The Love of My Youth
Mary Gordon, 2011
Knopf Doubleday
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307377425
Summay
Miranda and Adam, high-school sweethearts now in their late fifties, arrive by chance at the same time in Rome, a city where they once spent a summer deeply in love, living together blissfully.
At an awkward reunion, the two—who parted in an atmosphere of passionate betrayal in the 1960s and haven’t seen each other since—are surprised to discover that they may have something to talk about. Both have their own guilt, their sense of who betrayed whom, and their long-held interpretation of the events that caused them not to marry and to split apart into the lives they’ve led since—both are married to others, with grown children. For the few weeks they are in Rome, Adam suggests that they meet for daily walks and get to know each other again. Gradually, as they take in the pleasures of the city and the drama of its streets, they discover not only what matters to them now but also more about what happened to them long ago.
Miranda and Adam are masterfully portrayed characters, intent upon understanding who they are in relation to who they were. A story about what first love means and how it is shattered, and the lessons old lovers may still have to share with each other many years later, The Love of My Youth is also a poignant look back at the hopes and dreams of a generation and what became of them. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Mary Gilmour
• Birth—December 8, 1949
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Barnard College; M.A., Syracuse
University
• Awards—Guggenheim Fellowship; O. Henry Award;
Janet Heidegger kafka Award
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Mary Gordon is the author of the novels Spending, The Company of Women, and The Rest of Life, as well as the memoir The Shadow Man. She has received a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writer's Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 1997 O. Henry Award for best short story. She teaches at Barnard College and lives in New York City. (From the publisher.)
Extras
From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview:
• I don't have any great first job tales: I ve never worked on a tramp steamer or in a coal mine or anything like that. I think the inspiration for my writing came largely from my father and the joy that life in books represented to me."
• I love dancing; I adore salsa dancing and wish I could be in a Broadway chorus."
• I could not write without my dog, Rhoda, a Lab-chow mix."
• I would trade any writerly success if it would mean my children would be happy."
• I hate George Bush, John Ashcroft, Rumsfeld, and Cheney. I hate bullies. I hate people who say, It's so fun,' and say, 'literally,' when they mean, figuratively.' "
• When asked what book most influenced her life or career as a writer, here is what she said:
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. When I read it, I thought of myself as a poet. It made me aware that I could write prose that had the lyric power of poetry, and that I could explore the inner life of a woman with a depth and expansiveness I had never imagined.
(Author interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Emotionally engaging and smoothly flowing, The Love of My Youth showcases Gordon's power to write with controlled urgency, without dissembling or exaggeration, to reveal truths that are hard to face in the unsparing light of day, but without which we could not see ourselves as we are.
Liesl Schillinger - New York Times Book Review
Gordon...writes of the affection and wistfulness one has looking at the self growing smaller in the rearview mirror. And as a soulful and spiritual writer, the author of Final Payments and Circling my Mother, she is in many ways just the person to write such a book.... [The Love of My Youth] provides us a nice leisurely space to wander—and wonder.
Karen Sandstrom - Cleveland Plain Dealer
Thoughtful and moving, Gordon's latest captures the ardor and vulnerability of young love and the cautious circumspection of middle age. Miranda and Adam began a love affair in high school that endured through college only to end in a painful betrayal. When a mutual friend brings them together in present-day Rome, they haven't seen each other in more than three decades. Adam's ambitions to be a concert pianist never came to pass, and Miranda, once convinced that political activism could change the world, is now an epidemiologist. Both have married and raised children, but Rome still holds passionate memories for them. Though wary, they meet for daily walks, and Gordon's vividly detailed descriptions make Rome a palpable presence. Miranda and Adam tentatively reveal to each other the events of their lives, touching on aspirations, disillusionments, ideals, and desires, and these conversations set the pace of Gordon's novel. Only when Miranda is about to leave Rome are they able to fully express their emotions and achieve catharsis. Gordon's (Pearl) restraint is admirable, gradually exposing the differences in character that spelled the inevitable demise of this relationship. An accumulation of detail breathes life into her characters, and the writer's affection for this beloved, eternal city is endearing.
Publishers Weekly
The most honest scene in Gordon's new novel (after Pearl) has a 60-year-old Miranda in front of the full-length mirror in her Rome apartment dressing for a reunion dinner with old friends. She will be seeing Adam, who, decades ago, she believed to be the great love of her life. As she rejects one outfit after another she also tries on and casts off variations on how she will behave at this awkward gathering. Annoyance, excitement, and pride jockey for position as Miranda recalls Adam's long-ago betrayal. Ironically, Adam is performing the same ritual in front of his own armoire. He knows Italy and offers to meet Miranda, there on business, for daily walks that prove to be as aimless as their conversation, in which they needle each other while skirting around their big questions. It's only through flashbacks and interior monolog that readers meet the passionate, activist firebrand that was Miranda and the intense, insecure pianist that was Adam. But who are they now? Verdict: Gordon's stellar literary reputation ensures that her fans will line up for this latest entry. Their enjoyment, however, may hinge on whether they believe that Adam and Miranda were in love in their youth or just in love with their youth. —Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL
Library Journal
The novel is also filled with small resonating details, from the architectural beauties of urban Rome to Adam and Miranda’s anxious glimpses of their aging bodies in front of hotel mirrors. The Love of My Youth is as much about how we feel about our past and the choices we made and make, as it is about the love story between two young people. —Lauren Bufferd
BookPage
(Starred review.) In her first novel since Pearl (2005), virtuoso and versatile Gordon offers brilliantly fresh takes on family conflicts, women's lives, war, and global suffering while ingeniously meshing classic love stories with modern mores, and ecstasy with wisdom, to create an enthralling drama of innocent passion, crushing tragedy, and the careful construction of stable, nurturing lives.... [An] alluring novel. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. The Love of My Youth is, from the title onward, a novel about age. Do Adam's and Miranda's experiences of youth and/or older age speak to your own? Do they ring true to the course of a life? When you are young, [Miranda] thinks, you never believe that courage isn t enough. That the imaginative, original decision isn t always the right one [p. 16]. How does the idea of choice play into their actions as teenagers and then at the end of the story, when they separately decide not to become lovers again?
2. Have you been to Rome? Do Gordon s descriptions of the piazzas and museums, the artwork and puppet theater, the poor beggars and the upscale restaurants reflect your memories of the city? How does having the main characters walk around the city help you experience it? How do you think the landscape and the food ( the vivid flavors, spicy tomato, peppery meat and beans, bitter greens drenched in salty fish and vinegar and oil [p. 81]) fit into Adam s and Miranda s ideas about beauty, especially in comparison to their different views on artists such as Bernini?
3. Do Adam and Miranda s discussions ring true to their characters? Why do you think Gordon chose to structure the novel in this way, focusing on their conversations, and then including flashbacks to the years of their youth? What do you make of Miranda's statement that it excites her to be speaking this way, a way she no longer speaks [p. 140]? Do you think there is a language you share with your first love that is different from any subsequent relationship?
4. This is a novel of firsts first loves and first endings. The phrase the first arises frequently, including for the first time she considers the possibility that she might wish he were other than he is [p. 188], and, regarding Beverly's attentions to Adam, the first thing he has been reluctant to talk about to Miranda [p. 202]. What other firsts take place in the novel, and how do they drive the narrative? What do they say about how we come to know ourselves and experience another person?
5. In what ways does Gordon bring to life the novel s two time periods: 1964 1970 and then 2007? Is one era more alive on the page or are they equally successful at illuminating Adam s and Miranda s pasts and presents, as individuals within a generation at the forefront of so many changes?
6. With the exception of the opening, Gordon titles each contemporary chapter with the date, place(s), and a quote. Why do you think she choose this format? Does it act to enrich or distract from your experience of the narrative? Why do you think a quote from Miranda almost always heads the chapters?
7. Do you find meaning in the fact that Adam's name exists in the reverse spelling of Miranda's? Adam is, of course, the name of the first man in the Bible, his story beginning before he and Eve taste of the Tree of Knowledge. Do you think Adam's name fits his character and, if so, in what ways?
8. Questions of self-identity play a fundamental role in the novel. Miranda asks, Are we fated to always be the people we were? Always making the same mistakes? [p. 29] and then, at a different moment, wonders Is this the most important thing that can be said about us, that we are not who we were? [p. 64]. Perhaps as a way of combining these ideas, she also says that she is someone to whom, like [Adam], a great many things have happened. So the person I am was the one I was and also another person, perhaps many other persons [p. 154]. What is Gordon saying about how well we can know ourselves? How is that related to our ability to deeply understand another person? Did Adam and Miranda truly know each other when they were young? Do they see each other, and themselves, more clearly now that they are older? Do you feel you have a confident grasp on your own identity, or do you feel it shifting through the years?
9. In what ways do Adam and Miranda experience the past is it an ever-present aspect in either of their lives, or does it seem that they don t often think of it? How do their ideas relate to Yonatan's, who lets the past go (except for what he cannot escape, his nightmares of the 67 war), and Clare, who is perhaps too young to have a past long enough to focus on or forget?
10. Adam and Miranda discuss money much less directly than other topics, though its absence or presence has greatly affected their lives. Miranda has always had money, though it s unclear if she realizes where her money came from, and how much there is (Adam wonders if she knows it was her mother's inheritance, not her father's business acumen). For Adam, money is always a worry from his youth, when the family tried to keep the cost of his music lessons from him, continuing throughout his life as a teacher and father. What do you see as the role of money in Adam's and Miranda's lives separately and when they were together?
11. Spend some time discussing Adam's and Miranda's marriages and families, both their families of birth and the ones they have created. Was Miranda fair to her parents, in keeping her distance from them? Why did she feel much closer to Adam's mother than her own? What does it mean that one of the reasons she married Yonatan was because he was so unlike Adam? Is the same true for Adam, in regard to both Beverly and Clare? What do you think about him having known Clare since she was thirteen? What parts do Adam's and Miranda's children, all four of them, and their siblings, Rob and Jo, play in the narrative?
12. Regret is a running thread throughout the novel. Do you think Adam and Miranda feel equal regret for their actions? What do you make of the section in which Miranda says In order to have had the children we have, we had to lead our lives exactly as we did. Therefore, there can be no regrets [p. 283] and Adam responds in part by asking Would it have been better if my son had not been born? [p. 285]. As someone with or without children, how would you react to their discussion?
13. Adam slept with Beverly twice and believed she was on birth control. Miranda slept with Toby and never told Adam. Adam's betrayal is assumed by both to be much greater. Why is that the case? Do you believe Miranda when she thinks, but does not say, I too am guilty of lying, by omission [p. 232]? Does Miranda believe that she has betrayed Adam? Do their actions bear greater weight because they were each other s first sexual relationship? When Miranda sleeps with Toby, is the greater betrayal the infidelity of the body or the emotional infidelity of the secret? For Adam, was he betrayed equally by Beverly, or should he assume all responsibility for her pregnancy? What do you make of the scene in which Miranda cuts off her hair, and Adam feels betrayed? What have you done to me? [p. 272] Adam asks, to which Miranda replies with the voice of a generation, To you? I thought it was my hair. My body [p. 272].
14. Miranda remarks that forgiveness is irrelevant now because the pain he caused her is long gone and, painless, forgiveness is not difficult, therefore perhaps not worth much [p. 41]. When considering how she has hurt other people, Miranda says, We can forgive those who trespass against us. We can t forgive those we ve trespassed against [p. 213]. What does it mean to forgive someone? Is there a need to forgive one's self? What do you make of Adam's dismissal of Miranda's confession that she slept with Toby? Me? I forgive you? It is I who need forgiveness [p. 291]. Do you think that Miranda truly forgives Adam? Does Adam forgive himself?
15. Miranda has converted to Judaism, while Adam stays an unbelieving Catholic I don t have it, the ear for faith [p. 228] though as a teenager he believed that sleeping with Miranda put him in a state of sin. Is faith an active element in either Adam's or Miranda's life? Is it perhaps expressed not through religious faith, but through their perspectives on the purpose of their lives? Or through some other outlet?
16. Adam's and Miranda's definitions of what constitutes an ethical and worthy life are different his music, her saving the world a divide that began in their youth, and remains their guide to how they see the world. Levi says to Adam, The question must be not only why do we live but what do we live for? And one of the most important answers, Adam, you must believe me about this, is for beauty. For beauty whose greatness goes on and on [p. 183]. Adam believes that his musical gift is the way in which he must make some kind of mark [p. 52], to create beauty [p. 83], while Miranda wants to relieve suffering [p. 83]. In the end, Adam has not achieved fame, success, even, but he has not given over his calling [p. 9]. Do you think Miranda feels the same way about her work? Does either of them deeply value what the other does, or even understand the other s work? What is your own definition of a worthy life, and in what ways has that question helped direct your life choices?
17. Do you recognize yourself in any of the characters, particularly with regards to Adam and Miranda, and their spouses, children, or parents? If so, in what ways are you similar, and to what extent do you differ?
18. Adam and Miranda discuss ideas of belief, age, self-identity, beauty, and what it means to live a moral life, among other issues. Gordon is an author who covers these concepts in compelling and complicated ways, in both her fiction and nonfiction. Have you read any of her other books? How do themes of faith, family, love, and redemption operate here and elsewhere in her work?
19. The final words in the novel are Adam's, as he mirrors Miranda's about being grateful to "These trees. This light" [p. 302]. These images, based in the natural world, refer in part to two losses Miranda s father, her estrangement from him and the way she is able to miss him through the trees he taught her to name; and Adam's loss of Beverly, or perhaps more truthfully, Beverly s inability to exist in the world (her suicide note: it s too dark for me [p. 283]). Why do you think Gordon chose to close The Love of My Youth with these words, and a focus on gratefulness? What was your emotional experience of these final lines, and of the novel as a whole?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Our Man in Havana
Graham Greene, 1959
~200-250 pp. (varies by publisher)
Summary
Our Man in Havana is an espionage thriller, a penetrating character study, and a political satire that still resonates today. Conceived as one of Graham Greene’s “entertainments,” it tells of MI6’s man in Havana, Wormold, a former vacuum-cleaner salesman turned reluctant secret agent out of economic necessity. (From Penguin Group USA edition.)
Wormold is a vacuum cleaner salesman in a city of power outages. His adolescent daughter spends his money with a skill that amazes him, so when a mysterious Englishman offers him an extra income he's tempted. In return all he has to do is file a few reports. But when his fake reports start coming true things suddenly get more complicated and Havana becomes a threatening place. (From Random House UK edition.)
The 1959 film version stars Alec Guiness, Burl Ives, and Maureen O'Hara...and Noel Coward as Hawthorne. Also, Jeremy Northam does a fine turn in the novel's audio version.
* The novel was copyrighted in 1958 and published in 1959, thus the disparity in dates.
Author Bio• Birth—October 2, 1904
• Where—Berkhamstd, England, UK
• Death—April 3, 1991
• Where—Vevey, Switzerland
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Hawthornden Prize; Companion
of Honour; Chevalier of the Legion of
Honour; Order of Merit.
Known for his espionage thrillers set in exotic locales, Graham Greene is the writer who launched a thousand travel journalists. But although Greene produced some unabashedly commercial works—he called them "entertainments," to distinguish them from his novels—even his escapist fiction is rooted in the gritty realities he encountered around the globe. "Greeneland" is a place of seedy bars and strained loyalties, of moral dissolution and physical decay.
Greene spent his university years at Oxford "drunk and debt-ridden," and claimed to have played Russian roulette as an antidote to boredom. At age 21 he converted to Roman Catholicism, later saying, "I had to find a religion...to measure my evil against." His first published novel, The Man Within, did well enough to earn him an advance from his publishers, but though Greene quit his job as a London Times subeditor to write full-time, his next two novels were unsuccessful. Finally, pressed for money, he set out to write a work of popular fiction. Stamboul Train (also published as The Orient Express) was the first of many commercial successes.
Throughout the 1930s, Greene wrote novels, reviewed books and movies for the Spectator, and traveled through eastern Europe, Liberia, and Mexico. One of his best-known works, Brighton Rock, was published during this time; The Power and the Glory, generally considered Greene's masterpiece, appeared in 1940. Along with The Heart of the Matter and The End of the Affair, they cemented Greene's reputation as a serious novelist—though George Orwell complained about Greene's idea "that there is something rather distingué in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only."
During World War II, Greene was stationed in Sierra Leone, where he worked in an intelligence capacity for the British Foreign Office under Kim Philby, who later defected to the Soviet Union. After the war, Greene continued to write stories, plays, and novels, including The Quiet American, Travels with My Aunt, The Honorary Consul, and The Captain and the Enemy. For a time, he worked as a screenwriter for MGM, producing both original screenplays and scripts adapted from his fiction.
He also continued to travel, reporting from Vietnam, Haiti, and Panama, among other places, and he became a vocal critic of U.S. foreign policy in Central America. Some biographers have suggested that his friendships with Communist leaders were a ploy, and that he was secretly gathering intelligence for the British government. The more common view is that Greene's leftist leanings were part of his lifelong sympathy with the world's underdogs—what John Updike called his "will to compassion, an ideal communism even more Christian than Communist. Its unit is the individual, not any class."
But if Greene's politics were sometimes difficult to decipher, his stature as a novelist has seldom been in doubt, in spite of the light fiction he produced. Kingsley Amis, Evelyn Waugh, and R. K. Narayan paid tribute to his work, and William Golding prophesied: "He will be read and remembered as the ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man's consciousness and anxiety."
Extras
• Greene's philandering ways were legendary; he frequently visited prostitutes and had several mistresses, including Catherine Walston, who converted to Catholicism after reading The Power and the Glory and wrote to Greene asking him to be her godfather. After a brief period of correspondence, the two met, and their relationship inspired Greene's novel The End of the Affair.
• Greene was a film critic, screenwriter, and avid moviegoer, and critics have sometimes praised the cinematic quality of his style. His most famous screenplay was The Third Man, which he cowrote with director Carol Reed. Recently, new film adaptations have been made of Greene's novels The End of the Affair and The Quiet American. Greene's work has also formed the basis for an opera: Our Man in Havana, composed by Malcolm Williamson. (From Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Had [Greene] decided to believe his own tale, and told it with simple conviction, it might have been hair-raising.... Instead, he has used tricks, and achieved mostly unreality. His characters lack bone, flesh, and blood, and only occasionally seem lifelike. They are dumb when convenience requires, smart when convenience requires, rarely showing initiative on their own.
James M. Cain - New York Times (10/28/1958)
The ultimate chronicler of twentieth-century man’s consciousness and anxiety
William Golding - Author (Lord of the Flies)
As comical, satirical, atmospherical an ‘entertainment’ as he has given us.
Daily Telegraph - (UK)
Nobody should be anywhere near power who hasn't read (or seen the film of) Our Man in Havana, a powerful satire on the silly world of spying by a man who had experienced it
Mail on Sunday (UK)
No serious writer of this century has more thoroughly invaded and shaped the public imagination than did Graham Greene.
Time
He had a sharp nose for trouble and injustice. In Our Man In Havana—a witty send-up of an agent's life —it was Cuba before Castro.
Financial Times
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 Our Man in Havana:
1. What kind of man is Wormold? Do you consider him heroic? Or would you describe him as a Walter Mitty type, at heart a decent but vacuous being? Why would Graham have made Wormold the novel's protagonist?
2. Why does Wormold agree to accept Hawthorne's proposal to become an agent for the British government? If he had refused, what might have happened?
3. What is the joke about the vacuum cleaners that Wormold sells...as does Mr. Carter. Don't neglect to talk about the product names.
4. Hasselbacher is perhaps the most interesting character in the novel, certainly his pithy sayings are. How would you describe his world view or philosophy toward life? What does he mean when he says to Wormold? ...
You are interested in a person, not in life,
and people die or leave us....But if you're
interested in life, it never lets you down.
Hasselbacher also compares people to crossword puzzles. Can you explain, or expand on, that comparison? Do you agree with his observation? What are some other observations of his that strike you?
5. Follow-up to Question #4: Who is Dr. Hasselbacher—is he an agent? Or is he an innocent by-stander who gets swept up in Wormwold's intrigue? How does he become involved with Raoul? How does he know to warn Wormold about the European Traders' Association luncheon? Is Hasselbacher a martyr of sorts (consider the quotation in Question #4)?
6. What do you think of Beatrice? Why was she not sad to see her husband leave her? Why is she so delighted when Wormold confesses to her that his spying operation has been a sham?
7. What does the last line of the novel mean—and what precipitates Beatrice's thought? What does the future hold for their relationship?
8. Why isn't Wormold summarily fired? Why does the service keep him on—and even award him the Order of the British Empire (OBE).
9. In what way is this novel a sly comment on the work of an author, writing a novel?
10. This is a work of satire. What is Graham satirizing? Do you consider this a cyncical novel? Is it humorous? Consider the era in which this novel was written...and also the events of the Cuban missle crisis three years after the novel's publication.
11. Does Captain Segura represent pure evil?
12. Consider James Cain's 1958 review in the New York Times (see "Book Reviews" above). Do you agree with his assessment of this novel...or does he miss the mark?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Moo
Jane Smiley, 1995
Knopf Doubleday
437 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307472762
Summary
A big, blackly comic, wickedly-on-target send up of our society—all of it—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres. As a microcosm of today's western world, Smiley gives readers a huge Midwestern agricultural college nicknamed Moo U.
Nestled in the heart of the Midwest, amid cow pastures and waving fields of grain, lies Moo University, a distinguished institution devoted to the art and science of agriculture.
Here, among an atmosphere rife with devious plots, mischievous intrigue, lusty liaisons, and academic one-upmanship, Chairman X of the Horticulture Department harbors a secret fantasy to kill the dean; Mrs. Walker, the provost's right hand and campus information queen, knows where all the bodies are buried; Timothy Nonahan, associate professor of English, advocates eavesdropping for his creative writing assignments; and Bob Carlson, a sophomore, feeds and maintains his only friend: a hog named Earl Butz.
In this wonderfully written and masterfully plotted novel, Jane Smiley, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Thousand Acres, offers us a wickedly funny comedy that is also a darkly poignant slice of life. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 26, 1949
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Rasied—Webster Grove, Missouri
• Education—B.A., Vassar College; M.A., M.F.A, and Ph.D., Iowa University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 1992; National Book Critics Circle Award, 1991
• Currently—lives in Northern California
Jane Smiley is the author of numerous works of fiction, including The Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, Ordinary Love & Good Will, A Thousand Acres (for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize), and Moo. She lives in northern California. (From the publisher.)
More
Jane Smiley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist.
Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained a B.A. at Vassar College, then earned an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar.
Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in the Atlantic Monthly. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. In 1995 she wrote her sole television script produced, for an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. M. Forster's seminal Aspects of the Novel, that roams from eleventh century Japan's Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji to twenty-first century Americans chick lit.
From 1981 to 1996, she taught undergrad and graduate creative writing workshops at Iowa State University. She continued teaching at ISU even after moving her primary residence to California.
In 2001, Smiley was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Delectably entertaining.... An uproariously funny and at the same time hauntingly melancholy portrait of a college community in the Midwest.
The New York Times
Smart, irreverent, and wickedly tender.... Moo suggests a mix of Tom Wolfe's wit and John Updike's satiny reach.
The Boston Globe
Displays a wicked wit and an unerring eye for American foibles.... Stuffed with memorable characters, sparkling with deliciously acid humor, Moo is a rare bird in today'sliterary menagerie: a great read that also makes you think.
The Chicago Sun-Times
In Smiley's world, people are sometimes greedy, foolish, and muddleheaded, but they are most often triumphant.
BookList
Effortlessly switching gears after the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Thousand Acres, Smiley delivers a surprising tour de force, a satire of university life that leaves no aspect of contemporary academia unscathed. The setting is a large midwestern agricultural college known as Moo U., whose faculty and students Smiley depicts with sophisticated humor, turning a gimlet eye on the hypocrisy, egomania, prejudice and self-delusion that flourish on campus—and also reflect society at large. Everybody at Moo U. has an agenda: academic, sexual, social, economic, political and philosophical. Among the more egregious types that Smiley portrays are Dr. Lionel Gift, an intellectual whore who calls students "customers" and is willing to skew research to further his name and line his pocketbook; Dr. Bo Jones, who is conducting a secret experiment on an appealing boar named Earl Butz (Earl and the horses on campus are nicer than the humans by a mile); and a superlatively bossy secretary who is a lot smarter than the Ph.Ds she serves. A chapter titled "Who's in Bed With Whom" clears things up in that department—but only temporarily, since musical beds is a continuous game. A quartet of women roommates who all hide secrets from each other, an unscrupulous "little Texan with jug ears" who wants to give the college tainted money, and a stuffy dean who thinks that anything he desires is God's will are some of the large cast of characters that Smiley manipulates with remarkable ease—and though some portrayals verge on caricature, she never goes over the line. Details of midwest topography, weather and culture are rendered with unerring authenticity. The narrative sails along with unflagging vigor and cleverness, and even the ironic denouement has an inevitability that Smiley orchestrates with hilarious wit.
Publishers Weekly
Smiley, now acclaimed for her portrayals of the dark side of America's pastoral ideal (a Pulitzer for A Thousand Acres, plus her wonderful novellas, Ordinary Love and Good Will), returns with a sharp-edged spoof of academic life. "Moo U" is a large, Midwestern "ag and tech" school where campus politics and intrigue rule. Smiley has assembled a large, colorful group of characters who will be familiar to ivory tower dwellers: the campus secretary who controls personnel and paper flow, the faculty who plot for power and revenge, plus the dining hall worker, the students, and the administrators, all with their own agendas. While entertaining and on-target as parody, Moo is not as riveting as Smiley's best work. This should do well and be very popular with higher education insiders. —Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.
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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Secrets of Eden
Chris Bohjalian, 2010
Crown Publishing
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307394989
Summary
"There," says Alice Hayward to Reverend Stephen Drew, just after her baptism, and just before going home to the husband who will kill her that evening and then shoot himself.
Drew, tortured by the cryptic finality of that short utterance, feels his faith in God slipping away and is saved from despair only by a meeting with Heather Laurent, the author of wildly successful, inspirational books about ... angels.
Heather survived a childhood that culminated in her own parents' murder-suicide, so she identifies deeply with Alice’s daughter, Katie, offering herself as a mentor to the girl and a shoulder for Stephen – who flees the pulpit to be with Heather and see if there is anything to be salvaged from the spiritual wreckage around him.
But then the State's Attorney begins to suspect that Alice's husband may not have killed himself...and finds out that Alice had secrets only her minister knew.
Secrets of Eden is both a haunting literary thriller and a deeply evocative testament to the inner complexities that mark all of our lives. Once again Chris Bohjalian has given us a riveting page-turner in which nothing is precisely what it seems. As one character remarks, “Believe no one. Trust no one. Assume all of our stories are suspect. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1960
• Where—White Plains, New York, USA
• Education—Amherst College
• Awards—Anahid Literary Award, 2000; New England Book Award, 2002
• Currently—lives in Lincoln, Vermont
Christopher Aram Bohjalian, who goes by the pen name Chris Bohjalian, is an American novelist. Bohjalian is the author of 15 novels, including New York Times bestsellers Midwives, Secrets of Eden, The Law of Similars, Before You Know Kindness, The Double Bind, Skeletons at the Feast, and The Night Strangers.
Bohjalian is the son of Aram Bohjalian, who was a senior vice president of the New York advertising agency Romann & Tannenholz. Chris Bohjalian graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College, where he was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. In the mid-1980s, he worked as an account representative for J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in New York.
He and his wife lived in a co-op in Brooklyn until March 1986, when the two were riding in a taxicab in which the driver refused to let them out of the car for 45 minutes, ignoring all traffic lights and stop signs. Around midnight, the driver dropped them off at a near-deserted street in front of a crack house, where the police were conducting a raid and Bohjalian and his wife were forced to drop to the ground for their protection. The incident prompted the couple to move from Brooklyn; Bohjalian said, "After it was all over, we just thought, "Why do we live here?" A few days later, the couple read an ad in The New York Times referencing the "People's Republic of Vermont," and in 1987 the couple moved to Lincoln, Vermont.
Early career
After buying their house, Bohjalian began writing weekly columns for local newspaper and magazine about living in the small town, which had a population of about 975 residents. The Concord Monitor said of Bohjalian during this period, "his immersion in community life and family, Vermont-style, has allowed him to develop into a novelist with an ear and empathy for the common man." Bohjalian continued the column for about 12 years, writing about such topics as his own daily life, fatherhood and the transformation of America. The column has run in the Burlington Free Press since 1992. Bohjalian has also written for such magazines as Cosmopolitan, Reader's Digest and the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine.
Bohjalian's first novel, A Killing in the Real World, was released in 1988. Almost two decades after it was released, Bohjalian said of the book, "It was a train wreck. I hadn't figured things out yet." His third novel, Past the Bleachers, was released in 1992 and adapted as a Hallmark Channel television movie in 1995.
In 1998, Bohjalian wrote his fifth book, Midwives, a novel focusing on rural Vermont midwife Sibyl Danforth, who becomes embroiled in a legal battle after one of her patients died following an emergency Caesarean section. The novel was critically acclaimed and was selected by Oprah Winfrey as the October 1998 selection of her Oprah's Book Club, which helped push the book to great financial success. It became a New York Times and USA Today bestseller. Victoria Blewer has often described her husband as having "a crush" on the Sybil Danforth character. In 2001, the novel was adapted into a Lifetime Movie Network television film starring Sissy Spacek in the lead role. Spacek said the Danforth character appealed to her because "the heart of the story is my character's inner struggle with self-doubt, the solo road you travel when you have a secret."
Later career
Bohjalian followed Midwives with the 1999 novel The Law of Similars, about a widower attorney suffering from nameless anxieties who starts dating a woman who practices alternative medicine. The novel was inspired by Bohjalian's real-life visit to a homeopath in an attempt to cure frequent colds he was catching from his daughter's day care center. Bohjalian said of the visit, "I don't think I imagined there was a novel in homeopathy, however, until I met the homeopath and she explained to me the protocols of healing. There was a poetry to the language that a patient doesn't hear when visiting a conventional doctor." The protagonist, a father, is based in part on Bohjalian himself, and his four-year-old daughter is based largely on Bohjalian's daughter, who was three when he was writing the book., Liz Rosenberg of The New York Times said the novel shared many similarities with Midwives but that it paled in comparison; Rosenberg said, "Unlike its predecessor, it fails to take advantage of Bohjalian's great gift for creating thoughtful fiction featuring characters in whom the reader sustains a lively interest." Megan Harlan of The Boston Phoenix described it as "formulaic fiction" and said Bohjalian focused too much on creating a complex plot and not enough of complex characterizations. The Law of Similars, like Midwives, made the New York Times bestsellers list.
He won the New England Book Award in 2002, and in 2007 released "The Double Bind," a novel based on Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
In 2008, Bohjalian released Skeletons at the Feast, a love story set in the last six months of World War II in Poland and Germany. The novel was inspired by an unpublished diary written by German citizen Eva Henatsch from 1920 to 1945. The diary was given to Bohjalian in 1998 by Henatsch's grandson Gerd Krahn, a friend of Bohjalian, who had a daughter in the same kindergarten class as Bohjalian's daughter. Bohjalian was particularly fascinated by Henatsch's account of her family's trek west ahead of the Soviet Army, but he was not inspired to write a novel from it until 2006, when he read Armageddon: The Battle for Germany, Max Hastings' history of the final years of World War II. Bohjalian was struck not only by how often Henatsch's story mirrored real-life experiences, but also the common "moments of idiosyncratic human connection" found in both. Skeletons of the Feast was considered a departure for Bohjalian because it was not only set outside of Vermont, but set in a particular historical moment.
His 2010 novel, Secrets of Eden, was also a critical success, receiving starred reviews from three of the four trade journals (Booklist, Library Journal, and Publishers Weekly), as well as many newspapers and magazines. It debuted at # 6 on The New York Times bestseller list.
His next novel, The Night Strangers, published in 2011, represents yet another departure for Bohjalian. The is both a gothic ghost story and a taut psychological thriller.
He has written a weekly column for Gannett's Burlington Free Press since February 1992 called "Idyll Banter." His 1,000th column appeared in May 2011.
Personal comments
In a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview, Bohjalian offered up these personal comments:
I was the heaviest child, by far, in my second-grade class. My mother had to buy my pants for me at a store called the "Husky Boys Shop," and still she had to hem the cuffs up around my knees. I hope this experience, traumatizing as it was, made me at least marginally more sensitive to people around me.
I have a friend with Down syndrome, a teenage boy who is capable of remembering the librettos from entire musicals the first or second time he hears them. The two of us belt them out together whenever we're driving anywhere in a car.I am a pretty avid bicyclist. The other day I was biking alone on a thin path in the woods near Franconia Notch, New Hampshire, and suddenly before me I saw three bears. At first I saw only two, and initially I thought they were cats. Then I thought they were dogs. Finally, just as I was approaching them and they started to scurry off the path and into the thick brush, I understood they were bears. Bear cubs, to be precise. Which is exactly when their mother, no more than five or six feet to my left, reared up on her hind legs, her very furry paws and very sharp claws raised above her head in a gesture that an optimist might consider a wave and guy on a bike might consider something a tad more threatening. Because she was standing on a slight incline, I was eye level with her stomach—an eventual destination that seemed frighteningly plausible. I have never biked so fast in my life in the woods. I may never have biked so fast in my life on a paved road.
I do have hobbies—I garden and bike, for example—but there's nothing in the world that gives me even a fraction of the pleasure that I derive from hanging around with my wife and daughter.
He lives with his wife and daughter in Lincoln, Vermont, where he is active in the local church and the Vermont theater community—always off-stage, never on.
Writing style
Bohjalian novels often focus on a specific issue, such as homelessness, animal rights and environmentalism, and tend to be character-driven, revolving around complex and flawed protagonists and secondary characters. Bohjalian uses characteristics from his real life in his writings; in particular, many of his novels take place in fictional Vermont towns, and the names of real New Hampshire towns are often used throughout his stories. Bohjalian said, "Writers can talk with agonizing hubris about finding their voices, but for me, it was in Vermont that I discovered issues, things that matter to me." His novels also tend to center around ordinary people facing extraordinarily difficult situations resulting from unforeseen circumstances, often triggered by other parties. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Bohjalian, a seasoned pro, lucidly handles the back-and-forth chronology as successive narrators give their different perspectives on the same events, and he skillfully plants clues ... that carefully lead to a shocking final plot twist, though they cannot make it persuasive.... Trying to fold a serious subject into a commercially palatable format, Secrets of Eden is readable and fitfully insightful, but never truly illuminating.
Wendy Smith - Washington Post
Superbly written - vivid and horrifying without being melodramatic....a tribute to Bohjalian's storytelling skill.
Boston Globe
end. . .Bohjalian's book is about the power of secrets and sacrifice and a warning against jumping to judgment. Those who doubt their faith, he writes, are sometimes the strongest among us.
Amy Driscoll - Miami Herald
Page-turning.... Bohjalian has a knack for creating nuanced, detailed first-person female characters.... Secrets of Eden speeds along pleasingly as both thriller and character study.
Seattle Times
Superb... Fans of Bohjalian's 11 other novels (including Midwives) know to expect the unexpected and, thanks to his creativity and cunning, readers usually get walloped by one heck of a plot twist by book's end. In Secrets of Eden, the old saw that none of us knows what really goes on in a house when the shades are drawn rings chillingly true.
Carol Memmott - USA Today
Chris Bohjalian has always known how to keep the pages turning. In his latest novel, a small Vermont hamlet has been racked by a well-established couple's apparent murder-suicide. Bohjalian describes the aftermath of that ruinous night in varied voices, effortlessly slipping into the heads of the shaken local pastor, the no-nonsense deputy state attorney, and the best-selling author whose own past draws her to the scene of the crime.... [A] study of guilt and grief.
Entertainment Weekly
Bohjalian has built a reputation on his rich characters and immersing readers in diverse subjects—homeopathy, animal rights activism, midwifery—and his latest surely won’t disappoint. The morning after her baptism into the Rev. Stephen Drew’s Vermont Baptist church, Alice Hayward and her abusive husband are found dead in their home, an apparent murder-suicide. Stephen, the novel’s first narrator, is so racked with guilt over his failure to save Alice that he leaves town. Soon, he meets Heather Laurent, the author of a book about angels whose own parents’ marriage also ended in tragedy. Stephen’s deeply sympathetic narration is challenged by the next two narrators: deputy state attorney Catherine Benincasa, whose suspicions are aroused initially by Stephen’s abrupt departure (and then by questions about his relationship with Alice), and Heather, who distances herself from Stephen for similar reasons and risks the trip into her dark past by seeking out Katie, the Haywards’ now-orphaned 15-year-old daughter who puts into play the final pieces of the puzzle, setting things up for a touching twist. Fans of Bohjalian’s more exotic works will miss learning something new, but this is a masterfully human and compassionate tale.
Publishers Weekly
While stylistically reminiscent of his earlier best seller, Midwives, Bohjalian's 13th novel is his most splendid accomplishment to date. The story revolves around the apparent murder-suicide of Alice and George Hayward and its toll on the couple's teenage daughter Katie, the lost faith of Rev. Stephen Drew, and the minister's relationship with an author of books about angels. As the narrative takes its turn through a series of voices, Bohjalian wends his way through the reader's mind, toying with perceptions, trust, and doubt. Did George in fact kill himself after strangling his wife? As lives are dissected, relationships are uncovered and their repercussions hypothesized and echoed. Verdict: A fantastic choice for book clubs, this novel deals beautifully with controversial topics of domestic abuse, faith, and adultery without resorting to sensationalism. Fans of Jodi Picoult and Anita Shreve will enjoy this breathtaking piece of fiction.
Library Journal
Bohjalian returns with a story of violence. Part I opens with the first-person testimony of Stephen Drew, minister to a Baptist congregation in Haverill, Vt., that includes Alice Hayward, whose husband George tops off years of beatings by strangling her after dinner on the day she chose to be baptized. It quickly becomes clear that Stephen and Alice had been lovers, and the weirdly distanced description of the guilt he feels about her death is creepy even before we realize that George may not have shot himself after killing his wife, and Stephen is the top suspect in the eyes of deputy state's attorney Catherine Benincasa. The narration of Part II is problematic; while Stephen is arrogant and self-absorbed, Catherine is vengefully obsessed with the violence against women she sees in her work. The portrait of the Hayward marriage that emerges from both accounts is grimly predictable (angry, controlling man; passive, isolated woman). The novel improves dramatically with the narration in Part III of Heather Laurent, author of bestselling books about angels who has a brief affair with Stephen in the aftermath of Alice's murder. Heather's father killed her mother and then himself when she was 14, and she thinks she can help both Stephen and 15-year-old Katie Hayward, Alice and George's daughter, deal with their trauma. Heather's depiction of her parents' marriage has the specificity and complexity missing from the collage portrait of the Haywards, though her fixation on angels never amounts to anything more than a fictional device. Part IV, narrated by Katie, has a somber power as the girl imagines her parents' last hours. A schematic tale of battered wives, murderous husbands and the consequences for their traumatized daughters.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Re-read the quotes that open the book. One is from a leading voice of Enlightenment rationalism, the other from the Bible. Samuel Johnson speaks about loss and sorrow; the quote from Genesis is about the bonds of marriage. What did you think of this unique pairing when you began reading? Now that you’ve finished Secrets of Eden, how do these quotes help shape your understanding of the story?
2. What did you think of the title before you began reading? The phrase “secrets of Eden” appears when Heather Laurent and Reverend Drew are together in New York: “He pulled me against him and said simply, ‘There were no secrets in Eden’” (page 259). What do you think Reverend Drew means by that? What are the secrets in the biblical Eden? Where is the “Eden” in Secrets of Eden? Is it a place? A state of mind? What are the secrets in the story, and who is keeping them? What is gained or lost when these secrets are revealed?
3. Chris Bohjalian is known for writing novels with an evocative sense of place: New England,especially small-town Vermont. How does the setting of Secrets of Eden impact the characters? How is it vital to the story? Could these events have taken place in another landscape, another social context? Why or why not?
PART I: Stephen Drew
4. The novel begins from Reverend Stephen Drew’s perspective. How would you describe his voice as a narrator? Is he sympathetic? Reliable? What is his state of mind? In the first few pages of the first chapter, what does Reverend Drew reveal about himself? About Alice Hayward’s life and death? What does he not reveal? Did you immediately trust his point of view? Why or why not? What words would you use to describe him? Do you think he’d use the same words to describe himself?
5. When he recalls Alice Hayward’s baptism, Reverend Drew remembers the word “there” in a poignant way, comparing the last word Alice spoke to him with Christ’s last words on the cross. Why do you think this simple word —“there”—is given such weighty importance? How is it related to what Reverend Drew calls “the seeds of my estrangement from my calling” (page 13)?
6. Reverend Drew says of his calling to the church: “All I can tell you is I believe I was sent” (page 44). He then delves into a grisly description of the Crucifixion (pages 45–48), recalling the first time he studied it in high school. With what we know about Reverend Drew up to this point, how did his revelation help you understand him? Were you drawn in or repulsed by his fixation?
7. How does Reverend Drew explain his spiritual breakdown? Was there one moment when he lost his faith (Alice’s baptism, her death) or was it the result of a series of events? What kind of response did you have to his breakdown? One of empathy? Curiosity? Suspicion?
PART II: Catherine Benincasa
8. Before we hear from Catherine in her own voice, we see her through Reverend Drew’s eyes. What is your first impression of her from his perspective? Does that impression change once you see things from her point of view? What words would you use to describe Catherine?
9. Catherine says of Reverend Drew, “the guy had ice in his veins...a serial-killer vibe” (page 106). How does this compare with how he portrays himself? Do you think Catherine sees Reverend Drew clearly based on what she knows? Is she jumping to conclusions, or making use of her intuition and the hard truths she’s learned throughout her grueling years on the job?
10. At one point, Catherine says, “I know the difference between mourning and grief” (page 193). What do you think she means by this? Do you agree that there’s a difference? How would you describe the reactions, so far, of Reverend Drew, Heather, and Katie to the terrible events they’re faced with—as mourning or grief?
PART III: Heather Laurent
11. By the time we get to the section narrated by Heather, we’ve seen her from both Reverend Drew’s and Catherine Benincasa’s points of view, and we’ve read excerpts from her books. How would you describe her? Do you agree with Drew that she’s “unflappably serene...an individual whose competence was manifest and whose sincerity was phosphorescent” (page 65), or do you agree with pathologist David Dennison’s take on her: “‘Angel of death. I’m telling you: That woman is as stable as a three-legged chair’” (page 182)?
12. Heather’s section begins with her description of her first encounter with an angel: she’s a young woman, lost in the depths of depression, and intends to commit suicide (pages 225–232). How would you interpret this moment? What does it reveal about how she deals with the deaths of her parents? About how she sees the world?
13. Reverend Drew and Catherine Benincasa both provide graphic descriptions of crimes and crime scenes—the Haywards’ and others—but Heather’s memories of the violence between her parents is particularly grim. How do you react to reading these passages?
PART IV: Katie Hayward
14. Ending the novel in Katie Hayward’s voice is a provocative choice. What do you think of it? You’ve now seen her from the points of view of Reverend Drew, Catherine, and Heather—how would you describe her? Does she seem like a typical teenager? To borrow Catherine’s distinction, is Katie grieving or in mourning?
15. At one point during a conversation with Katie, Reverend Drew says, “it was one good thing to come out of that awful Sunday night: We were all striving to be better people. To be kind. To be gentler with one another” (page 321). Is this true in the case of the people in this novel? Can good come out of such violence, such painful loss? How does each of the four main characters respond? How does the town in general respond?
16. Re-read the interview between Katie Hayward and Emmet Walker (pages 155–160). Think back to when you read it the first time, before you’d finished the book. Did anything give you pause? Is there anything in Katie’s responses that reveals what we later find out to be true?
17. The novel ends with a revelation. Did it surprise you? How does the author build suspense throughout the novel? Can you find moments of foreshadowing that hint at the ending?
18. Part I ends with Reverend Drew saying, “If there is a lesson to be learned from my fall...it is this: Believe no one. Trust no one. Assume no one really knows anything that matters at all. Because, alas, we don’t. All of our stories are suspect” (page 101). Do you think all the narrators’ stories—Reverend Drew, Catherine, Heather, Katie—are suspect? Is one of them more believable, more reliable, than the others?
19. Pay particular attention to the minor characters: Ginny O’Brien, Emmet Walker, David Dennison, Amanda and Norman, Alice Hayward. What does each minor character reveal about the narrators? How does each move the story forward?
20. Reverend Drew remembers an intimate moment with Alice Hayward in which she asks him to “Remind me who I am” (page 99). How do you understand this need in Alice? What was she looking for in Reverend Drew? Do you think she got it?
21. Excerpts from Heather Laurent’s books are interspersed throughout the novel. Look closely at each excerpt and at what comes before and after. Discuss why you think these are included, and how they impact your reading based on where they appear. Is there a literal connection between what’s happening in the story and what’s happening in Heather Laurent’s books, or is the connection more nuanced? Does one excerpt stand out to you more than the others?
22. Chris Bohjalian’s readers know that his novels often address a significant social issue. Secrets of Eden tackles the tragedy of domestic violence. How did reading this novel influence your understanding of domestic violence?
23. Angels are a recurring image and a major theme in Secrets of Eden. Who sees them? When do they appear? How are they described? How do they affect each character differently? In the end, do the angels provide an image of hope?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Wolf Hall (Wolf Hall Trilogy, 1)
Hilary Mantel, 2009
Henry Holt & Co.
560 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312429980
Summary
Winner, 2009 Man Booker Prize
Winner, 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award
England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years, and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. The quest for the king’s freedom destroys his adviser, the brilliant Cardinal Wolsey, and leaves a power vacuum.
Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people and a demon of energy: he is also a consummate politician, hardened by his personal losses, implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?
In inimitable style, Hilary Mantel presents a picture of a half-made society on the cusp of change, where individuals fight or embrace their fate with passion and courage. With a vast array of characters, overflowing with incident, the novel re-creates an era when the personal and political are separated by a hairbreadth, where success brings unlimited power but a single failure means death. (From the publisher.)
Mantel published the sequel to Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies, in 2012. The final volume, The Mirror and the Light, came out in 2020.
Author Bio
• Birth—July 6, 1952
• Where—Glossop, Derbyshire, England, UK
• Education—University of Sheffield
• Awards—(See below)
• Currently—lives in England
Hilary Mary Mantel CBE* is an English novelist, short story writer and critic. Her work, ranging in subject from personal memoir to historical fiction, has been short-listed for major literary awards.
Mantel's best known work is her Wolf Hall Trilogy, 2009-2020. She won the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall, the series' first volume, and won the prize a second time in 2012 for the sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. (Mantel thus became the first British writer and the first woman to win the Man Booker Prize more than once.) The Mirror and the Light, the trilogy's final installment, came out in 2020.
Mantel was born in Glossop, Derbyshire, the eldest of three children, and was brought up in the Derbyshire mill village of Hadfield, attending the local Roman Catholic primary school. Her family is of Irish origin but her parents, Margaret and Henry Thompson, were born in England. After losing touch with her father at the age of eleven, she took the name of her stepfather, Jack Mantel. Her family background, the mainspring of much of her fiction, is explained in her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost.
Mantel attended Harrytown Convent in Romiley, Cheshire, and in 1970 went to the London School of Economics to read law. She transferred to the University of Sheffield and graduated as Bachelor of Jurisprudence in 1973. After graduating she worked in the social work department of a geriatric hospital, and then as a saleswoman. In 1974 she began writing a novel about the French Revolution, which was later published as A Place of Greater Safety.
In 1977 she went to live in Botswana with her husband, Gerald McEwen, a geologist, whom she had married in 1972. Later they spent four years in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia—a memoir of this time, Someone to Disturb, has been published in the London Review of Books. During her twenties she suffered from a debilitating and painful illness. This was initially diagnosed as a psychiatric illness for which she was hospitalised and treated with anti-psychotic drugs. These produced a paradoxical reaction of psychotic symptoms and for some years she refrained from seeking help from doctors. Finally, in Africa, and desperate, she consulted a medical text-book and realised she was probably suffering from a severe form of endometriosis, a diagnosis confirmed back in London. The condition and necessary surgery left her unable to have children and continued to disrupt her life, with continued treatment by steroids radically changing her appearance. She is now patron of the Endometriosis SHE Trust.
Novels
Her first novel, Every Day is Mother's Day, was published in 1985, and its sequel, Vacant Possession, a year later. After returning to England, she became the film critic of The Spectator and a reviewer for a number of papers and magazines in Britain and the United States.
Her novel Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), which drew on her first-hand experience in Saudi Arabia, uses a threatening clash of values between the neighbours in a city apartment block to explore the tensions between Muslim culture and the liberal West.
Her Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize-winning novel Fludd is set in 1956 in a fictitious northern village called Fetherhoughton, centring on a Roman Catholic church and a convent. A mysterious stranger brings about transformations in the lives of those around him.
A Place of Greater Safety (1992) won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award, for which her two previous books had been shortlisted. A long and historically accurate novel, it traces the career of three French revolutionaries, Danton, Robespierre and Camille Desmoulins, from childhood to their early deaths during the Reign of Terror of 1794.
A Change of Climate (1994), set in rural Norfolk, explores the lives of Ralph and Anna Eldred, as they raise their four children and devote their lives to charity. It includes chapters about their early married life as missionaries in South Africa, when they were imprisoned and deported to Bechuanaland, and the tragedy that occurred there.
An Experiment in Love (1996), which won the Hawthornden Prize, takes place over two university terms in 1970. It follows the progress of three girls—two friends and one enemy—as they leave home and attend university in London. Margaret Thatcher makes a cameo appearance in this novel, which explores women’s appetites and ambitions, and suggests how they are often thwarted. Though Mantel has used material from her own life, it is not an autobiographical novel.
Her next book, The Giant, O'Brien (1998), is set in the 1780s, and is based on the true story of Charles O'Brien or Byrne. He came to London to earn money by displaying himself as a freak. His bones hang today in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons. The novel treats O'Brien and his antagonist, the Scots surgeon John Hunter, less as characters in history than as mythic protagonists in a dark and violent fairytale, necessary casualties of the Age of Enlightenment. She adapted the book for BBC Radio 4, in a play starring Alex Norton (as Hunter) and Frances Tomelty.
In 2003, Mantel published her memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, which won the MIND Book of the Year award. That same year she brought out a collection of short stories, Learning To Talk. All the stories deal with childhood and, taken together, the books show how the events of a life are mediated as fiction. Her 2005 novel, Beyond Black, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize. Set in the years around the second millennium, it features a professional medium, Alison Hart, whose calm and jolly exterior conceals grotesque psychic damage. She trails around with her a troupe of 'fiends', who are invisible but always on the verge of becoming flesh.
The long novel Wolf Hall, about Henry VIII's minister Thomas Cromwell, was published in 2009 to critical acclaim. The book won that year's Man Booker Prize and, upon winning the award, Mantel said, "I can tell you at this moment I am happily flying through the air." Judges voted three to two in favour of Wolf Hall for the prize. Mantel was presented with a trophy and a £50,000 cash prize during an evening ceremony at the London Guildhall. The accounted for 45% of the sales of all the nominated books. On receiving the prize, Mantel said that she would spend the prize money on "sex and drugs and rock' n' roll".
The sequel to Wolf Hall—Bring Up the Bodies—was published in 2012, also to wide acclaim. It won the 2012 Costa Book of the Year and the 2012 Man Booker Prize. Mantel is working on the third novel of the Thomas Cromwell trilogy, called The Mirror and the Light.
She is also working on a short non-fiction book called The Woman Who Died of Robespierre, about the Polish playwright Stanisława Przybyszewska. Mantel also writes reviews and essays, mainly for the Guardian, London Review of Books and New York Review of Books. The Culture Show programme on BBC 2 broadcast a profile of Mantel on 17 September 2011.
In September 2014, in an interview published in the Guardian, Mantel confessed to fantasizing about the murdering of Margaret Thatcher in 1983, and fictionalized the event in a short story called "The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher: 6 August 1983." That story became the title story in her 2014 collection.
Awards
1987 Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize
1990 Southern Arts Literature Prize for Fludd
1990 Cheltenham Prize for Fludd
1990 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize for Fludd
1992 Sunday Express Book of the Year for A Place of Greater Safety
1996 Hawthornden Prize for An Experiment in Love
2003 MIND Book of the Year for Giving Up the Ghost (A Memoir)
2009 Man Booker Prize for Wolf Hall
2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for Wolf Hall
2010 Walter Scott Prize for Wolf Hall
2012 Man Booker Prize for Bring Up the Bodies
2012 Costa Book Awards (Novel) for Bring Up the Bodies
2012 Costa Book Awards (Book of the Year) for Bring Up the Bodies
2013 David Cohen Prize
She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2006 Birthday Honours and Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to literature.(Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/13/2014.)
*Commander of the British Empire
Book Reviews
Brilliant! How did she do it? Hilary Martel took a figure much maligned in history—and historical fiction—and transformed him into one of literature's most likeable characters.... The fun of this book is in following Cromwell, from abuse at the hand of his drunken father, through his stunning rise in power. It's deliciously satisfying to watch brilliance and cleverness play out to the benefit of our hero.
A LitLovers Litpick (Sept. '10)
In Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel's arch, elegant, richly detailed biographical novel centered on Cromwell...characters are scorchingly well rendered. And their sharp-clawed machinations are presented with nonstop verve in a book that can compress a wealth of incisiveness into a very few well-chosen words.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Henry VIII's quest to make Anne Boleyn his queen has inspired reams of historical fiction, much of it trashy and most of it trite. Yet from this seemingly shopworn material, Hilary Mantel has created a novel both fresh and finely wrought: a brilliant portrait of a society in the throes of disorienting change, anchored by a penetrating character study of Henry's formidable adviser, Thomas Cromwell. It's no wonder that her masterful book won the Man Booker Prize.... Wolf Hall is uncompromising and unsentimenta...Mantel's prose is as plain as her protagonist...but also...extraordinarily flexible, subtle and shrewd. Enfolding cogent insights into the human soul within a lucid analysis of the social, economic and personal interactions that drive political developments, Mantel has built on her previous impressive achievements to write her best novel yet.
Wendy Smith - Washington Post
Henry VIII's challenge to the church's power with his desire to divorce his queen and marry Anne Boleyn set off a tidal wave of religious, political and societal turmoil that reverberated throughout 16th-century Europe. Mantel boldly attempts to capture the sweeping internecine machinations of the times from the perspective of Thomas Cromwell, the lowborn man who became one of Henry's closest advisers. Cromwell's actual beginnings are historically ambiguous, and Mantel admirably fills in the blanks, portraying Cromwell as an oft-beaten son who fled his father's home, fought for the French, studied law and was fluent in French, Latin and Italian. Mixing fiction with fact, Mantel captures the atmosphere of the times and brings to life the important players: Henry VIII; his wife, Katherine of Aragon; the bewitching Boleyn sisters; and the difficult Thomas More, who opposes the king. Unfortunately, Mantel also includes a distracting abundance of dizzying detail and Henry's all too voluminous political defeats and triumphs, which overshadows the more winning story of Cromwell and his influence on the events that led to the creation of the Church of England.
Publishers Weekly
As Henry VIII's go-to man for his dirty work, Thomas Cromwell (1485–1540) isn't a likely candidate for a sympathetic portrait. He dirtied his hands too often. In the end, Henry dropped him just as he had Cromwell's mentor, Cardinal Wolsey, who counseled the king before him. But as Mantel (Beyond Black) reminds us, Cromwell was a man of many parts, admirable in many respects though disturbing in others. Above all, he got things done and was deeply loyal to his masters, first Wolsey and then the king. Nor was Henry always bloated and egomaniacal: well into his forties, when in good spirits, the king shone brighter than all those around him. Verdict: This is in all respects a superior work of fiction, peopled with appealing characters living through a period of tense high drama: Henry's abandonment of wife and church to marry Anne Boleyn. It should appeal to many readers, not just history buffs. And Mantel achieves this feat without violating the historical record! There will be few novels this year as good as this one.
Library Journal
Exhaustive examination of the circumstances surrounding Henry VIII's schism-inducing marriage to Anne Boleyn. Versatile British novelist Mantel (Giving Up the Ghost, 2006, etc.) forays into the saturated field of Tudor historicals to cover eight years (1527-35) of Henry's long, tumultuous reign. They're chronicled from the point of view of consummate courtier Thomas Cromwell, whose commentary on the doings of his irascible and inwardly tormented king is impressionistic, idiosyncratic and self-interested. The son of a cruel blacksmith, Cromwell fled his father's beatings to become a soldier of fortune in France and Italy, later a cloth trader and banker. He begins his political career as secretary to Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Chancellor of England. Having failed to secure the Pope's permission for Henry to divorce Queen Katherine, Wolsey falls out of favor with the monarch and is supplanted by Sir Thomas More, portrayed here as a domestic tyrant and enthusiastic torturer of Protestants. Unemployed, Cromwell is soon advising Henry himself and acting as confidante to Anne Boleyn and her sister Mary, former mistress of both Henry and King Francis I of France. When plague takes his wife and children, Cromwell creates a new family by taking in his late siblings' children and mentoring impoverished young men who remind him of his low-born, youthful self. The religious issues of the day swirl around the events at court, including the rise of Luther and the burgeoning movement to translate the Bible into vernacular languages. Anne is cast in an unsympathetic light as a petulant, calculating temptress who withholds her favors until Henry is willing to make her queen. Although Mantel's language is original, evocative and at times wittily anachronistic, this minute exegesis of a relatively brief, albeit momentous, period in English history occasionally grows tedious. The characters, including Cromwell, remain unknowable, their emotions closely guarded; this works well for court intrigues, less so for fiction. Masterfully written and researched but likely to appeal mainly to devotees of all things Tudor.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Wolf Hall:
1. What does Holbein's portrait capture about Thomas Cromwell's character that even Cromwell, himself, recognizes? What kind of man is Cromwell? In the rapacious world of Wolf Hall, do you find him a sympathetic character, or not?
2. What effect did Cromwell's upbringing have on his character and his later views about the privileged society that permeates the court? How does he feel about the aristocracy and its insistence on ancient rights.
3. What does Cromwell mean when he tells his son that "it's all very well planning what ou will do in six months, what you will do in a year, bjut it's no good at all if you don't have a plan for tomorrow"?
4. Comment on Cromwell's observation regarding an earl that "The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from his border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he never imagined." What does Cromwell mean...and in what sense is his statement a very modern view of the world?
5. Why does Cromwell dislike the Catholic clergy? What are his motives for helping Henry marry Anne Boleyn and sever ties to the Pope? What larger goals does he hope to achieve in helping ? Are they selfless...or selfish?
6. If you are familiar with Thomas More, especially through A Man for All Seasons, were you surprised by this book's treatment of him?
7. How does Cromwell perceive Anne Boleyn? How does she come across in this book? Consider his observation when she is in the presence of the king's friends: "Anne is brittle in their company, and as ruthless with their compliments as a house-wife snapping the necks of larks for the table." Also talk about the danger he sees for Anne as he thinks, "Any little girl can hold the key to the future."
8. Do you know the fate of Cromwell, some years after the book's ending? If you don't know, can you surmise? If you do, how does it color your reading of Wolf Hall?
9. Mantel is writing a sequel to Wolf Hall—The Mirror and the Light. Do you think you'll want to read it when published?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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