography of Branwell Brontë, as well as Vanishing Cornwall, an eloquent elegy on the past of a country she loved so much. Her autobiography, Growing Pains, appeared in 1977 and The Rebecca Notebook and Other Memories in 1981. Her books have translated well to the cinema. Sir Laurence Olivier starred in the filmed version of Rebecca; Jamaica Inn, Hungry Hill and Frenchman's Creek have also been notable successes; as well as The Birds and Don't Look Now, both adapted from a short story.
Daphne du Maurier was made a D.B.E. in 1969. She was married to Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Browning K.C.V.O., D.S.O. She died in 1989 at her home in Cornwall. Margaret Forster wrote in a tribute to her, "No other popular novelist has so triumphantly defied classification as Daphne du Maurier. She satisfied all the questionable criteria of popular fiction and yet satisfied too the exacting requirements of ‘real literature', something very few novelists ever do. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
(Sorry. Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer 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 Rebecca:
1. Du Maurier admitted that her heroine has no name because she could never think of an appropriate one—which in itself is a telling comment. What effect does it have on the novel that the heroine has no first name?
2. What kind of character is our heroine—as she presents herself at the beginning of her flashback? Describe her and her companion, Mrs. Hopper.
3. What kind of character is Maxim de Winter, and why does a man of his stature fall in love with the young heroine? What draws him to her?
4. The heroine describes Maxim thus: "His face...was arresting, sensitive, medieval in some strange inexplicable way...rob him of his English tweeds, and put him in black, with lace at his throat and wrists, he would stare down at us in our new world from a long distant past—a past where men walked cloaked at night, and stood in the shadow of old doorways, a past of narrow stairways and dim dungeons, a past of whispers in the dark, of shimmering rapier blades, of silent, exquisite courtesy." Why is this an apt description? In other words, how does it set the tone and foretell the events of the novel?
5. In what way does the relationship between the young heroine and Maxim change during the months after their arrival to Manderley?
6. What role does Mrs. Danvers play in this story—in her relationships to the characters (dead and alive) and also in relation to the suspense within the novel?
7. What is the heroine led to believe about Rebecca? In what way does the dead woman exert power over Manderley? At this point, what are your feelings about the new Ms. de Winter? Are you sympathetic toward her plight...or impatient with her lack of assertion? Or are you confused and frightened along with her?
8. What is the heroine's relationship with Maxim's sister Beatrice and her husband Giles? What about the advice Beatrice offers the heroine? ?
9. Both Beatrice and Frank Crawley talk to the heroine about Rebecca. Beatrice tells the heroine, "you are so very different from Rebecca." Frank Crawley says that "kindliness, and sincerity, and...modesty...are worth far more to a man, to a husband, than all the wit and beatufy in the world." What are both characters trying to convey to the heroine...and how does she interpret their words?
10. What are some of the other clues about Rebecca's true nature that the author carefully plants along the way?
11. How might the costume ball—and the heroine's appearance in Rebecca's gown—stand as a symbol for young Mrs. de Winter's situation at Manderley?
12. Were you suprised by the twist the plot takes when Rebecca's body is found...and when Maxim finally tells the truth about his and Rebecca's marriage? Did the strange details of plot fall into place for you?
13. How, if at all, do Maxim's revelations change your attitude toward him? Did you feel relief upon first reading his confessions? Can you sympathsize with his predicament, or do you censure his actions? What do you think of the heroine's reaction? In her place, how might you have reacted?
14. How does this new knowledge alter the heroine's behavior and her sense of herself?
15. After Favell threatens to blackmail him, Maxim calls on Colonel Julyan. Why? Why does Maxim act in a way that seems opposed to his own best interests?
16. In the end, what really happened to Rebecca? What is the full story of her death? Is it right that Maxim is absolved of any crime? Was he caught in an untenable position? Was Rebecca simply too evil—did she end up getting what she deserved?
17. How do you view the destruction of Manderley? Is it horrific...or freeing...or justified vengeance on Rebecca's part? Would the de Winters have had a fulfilling life at Manderley had it not burned?
18. Now return to the beginning of the book. How would you put into words, or explain, the sense of loss and exile that permeates tone of the opening? (You might think about a spiritual as well as physical exile.)
(Questions by LitLovers, Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Vernon God Little
DBC Pierre, 2003
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
300 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780156029988
Summary
Winner, 2003 Booker Prize; Whitbread Award
When sixteen kids are shot on high school grounds, everyone looks for someone to blame. Meet Vernon Little, under arrest at the sheriff's office, a teenager wearing nothing but yesterday's underwear and his prized logo sneakers. Moments after the shooter, his best buddy, turns the gun on himself, Vernon is pinned as an accomplice.
Out for revenge are the townspeople, the cable news networks, and Deputy Vaine Curie, a woman whose zeal for the Pritikin die is eclipsed only by her appetite for barbecued ribs from the Bar-B-Chew Barn. So Vernon does what any red-blooded American teenager would do; he takes off for Mexico.
Vernon God Little is a provocatively satirical, riotously funny look at violence, materialism, and the American media. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Alias—Peter Warren Finlay
• Birth—1961
• Where—Australia
• Reared—Mexico
• Education—Edron Academy (Mexico City)
• Awards—Booker Prize; Whitbread First Novel Award;
Bollinger Everyman Woodhouse Award;
• Currently—lives in Ireland, UK
DBC Pierre was raised in Mexico between the ages of 7 and 23, although he has also traveled extensively. He lived a very privileged life in the milieu of that 2 percent of Mexico that holds the country's wealth and spent much time in the USA. Despite a very unrealistic, or "fairy-tale" childhood, he found himself more in tune as a child with the other 98 percent of Mexicans, and increasingly escaped home to run with the street crowd. When, at 16, his father fell gravely ill, he was largely entrusted with the family home, its cars and staff, and without recourse to counsel or reason, in his grief embarked upon a life of blithe self-destruction, alongside another half dozen junior rakes. Only two of them survived their twenties, and then only just:
Mexico, with its contrasts, its crushing poverty and sparkling wealth, its institutionalised corruption and cultural wisdom, its love of life and its embracing of death, undoubtedly set me on a path toward the deep end, philosophically and emotionally speaking. A fast and careless life had put me in tune with the common man, for whom a throw of the dice would mean life or death.
When, as a teenager, I set out for Texas to bring cars over the border, I saw that the same divides applied to the richest country on earth. Truest kinship was found in a group of homeless derelicts who camped under a bridge beside where I used to stay. It is in their broken-down lives that the seeds for Vernon were planted.
DBC Pierre has worked as a designer and cartoonist and currently lives in Ireland. Vernon God Little, his first novel, was awarded the 2003 the Booker Prize, Whitbread First Novel Award, and the Bollinger Everyman Woodhouse Award.
Extras
• Pierre's true-life journey from debt-ridden drug addict to Booker Prize winner has been a stranger-than-fiction ride. He told the (London) Guardian, "For nine years I was in a drug haze, on a rampage of cocaine, heroin, anything I could get. I am not proud of what I have done and I now want to put it right."
• During his dark years of gambling and drug addiction, he once even sold the house of his best friend—and stole the proceeds.
• In addition, he ran up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt by taking part in a scheme to find Montezuma's gold in Mexico.
• He has said that the £50,000 check awarded with the Booker Prize would go about one-third of the way to settling his outstanding debts.
• Pierre landed a publishing deal for his first novel one hour before the first plane hit the World Trade Center on September, 11, 2001. "Ever since, I feel like there's some dark destiny swirling around the book," he said. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble, courtesy of Faber and Faber Ltd.)
Book Reviews
Startling and excellent....Like the best satires, it makes you feel faintly guilty for laughing, which intensifies the pleasure of reading. It also keeps you hooked....Vernon himself is a brilliant comic creation.
Carrie O'Grady - Guardian (UK)
While British critics enthusiastically compared Vernon to classics like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Catcher in the Rye, the book actually reads more like Beavis and Butt-head trying to do Nathanael West. It has moments of genuine horror and pathos, but for the most part it is a lumbering, mannered performance, a vigorous but unimaginative compendium of every cliché you've ever heard about America in general and Texas in particular.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
[A] dangerous, smart, ridiculous and very funny first novel.... dark, satirical prose, suffused with the language of youth culture.... The writing is simply terrific.... Plot aside—and there is much in this novel to keep the reader turning pages— Vernon God Little is just plain fun to read.
Sam Sifton - New York Times Book Review
If Huckleberry Finn were set on the Mexican-American border and written by the creators of South Park, it might read something like this.
San Francisco Chronicle
An unexpectedly moving first novel ... Raucous and brooding, coarse and lyric, corrosive and sentimental in about equal measure.
Joyce Carol Oates - The New Yorker
[H]is real triumph lies in Pierre's creation of Vernon, a mouthpiece for today's disaffected teenagers....[I]n his credible articulation of Vernon's existential angst Pierre has created an invigorating heir to Holden Caulfield.
Literary Review
Scabrously funny....[I]n Vernon Little, Pierre has channeled the most afflicted and endearing hero since Rushmore's Max Fischer.
Entertainment Weekly
Pierre takes a freewheeling, irreverent look at teenage Sturm und Drang in his erratic, sometimes darkly comic debut novel about a Texas boy running from the law in the wake of a gory school shooting. Vernon Gregory Little is the 15-year-old protagonist, a nasty, sarcastic teenager accused of being an accessory to the murders committed by his friend Jesus Navarro in tiny Martirio, "the barbecue sauce capital of Texas." Vernon manages to make bail and avoid the media horde that descends on the town after the killings, but he's unable to get to the other gun—his father's—which he knows will tie him to the crime, despite his innocence. His flight path takes him first to Houston, where he unsuccessfully tries to hook up with gorgeous former schoolmate Taylor Figueroa; the crafty beauty, promised a media job by the evil Lally, who's also duped Vernon's mom, follows him to Mexico and efficiently betrays him. Most of the plotting feels like an excuse for Vernon's endless, sharply snide riffs on his small town and the unique excesses of America that helped spawn the killings. Unfortunately, Vernon's voice grows tiresome, his excesses make him rather unlikable and the over-the-top, gross-out humor is hit-or-miss. Pierre's wild energy offers entertaining satire as well as cringe-provoking scenes, and though he can write with incisive wit, this is a bumpy ride..
Publishers Weekly
Published to critical acclaim in England, this first novel is a satirical look at contemporary America viewed through the eyes of Vernon Little, a 15-year-old who is the sole survivor of a high school massacre. Vernon's best friend, Jesus Navarro, was the shooter; but since Jesus is dead, the town makes Vernon their scapegoat. Pierre, whose real name is Peter Finlay and who occasionally visited Texas while growing up in Mexico, paints a black picture of a place where a boy can be executed before he is old enough to buy a drink legally, where a mother is more concerned about getting a new refrigerator than her innocent son's having been accused of mass murder. The stereotypes are broad: poor Mexicans are noble; white Texans are idiots; women are mindless, materialistic gossips; and convicted murderers are more humane than people outside. America may have difficulty finding the humor in this novel, but equally troubling is the inauthenticity of the narrative voice. Purchase only for libraries with sophisticated readers, far away from Texas. —Andrea Kempf, Johnson Cty. Community Coll. Lib., Overland Park, KS
Library Journal
A schoolyard massacre, a teenager on the lam, gross-out humor, and jabs at the media. Two things you should know at the outset. First, the narrative voice of 15-year-old Vernon Little overwhelms everything else. Second, the story is shaped like a doughnut. We know that one summer Tuesday in the oil town of Martirio in central Texas there occurred a Columbine-style massacre, and we know the identity of the shooter, but the context of the killings is withheld until near the end: that's the hole in the doughnut. The delayed revelation is pointless and without suspense; what happened is that Jesus Navarro, a Mexican kid and Vernon's buddy, goaded unendurably by his classmates, mowed down 16 of them before killing himself. Vernon is being held as a possible accessory to murder, though we know our boy is innocent. In his loud whine, he tells us about his Mom, his Mom's friends, his obsession (panties), and his predicament (no control over his bowels). His identity is filtered through favorite words ("slime," "cream pie," "fucken"), which capture a teenager's self-absorption, but nothing more: there is no vision of his world. He escapes to Mexico only to be entrapped by the gorgeous Taylor, a high-school acquaintance who's working hand-in-glove with Lally, a sinister con man who has already tricked Vern's Mom. Flown back to Houston, Vern stands accused of 34 murders; his TV image is so familiar that viewers even connect him to others (the "suggestibility" factor). Meanwhile, Lally has set up his own Reality TV, filming Death Row inmates and having viewers decide the order of their executions. Vern is convicted, then pardoned; what saves him are his own dried turds, found miles from the crime scene ("Stool's Out!" says Time). Humor and mass murder make for strange bedfellows, and first-timer Pierre fails to find the tone that might harmonize them.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
(Below are two sets of questions—from the publisher and from a reader and LitLovers visitor.)
1. How does Vernon”s colloquial narrative voice help to develop him as a character? Does it ring true to you as the everyday speech of a young Texan? Do you "hear" Vernon speaking as you read? Is his voice different from the way characters in the book speak to one another? How does it change over the course of the novel?
2. How does the lack of male figures in Vernon”s home life affect him? How does Lally”s arrival change the dynamic of the household? How does Lally use his maleness to manipulate the situation, not just with Vernon”s mother and her friends, but with Vernon himself?
3. What is represented by the "knife" that Vernon refers to throughout the book, starting on p. 7: "it”s like [his mother] planted a knife in my back when I was born, and every fucken noise she makes just gives it a turn"? Later, he explains that parents "take every word in the fucken universe, and index it back to your knife . . . parents succeed by managing the database of your dumbness and your slime, ready for combat." (41) Do we all have "knives"? Are they created and used by our families, or by ourselves?
4. The question of cause and effect is central to novel. What do you think is the cause of the Martirio school shooting? Can there be more than one cause of an event like this? Is the town itself partly responsible for the massacre? Are Goosens and Nuckels? What about Jesus”s classmates? If we read the "cause and effect balls" Vernon plays with obsessively in his death row cell as a metaphor, what might they tell us about these questions?
5 Vernon God Little contains elements of two classic American genres: the adolescent coming-of-age story and the road novel. Critics have mentioned the novel”s similarity to The Catcher in the Rye and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. How would you compare Vernon God Little to these novels? What other novels (or stories, or films) did it remind you of? Do you think Pierre is consciously referring to these archetypal stories?
6. Discuss the role of consumerism in this novel. Vernon says that Jesus lacks power and status in part because "he can”t afford new Brands. Licensed avenues of righteousness are out of his reach."? (230) What does Vernon mean by "licensed avenues of righteousness?"
7. Vernon feels freer in Mexico than at home; he imagines that "there”s a kind of immune system back home, to knock off your edges, wash out the feral genes, package you up with your knife.... Down here, in another space and time, I spend a night among partners with correctly calibrated Mexican genes." (175) What is the difference Vernon is getting at here? Is he romanticizing Mexican life? What does it have, or lack, that allows him to feel free of his "knife"?
8 How does Vernon change and mature over the course of the novel? How does your attitude toward him change? Did you ever think that he had been part of the shooting?
9. Is the kind of cruelty shown by Jesus”s classmates on the day of the shooting simply a fact of adolescent life, or is it a symptom of an unhealthy society? Do teenagers have a right to be free from teasing and harassment, or are they, as Charlotte Brewster suggests, naturally subject to the tyranny of the majority of their peers? Can the social persecution of Jesus be compared to the persecution of Vernon by media-influenced public opinion?
10. What is the role of the media in Vernon God Little? Why do we never meet a real reporter, one who is not a fraud or an opportunist like Lally? How does the media spotlight shape Martirio”s reaction to the shootings? Do you think media coverage of tragedies and trials in recent years has gone too far? Has it had any positive effects?
11. What do you think of Lasalle”s final advice to Vernon (p. 258-260)? He asks Vernon, " “Where”s this God you talk about?... Just fuckin people. You stuck with the rest of us in this snake-pit of human wants, wants frustrated and calcified into needs.... Don”t come cryin to me because you got in the way of another man”s needs.”" Is this the root of Vernon”s troubles? If he had not been "too darn embarrassed to play God," (261) if he had set out from the beginning to "give the people what they want," could he have avoided the predicament he finds himself in? What do you make of the fact that Lasalle turns out to have been an axe murderer?
12. What does Vernon God Little say about America? Is it effective as a commentary on our culture? How do humor and satire work in the novel to provide a new perspective on school violence?
(Questions issued by publishers.)
_________________
1. How would you compare VGL to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn or Catcher in the Rye?
2. Was the narrator consistently credible? (Most of the time his words and thoughts can believably belong to a fifteen year old, naive in some ways, precocious in others. However, the occasional line seems entirely out of place. The nearest example in chapter 5, p. 44: "Leona's Eldorado sashays past the pumpjack, full of musty, dry wombs and deep, bitter wants.")
3. Did you expect a negative ending to the story, based on all the difficulties of Vernon’s life?
4. How do you understand the relationship between Vernon and his mother? Is it believable that she does not defend him or take his side?
5. What kind of portrait of the media does Lalo Ledesma depict? Is this a fair portrait, or a stereotype?
6. Michiko Kakutani mentioned in her New York Times review that the events "ricochet mechanically between the predictable and the preposterous," resulting in a less than “convincing or compelling story." Was the story convincing to you?
7. Does this novel winning the Booker suggest a perpetuation of the "Ugly American" in the minds of Britons?
8. We’ve [Robyn's book club] now read The Line of Beauty, The Famished Road, The Bone People, and now VGL—all with a focus on young males. Can we compare and contrast the characters of Nick, Azaro, Simon/Claire, and Vernon?
(Questions courtesy of Robyn Rubenstein who prepared these questions on behalf of her book club in New York City—a club devoted to working its way through the Man Booker Prize books. Thanks Robyn.)
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Loitering with Intent(Stone Barrington Series, 16)
Stuart Woods, 209
Penguin Group USA
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451228567
Summary
Dumped by his glamorous Russian girlfriend during dinner at Elaine's, and running low on cash, Stone Barrington is having a bad week. So his luck seems to be improving when he's hired to locate the missing son of a very wealthy man—lucky because the job pays well, and because the son is hiding in the tropical paradise of Key West.
But when Stone and his sometime running buddy Dino Bacchetti arrive in the sunny Keys, it appears that someone has been lying in wait. When Stone very nearly loses his life after being blindsided at a local bar, he realizes that the young man he's been hired to track may have good reason for not wanting to be found.
Suddenly Key West is looking less like Margaritaville and more like the mean streets of New York. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 9, 1938
• Where—Manchester, Georgia, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Georgia
• Awards—Edgar Award for Chiefs, 1981; Grand Prix de
Litérature Policière for Imperfect Strangers, 1995
• Currently—lives in Key West, Florida; Mt. Desert, Maine;
New York City
Stuart Woods was born in 1938 in Manchester, Georgia. After graduating from college and enlisting in the Air National Guard, he moved to New York, where he worked in advertising for the better part of the 1960s. He spent three years in London working for various ad agencies, then moved to Ireland in 1973 to begin his writing career in earnest.
However, despite his best intentions, Woods got sidetracked in Ireland. He was nearly 100 pages into a novel when he discovered the seductive pleasures of sailing. "Everything went to hell," he quips on his web site "All I did was sail." He bought a boat, learned everything he could about celestial navigation, and competed in the Observer Singlehanded Transatlantic Race (OSTAR) in 1976, finishing respectably in the middle of the fleet. (Later, he took part in the infamous Fastnet Race of 1979, a yachting competition that ended tragically when a huge storm claimed the lives of 15 sailors and 4 observers. Woods and his crew emerged unharmed.)
Returning to the U.S., Woods wrote two nonfiction books: an account of his transatlantic sailing adventures (Blue Water, Green Skipper) and a travel guide he claims to have written on a whim. But the book that jump-started his career was the opus interruptus begun in Ireland. An absorbing multigenerational mystery set in a small southern town, Chiefs was published in 1981, went on to win an Edgar Award, and was subsequently turned into a television miniseries starring Charlton Heston.
An amazingly prolific author, Woods has gone on to pen dozens of compelling thrillers, juggling stand-alone novels with installments in four successful series. (His most popular protagonists are New York cop-turned-attorney Stone Barrington, introduced in 1991's New York Dead, and plucky Florida police chief Holly Barker, who debuted in 1998's Orchid Beach.) His pleasing mix of high-octane action, likable characters, and sly, subversive humor has made him a hit with readers—who have returned the favor by propelling his books to the top of the bestseller lists.
Extras
• His first job was in advertising at BBDO in New York, and his first assignment was to write ads for CBS-TV shows. He recalls: "They consisted of a drawing of the star and one line of exactly 127 characters, including spaces, and I had to write to that length. It taught me to be concise.
• He flies his own airplane, a single-engine turboprop called a Jetprop, and tours the country every year in it, including book tours.
• He's a partner in a 1929 motor yacht called Belle and spends two or three weeks a year aboard her.
• In 1961-62, Woods spent 10 months in Germany with the National Guard at the height of the Berlin Wall Crisis.
• In October and November of 1979, he skippered a friend's yacht back across the Atlantic, with a crew of six, calling at the Azores, Madeira, and the Canary Islands and finishing at Antigua in the Caribbean. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Never one to avoid a glamorous vacation spot, Stone Barrington travels to Key West, Fla., in this easygoing entry in bestseller Woods's long-running series (Hot Mahogany, etc.) to feature the New York cop turned lawyer. Stone is supposed to track down Evan Keating, a young man whose signature is needed on documents allowing his father to sell the family business, except that Evan doesn't want to be found and when he is, doesn't want to sign the papers. Meanwhile, there's always time to enjoy good food and romance. Stone and Dino Bacchetti, his former NYPD partner, eat a lot of conch, while a beautiful Swedish doctor, Annika Swenson, learns the hard way that being involved with Stone is the most dangerous job in America. Woods handles the proceedings with dispatch and good humor, the pages fly by, and contented readers will sit back and eagerly await the next installment.
Publishers Weekly
After a less than thrilling turn in Hot Mahogany (2008), Stone Barrington is back in top form with this twist-filled page-turner.... An exciting entry in prolific Woods’ long-running series.
Booklist
Beneath the excruciatingly apt title lurks a welcome return to detection, more or less, for jet-setting New York attorney Stone Barrington. Offered a hefty sum to sell the family business, chemist Warren Keating has already won the reluctant blessing of his ancient father Eli. But company rules require him to get the permission of his son as well. That's a bit awkward, because Warren hasn't seen Evan since the boy's college graduation five years ago, and a recent postcard Evan sent from Key West doesn't sound as if it's laying the groundwork for a reunion. Deputized to fly to Key West and get Evan's signature on the appropriate documents, Stone packs light—an easy job since his girlfriend, Tatiana Orlovsky, has just returned to her unworthy husband. With the help of his ex-partner Lt. Dino Bacchetti and Dino's old buddy Lt. Tommy Sculley, who retired from the NYPD to police Key West, Stone quickly traces Evan to a convenient barstool, makes his pitch and gets decked for his trouble—not by Evan, but by his enterprising girlfriend Gigi Jones. Stone awakens to find comely Dr. Annika Swenson bending over him. Since she doesn't have any American hang-ups about sex, she's soon putting Stone through his paces, leaving him panting for sleep and another round of conch fritters. Meanwhile, Evan's schoolmate Charley Boggs has been identified as a likely drug mule, then becomes a murder victim, and Evan has accused his father of poisoning his later brother Harry, who ran the company, and trying to hire a hit man to kill Evan. For a while everything seems confusing and uncertain. Luckily for Stone's legion of fans, the guilt is swiftly fixed to a professional killer you just know is going to be left free at journey's end to decimate the casts of future Stone adventures. Middling for this wildly uneven series. Readers who quit halfway through won't miss a thing.
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 Loitering with Intent:
1. What kind of character is Evan Keating? Why does he seem to be the target of other's schemes?
2. Why is Evan so illusive and then uncooperative when Stone finally tracks him down? What did you come to suspect about Evan? Do his alibi's pan out...or is he lying?
3. What is the reason that Evan's girlfriend attacks Stone? Is an explanation ever offered?
4. How 'bout that Swedish doctor? An charming diversion to the plot...or tiresome and dispensible?
5. At what point did you begin to suspect that Warren Keating might be on the up and up? Were you stumped by all the twists and turns the story takes?
6. Do you find the ending satisfying...does it wrap up all the loose ends and offer a few suprises along the way? Or did you find the end predictable...with a few explanations still missing?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The View from Castle Rock
Alice Munro, 2006
Knopf Doubleday
349 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400077922
Summary
A powerful new collection from one of our most beloved, admired, and honored writers.
In stories that are more personal than any that she’s written before, Alice Munro pieces her family’s history into gloriously imagined fiction. A young boy is taken to Edinburgh’s Castle Rock, where his father assures him that on a clear day he can see America, and he catches a glimpse of his father’s dream. In stories that follow, as the dream becomes a reality, two sisters-in-law experience very different kinds of passion on the long voyage to the New World; a baby is lost and magically reappears on a journey from an Illinois homestead to the Canadian border.
Other stories take place in more familiar Munro territory, the towns and countryside around Lake Huron, where the past shows through the present like the traces of a glacier on the landscape and strong emotions stir just beneath the surface of ordinary comings and goings. First love flowers under the apple tree, while a stronger emotion presents itself in the barn. A girl hired as summer help, and uneasy about her “place” in the fancy resort world she’s come to, is transformed by her employer’s perceptive parting gift. A father whose early expectations of success at fox farming have been dashed finds strange comfort in a routine night job at an iron foundry. A clever girl escapes to college and marriage.
Evocative, gripping, sexy, unexpected—these stories reflect a depth and richness of experience. The View from Castle Rock is a brilliant achievement from one of the finest writers of our time. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 10, 1931
• Where—Wingham, Ontario, Canada
• Education—University of Western Ontario
• Awards—Nobel Prize for Literature; Man Booker Prize;
3 Governor General's Literary Awards; Giller Prize;
National Book Critics Circle Award; Trillium Book Award;
Marian Engel Award; Lorne Pierce Medal; Foreign
Honorary Member, American Academy Arts & Letters
• Currently—lives in Clinton, Ontario, and Comox, British
Columbia
Even though Alice Munro is known for her love stories, don't mistake her for just another romance writer. Munro never romanticizes love, but rather presents it in all of its frustrating complexity. She does not feel impelled to tack happy endings onto her tales of heartbreak and healing. As a result, Munro's wholly credible love stories have marked her as a true original who spins stories that are as honest as they are dramatic.
Alice Munro got her start in writing as a teenager in Ontario, and published her first story while attending Western Ontario University in 1950. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled Dance of the Happy Shades, would not be published until 1968, but when it arrived, Munro rapidly established herself as a unique voice in contemporary literature. Over the course of fifteen short stories, Munro displayed a firmly focused vision, detailing the loves and life-altering moments of the inhabitants of rural Ontario. Munro takes a gradual, methodical approach to unraveling her stories, often developing a character's perspective through several paragraphs, only to demolish it with a single, biting sentence. Yet she also explores those heartbreaking delusions of her characters with humanity, undercutting the bitterness with genuine compassion.
Munro was instantly recognized for her debut collection of stories, winning the prestigious Governor General's Award in Canada. Monroe would then spend the majority of her career writing short stories rather than novels. "I want to tell a story, in the old-fashioned way—what happens to somebody—but I want that 'what happens' to be delivered with quite a bit of interruption, turnarounds, and strangeness," she explained to Random House.com. "I want the reader to feel something is astonishing—not the 'what happens' but the way everything happens. These long short story fictions do that best, for me."
Munro would write only one novel, Lives of Girls and Women, a coming-of-age tale about a young girl named Del Jordan, which is actually structured more like a collection of short stories than a typical novel. Throughout the rest of her work, she would continue to explore themes of love and the way memories shape one's life in short story collections such as Friend of My Youth, Open Secrets, the award-winning The Love of a Good Woman, and Runaway
Because her stories are so unencumbered by cliches and speak with such clarity and truthfulness, it is often assumed that Munro's work is largely autobiographical. The fact that she chooses to set so many of her tales in her hometown only fuel these assumptions further. However, Munro says that very little of her material is based on her own life, and takes a more creative approach to inventing her finely developed characters. "Suppose you have—in memory—a young woman stepping off a train in an outfit so elegant her family is compelled to take her down a peg (as happened to me once)," she explains, "and it somehow becomes a wife who's been recovering from a mental breakdown, met by her husband and his mother and the mother's nurse whom the husband doesn't yet know he's in love with. How did that happen? I don't know."
As Munro grows older, her themes are turning more and more toward illness and death, yet she continues to display a startling vitality and youthfulness in her writing. A writer with a long and celebrated career, Alice Munro's work is just as compelling, honest, and insightful as ever.
Extras
• Munro dropped out of college in 1951 to marry fellow student James Munro. The couple opened a bookstore in Victoria, had three children, and divorced in 1972. Munro continues to live in Canada with her second husband, geographer Gerald Fremlin.
• Munro wrote on a typewriter for a good part of her career, calling herself a "late convert to every technological offering" in a publisher's interview. "I still don't own a microwave oven," she says. (From Barnes and Noble.)
Book Reviews
Again and again, Munro pieces together narratives out of frayed, handed-down material, including her own recollections and those of her mother and father, paying special attention to the details of small-town and rural life. Some of these stories—"Lying Under the Apple Tree," about an early romance, and "Hired Girl," about a term of service with a wealthy family vacationing on an island up north—are as shapely and satisfying as any she has written.
A.O. Scott - New York Times
There are no pyrotechnics in [the prose], very little poetry. The few similes are apt but not dazzlingly so. There is suspense, but it is contrived without resort to any obvious devices. In short, Munro is the illusionist whose trick can never be exposed. And that is because there is no smoke, there are no mirrors. Munro really does know magic: how to summon the spirits and the emotions that animate our lives.
Geraldine Brooks - Washington Post
Ten collections of stories and one novel have made Alice Munro one of the most praised fiction writers of our time. In The View from Castle Rock her full range of gifts is on display: indelible characters, deep insights about human behavior and relationships, vibrant prose, and seductive, suspenseful storytelling. Munro, in a foreword, tells how, a decade ago, she began looking into her family history, going all the way back to 18th-century Scotland. This material eventually became the stories presented here in part 1, "No Advantages." Munro also worked on "a special set of stories," none of which she included in previous collections, because they were "rather more personal than the other stories I had written." They now appear here in part 2, "Home." With both parts, Munro says, she has had a free hand with invention. Munro has used personal material in her fiction before, but at 75, she has given us something much closer to autobiography. Much of the book concerns people who have died, and places and ways of life that no longer exist or have been completely transformed, and though Munro is temperamentally unsentimental the mood is often elegiac. One difficulty that can arise with this kind of hybrid work is that the reader is likely to be distracted by the itch to know whether an event really occurred, or how much has been made up or embellished. In the title story, the reader is explicitly told that almost everything has been invented, and this enthralling multilayered narrative about an early 19th-century Scottish family's voyage to the New World is the high point of the collection. On the other hand, "What Do You Want to Know For?" at the heart of which is an account of a cancer scare Munro experienced, reads like pure memoir and seems not only thin by comparison but insufficiently imagined as a short story. Perhaps none of the stories here is quite up to the mastery of earlier Munro stories such as "The Beggar Maid" or "The Albanian Virgin." But getting this close to the core of the girl who would become the master is a privilege and a pleasure not to be missed. And reliably as ever when the subject is human experience, Munro's stories-whatever the proportions of fiction and fact-always bring us the truth.—Sigrid Nunez
Publishers Weekly
With this new collection, Munro (Runaway) more than lives up to her reputation as a master of short fiction. In 12 exquisitely constructed tales, she draws on family lore and letters to interpret the history of her Laidlaw relatives, a tough bunch from Scotland's Ettrick Valley that eventually emigrated to the New World. The title story, set in 1818, details a transatlantic voyage undertaken by six Laidlaws for whom ocean sailing is a totally new experience. Their struggles in adjusting to shipboard life anticipate challenges ahead in America as their fears and hopes culminate in the arrival of baby Isabel, all her life to be known as one "born at sea." In "No Advantages," a modern-day narrator's visit to Ettrick reveals what the family gained (and perhaps lost) by leaving the legend-haunted valley, while other stories explore how the harsh realities of wilderness pioneering affect several generations. All the narratives exhibit Munro's keen eye for realistic details and her ability to illuminate the depths of seemingly mundane lives and relationships. Highly recommended. —Starr E. Smith, Fairfax Cty. P.L., VA
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. "No Advantages"
Visiting the graveyard of Ettrick Church, Munro finds the tombstone of her great-great-great-great grandfather, and is struck with a feeling that “Past and present lumped together here made a reality that was commonplace and yet disturbing beyond anything I had imagined” [p. 7]. What is disturbing about this merging of past and present?
2. "The View from Castle Rock"
Agnes is a willful, sexually alert woman, trapped in her fate as a woman and mother [p. 72]. She is married to Andrew Laidlaw although she had been involved with his brother James [p. 67], who has already gone out to Nova Scotia. Andrew, we are told, “was the one that she needed in her circumstances” [p. 55]. What might her circumstances have been? In what ways does Agnes seem to embody the desires and frustrations of women in her time, and possibly in our time?
3. Why does the old James mention “the curse of Eve” with regard to Agnes [pp. 44-45]? Discuss Munro’s prose in the paragraphs describing Agnes’ childbirth [pp. 46-47]. What is most effective, moving, or realistic about this scene?
4. Though Walter refuses Nettie’s father’s offer of work and in doing so refuses to commit himself to Nettie, in later life “he will find that she is a source of happiness, available to him till the day he dies.” He imagines her “acquiring a tall and maidenly body, their life together. Such foolish thoughts as a man may have in secret” [p. 78]. Why does Walter pass up this offer?
5. James Laidlaw has wanted all his life to go to America with his family [p. 62]; why, once he is on the ship, does he lose interest? Why does he become, on the ship, so profoundly and comically a man of Ettrick? What do his letters home [pp. 82-84] tell us about him?
6. Munro writes, “I am surely one of the liars the old man talks about, in what I have written about the voyage. Except for Walter’s journal, and the letters, the story is full of my invention” [p. 84]. Discuss the ways in which factual evidence [pp. 84-87] and imaginative embellishment work together in this story, as well as the effect of this mingling.
7. "Illinois"
Andrew muses on what it was in America that had suited his brother Will and also possibly contributed to his early death: “there was something about all this rushing away, losing oneself entirely from family and past, there was something rash and self-trusting about it that might not help a man, that might put him more in the way of such an accident, such a fate” [p. 110]. Does the collection draw distinctions between those who remain attached to family, even in a new land, and those who are more eager to cut their ties?
8. "The Wilds of Morris Township"
The Laidlaws who settled in Blyth, Ontario—including Munro’s great-grandfather Thomas—lived seemingly joyless lives: “without any pressure from the community, or their religion …they had constructed a life for themselves that was monastic without any visitations of grace or moments of transcendence” [p. 118]. Munro’s father marveled at the change, in a generation, from adventurous emigrants to cautious settlers: “To think what their ancestors did …To pick up and cross the ocean. What was it squashed their spirits? So soon” [p. 126]. What might be possible answers to this question?
9. "Working for a Living"
Foundering late one night in a snowdrift as he walked home from work, a father thought only about his failures: about the fact that he would die in debt, about his invalid wife and the children he would leave behind. On hearing this, his daughter wondered, “didn’t he struggle for his own self? I meant, was his life now something only other people had a use for?” [p. 166]. What does this incident tell us the realities of adulthood, and about the daughter’s ambition and her sense of self-importance?
10. In what details does this story show how life’s economic difficulties diminish people? Does the father seem somehow heroic in the face of his disappointments? What becomes of the mother’s early entrepreneurial talents? How do these people come to terms with their disappointments and continue to face the future?
11. "Fathers"
Bunt Newcombe is so brutal with his wife and children that his daughter Dahlia speaks constantly of her desire to kill him. The narrator says that now such a family “might be looked on with concern and compassion. These people need help.” But in that time and place, such misfortunes were taken at face value: “It was simple destiny and there was nothing to be done about it” [p. 175]. The narrator, however, is also sometimes beaten by her father: “I felt as if it must be my very self that they were after, and in a way I think it was. The self-important disputatious part of my self that had to be beaten out of me” [p. 195]. What does this story tell us about the expectations of the world in which Munro grew up, and about how she managed to survive it with what she would need to become a writer?
12. "Lying Under the Apple Tree"
Since the story is told long after the events narrated, an older woman is narrating the experience of her younger self. What effect does this have on the reader’s understanding of the girl’s sexuality? Would the girl have had the words to express what she was feeling at the time? Does the girl’s desire come through more clearly in the words of an older woman? Think about Munro’s perspectives, throughout the collection, on sexuality and desire as experienced by women.
13. What are the signs that the Craik family is slightly lower down on the social scale—or at least on the scale of social striving—than the narrator’s own family? What does she mean in saying, “I was deceiving this family and my own, I was at this table under false pretenses” [p. 218]? How surprising is the story’s ending, in which the narrator discovers that Russell is Miriam McAlpin’s lover?
14. "Hired Girl"
As with “Lying Under the Apple Tree,” this story explores the experience of learning about one’s place in the hierarchy of social class. The hired girl, noticing the difference between the Montjoys’ kitchen and her own family’s, thinks, “it seemed as if I had to protect it from contempt—as if I had to protect a whole precious and intimate though hardly pleasant way of life from contempt” [p. 240]. Given this feeling, how does the girl handle herself in the presence of the family she works for? What is she ashamed of?
15. "The Ticket"
This is a story about leaving home, and about how marriage often was, for women, the ticket out. Yet Aunt Charlie suggests, intuiting the girl’s true feelings, that the man she has chosen might not be “just the right ticket for you” [p. 283]. Discuss how this urgent communication between the older woman and the bride-to-be is handled in the narrative. What details make the end of the story so effective?
16. "Home"
The narrator goes back to visit the house where she grew up, which has been modernized by her father and stepmother: “So it seems that this peculiar house—the kitchen part of it built in the eighteen-sixties—can be dissolved, in a way, and lost, inside an ordinary comfortable house of the present time” [p. 289]. How does the story serve to lay bare again the life within the house, which the narrator calls “a poor man’s house, a house where people have lived close to the bone for over a hundred years” [pp. 289-90]?
17. When her father says, “I know how you loved this place,” the daughter thinks , “And I don’t tell him that I am not sure now whether I love any place, and that it seems to me it was myself that I loved here—some self that I have finished with, and none too soon” [p. 290]. How has the daughter’s self-love helped her to escape from the life she might have had, had she stayed close to home?
18. "What Do You Want to Know For?"
What is the connection between the major elements in this story—the mysterious crypt, the regional landscape and its history, and the lump in the narrator’s breast? What is the significance of the lamp sealed inside the vault, and Mrs. Mannerow’s comment upon it: “Nobody knows why they did it. They just did” [p. 339]?
19. "Messenger"
Munro writes in her epilogue, “We can’t resist this rifling around in the past, sifting the untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and anecdotes together, hanging on to threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore to life” [p. 347]. What is the overall effect of these stories, and how do they make you think about your own family’s history and your place in it?
20. On The View from Castle Rock
Discuss Munro’s decision to create a collection of stories from her own and her family’s history. She writes in her foreword, “These are stories. You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of a life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on. The part of this book that might be called family history has expanded into fiction, but always within the outline of a true narrative”. How and why is this approach interesting? Do these stories, in any substantive way, differ from those in Munro’s earlier collections?
(Questions from the publisher.)
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