Secrets to Happiness
Sarah Dunn, 2009
Little, Brown & Company
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316013604
Summary
Holly Frick has just endured the worst kind of breakup: the kind where you're still in love with the person leaving you. While her wounds are still dangerously close to the surface, her happily married best friend confesses over a bottle of wine that she is this close to having an affair. And another woman comes to Holly for advice about her love life—with Holly's ex!
Holly decides that if everyone around her can take pleasure wherever they find it, so will she. As any self-respecting 30ish New York woman would do, she brings two males into her life: a flawed but endearing dog, and a good natured, much younger lover. She's soon entangled in a web of emails, chance meetings, and misguided good intentions and must forge an entirely new path to Nirvana.
From the author of The Big Love, Secrets to Happiness is a big-hearted, knife-sharp, and hilariously entertaining story about the perils of love and friendship, sex and betrayal—and a thoroughly modern take on our struggle to be happy. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 28, 1969
• Where—Phoenix, Arizona, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Pennsylvania
• Currently—lives in Garrison, New York
Sarah Dunn an American author and television writer. She is known for the ABC sitcom American Housewife (starring Katy Mixon), as well as for her novels, The Big Love (2004), Secrets to Happiness (2009), and The Arrangement (2017). Her books have been translated into 19 different languages.
Born in Phoenix, Arizona, Dunn headed east to attend the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated magna cum laude as an English major. She remained in Philadelphia after college, writing a humor column for the Philadelphia City Paper and waiting tables at TGI Fridays. A few years later, at the age of 24, Dunn published The Official Slacker Handbook, and was subsequently lured out to Hollywood to write for Murphy Brown, Spin City, Veronica’s Closet and Bunheads. With Spin City co-creator Bill Lawrence, Dunn penned Michael J. Fox's final episode of the series.
On her (now defunct) website, Dunn claimed to have moved from Los Angeles to New York five times, and from New York back to Los Angeles four times, which means she is still living in New York …or, as of this writing, in the state of New York. In 2007, Dunn married former New York Observer executive editor Peter Stevenson, and the couple lives in Garrison, New York, with their children.
Dunn is a member of the all-female television writer group "The Ladies Room," which also includes Vanessa McCarthy, Stephanie Birkitt, and Julie Bean. The group was founded in July 2016. (Adapted from various online sources.)
Book Reviews
In the end, what makes Dunn's novel such a pleasure to read is the very thing that keeps it from being a breathless page-turner: Holly's singular spirituality. She may be as baffled as everyone else about how to achieve happiness, but she also knows that happiness isn't all it's cracked up to be. In a world—fictional and non- —where doing a good thing gets you accused of having a messiah complex, and doing whatever you want is justified as following your path, Holly never stops trying to figure out where her duty lies. Underneath it all—the sex, the shopping, the city—she's an old-fashioned heroine. Also funny.
Jincy Willett - New York Times
Sarah Dunn's Secrets to Happiness zips along hilariously, fueled by pitch-perfect dialogue…[It] is an antic urban comedy, with enough neurotic characters to fill the cast of a Woody Allen movie. It's great fun.
Boston Globe
The hapless protagonist of this topical novel is such a clever observer of modern life, offering a wealth of Exacto-sharp theories that echo sentiments we may feel but would hesitate to express.... Charming and approaching Tina-Fey funny, Dunn, whose first novel was The Big Love (no connection to the HBO series), combines crackling dialogue and absurdly real-feeling scenarios to create a big-city smart, yet universally appealing, little gem.
People
Secrets to Happiness is smart, bitingly funny, laced with sitcom-sharp dialogue and bittersweet. Far from a confectionary tale, it reads more like a spiritual journey, one that follows Holly and a cast of supporting characters as they try to turn their lives around.... But since this is not a chick-lit book, a guy is not the answer here. For Holly and her supporting cast, the secret to happiness is embracing the fact that, as one character states, it's O.K. to live an ordinary life. This means accepting a life they would have otherwise shunned.
New York Observer
Dunn charts several New Yorkers' lives in this snappy novel. The spotlight most often falls on Holly Frick, a 35-year-old divorcée whose egg walls "are taking on the consistency of tissue paper as we speak." A writer whose cheeky first novel bombed, Holly now resides low enough on the TV totem pole to be cranking out after-school dreck with her gay pal Leonard. Meanwhile, her best friend, Amanda, is cheating on her husband, and Holly adopts Chester, a cute little dog with cancer whose hopeful approach to life mirrors Holly's. While Holly's love life follows a formula-familiar trajectory, Amanda's romantic flailing ensnares Holly, and Chester's destiny takes an unexpected turn that means big changes for both of them. Although cliches pop up (the supergay friend, a $1,200 purse splurge), the energetic and witty prose speeds along the narrative. It's smarter than the usual single-in-the-city fare, and funnier, too.
Publishers Weekly
Like Dunn's heroine in her debut, The Big Love, Holly Frick is brokenhearted and looking for happiness against the backdrop of hectic New York City. Holly believes in doing the right thing. Whether it's a result of her evangelical Christian upbringing or just a generally overactive conscience, the "right thing" includes adopting a dog with a brain tumor and meeting her married friend's paramour because her friend thinks they'll like each other. The assorted cast of supporting characters includes a 22-year-old lover, a skinny girl who finally agrees to date the overweight guy from her gym, and a gay man who has an unhealthy relationship with his attention deficit disorder meds. These characters circle around Holly in an exploration of six degrees of separation as she touches each of them—and they her—in their quests for happiness. Readers of Dunn's previous novel and fans of Jennifer Weiner and Jane Green will enjoy the sophisticated tone of this classic searching-for-love story. Recommended for popular fiction collections.
Anika Fajardo - Library Journal
Holly Frick is smart and sassy, loyal and dedicated. All the qualities a woman could want in a girlfriend, but not the ones that seem to resonate with men, if her roster of failed relationships is any indicator. There’s her ex-husband, Alex, with whom she’s still in love; her ex-boyfriend, Spence, a womanizing creep whom Holly scathingly immortalized in her first novel; and Lucas, a 22-year-old boy-toy who, for all his playful sexuality, ultimately makes Holly feel like a cradle-robbing matron. But then she meets Jack, an opinionated Buddhist who is having an affair with her married best friend; and even though Holly takes an immediate dislike to him, she has to admit there’s something undeniable lurking just beneath the surface. Dunn displays a rapier wit; a perfectly nuanced gift for savvy, sophisticated dialogue; and an endearing moral compass, which she uses to great advantage as she blithely navigates the fraught and fatuous world of trendy New York’s treacherous dating scene.
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 Secrets to Happiness:
1. Reviewers note the humor in Dunn's novel, a good place to begin. What do you find funny about her book—about Holly's life, her cast of friends, and her perceptions?
2. Consider the genre referred to as "Chick Lit"—a term Holly finds objectionable. Why? What, if anything, distinguishes chick lit from all "fiction by and for women"? Does Secrets to Happiness itself fall into the chick lit category? Check out the LitLovers blog post, Chick Lit—Enough Gum to Chew On? You might also take a look at this post: Venus & Mars—Do We Write Differently Too?
3. All the novel's characters, including Holly, are searching for happiness. How do they define happiness, what are their expectations, and what eventually do they come to realize? For Holly what in particular is learned—and how does Chester help her along her path?
4. More than most of her friends, Holly seems grounded in morality—trying to doing what is right. Where does her moral compass come from—and how is it tested by her friends and her life in general? In life, just how difficult is it for any of us to stay on the straight-and-narrow ... (or is it "straightened arrow")?
5. What's with Jack? Or any of the males in this novel...Alex, Spence, Lucas?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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The Feast of the Goat
Mario Vargas Llosa, 2000
Picador : Macmillan
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312420277
Summary
Haunted all her life by feelings of terror and emptiness, forty-nine-year-old Urania Cabral returns to her native Dominican Republic—and finds herself reliving the events of l961, when the capital was still called Trujillo City and one old man terrorized a nation of three million.
Rafael Trujillo, the depraved ailing dictator whom Dominicans call the Goat, controls his inner circle with a combination of violence and blackmail. In Trujillo's gaudy palace, treachery and cowardice have become a way of life. But Trujillo's grasp is slipping. There is a conspiracy against him, and a Machiavellian revolution already underway that will have bloody consequences of its own.
In this "masterpiece of Latin American and world literature, and one of the finest political novels ever written" (Bookforum), Mario Vargas Llosa recounts the end of a regime and the birth of a terrible democracy, giving voice to the historical Trujillo and the victims, both innocent and complicit, drawn into his deadly orbit. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 28, 1936
• Where—Arequipa, Arequip, Peru
• Education—National University of San Marcos
• Awards—Nobel Prize; too many more to list
• Currently—lives in London, UK
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa, 1st Marquis of Vargas Llosa (last name Llosa is pronounced: yoh-sa) is a Peruvian-Spanish writer, politician, journalist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate.
Vargas Llosa is one of Latin America's most significant novelists and essayists, and one of the leading authors of his generation. Some critics consider him to have had a larger international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom. He was awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual's resistance, revolt, and defeat".
Vargas Llosa rose to fame in the 1960s with novels such as The Time of the Hero (La ciudad y los perros, literally The City and the Dogs, 1963/1966), The Green House (La casa verde, 1965/1968), and the monumental Conversation in the Cathedral (Conversación en la catedral, 1969/1975). He writes prolifically across an array of literary genres, including literary criticism and journalism. His novels include comedies, murder mysteries, historical novels, and political thrillers. Several, such as Captain Pantoja and the Special Service (1973/1978) and Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977/1982), have been adapted as feature films.
Many of Vargas Llosa's works are influenced by the writer's perception of Peruvian society and his own experiences as a native Peruvian. Increasingly, however, he has expanded his range, and tackled themes that arise from other parts of the world. Another change over the course of his career has been a shift from a style and approach associated with literary modernism, to a sometimes playful postmodernism.
Like many Latin American authors, Vargas Llosa has been politically active throughout his career; over the course of his life, he has gradually moved from the political left towards the right. While he initially supported the Cuban revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, Vargas Llosa later became disenchanted. He ran for the Peruvian presidency in 1990 with the center-right Frente Democratico (FREDEMO) coalition, advocating neoliberal reforms. He has subsequently supported moderate conservative candidates. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
A fierce, edgy and enthralling book...Mr. Vargas Llosa has pushed the boundaries of the traditional historical novel, and in doing so has written a book of harrowing power and lasting resonance.
New York Times
The book brings readers to the precipice of terror and lets us look into the abyss of cruelty as it poses and answers the question: Why do people not oppose dictators?... He has by his body of work already secured a place as one of the monumental writers of our time.
Boston Globe
[Vargas Llosa] is one of our greatest and most influential novelists. His new novel confirms his importance. In the world of fiction his continued exploration of the often-perilous intersection of politics and life has enriched 20th century literature... In The Feast of the Goat, Vargas Llosa paints a portrait that is darkly comic, poignant, admirable and horrifying all at once.
Madison Smartt Bell - Los Angeles Times
This fictional biography crosscuts between Trujillo's ascension and his final days in power, aspiring to—and often achieving—a kind of Shakespearean mix of high tragedy and low comedy, as Trujillo's excesses become ever more grotesque and fantastical. Only the addition of Urania Cabral, an attorney in New York who finally returns home to make peace with her father, a former member of Trujillo's inner circle, remains unconvincing.
The New Yorker
"This wasn't an enemy he could defeat like the hundreds, the thousands he had confronted and conquered over the years, buying them, intimidating them, killing them." So thinks Rafael Trujillo, "the Goat," dictator of the Dominican Republic, on the morning of May 30, 1961 a day that will end in his assassination. The "enemy" is old age at 70, Trujillo, who has always prided himself on his grooming and discipline, is shaken by bouts of incontinence and impotence. Vargas Llosa divides his narrative between three different story lines. The first concerns Urania Cabral, the daughter of one of Trujillo's closest associates, Agustin Cabral. She is 14 at the time of the Trujillo assassination and, as we gradually discover, was betrayed by her father to Trujillo. Since then, she has lived in the U.S. At 49, she impulsively returns on a visit and slowly reveals the root of her alienation. Urania's character is a little too pat, however. Vargas Llosa's triumph is Trujillo's story. We follow the sly, vile despot, with his petty rages, his lust, his dealings with his avaricious family, through his last day, with mingled feelings of repulsion and awe. Like Stalin, Trujillo ruled by turning his rage without warning against his subordinates. Finally, Vargas Llosa crosscuts Urania's story and Trujillo's with that of Trujillo's assassins; first, as they wait to ambush him, and then as they are tracked down, captured and tortured to death, with almost medieval ferocity, by Trujillo's son, Ramfis. Gathering power as it rolls along, this massive, swift-moving fictional take on a grim period in Dominican history shows that Vargas Llosa is still one of the world's premier political novelists. Vargas Llosa is on solid ground with The Day of the Goat, mining a rich vein.
Publishers Weekly
Vargas Llosa's fictional portrait of ruthless Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo focuses on the end of the old "goat's" life. Trujillo, who well understood that his power depended upon the United States, is said to have sought his protection and promotion by paying Congressmen and other U.S. "leeches" the equivalent of the annual military aid his nation received from Washington. Although the United States eventually got fed up with his excesses, its fear of a second Communist regime in the Caribbean kept him in power. So entirely ruthless was Trujillo that he even dispatched his physician off the docks of Santo Domingo, at the time named Ciudad Trujillo, when he was told that his prostate was cancerous. Vargas Llosa relates Trujillo's story from the perspective of Urania Cabral, a successful New York lawyer who has spent a lifetime in exile but returns to her homeland when the tyrant is finally murdered. Urania hopes to rid herself of the demons that have possessed her since 1961, when as a teenager she was battered and humiliated by the impotent and vindictive old dictator. Vargas Llosa, one of Latin America's master storytellers, has retold this nightmare with evenhanded eloquence and exuberant detail. Recommended for all but squeamish readers. —Jack Shreve, Allegany Coll. of Maryland, Cumberland
Library Journal
(Starred review.) True to the maxim that Latin American fiction reflects Latin Americans' preoccupation with history and politics, the latest novel by the Peruvian master is, like Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a powerfully drawn anatomy of tyranny and tyrannicide.... [A]n irresistible masterpiece. —Brad Hooper
Booklist
The Peruvian master (The Notebooks of Don Rigoberto, 1998, etc.) now turns to the bloody reign (1930-61) of the Dominican Republic's dictatorial president Rafael Trujillo-and its aftermath. The story consists of three parallel narratives. The first employs the viewpoint, and especially the memory, of Urania Cabral, a 49-year-old Manhattan attorney whose return to the homeland from which she had been exiled is juxtaposed against the story of her father, a callow politician who had curried favor by "giving" his then-adolescent daughter to the notoriously libidinous Trujillo. A second plot details the machinations of several conspirators, whose genuine love for their beleaguered country contrasts strongly with the personal enmity they bear toward their enemy-and eventual victim. Through a dexterous manipulation of rhetorical devices (notably, direct addresses to its characters by both an omniscient narrator and themselves) and shifting viewpoints (even within lengthy flashbacks), Vargas Llosa evokes a multiplicity of responses to the aforementioned characters-and especially to "the goat" (Trujillo), whose own thoughts and memories comprise the third-and strongest-strand. This is a Nixon-like egotist who puts the best possible face on his worst excesses: the priapic appropriation of dozens of virgins (a necessary exercise of his manly vigor, even though he has become incontinent); the ruthlessness with which political enemies are tortured and murdered (viewed as a moral cleansing vital to the health of the state); even the genocidal slaughter of Haitian immigrants working in the Republic's canefields (justified as a defense of his nation's racial and ethnic purity). Oddly enough, this monster of various appetites takes on a flawed, pathetic humanity. Vargas Llosa's exhaustively detailed portrayals of both the carnage he wreaks and his own sins, self-delusions, fears, and fantasies rival, perhaps even surpass, that of the unnamed dictator in Garcia Marquez's great novel The Autumn of the Patriarch. A landmark in Latin American fiction.
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 The Feast of the Goat:
1. By the end of the book, we learn why Urania Cabral left the Dominican Republic at the age of 14 (did you guess early on?). Yet the question remains: why does she return?
2. Talk about Trujillo's methods of maintaining loyalty from his subordinates. Why have so many remained loyal? Why would they agree to subject their wives and daughters to his carnality?
3. Eventually seven of Trujillo's supporters are driven to oppose him. What is it that motivates the assassins to turn against their leader?
4. Antonio de la Maza, one member of the inner circle who turns assassin, believes that the dictator had in effect already killed him. What does he mean by that—and what has Trujillo taken from him.
5. Follow-up to Question 4: Varga Llosa exposes the fallout that the corruption of power has on the lives of ordinary people. Talk about the regime's many crimes—and the toll those crimes took on familial relationships, business hopes and private dreams.
6. Vargas Lloso presents an intimate portrait of Trujillo. How is the dictator depicted—what kind of man does the author show him to be? What does he value, or crave, most? What do you consider his most hideous offense?
7. Which of the three story lines contained in the book—Urania Cabral's, the assassins', or Trujillo's—do you find most engaging?
8. Talk about some of the other members of the regime, primarily Trujillo's son Ramfis, and the president Joaquin Balaguer.
9. What miscalculations were made after the assassination that enabled Balaguer to take control of the government? Talk about the aftermath of the assassination.
10. After the assassination, one character laments Trujillo's death, believing that he gave the country prosperity and security. Is there validity to that observation? Can dictatorships, even brutal ones, be preferable to chaos, anarchy, and poverty?
11. What role did the Catholic Church play in the Dominican Republic under the Trujillo regime?
12. Is this book's depiction of torture overly graphic? Why might Vargas Llosa have incorporated such intimate details of brutality?
13. Machismo is on display in this novel. What role does it play in public and private life? How does it perpetuate the power structure?
14. Vargas Llosa hopes that his novel will serve as a spur to the memory so that the atrocities of Trujillo's rule will never be forgotten. The act of remembering plays a pivotal role in the book's plot. How are various characters driven by their memories...or in Augustin Cabral's case by his lack of memory? How, for instance, is Urania affected by her memory?
15. What do you see as the outcome for Urania? Will she find inner peace and move on, or will her memory keep her psychic wounds from ever healing?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Year We Left Home
Jean Thompson, 2011
Simon & Schuster
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781439175880
Summary
Named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a People magazine “Pick of the Week,” and an Indie Next and Midwest Connections selection, The Year We Left Home is the career-defining novel that Jean Thompson’s admirers have been waiting for: a sweeping and emotionally powerful story of a single American family during the tumultuous final decades of the twentieth century.
Stretching from the early 1970s in the Iowa farmlands to suburban Chicago and across the map of contemporary America, The Year We Left Home follows the Erickson siblings as they confront prosperity and heartbreak, setbacks and triumphs, and seek their place in a country whose only constant seems to be breathtaking change.
Ambitious and richly told, this is a vivid and moving meditation on our continual pursuit of happiness and an incisive exploration of the national character. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—
• Where—
• Education—
• Awards—
• Currently—lives in
Jean Thompson is the author of The Year We Left Home (2011), the acclaimed short fiction collections Do Not Deny Me (2009) and Throw Like a Girl (2007) as well as the novel City Boy; the short story collection Who Do You Love, a 1999 National Book Award finalist for fiction; and the novel Wide Blue Yonder, a New York Times Notable Book and Chicago Tribune Best Fiction selection for 2002.
Her short fiction has been published in many magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, and been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize. Jean's work has been praised by Elle Magazine as "bracing and wildly intelligent writing that explores the nature of love in all its hidden and manifest dimensions."
Jean's other books include the short story collections The Gasoline Wars and Little Face, and the novels My Wisdom and The Woman Driver.
Jean has been the recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, among other accolades, and taught creative writing at the University of Illinois—Champaign/ Urbana, Reed College, Northwestern University, and many other colleges and universities. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
It's [the] sense of the familiar revivified—of knowing what's coming yet being emotionally outflanked by it anyway—that best characterizes The Year We Left Home, an extraordinarily warmhearted novel whose impressive humanity and lightness of touch refresh some narrative elements so abundantly precedented that most fiction writers would have been afraid to go near them…with its episodic, home-centered structure, its stealthy gallop through time and its distribution of point-of-view duties among the increasingly estranged members of a nuclear family, [the novel] invites, and withstands, comparisons to Evan S. Connell's novels Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, two (or really one) of the great American fictions of the last century.
Jonathan Dee - New York Times Book Review
Startlingly good.... You may forget that the characters don’t really exist, that the Iowa farm family so expertly drawn by the author never drew breath themselves, that most of the events that transpire across the book’s three-decade span aren’t part of the historical record.
Julia Keller - Chicago Tribune
[A] rich, detailed, resonant, emotionally spot-on novel.... Thompson has a light, exquisite touch. The Year We Left Home feels weightless as a result. By the end of the novel, the reader knows more about the Ericksons than even the Ericksons. The effect is enormously satisfying, allowing the reader not only to connect the dots but to fill in the blanks the author shrewdly leaves wide open.
Bill Eichenberger - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Lovely.... Told with extraordinary grace.... The clan at the center of Jean Thompson’s spare, startlingly resonant new novel remain inextricably linked to the place that made them, even as they reach for lives richer in both geography and purpose. But even minor characters receive the full attention of the author’s prodigious talents; each one is drawn so vividly that they never feel less than utterly real.
Leah Greenblatt - Entertainment Weekly
Bookended by two wars—Vietnam and Iraq—Thompson's third novel (after the collection Do Not Deny Me) sketches the travails of an Iowa family over three decades. Matriarch Audrey neatly sums up the episodic novel's grand theme: "she'd been born into one world, hopeful and normal, and now she lived in another, full of sadness and failure." The novel opens as oldest daughter Anita, the beauty of the family, celebrates her marriage. Over the years, however, Anita confronts dissatisfaction with herself and disillusionment with her pompous husband. Her younger brother, Ryan, a high school senior as the novel opens, longs to escape his rural roots, dating a hippie poet and majoring in political science before realizing that the farmers who came before him might hold more relevance than he'd imagined. Cousin Chip comes back from Vietnam troubled and aimless, his wanderings from Seattle to Reno, Nev., to Veracruz, Mexico, offering a parallel to the spiritual restlessness all the other characters feel. Told from the point of view of more than a half-dozen characters, the vignettes that make up the narrative are generally powerful in isolation, but as a whole fail to develop into anything more than a series of snapshots of a family touched by time and tragedy.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Dazzling.... Unforgettable.... A masterful wide-angle portrait of an Iowa family over three decades.... Thompson’s ability to put these characters empathically on the page, in their special setting, over an extended period of years, with just the right dose of dark humor, rivals Richard Russo’s.... The novel is a powerful reflection on middle American life—on the changes wrought by the passing years and the values that endure.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Early on in the novel, Ryan muses "what really counted was the life you made for yourself, and the person you decided to be." (p. 11) Does this prove to be true? How does this play out in his life, and in the lives of his family members? How does this concept change for him?
2. "Something in him always stood apart, and he was not who people assumed was." (p. 27) How is this true for Ryan throughout the novel? How do the characters define themselves, and each other?
3. Which narrator did you like best: Anita, Ryan, Chip, Torrie, Audrey, Matthew, or Blake? Why do you think Thompson chose to have Ryan narrate the majority of the sections? Was there someone you wanted to hear more from?
4. Anita feels that she and her mother are always on the verge of a conversation: "Is this what it means to be a wife, a mother, a woman? Is it what you expected? Should I have gone about it differently?" (p. 105) Why don't they ever actually have that conversation? How might things be different for them, and other women in the novel, if they discussed such things with each other?
5. Why do you think Megan ruins Ryan's career with her essay? Is she crazy, or clever? Hurt, or just trying to stand out?
6. Why does Anita go to the Goodells' auction and give her relatives five thousand dollars? Does she feel responsible because her husband is a banker? Talk about Anita's concept of family and loyalty.
7. Martha's words at Anita's wedding startle Ryan: "You never can tell, looking at it from the outside. How miserable people can be in a marriage." (p. 14) How are her words prophetic? Do you think she was referring to her own marriage, which seemed so happy?
8. Discuss the many different ideas of marriage in the novel. Why does Anita marry Jeff (p. 183), and why does she stay with him? Why does Ryan get married (p. 221), and then have affairs that lead to divorce? What about Blake, whose wife everyone seems to look down on?
9. Ryan thinks to himself, "You decided that your life would go in a certain direction, and maybe it did. Or maybe you were kidding yourself, and the world was mostly a matter of being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time." (p. 221) Do you agree? How much of Ryan's life is shaped by his choices, and how much does he simply allow to happen to him?
10. The author states: "Everybody in America is one of two things, either in or out." (p. 288) How does this theme of insider and outsider play throughout the novel?
11. Why does Anita bring in Rhonda to live with her family? How is it true that sometimes a family needs an orphan?
12. For a while, Anita seems to be drifting through the duties of a wife and mother. What spurs her to take classes to become a realtor and get involved with Alcohol Anonymous? Did Jeff's descent into alcoholism empower her to take charge of her life, or do you think she would have done so regardless?
13. Throughout the novel, Chip is consistently an outsider who never seems to have much going for him. However, he often provides poignant insights to Ryan and others, and doesn't seem to experience the lack of fulfillment that plagues many other characters. Why do you think this is?
14. Why do you think Ryan and Chip remain close throughout the years? Is Ryan more like Chip than he might want to admit? How so?
15. Why does Ryan buy the Peerson house?
16. Referring to the Peersons, Blake remarks, "They didn't think in terms of happy." (p. 409) Do you agree that the older generations were more content with what they had, and less concerned with searching for happiness elsewhere? Discuss the characters' conceptions of happiness, and whether or not they are able to find it. What constitutes true happiness?
17. Discuss the title of the novel. Why do you think Thompson chose this title? How does it capture the spirit of the novel?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Memoirs of a Geisha
Arthur Golden, 1997
Knopf Doubleday
503 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400096893
Summary
In this literary tour de force, novelist Arthur Golden enters a remote and shimmeringly exotic world.
For the protagonist of this peerlessly observant first novel is Sayuri, one of Japan's most celebrated geisha, a woman who is both performer and courtesan, slave and goddess. We follow Sayuri from her childhood in an impoverished fishing village, where in 1929, she is sold to a representative of a geisha house, who is drawn by the child's unusual blue-grey eyes. From there she is taken to Gion, the pleasure district of Kyoto. She is nine years old.
In the years that follow, as she works to pay back the price of her purchase, Sayuri will be schooled in music and dance, learn to apply the geisha's elaborate makeup, wear elaborate kimono, and care for a coiffure so fragile that it requires a special pillow. She will also acquire a magnanimous tutor and a venomous rival. Surviving the intrigues of her trade and the upheavals of war, the resourceful Sayuri is a romantic heroine on the order of Jane Eyre and Scarlett O'Hara. And Memoirs of a Geisha is a triumphant work—suspenseful, and utterly persuasive. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1956
• Where—Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard; M.A., Columbia University; M.A.,
Boston College
• Currently—lives in Brookline, Massachusetts
A member of the Ochs-Sulzberger family (owners of the New York Times), Golden was educated at the Baylor School (then a boys-only school for day and boarding students) in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He attended Harvard College and received a degree in art history, specializing in Japanese art. In 1980, he earned an M.A. in Japanese history at Columbia University, and also learned Mandarin Chinese. After a summer at Beijing University, he worked in Tokyo. When he returned to the United States, he earned an M.A. in English at Boston University. He currently lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.
After its release in 1997, Memoirs of a Geisha spent two years on The New York Times bestseller list. It has sold more than four million copies in English and has been translated into thirty-two languages around the world.
The novel Memoirs of a Geisha was written after interviewing a number of geisha, including Mineko Iwasaki, for background information about the world of the geisha, although Golden fictionalized key aspects of Geiko life including the notion that they participated in ritualized prostitution.
After the Japanese edition of Memoirs of a Geisha was published, Arthur Golden was sued for breach of contract and defamation of character by Iwasaki. The plaintiff claimed that Golden had agreed to protect her anonymity, if she told him about her life as a geisha due to the traditional code of silence about their clients. The case was settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.
In 2005, Memoirs of a Geisha was made into a feature film starring Ziyi Zhang and Ken Watanabe, and directed by Rob Marshall, garnering three Academy Awards. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Part historical novel, part fairy tale, part Dickensian romance, Memoirs of a Geisha is not only a richly sympathetic portrait of a woman, but a finely observed picture of an anomalous and largely vanished world.... An impressive and unusual debut.
New York Times
Golden's storytelling is rich and slow-paced. Like Austen, he lavishes attention on the minute details that regulate and define social distinctions. In the raising of a teacup or an eyebrow there are worlds of implication. The prose style is simple and strangely satisfying, perfectly attuned to its time and place. Golden manages to find the simile for every occasion. "That startling month in which I first came upon the Chairman again...made me feel like a pet cricket that has at last escaped its wicker cage. For the first time in ages I could go to bed at night believing that I might not always draw as little notice in Gion as a drop of tea spilled onto the mats." Golden deftly makes use of a culture that deflects emotion and makes direct communication taboo to create a world of intrigue and romance. Depression and war remain in the background while Sayuri imbibes wisdom from her mentor, Mameha, battles her rival, Hatsumomo, and yearns for the attentions of the Chairman. Memoirs of a Geisha is an intelligent entertainment.
Dan Cryer - Salon
Arthur Golden's brilliant debut novel, Memoirs of a Geisha, is a reminder of just how silly the exhortation "write what you know!" can be. Clearly Golden, a 40-something American male, has never lived anything remotely similar to the experiences of a geisha coming of age in the 1930s, the glory days of Kyoto's Gion pleasure district. Yet it is precisely this vanished world that he re-creates with subtlety, sensuality, and supreme authority, bringing to life characters so complete and idiosyncratic—so fully sprung from the eras he has evoked—that his novel ultimately overwhelms us, as seductive and beguiling as the geisha of its title.... Like a gorgeously layered kimono, Memoirs gradually unfolds to reveal the courage, love, daring, and hope of an intensely human—and, it turns out, surprisingly modern—woman. Sayuri's voice, alternately poetic and mischievous, lends the narrative an immediacy that provides a beguiling counterpoint to the exquisitely detailed rituals—such as the lacquered mask Sayuri learns to apply so expertly—that make up so much of geisha life in prewar Gion. Like Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World, Memoirs of a Geisha revives a long-vanished world and makes us experience, however briefly, its fragile, mothlike, and indelible beauty.
Sarah Midori Zimmerman (Writer-editor, New York)
"I wasn't born and raised to be a Kyoto geisha.... I'm a fisherman's daughter from a little town called Yoroido on the Sea of Japan." How nine-year-old Chiyo, sold with her sister into slavery by their father after their mother's death, becomes Sayuri, the beautiful geisha accomplished in the art of entertaining men, is the focus of this fascinating first novel. Narrating her life story from her elegant suite in the Waldorf Astoria, Sayuri tells of her traumatic arrival at the Nitta okiya (a geisha house), where she endures harsh treatment from Granny and Mother, the greedy owners, and from Hatsumomo, the sadistically cruel head geisha. But Sayuri's chance meeting with the Chairman, who shows her kindness, makes her determined to become a geisha. Under the tutelage of the renowned Mameha, she becomes a leading geisha of the 1930s and 1940s. After the book's compelling first half, the second half is a bit flat and overlong. Still, Golden, with degrees in Japanese art and history, has brilliantly revealed the culture and traditions of an exotic world, closed to most Westerners.
Wilda Williams - Library Journal
Cherry-blossom delicate, with images as carefully sculpted as bonsai, this tale of the life of a renowned geisha, one of the last flowers of a kind all but eliminated by WW II, marks an auspicious, unusual debut. Japan is already changing, becoming industrialized and imperialistic, when in 1929 young Chiyo's fisherman father sells her to a house in Kyoto's famous Gion district. The girl's gray-eyed beauty is startling even in childhood, so much so that her training is impeded by the jealousy of her house's primary geisha, the popular, petty Hatsumomo. Caught trying to run away, Chiyo loses her trainee status until taken under the wing of Mameha, a bitter rival of Hatsumomo.
Chiyo flourishes with Mameha as her guide, soon receiving her geisha name, Sayuri, and having her mentor skillfully arrange the two main events vital to a geisha's success: the sale of Sayuri's virginity (for a record price), and the finding of a sugar-daddy to pay her way. Seeing the implications of Japan's militarism, Mameha pairs Sayuri with the general in charge of army provisions, so that as WW II drags on she and her house have things no one else in Gion can obtain. After the war, with her general dead and others vying for her attention, Sayuri pines anew for the only man she ever loved—an electrical-corporation chairman whose kindness to a crying Chiyo years before altered the course of her future.
Though incomparable in its view of a geisha's life behind the scenes, the story loses immediacy as it goes along. When modern times eclipse Gion's sheltered world, the latter part of Sayuri's life—compared to the incandescent clarity of its first decades—seems increasingly flat.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Many people in the West think of geisha simply as prostitutes. After reading Memoirs of a Geisha, do you see the geisha of Gion as prostitutes? What are the similarities, and what are the differences? What is the difference between being a prostitute and being a "kept woman, " as Sayuri puts it [p. 291]?
2. "The afternoon when I met Mr. Tanaka Ichiro, " says Sayuri, "really was the best and the worst of my life" [p. 7]. Is Mr. Tanaka purely motivated by the money he will make from selling Chiyo to Mrs. Nitta, or is he also thinking of Chiyo's future? Is he, as he implies in his letter, her friend?
3. In his letter to Chiyo, Mr. Tanaka says "The training of a geisha is an arduous path. However, this humble person is filled with admiration for those who are able to recast their suffering and become great artists" [p. 103]. The word "geisha" in fact derives from the Japanese word for art. In what does the geisha's art consist? How many different types of art does she practice?
4. Does Sayuri have a better life as a geisha than one assumes she would have had in her village? How does one define a "better" life? Pumpkin, when offered the opportunity to run away, declines [p. 53]; she feels she will be safer in Gion. Is her decision wise?
5. How does Sayuri's status at the Nitta okiya resemble, or differ from, that of a slave? Is she in fact a slave?
6. Are Mother and Granny cruel by nature, or has the relentless life of Gion made them what they are? If so, why is Auntie somewhat more human? Does Auntie feel real affection for Sayuri and Pumpkin, or does she see them simply aschattel?
7. "We must use whatever methods we can to understand the movement of the universe around us and time our actions so that we are not fighting the currents, but moving with them" [p. 127]. How does this attitude differ from the Western notion of seizing control of one's destiny? Which is the more valid? What are Sayuri's feelings and beliefs about "free will"?
8. Do you see Sayuri as victimized by Nobu's attentions, or do you feel pity for Nobu in his hopeless passion for Sayuri? Do you feel that, in finally showing her physical scorn for Nobu, Sayuri betrayed a friend, or that real friendship is impossible between a man and a woman of their respective stations?
9. How do Japanese ideas about eroticism and sexuality differ from Western ones? Does the Japanese ideal of femininity differ from ours? Which parts of the female body are fetishized in Japan, which in the West? The geisha's ritual of preparing herself for the teahouse is a very elaborate affair; how essentially does it differ from a Western women's preparation for a date?
10. Does the way in which the Kyoto men view geisha differ from the way they might view other women, women whom they might marry? What are the differences? How, in turn, do geisha view men? Is the geisha's view of men significantly different from that of ordinary women?
11. Do you find that the relationship between a geisha and her danna is very different from that between a Western man and his mistress? What has led Sayuri to think that "a geisha who expects understanding from her danna is like a mouse expecting sympathy from a snake" [p. 394]?
12. As the older Sayuri narrates her story, it almost seems as though she presents Chiyo and Sayuri as two different people. In what ways are Chiyo and Sayuri different? In what ways are they recognizably the same person?
13. Pumpkin believes that Sayuri betrayed her when she, rather than Pumpkin, was adopted by the Nitta okiya. Do you believe that Sayuri was entirely blameless in this incident? Might she have helped to make Pumpkin's life easier while they were in the okiya together? Or has Pumpkin's character simply been corrupted by her years with Hatsumomo and the entire cruel system that has exploited her?
14. Sayuri senses that she shares an en, a lifelong karmic bond, with Nobu [p. 295]. How might a Western woman express this same idea?
15. During Sayuri's life, Japan goes through a series of traumas and unprecedented cultural change: the Great Depression, the War, the American Occupation. How do the inhabitants of Gion view political events in the outside world? How much effect do such events have upon their lives? How aware are they of mainstream Japanese culture and life?
16. What personal qualities do Sayuri and Mameha have that make them able to survive and even prosper in spite of the many cruelties they have suffered? Why is Hatsumomo, for example, ultimately unable to survive in Gion?
17. Is Sayuri the victim of a cruel and repressive system, a woman who can only survive by submitting to men? Or is she a tough, resourceful person who has not only survived but built a good life for herself with independence and even a certain amount of power?
18. Why might Golden have chosen to begin his narrative with a "Translator's Note"? What does this device accomplish for him?
19. In Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden has done a very daring thing: he, an American man, has written in the voice of a Japanese woman. How successfully does he disguise his own voice? While reading the novel, did you feel that you were hearing the genuine voice of a woman?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Serena
Ron Rash, 2008
HarperCollins
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061470844
Summary
The year is 1929, and newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton travel from Boston to the North Carolina mountains where they plan to create a timber empire.
Although George has already lived in the camp long enough to father an illegitimate child, Serena is new to the mountains — but she soon shows herself to be the equal of any man, overseeing crews, hunting rattlesnakes, even saving her husband's life in the wilderness. Together this lord and lady of the woodlands ruthlessly kill or vanquish all who fall out of favor.
Yet when Serena learns that she will never bear a child, she sets out to murder the son George fathered without her. Mother and child begin a struggle for their lives, and when Serena suspects George is protecting his illegitimate family, the Pembertons' intense, passionate marriage starts to unravel as the story moves toward its shocking reckoning.
Rash's masterful balance of violence and beauty yields a riveting novel that, at its core, tells of love both honored and betrayed. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1953
• Where—Chester Springs, South Carolina, USA
• Reared—Boiling Springs, North Carolina, USA
• Education— B.A., Gardner-Webb College; M.A., Clemson
University
• Awards—O'Henry Prize; National Endowment for the Arts
Poetry Fellowship; Sherwood Anderson Prize
• Currently—lives in North Carolina
Ron Rash is the author of three prize-winning novels — One Foot in Eden, Saints at the River, and The World Made Straight — thee collections of poems and two collections of stories. A recipient of the O. Henry Prize, he holds the John Parris Chair in Appalachian Studies at Western Carolina University. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
With bone-chilling aplomb, linguistic grace and the piercing fatalism of an Appalachian ballad, Mr. Rash lets the Pembertons' new union generate ripple after ripple of astonishment…Among this novel's many wonders are Mr. Rash's fine ear for idiomatic, laconic talk and the startling contrast he creates between Serena and her new neighbors.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Serena, the Lady Macbeth of Ron Rash's stirring new novel, wouldn't fret about getting out the damned spot. She wouldn't even wash her hands; she'd just lick it off. I couldn't take my eyes off this villainess.... In addition to writing short stories, Rash is also a fine poet, and he brings a poet's concision and elliptical tendencies to this novel. As a result, these scenes and conversations constantly suggest more than they show, a technique that renders them alluring, sometimes erotic, often frightening. And his restraint is a necessity to keep this gothic tale from slipping into campiness. That's a real danger when you've got a beautiful murderess striding around the forest with a pet eagle on her wrist and a one-armed goon at her side. Frankly, it's sometimes difficult to catch the author's tone in these passages; the book seems deadly serious, but there are moments...when one suspects that Rash is rolling his eyes, too. But this is the challenge of the gothic novel: managing the accretion of excesses in a way that doesn't break the spell. The blind hag who delivers prophesies to the lumbermen, the insane preacher who warns of impending doom, even the portentous eclipse of the moon—all these details rise up just right.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
A powerful tale, well told, Serena is enriched by Rash’s artful use of language. With just the right turn of phrase, dead-on details and subtle use of symbol, he delivers a story that will remain with readers long after the final page.
People
Masterfully written.... The book is consistently heartbreaking in its portrayal of what humans are capable of.... Sprawling [and] engrossing.
Charlotte Observer
Depression-era lumber baron George Pemberton and his callous new wife, Serena, are venality incarnate in Rash's gothic fourth novel (after The World Made Straight), set, like the other three, in Appalachia. George—who coolly kills the furious father of Rachel Harmon, the teenage girl pregnant with George's bastard son-is an imperious entrepreneur laying waste to North Carolina timberland without regard for the well-being of his workers. His evil pales beside that of Serena, however. Rash's depictions of lumber camp camaraderie (despite deadly working conditions) are a welcome respite from Serena's unrelenting thirst for blood and wealth; a subplot about government efforts to buy back swaths of privately owned land to establish national parks injects real history into this implacably grim tale of greed and corruption gone wild—and of eventual, well-deserved revenge.
Publishers Weekly
This is a violent story about ambition, privilege, and ruthlessness played out in an Appalachian timber camp in North Carolina during the Depression. The novel opens with the camp's wealthy owner, George Pemberton, returning from Boston with his new bride, Serena. He is met on a train platform by his business partners—and by camp kitchen worker Rachel, who is carrying his child (and meeting the train with her angry father). When George leaves the platform, Rachel's father is dead, and Rachel herself has been spurned and humiliated. The novel is richly detailed, and many of the characters are skillfully drawn by Rash (The World Made Straight). Unfortunately, though, the Pembertons—who are rapacious and monstrously self-absorbed—often seem one-dimensional and implausible. Serena is particularly hard to believe at times. Still, parts of the novel are superb, particularly the final section when Serena turns violently against Rachel and her son. The Pembertons create a wasteland in these beautiful mountains, and Rash also renders that loss powerfully. Though flawed, this manages to be an engaging read. Recommended for libraries with large fiction collections
Patriack Sullivan - Library Journal
The latest from Rash (The World Made Straight, 2006, etc.) is a fine melodrama about a wealthy homicidal couple, latter-day Macbeths, in Depression-era Appalachia. The book is an artful expansion of "Pemberton's Bride," the brilliant standout in Rash's story collection Chemistry (2007). The opening is unforgettable. Pemberton and his bride Serena return from Boston to Waynesville, in the North Carolina mountains. Waiting at the train station is Abe Harmon and his pregnant daughter Rachel. Harmon has vowed to kill her seducer Pemberton, but the latter knifes the drunk old man to death as Serena watches approvingly. Pemberton has no fear of the consequences, for he owns the lumber company on which Waynesville depends and has the local officials on his payroll, all except his nemesis, sheriff McDowell. He has a worthy mate in Serena, daughter of a Colorado lumber baron; her entire family died in the 1918 influenza epidemic. No sentimentalist, she burnt down the family home before moving East. Eventually she too will bloody her hands, killing an innocent and strengthening her bond with Pemberton. The mercilessly exploited workers soon realize she is Pemberton's full partner; his former partner is killed in a hunting "accident." When she saves the life of a foreman, Galloway (felling trees is dangerous work), he becomes her lifelong slave, and hit man; the incompetent doctor who causes Serena to miscarry is just one of Galloway's victims. But the novel is not just a trail of blood. Rash also focuses on the quiet dignity of Rachel (now a single parent raising Jacob, Pemberton's son) and shows an unforced reverence for nature, hideously despoiled by Pemberton's relentless clear-cutting. The lumber king's one soft spot is his feeling for Jacob, but that proves too much for Serena. The last hundred pages are thrilling, as mother and son take flight; McDowell supports them heroically; and Pemberton...well, see for yourself. Should be a breakthrough for this masterful storyteller.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Explore the novel's use of historical figures and events—Horace Kephart, George Vanderbilt, and the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. How do these characters contribute to the historical texture of the novel? What are the values attributed to these characters? What does the book have to say about the importance of land preservation versus the need for economic interests?
2. How would you describe Serena's philosophy of life? What does she value most? What importance does she place on honesty? In your opinion, did she ever truly love Pemberton? If so, what do her actions in the end say about what she values most in life?
3. The moon, prominent in both mythology and folklore, has traditionally embodied femininity, romantic love, insanity, and life cycles. Serena is associated with the moon throughout the novel, and her name evokes Selena, a goddess of the moon. How does this association deepen the characterization of Serena? Is the author's pairing of the moon with Serena in any way ironic?
4. Although Serena and Rachel have decidedly different personalities, can you see any similarities between them? How do the juxtaposed scenes at the end of Book One—Serena taming the eagle and Rachel carrying Jacob to the doctor—create parallels between these women? How do Rachel's and Serena's childhoods shape their adult personalities?
5. Although many of the novel's events are dark and violent, there are comic moments as well, as in McIntyre's prophecies of snakes falling from the sky. What are some other comic scenes? What purpose do these episodes have in the larger pattern of the novel?
6. There is a hunting episode near the novel's beginning and one at the conclusion. Compare and contrast the characters and actions in these scenes. What foreshadowing can you see in the first hunting scene? How do these connections help you understand the second hunting episode more fully?
7. From the opening scene when he arrives in Waynesville and dispatches Harmon, Pemberton is in control of nearly everyone and everything he surveys. Considering his lifelong position of authority and control through economic and physical violence, why do you think he was blind to Serena's intentions in the end? Does the conclusion change your feelings about Pemberton? Why or why not?
8. Although the novel offers a kind of realism akin to the historical documentary, there are episodes of the otherworldly and supernatural that cannot be explained rationally. What effect do these scenes and characters have on you as the reader?
9. For instance, do you believe in the "second sight" of the blind Mrs. Galloway? What do these examples suggest about the nature of the world and the actions of human beings?
10. Several reviewers have argued that there has never been a character quite like Serena in previous American fiction. Do you agree? Can you think of other female characters who wield such life and death power with such ruthlessness?
11. In the novel's coda, it is 1929, Serena is living in Sao Paulo, Brazil. The notorious Nazi Joseph Mengele was living in Sao Paulo at the same time. Is there any indication that Serena and Mengele were somewhere connected? If so, what significance do you see in their connection?
12. When Rachel gathers ginseng early in the novel, she carefully replants the seeds to ensure more plants will grow. She is also extremely knowledgeable about the plants and creatures she lives among. Contrast her attitude to nature to the Pembertons.
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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