Summary | Author | Book Reviews | Discussion Questions
2nd Chance (Women's Murder Club Series, #2)
James Patterson, 2002
Grand Central Publishing
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446612791
In Brief
2nd Chance reconvenes the Women's Murder Club, four friends (a detective, a reporter, an assistant district attorney, and a medical examiner) who used their networking skills, feminine intuition, and professional wiles to solve a baffling series of murders in 1st to Die.
This time, the murders of two African Americans, a little girl and an old woman, bear all the signs of a serial killer for Lindsay Boxer, newly promoted to lieutenant of San Francisco's homicide squad. But there's an odd detail she finds even more disturbing: both victims were related to city cops.
A symbol glimpsed at both murder scenes leads to a racist hate group, but the taunting killer strikes again and again, leaving deliberate clues and eluding the police ever more cleverly. In the meantime, each of the women has a personal stake at risk—and the killer knows who they are. (From the publisher.)
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About the Author
• Birth—March 22, 1947
• Where—Newburgh, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Manhattan College; M.A., Vanderbilt Univ.
• Awards—Edgar Award, Best First Mystery Novel, 1977
• Currently—lives in Palm Beach, Florida
James Patterson had been working as a very successful advertising copywriter when he decided to put his Masters degree in English to a somewhat different use. Inspired by bestselling hair-raising thrillers like The Day of the Jackal and The Exorcist, Patterson went to work on his first novel. Published in 1976, The Thomas Berryman Number established him as a writer of tightly constructed mysteries that move forward with the velocity of a bullet. For his startling debut, Patterson was awarded the prestigious Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel—an auspicious beginning to one of the most successful careers in publishing.
A string of gripping standalone mysteries followed, but it was the 1992 release of Along Came a Spider that elevated Patterson to superstar status. Introducing Alex Cross, a brilliant black police detective/forensic psychologist, the novel was the first installment in a series of bestselling thrillers that has proved to be a cash cow for the author and his publisher.
Examining Patterson's track record, it's obvious that he believes one good series deserves another...maybe even a third! In 2001, he debuted the Women's Murder Club with 1st to Die, a fast-paced thriller featuring four female crime fighters living in San Francisco — a homicide detective, a medical examiner, an assistant D.A., and a cub reporter. The successful series has continued with other numerically titled installments. Then, spinning off a set of characters from a previous novel (1998's When the Wind Blows), in 2005 he published Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment. Featuring a "flock" of genetically engineered flying children, the novel was a huge hit, especially with teen readers, and spawned a series of vastly popular fantasy adventures.
In addition to continuing his bestselling literary franchises, Patterson has also found time to co-author thrillers with other writers — including Peter de Jonge, Andrew Gross, Maxine Paetro, and Howard Roughan — and has even ventured into romance (Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas, Sam's Letters to Jennifer) and children's literature (santaKid). Writing at an astonishing pace, this prolific author has turned himself into a one-man publishing juggernaut, fulfilling his clearly stated ambition to become "the king of the page-turners."
Extras
From a Barnes & Noble interview:
• Patterson's Suzanne's Diary For Nicholas was inspired by a diary his wife kept that tracked the development of their toddler son.
• Two of Patterson's Alex Cross mysteries (Along Came a Spider and Kiss the Girls) have been turned into films starring Morgan Freeman; in 2007, a weekly television series premiered, based on the bestselling Women's Murder Club novels.
• When asked what book most influenced his life, here is is response:
Probably the novel that most influenced me as a young writer is A Hundred Years of Solitude—simply because as I read it, I realized that I could never do anything half as good. So why not try mysteries? Gabriel García Márquez's magical mystery tour begins with one of the most engaging lines in fiction: "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." What follows is an exhilarating recounting of a century in the imaginary Colombian town of Macondo—the comedies and tragedies, joy and suffering, sublime and ridiculous. An entire town, for example, is affected with insomnia at one point in the novel. A woman literally rises to heaven while drying her laundry. And eventually, the firing squad, fires. Some have called this the great American novel—only it was written by a South American."
(Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
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Critics Say . . .
Patterson's best novel in years.
New York Post
A fast-paced thriller by the page-turningest author in the game right now.
San Francisco Chronicle
Inspiring heroines. juicy subplots. briskly paced. Patterson chalks up another suspenseful outing for his Women's Murder Club.
People
It's been a long time since we've seen a bestselling author of Patterson's clout credit an assistant author on the cover, and good for Patterson for that. The credit is deserved. This is Patterson's richest, most engaging novel since When the Wind Blows and, as the second in his "Women's Murder Club" series (after 1st to Die), yet more evidence that this prolific writer can roam beyond Alex Cross with style and success. Like all Pattersons, the narration mixes first- and third-person: the first here is voiced, as before, by San Francisco homicide detective Lindsay Boxer, while the third-person sections cover the doings of the other three members of Boxer's informal club, a reporter, a pathologist and a prosecutor, as well as the villain's shenanigans. The basic story line is vintage Patterson, i.e., a serial killer (here, one known as Chimera) goes on a calculated rampage until stopped by the good guys or in this case, gals. As the victims—a young girl shot dead, an elderly black woman hanged, two cops—pile up, it becomes clear to Boxer and others that they're up against a racist who hates black cops. Is the killer a cop himself? The story ripples with twists and some remarkably strong scenes, particularly Boxer's in-prison interview with a crazed con. But what makes this Patterson stand out above all is the textured storytelling arising from its focus on Boxer's personal issues. In the first novel, Patterson personalized Boxer by dealing with her rare blood disease; here, it's the emotionally powerful introduction of Boxer's long-lost father into her life that galvanizes the plot, particularly as Patterson ties the man into Chimera's rampage. Prime Patterson; first-rate entertainment.
Publishers Weekly
The second adventure in the "Women's Murder Club" places San Francisco homicide detective Lindsay Boxer on the trail of another serial killer. While the murders seem like unrelated hate crimes, a pattern emerges with the discovery of the "chimera" icon and a white powdery substance left at the scenes. Reporter Cindy Thomas researches the icon, assistant district attorney Jill Bernhardt combs likely cases filed, medical examiner Claire Washburn provides forensic clues, and Lindsay chases down the most likely suspect. When that suspect dies, and the killings continue, Lindsay, Claire, and Cindy narrowly miss becoming victims. Written in Patterson's no-nonsense style...the story is suspenseful, grim, and not altogether predictable. Recommended for fiction collections. —Joanna M. Burkhardt, Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Univ. of Rhode Island, Providence
Library Journal
This novel solidifies the new series and helps guarantee that readers will flock just as eagerly to the "Women's Murder Club" books as they do to the Alex Cross novels. —Kristine Huntley
Booklist
A murder outside San Francisco's La Salle Heights Church brings back the "Women's Murder Club," extending a series that could rival Kinsey Millhone for sales, if not for ingenuity, warmth, or humanity. How could the killer have sprayed the sidewalk with casual gunfire and yet managed to hit young Tasha Catchings, and only her, twice? wonders Lt. Lindsay Boxer. He must have been aiming at her instead of the rest of Aaron Winslow's church choir—presumably for the same reason he strung up Estelle Chipman in her Oakland basement and disguised the murder as suicide. Since the killer, whoever he is and whatever his motives are, is running rings around the SFPD, Lindsay calls in "the Margarita Posse": her best friend Claire Washburn, the city's Chief Medical Examiner; ADA Jill Bernhardt; and Cindy Thomas, the Chronicle's lead crime reporter. In no time at all, the Women's Murder Club—"three of the sharpest law-enforcement minds in the city"— have swung into action. One of them gets shot at, one gets pregnant, and one gets to date Aaron Warner. Meantime, the killer dubbed Chimera is continuing to take blood-soaked revenge for a 20-year-old injustice involving a figure from Lindsay's past, her long-estranged ex-cop father Marty Boxer, in a way that another author might make morally agonizing. Patterson, not one to stop and smell the roses, keeps up the pace by showing Chimera taunting Lindsay and attacking her and her buds, the SFPD running to and fro to counter the latest threat, and the body count rising en route to a showdown introduced by the killer's cool assessment that there's "no one to kill right away." Lots of slam-bang action, though, except for Lindsay, the alleged action heroines mostly have it happen to them instead of dishing it out.
Kirkus Reviews
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Book Club 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 2nd Chance:
1. What makes Lindsay Boxer and her "Murder Club" believe initially that the murders are racially-based hate crimes? What changes to indicate a different motive...and a different type of killer?
2. Talk about how the reappearance of her father affects Lindsay, both personally and professionally. How does he complicate her investigation—what is his connection to it?
3. What is the meaning of the chimera icon? (What is a chimera?) What does Cindy Thomas uncover in her research?
4. How would you describe the characters of the four women in the Murder Club? Is there one you like better, found more interesting or admirable, than the others?
5. If you're a crime/detective story fan, how do these four female crime solvers differ from their male counterparts in other books? What do these (or any?) women bring to detective work that men may not?
6. Patterson uses different narrators for the book: a first-person voice for Lindsay, and a 3rd-person narrator for others. Why might he use this double narrative technique? What does it accomplish? Is his approach effective?
7. How does Patterson depict the killer? He lets us into both the killer's and Lindsay's minds. Do you detect any similarities in their thought processes?
8. Patterson is known for his highly suspenseful crime books. How does he build suspense in 2nd Chance? Does he do it successfully—in other words, were you on the edge of your seat and turning the pages with anticipation? Was the outcome predictable...or were you surprised?
9. Does 2nd Chance inspire you to read Patterson's other books in the Women's Mystery Club series? Or, if you have read others, how does this one stack up?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The White Hotel
D.M. Thomas, 1981
Penguin Group USA
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780140231731
Summary
Winner, PEN-Silver Pen Award and Cheltenham Prize
By turns a dream of electrifying eroticism recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud, and a horrifying yet calmly unsensational narrative of the Holocaust, The White Hotel is now recognized as a modern classic that reconciles the nightmarish with the transcendent. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 27, 1935
• Where—Redruth, Cornwall, UK
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—PEN-Silver Pen Award; Cheltenham Prize
• Currently—lives in Cornwall, England
D.M. Thomas was born in Cornwall in 1935. After reading English at New College, Oxford, he became a teacher until he became a full-time writer. His novels include The Flute-Player, Ararat, Swallow, Sphinx, Summit, Flying into Love and Eating Pavlova. He has also published memoirs, several volumes of poetry and translations of Pushkin and Anna Akhmatova. He now lives in Cornwall, England. (From the publisher.)
More
Donald Michael Thomas, known as D. M. Thomas is a Cornish novelist, poet, and translator.
Born in Redruth, Cornwall, UK, he attended Trewirgie Primary School and Redruth Grammar School before graduating with First Class Honours in English from New College, Oxford in 1959. He lived and worked in Australia and the United States before returning to his native Cornwall.
He published poetry and some prose in the British science fiction magazine New Worlds (from 1968). The work that made him famous is his erotic and somewhat fantastical novel The White Hotel (1981), the story of a woman undergoing psychoanalysis, which has proved very popular in continental Europe and the United States. It has also elicited considerable controversy, as some of its passages are taken from Anatoly Kuznetsov's Babi Yar, a novel about the Holocaust. In general, however, Thomas's use of such "composite material" (material taken from other sources and imitations of other writers) is seen as more postmodern than plagiarist.
In the 1950s, at hight of the Cold War, Thomas studied Russian during his National Service. He retained a lifelong interest in Russian culture and literature. This culminated in a series of well-received translations of Russian poetry in the 1980s.
In all, he has published 16 works of fiction (most recently, Charlotte in 2000) ... and four works of poetry. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
(Pre-internet works have few,if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
[R]emarkable in conception and unusual in structure.... What The White Hotel sets out to perform, clearly, is the diagnosis of our epoch through the experience of an individual; and the highest praise I can give it is that for some time it comes close to achieving that goal. Indeed, the opening sections of the novel are so authoritative and imaginatively daring that I quickly came to feel I had found the book, that mythical book, that would explain us to ourselves. The letters among the analysts (Ferenczi, Sachs, Freud), for instance, are themselves quite fine: playful and somber, full of information and suffused with a sense of high, shared purpose.
Leslie Epstein - New York Times (3/15/1981)
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 The White Hotel:
1. The narrative structure of The White Hotel consists of letters, lyrical poetry, a case study, historical fiction, and redemptive fantasy. Was it difficult to see how all the sections and stylistic variations fit together? Did the novel's last sections give you a greater understanding of all that came before? What sections of the book did you find most challenging...or most compelling?
2. Some readers find the lyrical section pornographic and disturbing. What do you think? Why would Thomas have written such sexually graphic passages?
3. In a 1983 Mademoiselle magazine interview, Thomas said he wanted to combine a story about one of Freud's analysands he had read about with the horror at Babi Yar. It struck him that "these were the poles of experience in our century: love and death, Eros and Thanatos." The book, then, is concerned with the the universal struggle between the life instinct and death instinct. Talk about Freud's concept of the "death instinct"—and how it plays out in the novel. (This might require a little research.) Consider, also, this passage from the the White Hotel section:
It was so sweet I screamed but no one heard me for the other screams as body after body fell or leapt ... Charred bodies hung from trees, he grew erect again.
4. Follow up to Question 3: Why does Lisa write her dream poem on the score of Don Giovanni (Mozart's opera)? What is the symbolic relationship of that particular story to the novel?
5. Why might Thomas have named his novel "The White Hotel"? Why not ..."Babi Yar"? Or some other title?
6. Time is a central theme in the book; in fact, the book violates linear time. Can you identify areas where time is nonlinear? Why would distorted time, or timelessness, be important to the author's purpose?
7. Follow-up to Question 6: Consider the letter from Sachs to Freud in which he says that Lisa's fantasies are like Paradise before the Fall . . .
not that love and death did not happen there, but there was no time in which they could have meaning.
What does Sachs mean—"there was no time"? How does his comment relate to the novel, especially the final section in Palestine?
8. What do you think of Freud as a character in this novel—how is he portrayed?
9. What do you think of Lisa? Why don't we learn her name until later in the novel? Discuss her Cassandra-like visions of the future (an example of time warp)? Do her visions make sense to you when you first read them...or only after you've finished the book? Freud is often frustrated with her and wishes to drop her as a patient—why? And why, then, does he change his mind and continue to treat her?
10. Freud peels off the layers of repression in Lisa's mind and diagnoses her as a latent homosexual. Is that a credible diagnosis?
11. Why is Lisa frustrated with the progress of her treatment? Does Freud cure her? Who (or what) does cure her—and how?
12. What do you think of Freud's comment to Lisa—"much will be gained if we succeed in turning your hysterical misery into common unhappiness"? (This, by the way, is an actual comment once made by Freud.) Freud then tells Lisa that she is "cured of everything but life." Comment on that one?
13. Follow-up on Question 12: Later in the Camp, Lisa asks, Richard Lyons, "Were we meant to be happy and enjoy life? What happened?" Lyons retorts with "Were we made to be happy? You're an incurable optimist, old girl!" [Author's italics.] What, finally, does make Lisa happy, or at least bring her fulfillment?
14. Who is "Wolf Man," and what role does he play in this novel? (He was an actual patient of Freud, so you might do a little research about his case.)
15. In what ways does this work challenge the value of psychoanalytic therapy? Is it possible to dissect and explain the totality of a human life—using logic and causality? Consider this passage which follows the mass murder at Babi Yar:
The soul of man is a far country, which cannot be approached or explored. Most of the dead were poor or illiterate. But every single one of them had dreamed dreams, seen visions, and had amazing experiences, even the babes in arms (perhaps especially the babes in arms). Though most of them had never lived outside the Podol slum, their lives and histories were as rich and complex as Lisa Erdman-Berenstein's. If a Sigmund Freud had been listening and taking notes from the time of Adam, he would still not fully have explored even a single group, even a single person. (p. 220)
The first sentence, a quotation from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, appears twice in the book...45 pages apart. What does it mean? Finally, do you agree with the rest of the passage?
16. After the grave at Babi Yar has been covered up and forgotten, the narrator observes, "But all this had nothing to do with the guest, the soul, the lovesick bride, the daughter of Jerusalem." What is meant by that quotation?
17. Were you pleased with the way the book ended? Does it redeem the suffering of those at Babi Yar? Does a vision of afterlife redeem all suffering, everywhere? Is that what Thomas is getting at in the final section?
18. One critic feels the ending is weak—that it can't possibly atone for the brutality and suffering at Babi Yar. Had Thomas ended his novel after the mass shootings at Babi Yar, the novel would have stood as a powerful tragedy...and a statement about the 20th century's brutality, more fitting to the book's epigraph by Yeats. Agree? Disagree?
19. Speaking of the epigraph...talk about its relation, thematically, to the book? Why would Thomas have chosen those four lines of Yeats?
20. Thomas attempts a portrait of the 20th century by joining the imaginative reality of an individual to the historical reality of the collective. He juxtaposes the humanistic treatment of psychoanalysis with the madness and unspeakable cruelty of the Holocaust. Does his portrait succeed? Is it possible to for literature to capture the soul's intimate landscape, as well as a vast historical movement and its destruction—without diminishing either one?
21. Overall, talk about your experience reading the book. What did you like, dislike, find difficult, brilliant, funny, or compassionate...?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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In Country
Bobbie Ann Mason, 1985, 2005
HarperCollins
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060835170
Summary
In the summer of 1984, the war in Vietnam came home to Sam Hughes, whose father was killed there before she was born. The soldier-boy in the picture never changed. In a way that made him dependable. But he seemed so innocent. "Astronauts have been to the moon," she blurted out to the picture. "You missed Watergate. I was in the second grade."
She stared at the picture, squinting her eyes, as if she expected it to come to life. But Dwayne had died with his secrets. Emmett was walking around with his. Anyone who survived Vietnam seemed to regard it as something personal and embarrassing. Granddad had said they were embarrassed that they were still alive. "I guess you're not embarrassed," she said to the picture. (From the publisher.)
The novel was adapted to film in 1989 and starred Emily Lloyd and Bruce Willis.
Author Bio
• Birth—May 1, 1940
• Where—Mayfield, Kentucy, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Kentucky; M.A.,
State University of New York, Binghamton;
Ph.D., University of Connecticut
• Awards—Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award
• Currently—lives in Kentucky
Bobbie Ann Mason is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and literary critic from Kentucky.
With four siblings Mason grew up on her family's dairy farm outside of Mayfield, Kentucky. As a child she loved to read, so her parents, Wilburn and Christina Mason, always made sure she had books. These books were mostly popular fiction about the Bobbsey Twins and the Nancy Drew mysteries. She would later write a book about these books that she loved to read as an adolescent titled The Girl Sleuth: A feminist guide to the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and Their Sisters.
After high school, Mason went on to major in English at the University of Kentucky. After graduating in 1962, she took several jobs in New York City with various movie magazines, writing articles about various stars who were in the spotlight. She wrote about Annette Funicello, Troy Donahue, Fabian, and other teen stars.
She earned her master’s degree at the State University of New York at Binghamton in 1966. Next she went to graduate school at the University of Connecticut, where she subsequently received her Ph.D. in literature with a dissertation on Vladimir Nabokov's Ada in 1972. Her dissertation was published in paperback form as Nabokov's Garden two years later.
Stories
By the time she was in her later thirties, Bobbie Ann started to write short stories. In 1980 The New Yorker published her first story.
It took me a long time to discover my material. It wasn't a matter of developing writing skills, it was a matter of knowing how to see things. And it took me a very long time to grow up. I'd been writing for a long time, but was never able to see what there was to write about. I always aspired to things away from home, so it took me a long time to look back at home and realize that that's where the center of my thought was.
Mason went on to write Shiloh and Other Stories, a collection which appeared in 1982 and won the 1983 Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for outstanding first works of fiction. Later story collections include Love and Live (1989), Midnight Magic (1998), Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail (2002), and Nancy Culpepper (2006). Over the years, her stories have appeared in Atlantic Monthly, Mother Jones, New Yorker, and Paris Review.
Mason writes about the working-class people of Western Kentucky, and her short stories have contributed to a renaissance of regional fiction in America creating a literary style that critics have labeled "shopping mall realism."
Novels and memoir
Mason wrote her first novel, In Country, in 1985. It is often cited as one of the seminal literary works of the 1980s with a protagonist who attempts to come to terms with important generational issues, ranging from the Vietnam War to consumer culture. A film version was produced in 1989, starring Emily Lloyd as the protagonist and Bruce Willis as her uncle.
She followed In Country with another novel in 1988, Spence and Lila. She has since published others: Feather Crowns (1993), An Atomic Romance (2005), and The Girl in the Blue Beret (2011).
Mason also published her memoir Clear Springs in 1999.
Mason has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is currently the writer in residence at the University of Kentucky. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/13/2014.)
Book Reviews
An impressive first novel.... The novel, at its most polemic, is an indictment of our Government's casual attitude toward those who survived an unpopular war but are having difficulty surviving civilian life. More comfortable with an amiable cat named Moon Pie than with his former sweetheart, Emmett expresses his distress in words that could be echoed across the country: ''There's something wrong with me. I'm damaged. It's like something in the center of my heart is gone and I can't get it back.''
Joel Conarroe - New York Times (9/15/1985)
A brilliant and moving book...a moral tale that entwines public history with private anguish.
Richard Eder - Los Angeles Times
Mason's message is simple: the war dead are us—we are them—and, whatever political stance we took with regard to Vietnam, we are all Americans united by one past, one flag, one history.
Mary Mackey - San Francisco Chronicle
The size and importance of its subject and the richness of emotion that underpins it make the novel satisfying. It’s as impressive a work of fiction as I’ve read recently, on Vietnam or any other subject.
Robert Wilson - USA Today
Sam Hughes, whose father was killed in Vietnam, lives in rural Kentucky with her uncle Emmett, a veteran whom she suspects is suffering from exposure to Agent Orange. Sam is a typical teenager, trying to choose a college, anticipating a new job at the local Burger Boy, sharing intimacies with her friend Dawn, breaking up with her high school boyfriend, and dealing with her feelings for Tom, one of Emmett's buddies. Sam feels that her life is bound to the war in Vietnam and becomes obsessed with the idea because of the reluctance of her family and Tom to talk about it. Her father's diary finally provides the insight she seeksinsight she cannot accept until she has visited the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C. In Country is both a powerful and touching novel of America that analyzes the impact of the 1960s on the culture of the 1980s and a beautiful portrayal of an often forgotten area of the country. Essential for adult and YA collections. —Thomas L. Kilpatrick, Southern Illinois Univ. at Carbondale Lib
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for In Country:
1. Talk about Samantha Hughes. How would you describe her? As a 17-year-old, is her voice strong or engaging enough to carry the weight of this novel? Has Bobbie Ann Mason created a convincing teenager? Do you find her interests banal...if so, why do you think Mason might have chosen such a character to tell the story?
2. Why has Sam's family ignored—or neglected to talk to her about—her father, Dwayne? How and what should they have have told Sam about him? What has been the effect of this erasure of memory on Sam?
3. In what way does the family's neglect of Dwayne parallel America's neglect—even amnesia—of the Vietnam war itself? Why has that particular war, and its veterans, been so difficult to acknowledge?
4. Describe Sam's uncle Emmet and the toll the Vietnamese war has taken on him, as well as his three friends. Why won't they talk about the war?
5. Do you know any men or women who served in Vietnam? If so, are there similarities between them and Emmett, Tom, Earl and Pete?
6. What does Emmett mean when he says, "There's something wrong with me. I'm damaged. It's like something in the center of my heart is gone and I can't get it back"? Can that statement be true of other veterans returning from other wars—or does the Vietnam war hold a special distinction when it comes to damaged souls?
7. What is the symbolic significance of Sam's distance running—especially with regards to her uncle Emmett? How about the faulty transmission in the second-hand car she bought?
8. Mason depicts an American culture that revolves around cable TV and shopping malls. What effect has that consumer culture had on the country?
9. Are Sam's many popular cultural references—to horror movies, brand names, rock stars—meaningful to you? Why would Mason have included so many of them—what role do they play in the story?
10. How would you describe the world and people of western Kentucky, the setting of the novel?
11. Parts of this novel are very funny. Where do you see the humor? In Sam's grandmother?
12. In Country is a classic coming-of-age story. Can you trace the novel's specific coming-of-age phases: separation, isolation, and finally transformation and reintegration? What does Sam learn at the end of the novel—in what way is she transformed or enlightened?
13. The quest for the father has been a literary theme from the earliest ages of storytelling down to the present. Symbolically, what does the quest signify? Why is it such a powerful theme?
14. How does the journey to Washington mirror the journey taking place in Sam's mind? How is that journey more than "just a camping excursion," in the words of one reader? What does the inscription of her own name on the wall signify? What does it mean to Sam?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Little Women
Louisa May Alcott, 1868 and 1869
~500 pp. (varies by publisher)
Summary
Set in a small New England town during the Civil War years and Reconstruction, Little Women introduces Alcott's remarkable heroines, the March sisters, and above all her alter ego Jo March, with her literary ambition and independent spirit. The novel chronicles the episodes, large and small, of the sisters' progress toward adulthood: their amateur theatricals, sibling rivalries and reconciliations, friendships and romance, lessons about work and charity, and the loss of loved ones. (From the Library of America edition.)
More
Little Women is one of the best loved books of all time. Lovely Meg, talented Jo, frail Beth, spoiled Amy: these are hard lessons of poverty and of growing up in New England during the Civil War. Through their dreams, plays, pranks, letters, illnesses, and courtships, women of all ages have become a part of this remarkable family and have felt the deep sadness when Meg leaves the circle of sisters to be married at the end of Part I. Part II, chronicles Meg's joys and mishaps as a young wife and mother, Jo's struggle to become a writer, Beth's tragedy, and Amy's artistic pursuits and unexpected romance. Based on Louise May Alcott's childhood, this lively portrait of nineteenth- century family life possesses a lasting vitality that has endeared it to generations of readers. (From the Penguin Classics edition.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 29, 1832
• Where—Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
• Reared—Concord, Massachusetts
• Died—March 6, 1888
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts
• Education—tutored by father Bronson Alcott and by Henry
David Thoreau
Alcott was a daughter of noted Transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott and Abigail May Alcott. Louisa's father started the Temple School; her uncle, Samuel Joseph May, was a noted abolitionist. Though of New England parentage and residence, she was born in Germantown, which is currently part of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She had three sisters: one elder (Anna Alcott Pratt) and two younger (Elizabeth Sewall Alcott and Abigail May Alcott Nieriker). The family moved to Boston in 1834 or 1835, where her father established an experimental school and joined the Transcendental Club with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
During her childhood and early adulthood, she shared her family's poverty and Transcendentalist ideals. In 1840, after several setbacks with the school, her family moved to a cottage on two acres along the Sudbury River in Concord, Massachusetts.
The Alcott family moved to the Utopian Fruitlands community for a brief interval in 1843-1844 and then, after its collapse, to rented rooms and finally to a house in Concord purchased with her mother's inheritance and help from Emerson. Alcott's early education had included lessons from the naturalist Henry David Thoreau but had chiefly been in the hands of her father. She also received some instruction from writers and educators such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Margaret Fuller, who were all family friends.
She later described these early years in a newspaper sketch entitled "Transcendental Wild Oats," afterwards reprinted in the volume Silver Pitchers (1876), which relates the experiences of her family during their experiment in "plain living and high thinking" at Fruitlands.
As she grew older, she became both an abolitionist and a feminist. In 1847, the family housed a fugitive slave for one week. In 1848 Alcott read and admired the "Declaration of Sentiments" published by the Seneca Falls Convention on women's rights.
Early Writings
Due to the family's poverty, she began work at an early age as an occasional teacher, seamstress, governess, domestic helper, and writer — her first book was Flower Fables (1854), tales originally written for Ellen Emerson, daughter of Ralph Waldo Emerson. In 1860, Alcott began writing for the Atlantic Monthly. She was nurse in the Union Hospital at Georgetown, D.C., for six weeks in 1862-1863. Her letters home, revised and published in the Commonwealth and collected as Hospital Sketches (1863, republished with additions in 1869), garnered her first critical recognition for her observations and humor. Her novel Moods (1864), based on her own experience, was also promising.
A lesser-known part of her work are the passionate, fiery novels and stories she wrote, usually under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. These works, such as A Long Fatal Love Chase and Pauline's Passion and Punishment, were known in the Victorian Era as "potboilers" or "blood-and-thunder tales." Her character Jo in Little Women publishes several such stories but ultimately rejects them after being told that "good young girls should [not] see such things." Their protagonists are willful and relentless in their pursuit of their own aims, which often include revenge on those who have humiliated or thwarted them. These works achieved immediate commercial success and remain highly readable today.
Alcott also produced moralistic and wholesome stories for children, and, with the exceptions of the semi-autobiographical tale Work (1873), and the anonymous novelette A Modern Mephistopheles (1875), which attracted suspicion that it was written by Julian Hawthorne, she did not return to creating works for adults.
Success
Louisa May Alcott's overwhelming success dated from the appearance of the first part of Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, (1868) a semi-autobiographical account of her childhood years with her sisters in Concord, Massachusetts. Part two, or Part Second, also known as Good Wives, (1869) followed the March sisters into adulthood and their respective marriages. Little Men (1871) detailed Jo's life at the Plumfield School that she founded with her husband Professor Bhaer at the conclusion of Part Two of Little Women. Jo's Boys (1886) completed the "March Family Saga."
Most of her later volumes, An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Aunt Jo's Scrap Bag (6 vols., 1871–1879), Eight Cousins and its sequel Rose in Bloom (1876), and others, followed in the line of Little Women, remaining popular with her large and loyal public.
Although the Jo character in Little Women was based on Louisa May Alcott, she, unlike Jo, never married. Alcott explained her "spinsterhood" in an interview with Louise Chandler Moulton, "... because I have fallen in love with so many pretty girls and never once the least bit with any man."
In 1879 her younger sister, May, died. Alcott took in May's daughter, Louisa May Nieriker ("Lulu"), who was two years old. The baby was named after her aunt, and was given the same nickname.
In her later life, Alcott became an advocate of women's suffrage and was the first woman to register to vote in Concord, Massachusetts in a school board election.
Alcott, along with Elizabeth Stoddard, Rebecca Harding Davis, Anne Moncure Crane, and others, were part of a group of female authors during the U.S. Gilded Age to address women’s issues in a modern and candid manner. Their works were, as one newspaper columnist of the period commented, "among the decided 'signs of the times'" (“Review 2 – No Title” from The Radical, May 1868, see References below).
Despite worsening health, Alcott wrote through the rest of her life, finally succumbing to the after-effects of mercury poisoning contracted during her American Civil War service: she had received calomel treatments for the effects of typhoid. She died in Boston on March 6, 1888 at age 55, two days after visiting her father on his deathbed. Her last words were "Is it not meningitis?" (Author bio from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Discussion Questions
1. In the first two chapters, the girls use John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress as a model for their own journey to becoming "little women." What was Alcott trying to say by using such a strongly philosophical piece of literature as the girls' model?
2. What purpose does Beth's death serve? Was Alcott simply making a sentimental novel even more so, or was this a play on morality and philosophy? Do you think Beth was intended to be a Christ figure?
3. Consider the fact that Beth will never reach sexual maturity or marry. What do you think this says about the institution of marriage and, more important, about womanhood?
4. Consider Jo's writing: While we are treated to citations from "The Pickwick Portfolio" and the family's letters to one another, we are never presented with an excerpt from Jo's many literary works, though the text tells us they are quite successful. Why is this?
5. Do you find it surprising that once Laurie is rejected by Jo, he falls in love with Amy? Do you feel his characterization is complete and he is acting within the "norm" of the personality Alcott has created for him, or does Alcott simply dispose of him once our heroine rejects him?
6. Some critics argue that the characters are masochistic. Meg is the perfect little wife, Amy is the social gold digger, and Beth is the eternally loving and patient woman. Do you believe these characterizations are masochistic? If so, do you think Alcott could have characterized them any other way while maintaining the realism of the society she lived in? And if this is true, what of Jo's character?
7. The last two chapters find Jo setting aside her buddingliterary career to run a school with her husband. Why do you think Alcott made her strongest feminine figure sacrifice her own life plans for her husband's?
8. Alcott was a student of transcendentalism. How and where does this philosophy affect Alcott's writing, plot, and characterization?
9. Do you believe this is a feminine or a feminist piece of work?
(Questions issued for the Random House edition.)
Sabbath's Theater
Philip Roth, 1995
Knopf Doubleday
464pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679772590
Summary
Winner of the National Book Award
Sabbath's Theater is a comic creation of epic proportions, and Mickey Sabbath is its gargantuan hero.
Once a scandalously inventive puppeteer, Sabbath at sixty-four is still defiantly antagonistic and exceedingly libidinous. But after the death of his long-time mistress—an erotic free spirit whose adulterous daring surpassed even his own—Sabbath embarks on a turbulent journey into his past.
Bereft and grieving, besieged by the ghosts of those who loved and hated him most, he contrives a succession of farcical disasters that take him to the brink of madness and extinction. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 19, 1933
• Where—Newark, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Bucknell University; M.A., University of
Chicago
• Awards—the most awarded US writer—see below
• Currently—lives in Connecticut
After many years of teaching comparative literature—mostly at the University of Pennsylvania—Philip Roth retired from teaching as Distinguished Professor of Literature at Hunter College in 1992. Until 1989, he was general editor of the Penguin book series Writers from the Other Europe, which he inaugurated in 1974 and which introduced the work of Bruno Schultz and Milan Kundera to an American audience.
His lengthy interviews with foreign authors—among them Primo Levi, Ivan Klima, and Aharon Appelfeld—have appeared in the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and the New York Times Book Review. Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933 and has lived in Rome, London, Chicago, and New York. He now resides in Connecticut. (From the publisher.)
More
Philip Roth's long and celebrated career has been something of a thorn in the side of the writer. As it is for so many, fame has been the proverbial double-edged sword, bringing his trenchant tragic-comedies to a wide audience, but also making him a prisoner of expectations and perceptions. Still, since 1959, Roth has forged along, crafting gorgeous variations of the Great American Novel and producing, in addition, an autobiography (The Facts) and a non-fictional account of his father's death (Patrimony: A True Story).
Roth's novels have been oft characterized as "Jewish literature," a stifling distinction that irks Roth to no end. Having grown up in a Jewish household in a lower-middle-class sub-section of Newark, New Jersey, he is incessantly being asked where his seemingly autobiographical characters end and the author begins, another irritant for Roth. He approaches interviewers with an unsettling combination of stoicism, defensiveness, and black wit, qualities that are reflected in his work. For such a high-profile writer, Roth remains enigmatic, seeming to have laid his life out plainly in his writing, but refusing to specify who the real Philip Roth is.
Roth's debut Goodbye, Columbus instantly established him as a significant writer. This National Book Award winner was a curious compendium of a novella that explored class conflict and romantic relationships and five short stories. Here, fully formed in Roth's first outing, was his signature wit, his unflinching insightfulness, and his uncanny ability to satirize his character's situations while also presenting them with humanity. The only missing element of his early work was the outrageousness he would not begin to cultivate until his third full-length novel Portnoy's Complaint—an unquestionably daring and funny post-sexual revolution comedy that tipped Roth over the line from critically acclaimed writer to literary celebrity.
Even as Roth's personal relationships and his relationship to writing were severely shaken following the success of Portnoy's Complaint, he continued publishing outrageous novels in the vein of his commercial breakthrough. There was Our Gang, a parodic attack on the Nixon administration, and The Breast, a truly bizarre take on Kafka's Metamorphosis, and My Life as a Man, the pivotal novel that introduced Roth's literary alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman.
Zuckerman would soon be the subject of his very own series, which followed the writer's journey from aspiring young artist with lofty goals to a bestselling author, constantly bombarded by idiotic questions, to a man whose most important relationships have all but crumbled in the wake of his success. The Zuckerman Trilogy (The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, and The Counterlife) directly parallels Roth's career and unfolds with aching poignancy and unforgiving humor.
Zuckerman would later reemerge in another trilogy, although this time he would largely be relegated to the role of narrator. Roth's American Trilogy (I Married a Communist, the PEN/Faulkner Award winning The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America), shifts the focus to key moments in the history of late-20th–century American history.
In Everyman (2006), Roth reaches further back into history. Taking its name from a line of 15th-century English allegorical plays, Everyman is classic Roth—funny, tragic, and above all else, human. It is also yet another in a seemingly unbreakable line of critical favorites, praised by Kirkus Reviews, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and The Library Journal.
In 2007's highly anticipated Exit Ghost, Roth returned Nathan Zuckerman to his native Manhattan for one final adventure, thus bringing to a rueful, satisfying conclusion one of the most acclaimed literary series of our day. While this may (or may not) be Zuckerman's swan song, it seems unlikely that we have seen the last Philip Roth. Long may he roar. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Literary Awards
Philip Roth is one of the most celebrated living American writers. Two of his works of fiction have won the National Book Award (Goodbye, Columbus; Sabbath's Theater); two others were finalists. Two have won National Book Critics Circle awards (Patrimony; Counterlife); again, another two were finalists. He has also won three PEN/Faulkner Awards (Operation Shylock, The Human Stain, and Everyman) and a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his 1997 novel, American Pastoral. In 2001, The Human Stain was awarded the United Kingdom's WH Smith Literary Award for the best book of the year. In 2002, he was awarded the National Book Foundation's Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Literary critic Harold Bloom has named him as one of the four major American novelists still at work, along with Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and Cormac McCarthy. In May 2006, he was given the PEN/Nabokov Award, and in 2007 the first PEN/Saul Bellow Award — both for lifetime achievement.
The May 21, 2006 issue of the New York Times Book Review announced the results of a letter that was sent to what the publication described as "a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify 'the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years." Of the 22 books cited, six of Roth's novels were selected: American Pastoral, The Counterlife, Operation Shylock, Sabbath's Theater, The Human Stain, and The Plot Against America. The accompanying essay, written by critic A.O. Scott, stated, "If we had asked for the single best writer of fiction of the past 25 years, [Roth] would have won." ("More" and "Awards" from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Sabbath's Theater [is] Mr. Roth's longest and, in my judgment, richest, most rewarding novel.... Ever since Portnoy's Complaint, Mr. Roth has been pre-eminent as a literary stand-up comedian, and some of the routines in Sabbath's Theater show him in top form.... [However,] there is plenty of nastiness in this book, and certain readers will find it repellent, not funny at all. One of Sabbath's friends, his patience exhausted by Mickey's abusive behavior, calls it "the discredited male polemic's last gasp." There is something to this charge, and the novel is stronger for allowing readers to consider the hero in such terms, if they choose. But it would be a mistake to do so exclusively, for that would involve foreclosing on the sympathies we give to the outrageous Sabbath when, in a section of 60 pages, the heart of the novel and one of the great sequences in American fiction, he returns to the Jersey Shore of his boyhood.
William H. Pritchard - New York Times Book Review
The novel fails to open out into a larger comment on society or our shared experience of mortality: Sabbath remains such a willfully selfish character that his adventures become a kind of black hole, absorbing rather than emitting light. He does not grow or learn from Drenka's death or his other losses; he simply learns to reaffirm the narcissism that has informed his entire life. As a result, Sabbath cannot assume a tragic stature; he remains, merely, pathetic.
Michiko Yakutani - New York Times
This is Roth's twenty-first novel and displays all the Rothian concerns and stylistic quirks his readers have grown accustomed to, only more exaggerated. It is a long, long book, but it grows on you.—Bonnie Smothers
Booklist
Roth's National Book Award-winning novel is a hilarious, beautifully written spoof about an aging puppeteer who finds himself rudderless when the death of his mistress, Drenka, effectively removes the driving force of his life: sex. Mickey Sabbath, now resigned to preparing for his own death, toasts all of the formerly significant figures in his life, including his first wife, who walked out on him; his mother, who was consumed by the death of Mickey's older brother during the war; and the nubile Drenka, whose appeal for Mickey's sexual fealty shortly before her death falls upon deaf ears. David Dukes reads this rip-roaring tale with a sensitivity that complements Roth's well-wrought prose. Recommended for all serious fiction collections, but advise your patrons to listen with the car windows up and the volume down. —Mark Annichiarico.
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
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