Returning to Earth
Jim Harrison, 2007
Grove/Atlantic
280 pp.
ISBN-13: 780802143310
Summary
Hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "a master … who makes the ordinary extraordinary, the unnamable unforgettable," beloved author Jim Harrison returns with a masterpiece — a tender, profound, and magnificent novel about life, death, and finding redemption in unlikely places.
Slowly dying of Lou Gehrig's Disease, Donald, a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man, begins dictating family stories he has never shared with anyone, hoping to preserve history for his children. The dignity of Donald's death and his legacy encourages his loved ones to find a way to redeem — and let go of — the past, whether through his daughter's emersion in Chippewa religious ideas or his mourning wife's attempt to escape the malevolent influence of her own father.
A deeply moving book about origins and endings, and how to live with honor for the dead, Returning to Earth is one of the finest novels of Harrison's long, storied career, and will confirm his standing as one of the most important American writers now working. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth— December 11, 1937
• Where—Grayling, Michigan, USA
• Education—Michigan State University
• Awards—National Endowment for the Arts grant;
Guggenheim Fellowship
• Currently—lives in Michigan, New Mexico, Montana
Jim Harrison is an American author known for his poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, and writings about food. His work has appeared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone, Outside, Playboy, Men's Journal, and the New York Times Magazine. He has published several collections of novellas, including Legends of the Fall (1979), which contained two that were eventually turned into films: Revenge (1990) and Legends of the Fall (1994).
He has written over twenty-five books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, including four volumes of novellas, The Beast God Forgot to Invent, Legends of the Fall, The Woman Lit by Fireflies, and Julip; seven other novels, The Road Home, Wolf, A Good Day to Die, Farmer, Warlock, Sundog, and Dalva; ten collections of poetry, including most recently Braided Creek, with Ted Kooser, and The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems; and three works of nonfiction, Just Before Dark, The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand, and the memoir Off to the Side.
Much of Harrison's writing depicts sparsely populated regions of North America with many stories set in places such as Nebraska's Sand Hills, Michigan's Upper Peninsula and Montana's mountains.
The winner of a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Spirit of the West Award from the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association, he has had his work published in twenty-two languages. (Adapted from Wikipedia and the publisher.)
Book Reviews
As a rough rule, it seems that writers fall into two camps. There are those who delight in rousting the truth from its concealment amid pieties and convention. If they must strip-mine the world to expose its hypocrisy, they will do so, even if they leave a landscape barren of hope. Then there are those writers who prefer to remythologize life on earth, finding it rich with strange congruences and possibilities. Jim Harrison is a writer of the second type, and Returning to Earth is his extraordinary valediction to mourning. It sharpens one’s appetite for life even at its darkest.
Will Blythe - The New York Times
Dying at 45 of Lou Gehrig's disease, Donald, who is Chippewa-Finnish, dictates his family story to his wife, Cynthia, who records this headlong tale for their two grown children (and also interjects). Donald's half-Chippewa great-grandfather, Clarence, set out from Minnesota in 1871 at age 13 for the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In Donald's compellingly digressive telling, Clarence worked the farms and mines of the northern Midwest, and arrived in the Marquette, Mich., area 35 years later. As Donald weaves the tale of his settled life of marriage and fatherhood with that of his restless ancestors, he reveals his deep connection to an earlier, wilder time and to a kind of people who are "gone forever." The next three parts of the novel, each narrated by a different member of Donald's family, relate the story of Donald's death and its effects. While his daughter, Clare, seeks solace in Donald's Anishnabeg religion, Cynthia and her brother, David, use Donald's death to come to terms with the legacy of their alcoholic father. The rambling narrative veers away from the epic sweep of Harrison's Legends of the Fall, and Donald's reticence about the role religion plays in his life dilutes its impact on the story. But Harrison's characters speak with a gripping frankness and intimacy about their own shortcomings, and delve into their grief with keen sympathy.
Publishers Weekly
Time, memory, and the land all play key roles in Harrison's remarkable new novel, set, like much of his work (e.g., True North), in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. At the center of the story is Donald, a middle-aged Chippewa-Finnish man dying of Lou Gehrig's disease. His dignity, presence, and approach to life, deeply influenced by Native American culture and spirituality, have had a powerful effect on his family, and the novel is largely concerned with his feelings about his impending demise and his family's reactions to it. Along with the example of his life, his legacy is a family history he dictates to his wife, Cynthia, during his last days in order to preserve what memories he can for those who remain, including children Clare and Herald. After his death, the family must come to terms with how he has affected their lives and find their own ways both to honor him and to let him go. A deeply felt meditation on life and death, nature and God, this is one of Harrison's finest works. Recommended for all public libraries. —Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA
Library Journal
Meditations on mortality and quasi-incestuous desire inform this thoughtful, occasionally rambling novel. Making his fictional return to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Harrison (True North, 2004, etc.) tells the story of a death and its aftermath through four different narrators. The first is Donald, a man of mixed Chippewa-Finnish blood, who reflects on his life as he suffers through the final stages of Lou Gehrig's disease. He's a 45-year-old man of deep spirituality and profound dignity, and he's determined to assume control over his last days. The final section's narrator is Cynthia, Donald's wife, who is still trying to come to terms with his death five months later. He had enriched her life in ways that her wealthy family never could, and she had married him because he was so unlike her pedophile father. These sections are by far the novel's strongest, leaving the reader to wonder how and why Harrison chose the two narrators in the middle. One is K, a free spirit with a Mohawk haircut, who is the stepson of Cynthia's brother, David. K helps Donald through his last days, while sleeping with Donald's daughter, Clare, and lusting after her mother. Though the familial ties are too close for comfort, Cynthia occasionally feels twinges of desire for her daughter's cousin/lover as well. The weakest section of the novel is narrated by David, who hasn't been able to come to terms with unearned wealth as well as his sister has, and whose life balances good works with mental instability. It seems that their disgraced father has somehow influenced both David's character and his fate. As the last three narrators resume their lives after Donald's death, it appears to each of them that his spirit has not died with him and perhaps is now inhabiting a bear. Studying Chippewa spirituality, daughter Clare comes to believe this most strongly, which makes one wonder why she and perhaps her brother weren't narrators instead of K and David. Death remains a mystery, as Harrison explores the meaning it gives to life.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. As in his previous works of fiction, Jim Harrison chronicles life in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a rugged landscape of thick forests filled with bear and deer. Begin your discussion of this novel by considering how this untamed backdrop affects and shapes his characters’ lives on both a physical and spiritual level. Consider the vast expanse of Lake Superior as well as the extreme climate of harsh winters and hot mosquito-filled summers–how might this influence people to be constantly at the mercy of nature?
2. K. describes Donald’s story as “what William Faulkner called ‘the raw meat on the floor’” (p. 98). What does he mean by this statement? What is it about Donald’s character and the way in which he lives that generates such respect and admiration among his family members? How far do you agree with the statement that “I never knew anyone who so thoroughly was what he was” (p. 162)? Would you describe anyone else’s story in the novel as “the raw meat on the floor?”
3. Donald’s attitude toward his death is stoic and without self-pity: “I think you’re better off understanding things like this than simply being pissed off” (p. 25). Talk about the importance of his religion in his ability to remain strong throughout his illness and the preparations for his suicide. Why is he so private about his religion? Trace the influences of his past on his personal brand of religion: take into accounts his months spent with Flower as a child, his Indian Chippewa heritage, his work ethic, and his reverence for nature.
4. What do we learn about Donald through his admission of his plan to murder a childhood enemy? Does your impression of him change? For the better or the worse?
5. Donald states “my own father’s solution for the hard knocks of life was to work too hard and that’s also been a downfall of my own” (p. 46). Identify and explain the ways in which work and the need to work appear in the novel: think about the contrast between Cynthia’s father and Donald’s father, about David’s teaching position in Mexico and what it means to him, as well as Cynthia’s decision to move away to find meaningful work. Find instances where mental well-being depends on physical exertion and, in contrast, where a lack of physical activity hinders intellectual thought.
6. As Donald recounts his family history to his wife, Cynthia, he seems to discover or rediscover a deep connection to his ancestors, especially with his great-grandfather, the first Clarence. How are the two of them alike? Consider Donald’s empathy for Clarence losing his beloved horse, Sally, stating that “I understand his feelings because I have lost my body” (p. 26). Even before the telling of these stories, what are some of the ways in which Donald has passed down his Indian heritage to his children?
7. In relating a moving story about a raven funeral, Donald muses about his own death (p. 71). How is his death similar to the raven’s passing? Discuss the author’s portrayal of Donald’s final moments, narrated by K. in one short paragraph in fairly clinical terms. Was the brevity of this description surprising to you or did it resonate with deeper, unspoken emotion? Did you want to see the family’s immediate reactions to the death or were you content to give them their privacy and imagine for yourself?
8. “We’ve been so inept and careless about death in America and have paid big for the consequences” (p. 226). What do you think this statement means and how far would you agree with it?
9. Death and attitudes toward it obviously play a central role in this novel. David states: “Death gives us a shove into a new sort of landscape” (p. 166) while Cynthia questions, “What’s an appropriate response to death?” (p. 228). Briefly consider the different characters’ responses to Donald’s death. Given what we know of their personalities does anyone’s reaction surprise you? Does anyone manage to act as Donald hoped? – “You can remember me but let me go?” (p. 228).
10. Why do you think Clare feels the need to immerse herself in Chippewa ideas on death after her father’s passing? Why is she drawn to Flower instead of her own mother? Is there a parallel between her feelings for Flower and those of her father’s feelings for Flower? How realistic do you find her responses?
11. Consider the ways in which Cynthia deals with Donald’s death. Why is she unable to help Clare? Discuss the parallels of learning to let go as a mother with letting someone go in death.
12. Donald’s death serves as a catalyst of sorts for David and gives him the strength to seek out Vera, the girl he loved twenty years earlier. Why do you think he is able to put the past behind him now?
13. Herald and Clare, Donald and Cynthia’s children, are strikingly dissimilar in character. Find instances of this dissimilarity and discuss how their character traits prepare them for handling their father’s illness and death. Do they step out of their expected roles at all? In many ways they mirror the difference that exists between Cynthia and her brother David, even K. and his sister, Rachel. What might these differences tell us about human nature?
14. David is a fascinating character, balancing his life between the wilds of his cabin and the remote poverty of Mexican villages. K. states, “David had spent his life nearly suffocated by ambiguities” (p. 137). How far would you agree with this statement? Central to his being is the need to make reparations for wrongs committed by his family over the last century. How do his survival kits for Mexican illegal immigrants fit into this picture? At one point he is advised to “cast your role as a screwdriver rather than a tank” (p. 187) in his humanitarian efforts. How far could this statement apply to his personal life too?
15. Fathers and father figures play an important role throughout the novel. Consider Cynthia’s attitude toward her father as a girl and its influence on her falling in love with Donald. Does her attitude toward her father and his monstrous act of raping Vera change over the course of the novel? What does she discover about his experience in the war, and does her knowledge bring any conclusions? What do we learn about David’s relationship with his father, and how has this affected his life? Who were father figures for Cynthia and her brother David? What about K? Talk about the four father figures in his life.
16. What are your impressions of the author’s portrayal of love in the novel? Consider the reasons for Donald and Cynthia’s deep and lasting love, which started in the most unlikely of circumstances. K. reflects with anger on “the randomness of love” (p. 105), which makes him love Cynthia more than Clare. Discuss the different relationships presented in the novel and consider the role played by “randomness.”
17. Discuss how the novel explores the idea of history, especially through the characters of David and Donald. David compares the destructive nature of Donald’s disease to his own “dithering obsession with the destructiveness of history” (p. 149). What do you think he means by this and is it a fair analogy to make? How does his preoccupation with history impact his life? Consider both the positive and negative ways. Talk about Donald’s attitude toward history. Why do you think he states “I like the stories with people myself” (p. 6)?
18. We learn, quite surprisingly, that Donald was jealous of David’s vivid animal-filled dreams (p. 119) but Donald seems to have had many striking dreams himself. Identify examples of dream images that have special importance in the novel. Consider the dream of the first Clarence that led him to a horse farm. How does Cynthia follow in his footsteps at the end of the novel? Given that dreaming occurs when the mind is in a state of subconsciousness, could Donald’s three days on the mountain fit into the dream category? What are some of the visions he experienced during his fast and how are they relevant to the rest of the novel?
19. As you will have noted, bears appear in dreams throughout the novel, and from Donald’s first mention of bad dreams about flying bears as a child, it is evident that bears will play a major role in the book. Consider the implications of the statement that “a bear is just a bear” in terms of understanding Donald’s religion. Find instances of the prevalence of bears in daily life in the Upper Peninsula. and discuss the spiritual importance of bears in Chippewa lore. How do different family members react to the possibility of Donald’s soul migrating into a bear’s body? What realization occurs at the very end of the novel when Cynthia and Clare sight a bear together? Has Cynthia changed since Donald’s death? What might this mean for her relationship with her daughter?
20. Discuss how the novel portrays man’s symbiotic relationship with nature. Consider the ways in which Donald and his family bring nature into their lives, indeed need nature in order to live life fully, and find instances where people show a lack of reverence toward nature and animals. When Donald spends his three days in the wilderness he finds his place in the world and recounts “I was able to see how creatures including insects looked at me rather than just how I saw them” (p. 70). Given what we know about the importance of nature in the characters’ lives, what might K.’s sister, Rachel, represent in the novel?
21. At the end of the novel Cynthia discovers what Camus refers to as “terrible freedom” (p. 274). What is this, and why does it fill Cynthia with “vertigo”? Do you think she will survive in Montana?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Wednesday Sisters
Meg Waite Clayton, 2008
Random House
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781616791216
Summary
Five women, one passion, and the unbreakable bond of friendship.
When five young mothers—Frankie, Linda, Kath, Ally, and Brett—first meet in a neighborhood park in the late 1960s, their conversations center on marriage, raising children, and a shared love of books. Then one evening, as they gather to watch the Miss America Pageant, Linda admits that she aspires to write a novel herself, and the Wednesday Sisters Writing Society is born.
The five women slowly, and often reluctantly, start filling journals, sliding pages into typewriters, and sharing their work. In the process, they explore the changing world around them: the Vietnam War, the race to the moon, and a women’s movement that challenges everything they believe about themselves.
At the same time, the friends carry one another through more personal changes–ones brought about by infidelity, longing, illness, failure, and success. With one another’s support and encouragement, the Wednesday Sisters begin to embrace who they are and what they hope to become, welcoming readers to experience, along with them, the power of dreaming big. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—in the USA: Washington D.C., Kansas City, Chicago,
Los Angeles, and New Jersey
• Education—J.D., University of Michigan
• Currently—lives in Palo Alto, California
Meg Waite Clayton is the author of The Language of Light, a finalist for the Bellwether Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in Runner’s World, Writer’s Digest, and literary magazines. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School and was a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. She lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband and their two sons. (From the publisher.)
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Her own words:
I didn't start out being a novelist, I started out as someone who wanted to be a novelist but had no idea how one went about that—much less any faith in my own talent. I went off to the University of Michigan thinking I would become a doctor, one of the few educational and career paths I understood. I emerged after seven years as a corporate lawyer in a tidy blue suit, and it was years later—and only at my husband's gentle reminder that I wasn't getting younger—that I got up the nerve to give writing a serious try. I was thirty-two by then, and pregnant with my second son, who was eleven when my first novel was published. Writing, I've discovered, is a lot harder than it looks.
Along the way, I wrote short stories and essays, and more than a few pages that are in the proverbial drawer. I had great luck on the first piece I ever published, an essay called "What the Medal Means" which sold quickly to the only publication I could imagine it in, Runner's World. The other short nonfiction I've published also placed relatively easily: another short essay in Runner's World, as well as pieces that appeared in Writer's Digest, Virginia Quarterly Review, and an anthology titled Searching For Mary Poppins.
My fiction, though, was slower going. I sent stories out again and again before they began to sell, revising each time before I mailed them until they did finally start appearing in publications that include Shenandoah, Other Voices, and Literary Review.
I've also been raising children all the years I've been writing, as the Wednesday Sisters do, developing the ability to write anywhere and anytime. I moved a few times in the interim as well, from Los Angeles to Baltimore to Nashville and now to Palo Alto, California. I'm used to moving, though; I'd lived in ten different houses in Washington D.C., Kansas City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New Jersey before I went off to college. Despite all those moves, though, like Frankie in the opening scene of The Wednesday Sisters, I get nervous every time I move away from old friends.
Although my fiction is not closely autobiographical, I do draw heavily from my own emotions and experiences as I write. If you're interested in more information on how I do that, please visit the links on the right or the Writers page." (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Clayton captures the evolution of a decades-long friendship in an highly accessible narrative. She grabs the reader's attention—while introducing compelling and quirky characters that are easy to identify with. The Wednesday Sisters is a refreshing alternative. —Jessica Harrison
Salt Lake City Deseret News
The Wednesday Sisters poignantly illustrates the way it really was back in the days when the glass ceiling was more like the roof of a marble tomb—Though all their hopes aren't realized, the friendship these women share provides a haven for each one anyway—and for the readers of this novel. —Faye Jones
Nashville Scene
In her light second novel, Clayton chronicles a group of mothers who convene in a Palo Alto park and share their changing lives as the late 1960s counterculture blossoms around them. Linda is a runner who tracks women's progress at the Olympics. Brett has one eye on the moon, where men are living out her astronaut dreams. Southern belle Kath isn't convinced she has dreams outside the confines of her marriage (but she's open to persuasion), while quiet Ally only hopes for what the other women already have: a child. Frankie, a Chicago transplant who has followed her computer genius husband to a nascent Silicon Valley, is the story's narrator and the ladies' ringleader, inspiring them all to follow her dream of becoming a writer. They write in moments snatched from their household chores and share their stories in the park. Though the narration and story lines are so syrupy they verge on hokey, Clayton ably conjures the era's details and captures the women's changing roles in a world that expects little of them.
Publishers Weekly
Readers will be swept up by this moving novel about female friendship and enthralled by the recounting of a pivotal year in American history as seen through these young women’s eyes. —Aleksandra Walker.
Booklist
Meg Waite Clayton's stirring novel will appeal not just to those who secretly wish to be writers, but to anyone with a love of great books; anyone who has felt truly moved by a book or an author; and anyone who has had their dreams bolstered by good and faithful friends. It will speak volumes to fans of The Friday Night Knitting Club and The Jane Austen Book Club. You'll want to share The Wednesday Sisters with anyone who believes in the power of a good book—to inspire those close to us, and for those who inspire.
Bronwyn Miller - BookReporter
A story of female friendship in Palo Alto evokes the '60s, including the stirrings of second-wave feminism. Beauty-pageant protests, inequality for female athletes, daughters denied educational opportunities and many other not-so-subtle reminders of how far we've come pepper Clayton's predictable second novel, which brings together Frankie, Linda, Kath, Brett and Ally in a Californian park in 1967. Their friendship inspires a writing group, the Wednesday Sisters Writing Society, and also a support network as crises come and go: There are Ally's miscarriages; Linda's health scare; Kath's marriage problems. The women share confessions, rifts and revelations which edge them toward greater achievement, while behind them a stream of iconic '60s moments—the Olympic Black Power salute; the moon landing—and books (Love Story, The French Lieutenant's Woman) add period flavor.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What do you think draws the women together in the opening scenes of The Wednesday Sisters? Is it, as Linda suggests, a shared love of books, or is it a shared fascination with Brett’s white gloves, or is it both or something else?
2. Twice in the novel, Linda attempts to ask about Brett’s gloves, but she is cut off by one of the other Sisters. Why are they reluctant to cross that line? What do you think the gloves symbolize? Do you think young women meeting Brett today would be as gentle about her gloves? Are there generational differences in the ways women relate?
3. Ally enters the group in part based on an unspoken assumption that Carrie is her daughter, when the child is in fact her niece. Why do you think Frankie keeps this secret rather than sharing it with the others? Do you think Ally’s life would be different today, given the existence of fertility treatments and support groups?
4. Why does Kath go so far in trying to win Lee back? Did this surprise you? Do you think she would have acted differently if the success of her marriage weren’t so important to her parents? If divorce had been as prevalent then as it is now? If she had been able to provide for herself financially? Would you, like Kath’s friends, be reluctant to counsel her to leave her husband? Or can you imagine giving her different advice?
5. Linda’s breast cancer and Ally’s fertility issues cause each to doubt her own femininity, and leave their friends at a loss as to how to help them. Have you or a friend ever been through a similar crisis? What has helped you hold on to your sense of self through tough times? How have your friendships affected this experience?
6. Why do you think Frankie finds it so difficult to tell Danny she’s writing a book, when she has no trouble at all confiding this fact to her husband’s boss? Why are we sometimes reluctant to admit we have dreams?
7. The old abandoned mansion–“a Miss Havisham house,” as Frankie’s husband, Danny, calls it, after the moldering mansion in Dickens’s Great Expectations–is a haunting presence through most of the novel. What does this house seem to symbolize? Does it mean something different to each of the Sisters? What does its destruction mean?
8. Published books are mentioned throughout the novel–from The Great Gatsby to The Bell Jar to To Kill a Mockingbird. What role do these titles play in The Wednesday Sisters? Why do you think each of the Sisters chooses the “model book” she does? What model book might you choose yourself?
9. The writing group the Sisters form in The Wednesday Sisters helps its members grow in self-awareness and self-confidence. Have you been a part of a group–perhaps even a reading or writing group–that has had a similar effect on you? What do you think of the author’s message that writing doesn’t have to culminate in a book deal; that it can feed the soul of anyone who works hard at it; that with hard work, it is possible to get better; and that writing can help one make sense of one’s life?
10. In one memorable scene, the Wednesday Sisters gather in a funeral parlor and imagine what they can accomplish in their lives that will not perish with their deaths. Did this make you think about writing in a new light? What about motherhood?
11. The women’s movement provides an evolving backdrop to the lives of the women in The Wednesday Sisters. How did you relate the experiences of the Wednesday Sisters to events in your own life or in the lives of women you know who lived at that time?
12. The Wednesday Sisters make a tradition of watching the Miss America Pageant every year. How do their reactions to the pageant change over time, and why? How does the pageant itself change?
13. If the Miss America Pageant is one recurring motif in the novel, the space program is another. What similarities and differences do you see in the way the author uses these two iconic slices of Americana?
14. Brett’s novel, The Mrs. Americas, posits a future in which a spaceship crewed by women and carrying a cargo of frozen sperm takes off on a mission to propagate the human race beyond the confines of our solar system. Why do you think Clayton chose to have Brett write this particular novel?
15. In addition to exploring the empowerment of women and the prevalence of sexism, The Wednesday Sisters addresses other social issues. In what ways are race and class raised in the novel? What did you think of the Sisters’ reactions to the fact that Ally’s husband, Jim, was from India?
16. Why do you think the author chose to set the climax of her novel on the set of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson? How does this scene compare to the Miss America Pageants described in the novel?
17. Throughout the novel, the Wednesday Sisters’ friendships are complex, constantly evolving, and occasionally downright messy. Yet even as their bonds are tested, the group endures and grows stronger. What do you think keeps their friendships growing stronger rather than breaking apart?
18. In an interview, author Meg Waite Clayton once said, “If an author makes me weep, I am theirs–though why so many of us like books that make us cry puzzles me to no end.” Do you share this sentiment? Why do you think readers respond to novels that make them cry?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Main Street
Sinclair Lewis, 1920
~400 pp. (varies by publisher)
Summary
Sinclair Lewis's barbed portrait of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, shattered the myth of the American Middle West as God's Country and became a symbol of the cultural narrow-mindedness and smug complacency of small towns everywhere. At the center of the novel is Carol Kennicott, the wife of a town doctor, who dreams of initiating social reforms and introducing art and literature to the community.
The range of reactions to Main Street when it was published in 1920 was extraordinary, reflecting the ambivalence in the novel itself and Lewis's own mixed feelings about his hometwon of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, the prototype for Gopher Prairie. (From Penguin Signet Edition.)
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Carol Milford is a liberal, free-spirited young woman, reared in the metropolis of Minneapolis. She marries Will Kennicott, a doctor, who is a small-town boy at heart. When they marry, Will convinces her to live in his home-town of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota. Carol is appalled at the backwardness of Gopher Prairie. But her disdain for the town's physical ugliness and smug conservatism compels her to reform it.
She speaks with its members about progressive changes, joins women's clubs, distributes literature, and holds parties to liven up Gopher Prairie's inhabitants. Despite her friendly, but ineffective efforts, she is constantly derided by the leading cliques. She finds comfort and companionship outside her social class. These companions are taken from her one by one.
In her unhappiness, Carol leaves her husband and moves for a time to Washington, D.C., but she eventually returns. Nevertheless, Carol does not feel defeated:
I do not admit that Main Street is as beautiful as it should be! I do not admit that dish-washing is enough to satisfy all women!
Carol is discontented with life in Gopher Prairie, but she finds that big city life also has disadvantages. In the end, she learns to settle with Gopher Prairie and accept it for what it is. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
• Birth—February 7, 1885
• Where—Sauk Centre, Minnesota, USA
• Death—January 10, 1951
• Where—Rome, Italy; buried in Sauk Centre, Minn.
• Education—B.A., Yale University
• Awards—Nobel Prize; Pulitizer Prize (he refused it)
Sinclair Lewis began reading books at a young age and kept a diary. His father, Edwin J. Lewis, was a physician and, at home, a stern disciplinarian who had difficulty relating to his sensitive, unathletic third son. Lewis' mother, Emma Kermott Lewis, died in 1891. The following year, Edwin Lewis married Isabel Warner, whose company young Lewis apparently enjoyed. Throughout his lonely boyhood, the ungainly Lewis—tall, extremely thin, stricken with acne and somewhat popeyed—had trouble gaining friends and pined after various local girls. At the age of 13, he unsuccessfully ran away from home, wanting to become a drummer boy in the Spanish-American War.
He entered Yale in 1903 but did not receive his bachelor's degree until 1908, having taken time off to work at Helicon Home Colony, Upton Sinclair's cooperative-living colony in Englewood, New Jersey, and to travel to Panama. Lewis's unprepossessing looks, "fresh" country manners, and seemingly self-important loquacity did not make it any easier for him to win and keep friends at Yale than in Sauk Centre. Some of his crueler Yale classmates joked "that he was the only man in New Haven who could fart out of his face". Nevertheless, he did manage to initiate a few relatively long-lived friendships among students and professors, some of whom recognized his promise as a writer.
Lewis's earliest published creative work—romantic poetry and short sketches—appeared in the Yale Courant and the Yale Literary Magazine, of which he became an editor. After his graduation from Yale, Lewis moved from job to job and from place to place in an effort to make ends meet, write fiction for publication, and chase away boredom. While working for newspapers and publishing houses (and for a time at the Carmel-by-the-Sea, California writers' colony), he developed a facility for turning out shallow, popular stories that were purchased by a variety of magazines. At this time, he also earned money by selling plots to Jack London.
Novels
Lewis's first published book was Hike and the Aeroplane, a Tom Swift-style potboiler that appeared in 1912 under the pseudonym Tom Graham. In 1914 he married Grace Livingston Hegger, who was an editor at Vogue magazine. His first serious novel, Our Mr. Wrenn: The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man, appeared in 1914, followed by The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life (1915) and The Job (1917). That same year also saw the publication of another potboiler, The Innocents: A Story for Lovers, an expanded version of a serial story that had originally appeared in Woman's Home Companion. Free Air, another refurbished serial story, was published in 1919.
Upon moving to Washington, DC, Lewis completed Main Street which was published on October 23, 1920. As his biographer Mark Schorer wrote, the phenomenal success of Main Street "was the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history." Based on sales of his prior books, Lewis's most optimistic projection was a sale of 25,000 copies. In the first six months of 1921 alone, Main Street sold 180,000 copies, and within a few years sales were estimated at two million. According to Richard Lingeman "Main Street earned Sinclair Lewis about three million current [2002] dollars."
He followed up this first great success with Babbitt (1922), a novel that satirized the American commercial culture and boosterism. The story was set in the fictional Zenith, Winnemac, a setting Lewis would return to in future novels.
Lewis' success in the 1920s continued with Arrowsmith (1925), a novel about an idealistic doctor which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize (which he refused). The controversial Elmer Gantry (1927), which exposed the hypocrisy of hysterical evangelicalism, was denounced by religious leaders and was banned in some U.S. cities. He divorced his first wife, Grace Hegger Lewis, in 1925, and married Dorothy Thompson, a political newspaper columnist, on May 14, 1928. Lewis closed out the decade with Dodsworth (1929), a novel about the most affluent and successful members of American society leading essentially pointless lives in spite of their great wealth and advantages.
Middle-Late Years
In 1930, Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature in his first year of nomination. In the Swedish Academy's presentation speech, special attention was paid to Babbitt. In his Nobel Lecture, he praised Theodore Dreiser, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, and other contemporaries, but also lamented that...
in America most of us—not readers alone, but even writers—are still afraid of any literature which is not a glorification of everything American, a glorification of our faults as well as our virtues.... [America] is the most contradictory, the most depressing, the most stirring, of any land in the world today.
After winning the Nobel Prize, Lewis published nine more novels in his lifetime, the best remembered being It Can't Happen Here, a novel about the election of a fascist U.S. President.
Lewis died in Rome at the age of 65, from advanced alcoholism and his cremated remains were buried in Sauk Centre. A final novel, World So Wide, was published posthumously. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Three major characteristics define Lewis's work: detail, satire, and realism. Lewis remarkably portrays ordinary life, ordinary characters, and ordinary speech. Many critics...praised Lewis for his ability to meticulously reproduce different dialects and speech. Lewis used vivid detail to create scenes of the American middle class. His social satire was critical of American life and certain types of Americans and institutions which he felt harmed Americans and prevented the country from living up to its democratic ideals.
Lewis's novels fit under the umbrella of American social fiction, whose primary purpose is to represent contemporary American society, primarily in a realist style with realistic language. Lewis artfully described American culture and life of the time, helping Americans see their own lives with their many flaws. Critics praised him, claiming that his writing represented the culture of the 1920s and 1930s. Mark Schorer, in his exhaustive biography, notes regarding Lewis's work:
American culture seems always to have had a literary spokesman, a single writer who presented American culture and American attitudes toward its culture, to the world" (270).
Lewis was that author. The titles of two of his novels, Main Street and Babbitt, were introduced into the American vocabulary. These words developed their own cultural meanings.
Sinclair Lewis Society
Main Street, which Mr. Sinclair Lewis's novel of that title has made a synonym for spiritual stagnation, is not merely the epitome of our Middle Western civilization. Nor are the inhabitants of Gopher Prairie characteristic of any one country alone, nor of any particular age. There have always been Main Streets—everywhere—and the make-up of the men and women who have lived along them has never fundamentally changed with time or place.
C. Edward Morris - New York Times (1/10/1921)
Main Street bored me to extinction. I hated it as one hates stale bread seven days a week.... [The book's] lack of style hurts at every step.... It's capacity for minuteness, plus a lumbering style, makes such a reader feel is if he were watching an elephant with a teacup—you're afraid he'll break it and you wish he would, in order to end a nerve-irritating performance.
Catherine Beach Ely - New York Times (5/8/1921)
In Main Street an American had at last written of our life with something of the intellectual rigor and critical detachment that had seemed so cruel and unjustified [in Charles Dickens and Matthew Arnold]. Young people had grown up in this environment, suffocated, stultified, helpless, but unable to find any reason for their spiritual discomfort. Mr. Lewis released them.
Lewis Mumford
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 Main Street
1. In his time, Lewis was attacked for breaking-down the abiding American myth of small-town wholesomeness. Lewis painted small-town life as narrow, provincial, and suffocating. Was that a fair assessment back then, do you think? Is it a fair assessment today? Does today's technology—in travel and telecommunications—make a difference? Consider this question particularly in light of today's political climate of red-state, blue-state—amidst claims of heartland "values" vs. East-West Coast "elitism."
2. What is Carol's first impression of Gopher Prairie? Find the passage in which she first sees the town and talk about Lewis's attention to detail.
3. What does Carol's long-deceased father mean for her and for the subsequent events of the story? Think about, especially, how she sees her father in Erik.
4. Talk about both the Jolly Seventeen and the Thanatopsis Club. What is the raison d'etre of each group and what is lewis's point of satire? How do the women view Carol...and why doesn't she fit in?
5 How does Carol attempt to escape the boredom and narrowness of Gopher Prairie? Do you find her a sympathetic character? What about Kinnecott?
6. Is Carol's budding friendship with Erik a threat to her or a boon?
7. Talk about the difference between Carol's and Vida Sherwin's approaches to getting things accomplished.
8. Why does Carol give up life in Washington and return to Gopher Prairie?
9. Is the ending resolved or unresolved? Is Carol defeated by Gopher Prairie? Will she prevail in her idealism? Or has she learned something from her time in Washington? Will speaks the novel's last lines. Why? Is Lewis, perhaps, suggesting that his common-sense is a more preferred approach to life? Or a blending of both common-sense and idealism?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman
Elizabeth Buchan, 2002
Penguin Group USA
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780142003725
Summary
For twenty-five years, Rose Lloyd has juggled marriage, motherhood, and career with remarkable success. It has been a life of family picnics, books and wine, a cherished house, and her own exquisitely designed garden-sunny and comfortable. But then the carefully managed life to which Rose has become accustomed comes crashing down around her when—over the course of a few days—her marriage and her career both fall apart.
Can Rose, whose anguish is barely softened by the ministrations of friends and grown children with their own problems, ever start over? Not easily. But it's amazing what prolonged reflection, the slimming effect of a lost appetite, a new slant on independence (and a little Parisian lingerie) will do. Especially when an old flame suddenly reappears.
Full of humor, clever insight, and a whimsical sense of the absurd, Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman is an irresistible and finely written fantasy for anyone who ever wondered what a certain age would look like from beyond the looking-glass-and who will find it ripe with promise that the best days are yet to come. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 21, 1948
• Where—Guildford, Surrey, England, UK
• Education—Uiversity of Kent at Canterbury
• Awards—Romantic Novelists' Assoc. Novel of the Year, 1994
(for Consider the Lily)
• Currently—lives in London, England
Elizabeth Buchan has seen success on both sides of the publishing fence. She began her career writing for Penguin, then took a job as a fiction editor at Random House. When she began writing for herself, she managed motherhood, writing and editing. Her medium is the romance novel, but Buchan produces much more than just escapist love stories. In an interview with iMagazine.com, she explains,
Romantic fiction is a wider, richer and more honorable tradition than it is given credit for. It includes some of the greatest novels ever written —Jane Eyre, Tess of the D'Urbevilles, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice and Anna Karenina.
Although Buchan is best known for her romance novels, her first book was actually a biography of one of the world's most beloved children's authors. Beatrix Potter: The Story of the Creator of Peter Rabbit was released 1988. Written for young readers, the book covers Potter's extraordinary life, her art and her lasting contribution to children's literature.
Her first novel, Daughters of the Storm (1989), intertwines the fates of three women as the fate of a nation hangs in the balance. On the eve of the French Revolution, Sophie, Heloise and Marie each seek freedoms of their own — in love and society — and forge a friendship that will change their lives forever. In Light of the Moon (1991) Evelyn St. John is in occupied territory in France during World War II. When she meets and falls in love with someone who is supposed to be the enemy, political truths are redefined in the name of love.
London's Sunday Times called Buchan's third novel "the literary equivalent of the English country garden" when it was released in 1993. Consider the Lily is the story of two cousins —one rich, the other poor—and their competition for the love of the same man. Set against the backdrop of the English countryside in the years between the two world wars, the novel became an international bestseller and Buchan won the 1994 Romantic Novelists' Association Novel of the Year Award.
Eventually, after the success of Consider the Lily, the call to write became so loud that Buchan retired from her publishing career. Her fourth novel, Perfect Love (1996) also marks a shift in Buchan's novels. Her first three were historical romances, but with the fourth, characters and settings are brought into the 20th century. Here, Prue Valor has been in a proper English marriage with the much older Max for twenty years. Without explanation, but certainly with much guilt, Prue begins an affair with her stepdaughter's new husband (they are the same age) when they realize they cannot deny their attraction for each other. Living magazine said of the book, "The real battle in this novel is between raging passions and English restraint."
Set in the high-finance world of London in the 1980s, Against Her Nature (1997) tells the story of the fallout from being the subject of rumors of incompetence amid a devastating Lloyd's crash. Two women, Tess and Becky balance their fast-paced game of success with every opportunity afforded them, including children. In Secrets of the Heart (2000), four thirty-somethings have found love and must now find a way to hold on to it. Only two succeed in this clever story about the deals we make for love.
Buchan's next novel, Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman (2003) was released to much critical acclaim. This is the story of what happens during the "happily ever after." Shocked at her husband's affair and the collapse of their marriage, Rose reviews the last twenty years of her life, remembers the carefree woman she used to be, and makes a triumphant decision to fight back by moving on. The book became a New York Times bestseller, film rights to the book were snatched up almost immediately, and the Boston Globe called it "a thoughtful, intelligent, funny, coming-of-middle-age story."
Questions of fulfillment are also the subject of 2004's The Good Wife. Fanny is the devoted woman behind a very public, very busy politician—yet her own ambitions disappeared somewhere along the way. Likewise, in Everything She Thought She Wanted (2005), two women must decide just how much happiness they can sacrifice in order to stay with their husbands.
In her earlier books, Buchan brought intelligence and depth to the historical romance novel. Her later books have also captured the hard choices women must make in love, in family and in society. With humor and intelligence, her contemporary characters are Bridget Jones aged 25 years, at the point where she has attained the life she sought so long ago, but finds that the searching never ends.
Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Nobel interview:
• Buchan is married to a grandson of John Buchan, author of The Thirty-Nine Steps, the famous 1915 spy thriller (and 1953 film) .
• Buchan reflects that "one of the great joys that hedges around the business of writing is making contact with other writers. I belong to a group that meets every month or so in a shabby old pub in north London, and we sit down to dinner, all of us writers, all of us totally absorbed by the problems, pleasures, and rewards of the process."
• When asked what book most influenced her life, here is what she answered:
Middlemarch by George Eliot. For me, the touchstone for the novel. Once read, the fictional construction of a small town in rural England in the early 19th century is impossible to forget. A truly mature work, infused by intellect and a vision of society, in which the author's sure, disciplined handling and analysis of human nature is perfectly poised, drawing together in a thematic whole the lives of the men and women who lie in "unvisited tombs."
Book Reviews
This Middle-Aged’ woman’s revenge is delightfully dishy. The "revenge" in the title has little to do with getting back at people. Rather, Buchan celebrates the patience and wisdom that only age brings. While middle-aged women will relish the novel, it's a cautionary tale for husbands with eyes glued to the pertly twitching buttox of that office minx. Beware. Better that aging first bride than the girlish tendril you seduced. She just might start craving what you thought you had escaped.
USA Today
It would be easy to turn Rose's story into a fantasy of revenge.... But what makes Buchan's take on the situation so appealing is that she sidesteps the expected plot devices. It takes more than misfortune, even if it is extreme, to change the basics of character. Rose never has been the kind of woman to brood on her hurts or to nurse a desire for revenge. It wouldn't be realistic for her anger and hurt to drive her in that direction now. Buchan skillfully brings the reader into Rose's days, and while there is anger there is also sadness, memories both bitter and sweet, and worries about the future.... Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman is not about revenge as much as it is about change. It is a nicely written piece of chick lit that ends up being thought-provoking in its restraint.... This is a novel that is about a three-dimensional woman, not a stereotype, and she's a character that grows on the reader while she grows into a new stage of her life.
Denver Post
Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman is an eye-catcher of the first degree—even if most of those eyes are starting to disappear into the folds of their faces.... I raced through [the book] like a woman two weeks late for her hair-color appointment...[it] is a guilty pleasure.
Rocky Mountain News
A must-read for Elizabeth Berg fans and anyone looking for a new perspective on love and starting over. —Carrie Bissey
Booklist
(Audio version.) Buchan's latest novel finds the carefully managed life of 48-year-old Rose Lloyd, a successful book review editor, turned upside down. First, her husband of 25 years announces he's leaving Rose for her own sexy assistant. Next, insult is added to injury: Rose is fired from her job and replaced by none other than the woman who broke up her marriage. Buchan lends a compelling emotional depth to her main characters, seamlessly merging Rose's struggle to rise above the betrayal, shock and fear of middle-aged "invisibility" with flashbacks to her youth, recollections of her first love to a now famed travel writer, memories of family vacations and her grown kids' childhood. With extensive stage and theater work to her credit, and incorporating myriad voices to the diverse cast, Gilpin makes the book's transition to a 10-hour unabridged audio format exceptionally smooth. Narrating mostly in a proper British accent, which perfectly suits Rose's "delight in domesticity" and enhances the book's dry, slightly askew sense of humor, Gilpin also captures the outrage of Rose's son and daughter (both of whom have their own relationship issues), the American drawl of her old flame (who makes an unexpected return), the grumpy rumblings of an elderly neighbor she cares for and the feisty opinions of her mother, making for a good production listeners will enjoy.
Publishers Weekly
Happy for 25 years, Rose watches aghast as both her career and her marriage suddenly go down the drain. A best seller in England that's slated for the post-Bridget Jones crowd
Library Journal
Britisher Buchan’s US debut, the story of a middle-aged wife who, when her life and marriage fall apart, manages to fight back, move on, even hope for something better. Rose Lloyd, book editor for a London paper, is happily married to Nathan, an executive on the paper, and the mother of two adult children, Sam and Poppy. Her life is probably as good as it gets, and though Rose isn’t complacent, she is certainly unprepared for the betrayals about to implode her life. Nathan announces he’s leaving and moving in with her trusted assistant, the younger and sexy Minty. Reeling, she learns next that she’s to be replaced as editor by Minty because her boss wants someone younger, with new ideas, running the book section. Her woes mount as she hears that her mother needs surgery and Nathan is no longer paying her medical insurance. Her much loved cat dies, daughter Poppy e-mails from Thailand that’s she’s married hippie boyfriend Richard, and Nathan also wants their house for him and Minty. A bitter blow, because Rose has loved fixing it up and making a beautiful garden. At first she weeps, wonders where she went wrong, can’t eat, drinks too much. But then she begins to fight back. She visits a college friend in Paris who makes her buy some sexy clothes, is given some interesting jobs, is befriended by a Cabinet Minister who’s been hurt by a scandal caused by his mentally ill wife, and meets up again with her first love, American Rhodes scholar Hal Thorne, now a famous travel writer. As she recalls how she met and parted from Hal, she learns that Nathan is finding life with Minty more complicated than he’d expected and that he misses his family. With her children making interesting changes in their lives, Rose is ready for a few herself. A wry and elegant tale about a woman of a certain age fighting back and winning unexpected victories.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Do you think the young Rose should have stayed with Hal or did she make the right decision to marry Nathan?
2. How would you describe Minty's relationship with Rose? Were there definite indicators something was amiss that Rose might have noticed sooner?
3. Do you think that Rose was complacent in her marriage and career? What have you learned from her journey toward self-exploration?
4. What do you think of Minty? Did she really want Rose's life all along and just pretended to be independent or do you think something changed her?
5. Rose sought friendship and solace with friends to help her through the depression. Are there other ways she might have helped herself? What would you have done?
6. The novel was written from a wife's point of view. At any time in the novel, did you find yourself sympathizing more with Nathan than with Rose?
7. Which character, if any, in the novel disappointed you most and why? Which character surprised you most and why?
8. How do you think Rose's life choices have influenced her daughter Poppy's life? Do you think Poppy's marriage will last?
9. The novel ends on an ambiguous note. What do you think happens next?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The Wednesday Letters
Jason F. Wright, 2007
Penguin Group USA
280 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425223475
Summary
The surprise New York Times bestseller, from an author who delivers "American storytelling at its best."
Jack and Laurel have been married for 39 years. They've lived a good life and appear to have had the perfect marriage. With his wife cradled in his arms, and before Jack takes his last breath, he scribbles his last "Wednesday Letter."
When their adult children arrive to arrange the funeral, they discover boxes and boxes full of love letters that their father wrote to their mother each week on Wednesday. As they begin to open and read the letters, the children begin to uncover the shocking truth about the past. In addition, each one must deal with present-day challenges. Matthew has a troubled marriage, Samantha is a single mother, and Malcolm is the black sheep of the family who has returned home after a mysterious two-year absence.
The Wednesday Letters has a powerful message about forgiveness and quietly beckons for readers to start writing their own "Wednesday Letters." (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 1, 1971
• Where—Florissant, Missouri, USA
• Reared—in Germany; Virginia and Utah, USA
• Currently—lives in Woodstock, Virginia
Jason Fletcher Wright was near St. Louis, Missouri, to Willard Samuel Wright and Sandra Fletcher Wright. Within months of his birth, Jason's father was transferred to Germany and the family lived and traveled throughout Europe until 1975. They later lived in Chicago, Illinois and Charlottesville, Virginia.
Jason is a New York Times bestselling author and political pundit. He also appeared in the 1990 film Troll 2, one of the lowest-rated movies of all-time, according to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB.com).
His 2007 novel, The Wednesday Letters, reached #6 on the New York Times bestseller list. It also appeared on the Wall Street Journal and USAToday bestseller lists.
His 2005 novel, Christmas Jars, was also a New York Times bestseller, appearing on the paperback list in 2007. Film rights have been optioned by Academy Award winning director Kieth Merrill. The film is scheduled to shoot in the fall of 2008 and reach theaters in 2009.
His debut novel, The James Miracle, was first released in 2004 and will be re-released in 2009.
In addition to his novels, Jason has published opinion editorials (op/eds) on issues ranging from pop culture to politics. His articles have appeared in more than 50 newspapers and magazines across the United States including Glenn Beck's Fusion Magazine, the Washington Times, Chicago Tribune, and Forbes. He also edited and appeared in Americans on Politics, Policy, and Pop Culture: The 101 Best Opinion Editorials From OpEds.com in 2005.
Jason also works as a political and public policy consultant and is the founder of PoliticalDerby.com, a political website known for ranking the candidates running for the White House in 2008
Jason is also a public speaker who has spoken before thousands on writing, service, and various political/social issues. He appears regularly on FoxNews morning show, Fox & Friends. He has also appeared on most major cable news channels including and C-SPAN.
He met and married his wife, Kodi Erekson Wright, in 1993 in Provo, Utah. They now live with their four children in Woodstock, Virginia and are members of the The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
In the wake of his bestselling Christmas Jars comes a sweetly crafted story from Wright, a Virginia businessman. Jack and Laurel Cooper are two hardworking, loving Christian pillars of the community who die in each other's arms one night in the bed-and-breakfast that they own and operate. The event calls their three grown children home for the funeral, including their youngest son, a fugitive from the law who must face an outstanding warrant for his arrest and confront his one true love, now engaged to another man. As events unfold around the funeral, the three children discover a treasure trove of family history in the form of "Wednesday letters"-notes that Jack wrote to his wife every single week of their married lives. As they read, the children brush across the fabric of a devoted marriage that survived a devastating event kept secret all these years. It's a lovely story: heartening, wholesome, humorous, suspenseful and redemptive. It resonates with the true meaning of family and the life-healing power of forgiveness all wrapped up in a satisfying ending.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. Jack’s death was expected, whereas Laurel’s was a surprise. Do you think one way is preferable to the other? Are there things you can do to help prepare yourself for a loved one’s demise?
2. A&P adopts the nickname that others had given to mock her, telling herself, “nicknames mean you matter” (p. 5). Have you ever had a nickname you didn’t like? How might you have turned it around to give it a positive meaning?
3. The youngest Cooper child, Malcolm, has been away for two years. Would he have returned to Woodstock earlier if he’d known his father was dying of cancer? Should he have returned sooner?
4. When Malcolm does return home, he discovers a secret his parents kept from him. Have you ever discovered secrets held by someone you loved after he or she had passed on? How did your discovery affect your feelings about that person?
5. Why did Laurel try to keep Malcolm’s parentage a secret? Would Jack and Malcolm have been happier if she had?
6. When Sam was 17, she ran away to New York City to pursue her dream of having an acting career. Though she got a small part in a show called “Curtains” she eventually stopped pursuing her dream. How and why did this happen? Is it admirable or disappointing that Samantha puts other’s needs ahead of her dreams?
7. When reading her father’s letters, Samantha learns that he paid for the part in the show she got. Yet she’s not angry about this. Why not? Was this the act of a loving parent or a controlling father? Does learning this secret change Samantha’s view of herself?
8. Aside from the Coopers, who is your favorite character and why?
9. oe is finally able to give up alcohol because the girl he nearly killed forgave him—even visiting him and frequently writing him letters while he was in prison. What is the novel saying about the relationship between forgiveness and self-acceptance? Where else are these themes worked through the novel?
10. Matthew and Monica’s marriage is troubled by their childlessness. Would it have lasted if they hadn’t been able to adopt a child? What does a child bring to a couple like Matthew and Monica?
11. What does Nathan’s inability to trust Rain say about him? Is there such a thing as a healthy skepticism?
12. Discuss Malcolm’s development over the course of the novel. How do the letters play a part in his journey to maturity? What is it about letters that gives them such power? When was the last time you wrote a letter?
13. It takes an unusual spirit to forgive your rapist—and even welcome him into your community. Could you—like Jack and Laurel—accept Pastor Doug as a man of God?
14. Does The Wednesday Letters inspire you to start any traditions of your own?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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