The World to Come
Dara Horn, 2006
W.W. Norton & Co.
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393329063
Summary
A million-dollar painting by Marc Chagall is stolen from a museum during a singles' cocktail hour. The unlikely thief is Benjamin Ziskind, a lonely former child prodigy who writes questions for quiz shows and who is sure the painting used to hang on a wall of his parents' living room. As Ben tries to evade the police, he and his twin sister, Sara, seek out the truth of how the painting got to the museum, whether the "original" is actually a forgery, and whether Sara, an artist, can create a convincing forgery to take its place.
Eighty years prior, in the 1920's in Soviet Russia, Marc Chagall taught art to orphaned Jewish boys. There Chagall befriended the great Yiddish novelist known by the pseudonym "Der Nister," The Hidden One. And there, with the lives of these real artists, the story of the painting begins, carrying with it not only a hidden fable by the Hidden One but also the story of the Ziskind family—from Russia to New Jersey and Vietnam.
Prize-winning author Dara Horn interweaves mystery, romance, folklore, theology, history, and scripture into a spellbinding modern tale. She brings us on a breathtaking collision course of past, present, and future—revealing both the ordinariness and the beauty of "the world to come." Nestling stories within stories, this is a novel of remarkable clarity and deep inner meaning. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Dara Horn was born in New Jersey in 1977 and received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University in 2006. In 2007 Granta magazine selected Horn as one of the Best Young American Novelists.
Horn's first novel, In the Image, published when she was 25, received a 2003 National Jewish Book Award, the 2002 Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and the 2003 Reform Judaism Fiction Prize. Her second novel, The World to Come, published in 2006, received the 2006 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, the 2007 Harold U. Ribalow Prize, was selected as an Editors' Choice in the New York Times Book Review, and as one of the Best Books of 2006 by the San Francisco Chronicle. It has been translated into eleven languages. Her third novel, All Other Nights, published in April 2009 was selected as an Editors' Choice in the New York Times Book Review.
Horn has taught courses in Jewish literature and Israeli history at Harvard and Sarah Lawrence College; she has lectured at universities and cultural institutions throughout the United States and Canada. She lives with her husband, daughter and two sons in New Jersey. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[T]he book succeeds, in part because Horn gracefully plays off certain words and images, using them as touchstones and leitmotifs: the title phrase and the Chagall painting; the recurring references to wombs, caves, bridges and the dents that angels supposedly leave beneath our noses. Little connections leap the narrative gaps and draw story lines together. Throughout this rich, complex and haunting novel, Horn reminds us that our world poses constant threats to the artist and to art, to the individual and the creative spirit. Their very survival is a miracle: in a sense, every one of us is that bearded man flying, unaware, over Vitebsk.
Susann Cokal - New York Times Book Review
Horn writes about theology and moral imperatives and the afterlife—as though she didn't realize that such things just aren't done in sophisticated literary prose. But that daring is endearing, especially when it flows from deeply sympathetic characters, an encyclopedic grasp of 20th-century history and a spiritual sense that sees through the conventional barriers between this life and the one to come—or the one before.
Ron Charles - Washington Times
Horn’s prose sallies along with confidence and intensity, sometimes to the point of whimsy, which means that the novel is, by turns, profoundly bleak and fantastically sweet... The World to Come is the stuff of dreams, enchanting and daring ... [Horn] has a spiritual and moral intuition that transcends most of her contemporaries. This is no mean feat—especially since she combines it with a flair for fantastical storytelling.
London Times
A deeply involving tale, a family saga and a mystery... brilliantly imagined... The novel may sound over-ambitious — pogrom and privation, familial and romantic love, life after death (and before), not to mention high art and quiz shows. And yet it all seems to work—beautifully.
Wall Street Journal
Isn't there a Willy Wonka gum that tastes like all good foods at once? If so, Dara Horn's The World to Come is the literary equivalent of that confection, equal parts mystery, sprawling novel, folktale, philosophical treatise, history, biography, love story and fabulist adventure... each page of her novel is a marvel.
San Francisco Chronicle
Horn's roving, kinetic imagination and storytelling talent are on abundant display here, and there's no question that this book is the real thing.
Chicago Tribune
Piercingly beautiful... delightful and often funny... Almost romantic, almost tragic, almost comic, almost mystical— the novel suspends us between emotions, never allowing any to become predominant, and we hang there in that indeterminate space, perfectly happy, hoping that the book will never end.
Newsday (Long Island, New York)
A deeply satisfying literary mystery and a funny-sad meditation on how the past haunts the present—and how we haunt the future.
Time
Former child prodigy Ben Ziskind-5'6", 123 pounds and legally blind—steals a Marc Chagall painting at the end of an alienating singles cocktail hour at a local museum, determined to prove that its provenance is tainted and that it belongs to his family. With surety and accomplishment, Horn telescopes out into Ziskind's familial history through an exploration of Chagall's life; that of Chagall's friend the Yiddish novelist Der Nister; 1920s Soviet Russia and its horrific toll on Russian Jews; the nullifying brutality of Vietnam (where Ben's father, Daniel, served a short, terrifying stint); and the paradoxes of American suburbia, a place where native Ben feels less at home than the teenage Soviet refugee Leonid Shcharansky. Ben's relationship with his pregnant twin sister, Sara, a painter who eventually tries to render a forgery of the painting to return to the museum, is a damply compelling exposition of what it means to have someone biologically close but emotionally distant. Horn, born in 1977, expertly handles subplots and digressions, neatly bringing in everything from Yiddish lore to Nebuchadnezzar, Da Nang, the Venice Biennale, recent theories of child development, brutal Soviet politics and Daniel's job as a writer for fictional TV show American Genius. Characters like Erica Frank, of the Museum of Hebraic Art, give tart glimpses into still-claustrophobic Goodbye, Columbus territory, which Horn then unites with a much grander place that furnishes the book's title.
Publishers Weekly
Horn's accomplished second novel (after the award-winning In the Image) reads like a dynamic hybrid of Nicole Krauss's The History of Love and Milan Kundera's philosophical flights of fancy. It is an artful exploration of a Jewish American family's Eastern European roots, a rumination on forgery in art, and an inventive exploration of the work of Chagall and the forgotten writings of his Russian compatriots. Finding himself alone after his divorce and his mother's recent death, Ben Ziskind distracts himself with work, crafting questions for a TV quiz show. When he decides to steal a Chagall painting that once belonged to his mother, his actions shake him from his hermetic shell. Flashbacks to Ben's past and to the lives of Chagall and his one-time novelist friend, the Hidden One, merge together. Horn deftly weaves an intricate story steeped in folklore and family secrets. Along the way, readers are offered glimpses of the possibilities, allegorical and otherwise, of life's beginning and end. This is intelligent, compelling literary fiction; recommended for public libraries. —Misha Stone, Seattle P.L.
Library Journal
A heist with a twist, Horn's engaging second novel (after In the Image, 2003) explores the history behind a stolen painting as well as the saga of the family that owned it for nearly a century. Recognizing it from his childhood living room, Benjamin Ziskind, a socially awkward quizmaster, lifts a million-dollar Chagall during a museum cocktail hour. We quickly learn that the master painter once taught art to Ben's grandfather in a bleak Russian orphanage in the 1920s. The piece, a sketch for the famed Over Vitebsk, was a gift from the artist to his young pupil. Of additional intrigue to the museum and eventually to Ben are a series of stories written by a legendary Yiddish author (and Chagall's onetime neighbor) that are hidden in the painting's frame. As Ben is pursued—not by the police, oddly enough, but by Erica Frank, a museum staff member—Horn shuttles readers through three generations of the Ziskind family, loosely following the painting as it changes hands, crosses an ocean and withstands enormous turmoil. The family history, and Ben's own covert investigation of the painting's place within it, uncovers questions of authenticity on multiple levels and leaves him (along with his twin sister and accomplice Sara) with a heavy moral decision to make. Despite the vast oscillations in time and place, the story is remarkably coherent, and it is only in the last 50 pages that Horn runs out of gas. The romance that buds between Ben and Erica is trite and seems tacked on to the otherwise finely crafted tale. And the author's reliance on symbolism and doubles, which is subtly effective throughout, becomes unwieldy. After an appealing journey into the past, Horn should have left her readers in the present; her final chapter is a confusing and corny look into "the world to come." An engrossing adventure, in spite of its flaws. Fans of art and Judaic studies will particularly enjoy this well-researched work.
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 World to Come:
1. Start with the book's title. What is its meaning within the context of the novel? Describe in your own words "the world to come." How does it bind together past and present? Is it a vision that you can accept as your own...or simply as one presented by the author?
2. The painting at the heart of the novel is real: "A Study for 'Over Vitebsk,'" in which a bearded man moves "over the houses as if walking—unaware, in murky horizantal profile, that he was actually in flight." Talk about the painting's possible meaning—for art's ability to transport viewers. Might its image also suggest that the characters in this work (perhaps all of us) live magical lives without knowing it?
3. Considering your thoughts for Question #2, what do you make of a character's comment to Der Nister that art doesn't necessarily have meaning—"It's just color. And light. A little happiness. Do yourself a favor and don't beat it to death"? Do you agree with the remark? Does visual art lend itself to "meaning" the same way that writing does? Or is art's effect purely emotional?
4. What do you think of Ben Ziskind? Talk about his theft of the Chagall painting—is it "theft"? What prompts him to take it? Does he have a moral claim to it?
5. What is Ben's relationship with his sister Sara? Talk about her role with respect to the painting?
6. How does Erika Frank trace the painting's heist to Ben?
7. Readers have remarked on the book's otherworldly quality. Do you agree—if so, what lends it that quality? Where, or at what point, in the novel do you sense it most?
8. Dara Horn weaves folk tales into her narrative. Talk about the ways in which the tales are similar to art, even religion, in their opposition to a rational world—what we call "reality." Do you have a favorite tale from the book?
9. How does this work portray art as dangerous—for those who create it or own it? Why has art (visual or other) so often threatened the status quo of governments or society?
10. Also, consider art's uncanny ability (even if, or especially if threatened) to survive. Der Nister, for instance, hides his tales behind Chagall's painting.
11. Many have compared this work to Nicole Krauss's novel, The History of Love. Have you read Krauss's book...and if so, do you see similarities?
12. How would you describe The World to Come—as a mystery, heist story, family saga, romance, fantasy, historical fiction, or a philosophical / religious work?
13. Horn's novel moves back and forth in time and space— from the present, to Russia in the 1920s, and to Vietnam. She incorporates stories within stories. Does this structure enrich the narrative for you? Or do you find it irksome, disjointed, or hard to follow? In other words, how did you experience this novel?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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You Know When the Men Are Gone
Siobhan Fallon, 2011
Penguin Group USA
2011 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399157202
Summary
Reminiscent of Raymond Carver and Tim O'Brien, an unforgettable collection of interconnected short stories.
In Fort Hood housing, like all army housing, you get used to hearing through the walls... You learn too much. And you learn to move quietly through your own small domain. You also know when the men are gone. No more boots stomping above, no more football games turned up too high, and, best of all, no more front doors slamming before dawn as they trudge out for their early formation, sneakers on metal stairs, cars starting, shouts to the windows above to throw them down their gloves on cold desert mornings. Babies still cry, telephones ring, Saturday morning cartoons screech, but without the men, there is a sense of muted silence, a sense of muted life.
There is an army of women waiting for their men to return in Fort Hood, Texas. Through a series of loosely interconnected stories, Siobhan Fallon takes readers onto the base, inside the homes, into the marriages and families-intimate places not seen in newspaper articles or politicians' speeches.
When you leave Fort Hood, the sign above the gate warns,"You've Survived the War, Now Survive the Homecoming". It is eerily prescient. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Siobhan Fallon lived at Fort Hood while her husband, an Army major, was deployed to Iraq for two tours of duty. She earned her MFA at the New School in New York City. Fallon lives with her family near the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Siobhan Fallon tells gripping, straight-up, no-nonsense stories about American soldiers and their families. It's clear from her tender yet tough-minded first book, You Know When the Men Are Gone, that she knows this world very well. The reader need not look at Ms. Fallon's biography to guess that she, like her book's characters, has spent time living in Fort Hood, Tex., watching the effects of soldiers' leave-takings and homecomings on men and the wives they leave behind.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Terrific and terrifically illuminating…The highest praise I can give this book—as a critic and a soldier's wife—is that it's so achingly authentic that I had to put it down and walk away at least a dozen times. At one point, I stuffed it under the love seat cushions. If Fallon ever expands her talents into a novel, I may have to hide in the closet for a month. Challenging as the subject matter may be, this is a brisk read. Fallon's sentences are fleet and trim. Her near-journalistic austerity magnifies the dizzying impact of the content.
Lily Burana - Washington Post
A haunting collection likely to inform and move many readers, whether they are familiar with the intricacies of military life or not. Though the everyday experience of the women waiting for their husbands to come home may be a sense of muted life, these stories pulse with the reality of combat and its domestic repercussions.
Jessica Treadway - Boston Globe
Fallon, who earned an MFA in writing from the New School in New York, gives a compassionate yet unflinching portrait of the modern-day home front. She knows the world well, having spent two of her husband's deployments among the waiting wives. In You Know When the Men Are Gone, she reminds us of the outsized burden our military families carry, that the overseas casualty counts carried in newscasts can never tell the whole truth.
De Turenne - Los Angeles Times
Surely marks the beginning of a major career.... [Fallon] has a sharp, clean, prose style; a gift for telling urgent, important stories; and an eye for the kind of odd, revelatory detail that may seem ordinary if you have spent time on military bases but that civilians rarely encounter.
Stephanie Vaughn - San Francisco Chronicle
The crucial role of military wives becomes clear in Fallon's powerful, resonant debut collection, where the women are linked by absence and a pervading fear that they'll become war widows. In the title story, a war bride from Serbia finds she can't cope with the loneliness and her outsider status, and chooses her own way out. The wife in "Inside the Break" realizes that she can't confront her husband's probable infidelity with a female soldier in Iraq; as in other stories, there's a gap between what she can imagine and what she can bear to know. In "Remission," a cancer patient waiting on the results of a crucial test is devastated by the behavior of her teenage daughter, and while the trials of adolescence are universal, this story is particularized by the unique tensions between military parents and children. One of the strongest stories, "You Survived the War, Now Survive the Homecoming," attests to the chasm separating men who can't speak about the atrocities they've experienced and their wives, who've lived with their own terrible burdens. Fallon writes with both grit and grace: her depiction of military life is enlivened by telling details, from the early morning sound of boots stomping down the stairs to the large sign that tallies automobile fatalities of troops returned from Iraq. Significant both as war stories and love stories, this collection certifies Fallon as an indisputable talent.
Publishers Weekly
civilians will ever experience: Fort Hood, TX. Fort Hood is a place where husbands and fathers pack their gear and leave for deployments of a year or longer. Left behind are the families, and each of the eight stories describes a different spouse or family coping with such a prolonged absence. The wife and mother with breast cancer, the teenage bride, the young mother, the Serbian wife who speaks little English—each deals with the stress and loneliness of her husband's deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan in her own way. Some isolate themselves, choosing to live off base or move back in with their families. Others embrace the company and support of other army wives and attend Family Readiness Group meetings. This might be a work of fiction, but Fallon's work is remarkably real, and each story's characters immediately grip the reader. Verdict: Excellent; even readers who do not usually read short stories should seek out this book.—Shaunna Hunter, Hampden-Sydney Coll. Lib., VA
Library Journal
In an accomplished debut story collection, Fallon lays bare the lonely lives of military families when the men go to war. In these eight loosely connected tales, the families of Fort Hood, Texas, wait for their men to come home. That waiting, filled with anxiety, boredom and sometimes resentment, creates a Godot-like existence, in which real life begins only when a soldier's deployment ends. In the title story, young Meg, her husband in Iraq, becomes obsessed with her neighbor Natalya, a glamorous Serbian with little English and two babies, doubly isolated in Fort Hood. Meg presses her ear to their shared wall and eventually hears the voice of a strange man. In "The Last Stand," a soldier returns from Iraq permanently injured, to a wife tired of the strains of army life. She brings him to a hotel and then buys him breakfast before notifying him of their imminent divorce, their marriage a casualty of the war. In "Leave," Officer Nick Cash suspects his wife is cheating on him. On his scheduled leave home from Iraq, he tells his wife he has to stay at the front, but then secretly returns to Fort Hood, breaks into the basement of his own house and hides there for a week, waiting for the truth with a knife in his hand. In "Camp Liberty," the only story to take place largely in Iraq, David Mogeson, an investment banker who joined up after 9/11, befriends Raneen, a female interpreter. Back home on leave, he is bored by his longtime girlfriend and overwhelmed by a lifestyle of privilege, but when he returns to Iraq (and fantasies of building something with Raneen), he discovers she's been kidnapped, an all-too-common fate for interpreters. Fallon reveals the mostly hidden world of life on base for military families, and offers a powerful, unsentimental portrait of America at war. A fresh look at the Iraq war as it plays out on the domestic front.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In the first story, "You Know When the Men Are Gone," why does the narrator develop such an obsession with her neighbor? While it turns out that Natalya is worthy of Meg's scrutiny, is it easier for Meg to be a nosy neighbor than for her to focus on the danger her husband faced overseas?
2. Infidelity is a recurring theme in many of the stories. Did this surprise you?
3. Most of the stories take place in Fort Hood. Why do you think "Camp Liberty" is included in the collection if it takes place in Iraq? Is it in keeping with the other stories?
4. In "Camp Liberty," "Leave," and "The Last Stand," the main characters are men. Does that change the feel from the rest of the collection, which is primarily from a female point of view?
5. Many of the stories in You Know When the Men Are Gone are about the relationships between men and women. How would these stories change if the protagonists were flipped? If, say, "Inside the Break" was told from Manny's point of view instead of Kailani's? Or if "Leave" followed Trish instead of Nick?
6. In "The Last Stand," why does Helena sleep with Kit in the hotel room? Do you find her sympathetic?
7. In "Remission," Ellen feels that she is pitied by the other wives because of her cancer, but considered lucky because her husband has not been deployed. Does either of these circumstances outweigh the other? Is there a sliding scale of "tragedy" and "luck" in the lives of the families in Fort Hood? In your own life?
8. "Inside the Break" mentions pamphlets with such titles as "Roadmap to Reintegration," "What to Expect When Deployed Soldiers Return," and "Communicating with Your Spouse." Is it possible to sum up, in writing, the vast emotional landscape that families and soldiers experience upon the soldiers' return? Do you think Siobhan Fallon attempted to do that with this collection? If you think so, did she succeed?
9. What do you think the husband does at the end of "Leave"?
10. In "You've Survived the War, Now Survive the Homecoming," the sign refers to drunk driving, but do you think the author intends it as a metaphor for more?
11. In the same story, toward the end, Fallon writes: "Their fate depended on whether Carla walked out of the room with the baby or stood next to her husband. She bit her lip and wondered if this was the sum of a marriage: wordless recriminations or reconciliations, every breath either striving against or toward the other person, each second a decision to exert or abdicate the self." Do you agree with this take on marriage? Or do you think it's applicable only under extreme circumstances?
12. Which is your favorite story, and why?
13. Obviously the stories in You Know When the Men Are Gone are tied together by Fort Hood. What other themes do the stories share?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Welcome to the World, Baby Girl
Fannie Flagg, 1998
Random House
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780804118682
Summary
Once again, Flagg's humor and respect and affection for her characters shine forth. Many inhabit small-town or suburban America.
But this time, her heroine is urban: a brainy, beautiful, and ambitious rising star of 1970s television. Dena Nordstrom, pride of the network, is a woman whose future is full of promise, her present rich with complications, and her past marked by mystery.
Among the colorful cast of characters are:
- Sookie, of Selma, Alabama, Dena's exuberant college roommate, who is everything that Dena is not; she is thrilled by Dena's success and will do everything short of signing autographs for her; Sookie's a mom, a wife, and a Kappa forever.
- Dena's cousins, the Warrens, and her aunt Elner, of Elmwood Springs, Missouri, endearing, loyal, talkative, ditsy, and, in their way, wise.
- Neighbor Dorothy, whose spirit hovers over them all through the radio show that she broadcast from her home in the 1940s.
- Sidney Capello, pioneer of modern sleaze journalism and privateer of privacy, and Ira Wallace, his partner in tabloid television.
- Several doctors, all of them taken with—and almost taken in by-Dena
There are others, captivated by a woman who tries to go home again, not knowing where home or love lie. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Real Name—Patricia Neal
• Birth—September 21, 1944
• Where—Birmingham, Alabama, USA
• Education—University of Alabama
• Currently—lives in Montecito, California
Fannie Flagg began writing and producing television specials at age nineteen and went on to distinguish herself as an actress and writer in television, films, and the theater. She is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe (which was produced by Universal Pictures as Fried Green Tomatoes), Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!, Standing in the Rainbow, and A Redbird Christmas. Flagg’s script for Fried Green Tomatoes was nominated for both the Academy and Writers Guild of America awards and won the highly regarded Scripters Award. Flagg lives in California and in Alabama.
Before her career as a novelist, Flagg was known principally for her on-screen television and film work. She was second banana to Allen Funt on the long-running Candid Camera, perhaps the trailblazer for the current crop of so-called reality television. (Her favorite segment, she told Entertainment Weekly in 1992, was driving a car through the wall of a drive-thru bank.) She appeared as the school nurse in the 1978 film version of Grease, and on Broadway in The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. And she was a staple of the Match Game television game shows in the '70s.
Quite early on in her writing career, Fannie Flagg stumbled onto the holy grail of secrets in the publishing world: what editors are actually good for.
Attending the Santa Barbara Writer's Conference in 1978 to see her idol, Eudora Welty, Flagg won first prize in the writing contest for a short story told from the perspective of a 11-year-old girl, spelling mistakes and all—a literary device that she figured was ingenious because it disguised her own pitiful spelling, later determined to be an outgrowth of dyslexia. But when a Harper & Row editor approached her about expanding the story into a full-length novel, she realized the jig was up. In 1994 she told the New York Times:
I just burst into tears and said, "I can't write a novel. I can't spell. I can't diagram a sentence." He took my hand and said the most wonderful thing I've ever heard. He said, "Oh, honey, what do you think editors are for?"
Writing
And so Fannie Flagg—television personality, Broadway star, film actress and six-time Miss Alabama contestant—became a novelist, delving into the Southern-fried, small-town fiction of the sort populated by colorful characters with homespun, no-nonsense observations. Characters that are known to say things like, "That catfish was so big the photograph alone weighed 40 pounds."
Her first novel, an expanded take on that prize-winning short story, was Coming Attractions: A Wonderful Novel, the story of a spunky yet hapless girl growing up in the South, helping her alcoholic father run the local bijou. But it was with her second novel where it all came together. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe—a novel, for all its light humor, that infuses its story with serious threads on racism, feminism, spousal abuse and hints at Sapphic love -- follows two pairs of women: a couple running a hometown café in the Depression-era South and an elderly nursing home resident in the late 1980s who strikes up an impromptu friendship with a middle-aged housewife unhappy with her life.
The result was not only a smash novel, but a hit movie as well, one that garnered Flagg an Academy Award nomination for adapting the screenplay. She won praise from the likes of Erma Bombeck, Harper Lee and idol Eudora Welty, and the Los Angeles Times critic compared it to The Last Picture Show. The New York Times called it, simply, "a real novel and a good one."
As a writer, though, this Birmingham, Alabama native found her voice as a chronicler of Southern Americana and life in its self-contained hamlets. "Fannie Flagg is the most shamelessly sentimental writer in America," The Christian Science Monitor wrote in a 1998 review of her third novel. "She's also the most entertaining. You'd have to be a stone to read Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! without laughing and crying. The cliches in this novel are deep-fat fried: not particularly nutritious, but entirely delicious."
The New York Times, also reviewing Baby Girl, took note of the spinning-yarns-on-the-front-porch quality to her work: "Even when she prattles—and she prattles a great deal during this book—you are always aware that a star is at work. She has that gift that certain people from the theater have, of never boring the audience. She keeps it simple, she keeps it bright, she keeps it moving right along—and, most of all, she keeps it beloved."
But, lest she be pegged as simply a champion of the good ol’ days, it's worth noting that her writing can be something of a clarion call for social change. In Fried Green Tomatoes, Flagg comments not only on the racial divisions of the South but also on the minimization of women in both the 1930s and contemporary life. Just as Idgie Threadgoode and Ruth Jamison commit to a life together—without menfolk—in the Depression-era days of Whistle Stop, Alabama, middle-aged Evelyn Couch in modern-day Birmingham discovers the joys of working outside the home and defining her life outside meeting the every whim of her husband.
On top of her writing, Flagg has also stumped for the Equal Rights Amendment.
I think it's time that women have to stand up and say we do not want to be seen in a demeaning manner," Flagg told a Premiere magazine reporter in an interview about the film adaptation of Fried Green Tomatoes.
Extras
• Flagg approximated the length of her first novel by weight. Her editor told her a novel should be around 400 pages. "So I weighed 400 pages and it came to two pounds and something," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1987." I wrote until I had two pounds and something, and, as it happened, the novel was just about done."
• She landed the Candid Camera gig while a writer at a New York comedy club. When one of the performers couldn't go on, Flagg acted as understudy, and the show's host, Allen Funt, was in the audience.
• Flagg went undiagnosed for years as a dyslexic until a viewer casually mentioned it to her in a fan letter. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
I found the whole thing rather enjoyable....[Flagg] keeps it simple, she keeps it bright, she keeps it moving right along.
Robert Plunket - New York Times
Because so much of Flagg's third novel takes place in the 1970s media-celebrity echelons of New York City, it doesn't offer the regional and historical color and texture of its predecessor, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. Instead, Flagg's achievement here lies in a well-choreographed story of loyalty and survival that zigzags deftly across the post-war years, panning in on the never-changing decency of Elmwood Springs, Mo., then pulling back to watch national TV news devolve into sensationalism--all the while drawing us into the compelling life of Dena Nordstrom. Star of America's most popular morning news show, Dena shuts herself down and shuts men out for painful reasons that are unknown even to her. Only after the stress of ambush- and sound-byte journalism brings on a hemorrhaging ulcer does Dena slowly unearth the scandal that, when Dena was four, drove her mother from Elmwood Springs, hometown of the war hero father that Dena never knew. That her mother's nemesis is a newspaper gossipmonger is nicely ironic, although her mother's secret shame seems slightly larger than life. In contrast, Dena's college friend Sookie and great aunt Elner are reminders of how well Flagg can cook up memorable women from the most down-to-earth ingredients, while a cameo by Tennessee Williams is uncannily true to life. Fans may be sorry at first to leave Elmwood Springs for the big city, but even the most reluctant will get wrapped up in Dena's search for the truth about her family and her past.
Publishers Weekly
Ultimately, the experience of reading Baby Girl is much like eating a chocolate eclair (or, if you prefer, like having mediocre sex). In other words, you have to go through a lot of air and fat before you get to the custard. Not that the book isn't highly readable—it is, much like the back of a cereal box is readable. It's also exasperating, and in the end, the episodic nature and often-ponderous dialogue make it seem more like watching a TV movie than reading a novel. —Cara Jepsen
BookPage
The author of Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe returns with another engaging paean to the joys of down-home southern life. Gorgeous, ambitious Dena Nordstrom is doing very well in '70s Manhattan. She's the popular star of a network morning show, poised to rise as the ratings-driven TV industry promotes appealing women to make palatable the increasingly nasty interviews that are turning the news into scandal mongering 'entertainment.' Dena barely remembers Elmwood Springs, Missouri, where she spent four happy years before her mysterious mother abruptly left town and embarked on a decade of wandering before vanishing from 15-year-old Dena's life altogether in 1959. But the folks back in Elmwood Springs remember Baby Girl, daughter of a local boy killed in WWII, and Flagg has some obvious but effective fun with the contrast between the townspeople's homey-to-the-verge-of-caricature existence and Dena's high-powered urban-professional lifestyle. Of course, she's not really happy: she drinks too much and has bleeding ulcers that send her, acting reluctantly on doctor's orders, to a handsome psychiatrist (who falls in love with her at first sight, natch) and then back to Elmwood Springs to recuperate from overwork. Readers may share Dena's initial reaction to the relentlessly folksy locals ('Get me out of here,' she commands her agent), but the New York cast of characters is just as cliched: noble, Walter Cronkite-like anchorman; sleazy network executive; sleazier 'researcher"/dirt-digger. The author does, however, know how to spin a rattling good yarn. Even those who gag at the way she holds up 'Neighbor Dorothy' and her hokey 1940s radio show as the epitome of small-town goodness will probably find themselves flipping pages rapidly to discover what happened to Dena's mother. The denouement has a clever twist, and if the happy ending is not exactly a surprise, it taps into enough classic American fantasies about getting out of the rat race to be quite moving. Shamelessly corny and extremely enjoyable.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. This novel tells of Dena's long journey home. What does home look and sound and smell like to you? Is it a place or a state of mind?
2. "Elmswood Springs is a town that likes itself." Do you agree with this assessment of Dena's hometown? How does Dena's opinion of the town change over the course of the novel?
3. The Smith family talks about being able to stop time. Would you like to have this power? If you could, when would you freeze time in your own life?
4. Aunt Elner would want to be at home with her family and friends if she knew the end of the world was coming. What would you do?
5. What has caused Dena's identity crisis? How does she manage to keep the people in her life fooled about her real condition for so long?
6. Why are people in Dena's life so persistent even though she continually shuts them out? Did you ever lose patience with her?
7. Why does Gerry O'Malley believe in true love? Do you think it exists?
8. Why does Dena sleep through Christmas every year and then lie about it? Many people have very conflicted feelings about the holidays for a whole host of reasons. How do you feel about holidays? Do you ever want to sleep through them?
9. Dena is initially very resistant to therapy. How much do you think therapy helped her in the end? Did this novel challenge or confirm your own opinions about therapy?
10. Dena's therapist tells her: I think you are mistaking a profession for a personal identity." Discuss the meaning of this statment. Does it apply to anyone you know?
11. Ask each person in your reading group to give three answers to the question: who are you? How easy or difficult is thisto do? Do you have any answers in common?
12. What was the significance of Dena's recurring dream about the house with the carousel?
13. Dena gets to interview Tennessee Williams, an artist who inspired her. If you could interview a person who has had a major impact on your personal/and or professional development, who would it be? What would you ask them?
14. This novel examines the nature of celebrity in modern America. Why does Dena want to be famous? And why does she eventually reject it? Is celebrity something you would want for yourself?
15. Discuss the negative impact gossip in the media has on various characters in this novel. Where do you think the line should be drawn regarding the private lives of public people?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Beekeeper's Apprentice: (Mary Russell Series 1)
Laurie R. King, 1994
Picacodor
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312427368
Summary
In 1915, Sherlock Holmes is retired and quietly engaged in the study of honeybees when a young woman literally stumbles into him on the Sussex Downs. Fifteen years old, gawky, egotistical, and recently orphaned, the young Mary Russell displays an intellect to impress even Sherlock Holmes—and match him wit for wit. Under his reluctant tutelage, this very modern twentieth-century woman proves a deft protegee and a fitting partner for the Victorian detective.
In their first case together, they must track down a kidnapped American senator's daughter and confront a truly cunning adversary—a bomber who has set trip wires for the sleuths and who will stop at nothing to end their partnership. Full of brilliant deductions, disguises, and dangers, this first book of the Mary Russell. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Leigh Richards
• Birth—1952
• Where—San Francisco, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California;
M.A. Theological Union
• Awards—Edgar Award; John Creasy
Memorial Award; Nero Award; Macavity
Award
• Currently—lives in northern California
Laurie R. King is an award-winning American author best known for her detective fiction. Among her books are the Mary Russell series of historical mysteries, featuring Sherlock Holmes as her mentor and later partner, and a series featuring Kate Martinelli, a fictional lesbian San Francisco, California, police officer.
King's first book, A Grave Talent (1993), received the 1994 Edgar Award for Best First Novel and a 1995 John Creasey Memorial Award. This was followed by the 1996 Nero Award, for A Monstrous Regiment of Women, and the 2002 Macavity Award for Best Novel, for Folly. She has also been nominated for an Agatha Award, an Orange Prize, and two more Edgars. Using the pseudonym "Leigh Richards", she has published a futuristic novel, Califia's Daughters (2004).
King earned a BA degree in comparative religion from the University of California, and then completed an MA in Old Testament Theology at Graduate Theological Union where her thesis was on "Feminine Aspects of Yahweh". She later received an honorary doctorate from the Church Divinity School of the Pacific. She has lived for many years in the hills above Monterey Bay near Santa Cruz, California. From 1977 until his death in early 2009, she was married to the historian, Noel Quinton King. They became the parents of two children, Zoe and Nathan. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Sherlock Holmes takes on a young, female apprentice in this delightful and well-wrought addition to the master detective's casework. In the early years of WW I, 15-year-old American Mary Russell encounters Holmes, retired in Sussex Downs where Conan Doyle left him raising bees. Mary, an orphan rebelling against her guardian aunt's strictures, impresses the sleuth with her intelligence and acumen. Holmes initiates her into the mysteries of detection, allowing her to participate in a few cases when she comes home from her studies at Oxford. The collaboration is ignited by the kidnapping in Wales of Jessica Simpson, daughter of an American senator. The sleuthing duo find signs of the hand of a master criminal, and after Russell rescues the child, attempts are made on their lives (and on Watson's), with evidence piling up that the master criminal is out to get Holmes and all he holds dear. King (A Grave Talent ) has created a fitting partner for the Great Detective: a quirky, intelligent woman who can hold her own with a man renowned for his contempt for other people's thought processes.
Publishers Weekly
At 15, Mary Russell is tall and gangling, bespectacled and bookish. In 1915, the orphaned heiress is living in her ancestral home with an embittered aunt she has plucked from genteel poverty to act as a guardian until she reaches her majority. In order to escape the woman's generally malevolent disposition, she wanders the Downs. On one such outing, she trips over a gaunt, elderly man sitting on the ground, "watching bees." This gentleman turns out to be Sherlock Holmes, and the resulting acquaintance evolves into a mentoring experience for the young woman. The story is well written in a style slightly reminiscent of Conan Doyle's, but is also very much King's own. The plot is somewhat predictable, but the characterizations are excellent and the times and places are skillfully evoked. Readers come to understand much of Holmes that was unexplained by Dr. Watson. These additions are entirely plausible, and the relationship between the great detective and his apprentice is delightful. Readers see much of Sussex, London, and even of student life at Oxford and the conditions of Romanies (Gypsies) in Wales. Wartime Britain is accurately evoked, and the whole is a lot of fun to read. While a fitting addition to the Holmes oeuvre, the narrative is delightfully feminist. It is likely to please YAs already entranced by Sherlock Holmes and will surely attract a few new fans. — Susan H. Woodcock, King's Park Library, Burke, VA.
Library Journal
Imagine Sherlock Holmes retiring to a Sussex farm but keeping his hand in by occasionally investigating cases for the British government. Imagine further that Watson was not so much Holmes' helpmate and confidant as a kindly bumbler who proved more a hindrance than a help.
Booklist
Nothing in King's brooding debut A Grave Talent (1993) could have prepared you for this uncommonly rich Sherlockian pastiche, in which the great detective is brought out of retirement among the bees of Sussex by a new amanuensis, budding theologian Mary Russell.... A surpassingly ingenious companion to Sena Jeter Naslund's Sherlock in Love.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In an Editor’s Preface, King playfully discloses the “true” origin of the story at hand—that what follows will be the actual memoirs of Mary Russell, which were mysteriously sent to her out of the blue, along with a trunk full of odds and ends.Why does King begin with this anecdote, essentially including herself in the story? Does it bring the world of the novel closer to our own? Have you read any other books (Lolita, for example) which begin with a false-preface, and what effect does this device have on the rest of the novel? Were you fooled?
2. It is 1915, the Great War is raging through Europe and the men of England are in the trenches. How does this particular period in history allow a character like Mary Russell to take the stage in areas of post-Victorian society usually reserved for men? In what significant ways does she seize these opportunities? Would she have thrived if born into a different, more oppressive social climate, say, one hundred years earlier?
3. How would you characterize Mary Russell based on her first opinion of bees? Does her disdain for their mindless busy-work and adherence to hive social structure reflect a particular attitude toward the social landscape of England at the time? Do you agree with Mary?
4. Holmes uses the game of chess to sharpen Mary Russell’s strategic thinking and intuition. How does chess—and, in particular, the Queen—serve as a metaphor throughout the story? In what ways does King herself use the game to comment upon the masterapprentice relationship?
5. Russell and Holmes don disguises throughout The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, and their work sometimes requires them to cross dress. Discuss each point in the novel where either Russell or Holmes takes cover in the opposite sex; what special access does this method of disguise give them to the other characters? Is gender reversal necessary in order to win the confidence of certain people? How does Mary Russell’s world changewhen she dresses as a man?
6. Watson is eternally known as the great detective’s sidekick. Who, in your opinion, is a more effective foil for Holmes, Watson or Russell? What different aspects of Holmes’s personality emerge in the presence of each? What would happen if Holmes were paired with a different partner, one more timid or less tenacious?
7. At Oxford, Mary Russell concludes that theology and detective work are one and the same. In your opinion, how are the two subjects related?
8. The art of deduction is constantly at play in The Beekeeper’s Apprentice. Even when Mary notices that Watson has shaven off his mustache, she cares to look closer at the skin and imagine that it was done “very recently”. Is Laurie King training the reader’s perceptions to be more acute throughout the novel? Does every detail of our lives hold a mystery and a story?
9. What are some crucial differences between the training Patricia Donleavy received from Moriarty and the training Mary Russell received from Holmes? What mental and emotional strengths do both women have in common, and what separates them? Holmes comments: “A quick mind is worthless unless you can control the emotions with it as well.” How does this maxim apply?
10. At what point in the novel did you suspect that Russell’s adversary was a woman? When you read a mystery, what assumptions do you typically make about the gender of the villain? In what ways does King toy with the reader’s assumptions about gender throughout the novel?
(Questions courtesy of the author's website.)
Mister Pip
Lloyd Jones
Random House
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385341073
Summary
A novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives.
On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much curiosity and scorn, who sweeps out the ruined schoolhouse and begins to read to the children each day from Charles Dickens’s classic Great Expectations.
So begins this rare, original story about the abiding strength that imagination, once ignited, can provide. As artillery echoes in the mountains, thirteen-year-old Matilda and her peers are riveted by the adventures of a young orphan named Pip in a city called London, a city whose contours soon become more real than their own blighted landscape. As Mr. Watts says, “A person entranced by a book simply forgets to breathe.” Soon come the rest of the villagers, initially threatened, finally inspired to share tales of their own that bring alive the rich mythology of their past. But in a ravaged place where even children are forced to live by their wits and daily survival is the only objective, imagination can be a dangerous thing.
More
Celebrating the timeless power of storytelling, Mister Pip unites the stirring tale of a young girl’s quest for hope with a marvelous tribute to a Charles Dickens classic. Thirteen-year-old Matilda is coming of age on a Pacific island that has been torn apart by war. Almost everyone, including her father, has left to find work or escape the danger. Among those few who remain is the eccentric and mysterious Mr. Watts, the island’s sole remaining white man, who takes on the role of teacher and begins to read Great Expectations aloud to students. For Matilda and her classmates, the story offers an escape from their brutal reality, while instilling in them the strength to endure in a place where nothing is certain, not even their survival. Mister Pip celebrates individual strength, the ability of humanity to transform itself through narrative, and powerful friendships that cross cultural lines. In this gripping and imaginative novel, Lloyd Jones gives us a unique way to explore issues of faith, family, loyalty, identity, and, ultimately, the transcendence of literature. (From the publisher
Author Bio
• Birth—March 23 1955
• Where—Lower Hutt, New Zealand
• Education—B.A. Victoria University
• Awards—Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship;
Commonwealth's Writers' Prize (Mister Pip).
• Currently—Wellington, New Zealand
Lloyd Jones is a New Zealand author whose novels and collections of stories include the award-winning The Book of Fame, Biografi, a New York Times Notable Book, Choo Woo, Here at the End of the World We Learn to Dance and Paint Your Wife.
He is a graduate of Victoria University. In 1988 he was the recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellowship.
In 1994 he curated an exhibition which illustrated the New Zealand Saturday. This work was a collaboration with photographer Bruce Foster and held at the National Library in Wellington. The work was published as the The Last Saturday and included historical photographs, contemporary ones by Foster and an essay by Jones.
In 2003, a theatrical adaptation of his novel, The Book of Fame was presented at Wellington's Downstage Theatre.
n May 2007, he won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Overall Best Book Award for his novel Mister Pip. The novel is set during the Bougainville Civil War of the early 1990s. His novel Mister Pip was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize 2007.
In August 2007 he spent a year in Berlin as beneficiary of the Creative New Zealand Berlin Writers' Residency.
He is the younger brother of property tycoon Bob Jones. (From the publisher and Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Mister Pip moves easily, even comically, into its Great Expectations fetish…if Mister Pip is preachy—and it is—it's also a book with worthwhile thoughts to impart. Mr. Jones's ability to translate these thoughts into the gentle, tropical, roundabout idiom of his setting…turns out to be genuinely affecting.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones's spare, haunting fable explores the power and limitations of art as Matilda chronicles 21 increasingly desperate months. The villagers are trapped between the rebels and the soldiers just as inexorably as Matilda is caught between Mr. Watts and her fiercely religious mother.
Wendy Smith - Washington Post
A promising though ultimately overwrought portrayal of the small rebellions and crises of disillusionment that constitute a young narrator's coming-of-age unfolds against an ominous backdrop of war in Jones's latest. When the conflict between the natives and the invading "redskin" soldiers erupts on an unnamed tropical island in the early 1990s, 13-year-old Matilda Laimo and her mother, Dolores, are unified with the rest of their village in their efforts for survival. Amid the chaos, Mr. Watts, the only white local (he is married to a native), offers to fill in as the children's schoolteacher and teaches from Dickens's Great Expectations. The precocious Matilda, who forms a strong attachment to the novel's hero, Pip, uses the teachings as escapism, which rankles Dolores, who considers her daughter's fixation blasphemous. With a mixture of thrill and unease, Matilda discovers independent thought, and Jones captures the intricate, emotionally loaded evolution of the mother-daughter relationship. Jones (The Book of Fame; Biografi) presents a carefully laid groundwork in the tense interactions between Matilda, Dolores and Mr. Watts, but the extreme violence toward the end of the novel doesn't quite work. Jones's prose is faultless, however, and the story is innovative enough to overcome the misplayed tragedy.
Publishers Weekly
This eighth offering by New Zealander Jones (e.g., The Book of Fame) follows the early years of teenage protagonist Matilda on a remote island off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Matilda's father takes a job with an Australian mining company, leaving Matilda and her mother behind on the island. Meanwhile, the village's lone white occupant appoints himself local schoolmaster, with his first lesson being a yearlong recitation of Dickens's Great Expectations, whose themes of estrangement and personal metamorphosis mirror Matilda's story. When rebellion ferments on the island, the central authorities impose a naval blockade, cutting off the inhabitants from the outside world. As government soldiers move against villages sympathetic to the rebels, Matilda must choose between remaining on the island or striking out for Australia in search of her father. Despite surprising plot twists and delightfully eccentric personalities, there are moments when Jones's characters speak with the author's voice rather than their own. In the end, however, this book addresses ideas of place and homesickness with conviction, making it a worthwhile read. Recommended for public libraries.
Chris Pusateri - Library Journal
Bringing Great Expectations to desperate children ravaged by revolution, an eccentric teacher becomes a martyr to literature and transforms the prospects of a strong-willed girl. He's actually "Mr. Watts." But so identified does he become with Dickens' wondrous coming-of-age narrative that he's known as "Mr. Pip." Jones (Paint Your Wife, 2004, etc.) juxtaposes this English exile, married to a native black woman and now the last white man on an unspecified Survivor-style island, with teenaged Matilda, his most eager student. He's a stopgap professor, really, just volunteering to instruct 20 kids, seven to 15 years old, who gather for shelter from the war between the "redskins" and the "rebels." A long-bearded Scheherazade in a white linen suit, Watts draws out the telling of Dickens' classic to the children and soon we have the age-old tale: story as balm, spell, savior. He also invites the island mothers in for show ‘n' tell: chances to share their wisdom. They offer fishing tips; rhapsodies of the sea; and one tells of a woman who "once turned a white man into marmalade and spread him onto her toast." That tale spinner is Matilda's mother, and she becomes Watts's rival, her pidgin Bible contrasting his Victorian tale; she is imperiled nature; he's threatening culture. He reminisces about "the smell of fresh-mown grass and lawnmower oil"; she fears the capture of her daughter's soul. And yet in time, for Matilda's sake, the pair negotiate a tremulous peace-one soon savaged by murder, as the redskins descend. As the revolution intensifies, the schoolhouse burns, along with Great Expectations. And Watts's last injunction to his students is that they rebuild the story orally, for themselves,piece by piece. A little Gauguin, a bit of Lord Jim, the novel's lyricism evokes great beauty and great pain.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Is it important that Mr. Watts is the last white man on the island? Why?
2. Why does Matilda write Pip’s name in the sand alongside the names of her relatives? Why does this upset her mother? How does this contribute to Dolores’s feelings about Mr. Watts’s instruction of her daughter? Are these feelings understandable?
3. Why do you think Mr. Watts pulled his wife in the cart? Why did he wear the red clown nose? What meaning did that have for them?
4. What is the message Matilda’s mother is trying to express to the children with the story of her mother’s braids? How is this related to the issue of Mr. Watts’s faith in God?
5. What did you think of the lessons that the mothers of the children bring to the classroom? If you were the parent of a child in Matilda’s class, what lesson would you teach the children? What might your mother have taught the class?
6. Who is Dolores warning the children about when she tells them the story about the devil lady and the church money? How does this story justify her actions regarding the book and the redskins? Do you agree with Dolores’s refusal to bring forth the book? With Matilda’s?
7. Where do you think Gilbert’s father takes Sam? How do you know? In your opinion, was it necessary that he do so?
8. Why does the corned beef in Mr. Watts’s house “represent a broad hope” for Matilda? Discuss Mr. Watts’s reaction to Matilda’s fragment. Do you believe that Grace was alive when Matilda arrived?
9. Discuss how the characters in this story struggle to reconcile the concepts of race and identity. Does it seem to dictate their interaction with each other? How does it influence their concepts of self? What moments, especially, helped reveal this to you?
10. What is the meaning of the story of the Queen of Sheba? Why does Mr. Watts bring it up? Why is it significant that Dolores is familiar with that story?
11. Why does Dolores step forward to declare herself “God’s witness” to the murder of Mr. Watts? Were you surprised that she did? Why does she insist that Matilda remain silent?
12. Do you think Matilda was able to return home? How would that outcome affect your reading of both novels?
13. Discuss your memorable experiences of being read to as a child. What book made the greatest impact on your life? Did any book come to you at precisely the right time, the way Great Expectations was brought to Matilda?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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