The Bird Sisters
Rebecca Rasmussen, 2011
Crown Publishing
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307717962
Summary
When a bird flies into a window in Spring Green, Wisconsin, sisters Milly and Twiss get a visit. Twiss listens to the birds' heartbeats, assessing what she can fix and what she can't, while Milly listens to the heartaches of the people who've brought them. These spinster sisters have spent their lives nursing people and birds back to health.
But back in the summer of 1947, Milly and Twiss knew nothing about trying to mend what had been accidentally broken. Milly was known as a great beauty with emerald eyes and Twiss was a brazen wild child who never wore a dress or did what she was told. That was the summer their golf pro father got into an accident that cost him both his swing and his charm, and their mother, the daughter of a wealthy jeweler, finally admitted their hardscrabble lives wouldn't change. It was the summer their priest, Father Rice, announced that God didn't exist and ran off to Mexico, and a boy named Asa finally caught Milly's eye. And, most unforgettably, it was the summer their cousin Bett came down from a town called Deadwater and changed the course of their lives forever.
Rebecca Rasmussen's masterfully written debut novel is full of hope and beauty, heartbreak and sacrifice, love and the power of sisterhood, and offers wonderful surprises at every turn. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Spring Green, Wisconsin; Northfield,
Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Colorado State University; M.F.A.,
University of Massachuesetts and Penn State
• Currently—lives in St. Louis, Missouri
Rasmussen was raised in Spring Green, Wisconsin. When she was very young, her parents divorced, with the result that she spent a considerable portion of her growing years in Northfield, Illinois as well. Rasmussen has four brothers.
Rasmussen began writing early. Her short stories have appeared in TriQuarterly and Mid-American Review magazines. She was a finalist in the 30 Below contest of Narrative Magazine. She was also a finalist in the Family Matters contest of Glimmer Train magazine.
Rasmussen received a BA degree from Colorado State University and Master's degrees from the University of Massachusetts and Penn State University. It was during the UM coursework that she completed her first novel, The Bird Sisters two years later, in April, 2011. See the author's website for the story behind her novel.
Rasmussen is married and has a daughter. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Rasmussen's debut novel begins like a typical coming-of-age story, but reveals itself to be a singular portrayal of familial sacrifice and loss. As elderly women, sisters Twiss and Milly live alone in the house where they grew up in Spring Green, Wis. They spend their days tending to injured birds and roaming their land, lost in memories. For Milly, there is the constant reminder of what could have been. Twiss spent her childhood happily trailing behind their golf-pro father, but Milly dreamed about a family and children that never happened. There was hope for a young Milly, until an accident strips their father of his golfing abilities and sets in motion a series of events that rips apart the already unstable family. Dad retreats to the barn, and mom bemoans her choice to marry for love, leaving behind her wealthy family; a cousin who was thought to be a friend becomes an unexpected rival; and the sisters are left with only each other. As young women, and as old ones, they learn that their relationship is rewarding, but not without consequence. Achingly authentic and almost completely character driven, the story of the sisters depicts the endlessly binding ties of family.
Publishers Weekly
What a pleasure to become acquainted with Milly and Twiss of Spring Green, WI, as these aging sisters invite us to accompany them back to a summer in the mid-1940s when they were both at the threshold of adolescence. As their falling-apart family is in desperate need of repair, the girls try to patch up their estranged parents' relationship. Milly is as sweet as Twiss is contrary; the two have decidedly different approaches to the challenge. And both are quite taken with their older teenage cousin Bettie, who comes to spend the summer with them. Ripe with surprises, this visit will mold and shape the sisters' lives for years to come. Rasmussen's debut novel is full of grace and humanity. Her heroines are fearless and romantic, endearing and engaging, and her poetic prose creates an almost magical, wholly satisfying world. Verdict: While readers may desire to know more about the sisters' interest in "bird repair" (in their later years they tend to the needs of injured birds), this wistful but wise story is enchanting and timeless. A splendid choice for those searching for literary coming-of-age novels.—Andrea Tarr, Corona P.L., CA
Library Journal
A bittersweet, charmingly offbeat debut introduces spinster sisters Milly and Twiss looking back on a life of complicated emotions and early heartbreak. Rasmussen strikes an appealing tragicomic tone in her flashback-punctuated portrait of the elderly sisters who have devoted their lives to saving birds. Children of mismatched parents—a wealthy mother who gave up her inheritance to marry (for love) a man whose only skill was his graceful golf swing—beautiful Milly and tomboyish Twiss have spent their lives in rural Spring Green, Wis., among characters like Father Rice, who confounds his congregation one Sunday by questioning God's existence and announcing his yearning "to drink a margarita and sleep with a Mexican woman." As children, Milly dreamed of a husband and family, possibly via a relationship with local boy Asa, shy and quiet like her, while Twiss planned on being a scientist or explorer. But after the Accident that deprives their father of his golf skills and the extended visit of Cousin Bett, who rescues Milly from drowning and offers Twiss a surprising insight into herself, the future is set on different tracks. While the climax doesn't ring true, it also doesn't diminish the warmth and originality of Rasmussen's voice. A good-natured, leisurely, sometimes fanciful but fresh first work.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The Bird Sisters is set in Spring Green, Wisconsin, a small farming community by the Wisconsin River. Spring Green seems to be distinct in nearly every way from Deadwater, Minnesota, which is where Cousin Bett has grown up. How does each location shape the story, each community, and our characters? Can you imagine Milly and Twiss in Deadwater? How do the places we live shape us?
2. The novel is primarily set during the late 1940s, when the pace of life was a little bit slower than it is today. There seems to be a pervasive cultural nostalgia and a renaissance with regard to skills and cultural mores from the recent past (for example, folks learning how to can vegetables, a love of vintage clothing, etc.). Why do you think this is?
3. Memories play such a powerful role in Milly and Twiss's lives because, in many ways, their lives were arrested while both were teenagers. Can they ever be at peace? Is there always time for a fresh start?
4. Milly and Twiss will do anything and everything for each other in the novel, but they won't talk openly about all that has happened to them over the course of their lives especially events in their youth. Why is it so difficult for them? After so many years together, do you think that each knows of the other's disappointments, vulnerabilities, and heartbreaks without having to explicitly say it? Or do you think that even after all this time the two do not know each other as well as they think?
5. Money is a constant source of tension for Milly and Twiss's parents in the novel, but in the beginning of their relationship, their mother thought that her dreams would come true without her family's money, and their father thought that his dreams would come true through his proximity to money at the country club. How were they right and how were they wrong? Money, and lack of it, is also a source of conflict between other characters (for example, Father Rice steals the entire meager collection from the church and Mr. Peterson pays for Bett's medical care). How does money solve problems in the novel as well as create them?
6. Cousin Bettie Bett comes down from Deadwater, Minnesota, to stay with Milly and Twiss for the summer and in doing so changes the dynamics of their family. Bett grows close to each of the sisters in very different ways. How would the family have changed if not for Bett? In other words, do you think that the changes were the result of Bett's particular personality? Or do you think that she was just in the right place at the right time to be seen as a catalyst?
7. Both Milly and Twiss sacrifice their personal dreams for, they think, the betterment of the other. When is personal sacrifice for the sake of the larger goal noble and valiant? At what point is it foolish? Do you think that they make the right choices? How do you think Bett feels about her choices? What do you think she was trying to tell Milly by sending her the book?
8. Milly and Twiss love their parents deeply, but they don't know quite how to forgive them. How do you think their lives might change if they were able to forgive them? Are they able to forgive Bett and Asa?
9. Asa, Mr. Peterson, and Joe all seem to make significant life choices based on snap judgments. How has this impulsive streak served them well? How has it hurt them? If Asa truly loved Milly as he seemed to, how could he so quickly abandon her? Do you think he understood at the time what Milly was asking of him? And by asking it, do you think she was asking too much of someone she loved?
10. Throughout the novel, Twiss and Father Rice exchange letters. In these letters, Twiss often reveals her secret feelings. Father Rice, in turn, reveals his. In the age of the Internet, have we lost the intimacy that can be found in this old-fashioned form of correspondence, the traditional letter? How do we choose to share what we do when it's by letter, e-mail, text, Twitter, Facebook update, blog post, or telephone? When was the last time you handwrote a letter?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page (summary)
The Ministry of Special Cases
Nathan Englander, 2007
Random House
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375704444
Summary
The long-awaited novel from Nathan Englander, author of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. Englander’s wondrous and much-heralded collection of stories won the 2000 Pen/Malamud Award and was translated into more than a dozen languages.
From its unforgettable opening scene in the darkness of a forgotten cemetery in Buenos Aires, The Ministry of Special Cases casts a powerful spell.
In the heart of Argentina’s Dirty War, Kaddish Poznan struggles with a son who won’t accept him; strives for a wife who forever saves him; and spends his nights protecting the good name of a community that denies his existence—and denies a checkered history that only Kaddish holds dear.
When the nightmare of the disappeared children brings the Poznan family to its knees, they are thrust into the unyielding corridors of the Ministry of Special Cases, the refuge of last resort.
Nathan Englander’s first novel is a timeless story of fathers and sons. In a world turned upside down, where the past and the future, the nature of truth itself, all take shape according to a corrupt government’s whims, one man—one spectacularly hopeless man—fights to overcome his history and his name, and, if for only once in his life, to put things right.
Here again are all the marvelous qualities for which Englander’s first book was immediately beloved: his exuberant wit and invention, his cosmic sense of the absurd, his genius for balancing joyfulness and despair.
Through the devastation of a single family, Englander captures, indelibly, the grief of a nation. The Ministry of Special Cases, like Englander’s stories before it, is a celebration of our humanity, in all its weakness, and—despite that—hope. (From the publisher.)
About the Author Bio
• Birth—1970
• Where—West Hempstead, Long Island , New York, USA
• Education—State University of New York, Binghampton
• Awards—PEN/Malamud Award; Frank O'Connor Short Story Award
• Currently—lives in New York City
Nathan Englander is an American short story writer and novelist. His debut short story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, was published in 1999; his second, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank (2012), won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His novels include The Ministry of Special cases (2007) and Dinner at the Center of the Earth (2017).
Biography
Englander was born and raised in West Hempstead on Long Island, New York, in what is part of the Orthodox Jewish community. He attended the Hebrew Academy of Nassau County for high school and graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton and the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. In the mid-1990s, he moved to Israel, where he lived for five years.
Englander now lives both in Brooklyn, New York, and in Madison, Wisconsin. He has taught fiction at City University of New York - Hunter College in the MFA Creative Writing program. He currently teaches fiction in the MFA program at New York University.
Literary career
Since the 1999 publication of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Englander has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, and a fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Four of his short stories have appeared in editions of The Best American Short Stories:
— "The Gilgul of Park Avenue" (2000 ed.: guest editor, E.L. Doctorow
— "How We Avenged the Blums" (2006 ed.): guest ed.,r Ann Patchett
— "Free Fruit for Young Widows" (2011 ed.): guest ed., Geraldine Brooks
— "What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank" (2012 ed.): guest ed., Tom Perrotta.
The Ministry of Special Cases, Englander's 2007 novel is set in 1976 in Buenos Aires during Argentina's "Dirty War." His 2017 novel, Dinner at the Center of the Earth is concerned with the Israel-Palestinian conflict and has elements of a political thriller.
Englander has also served as juror for Canada's 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/3/2017.)
Book Reviews
Beautifully written, The Ministry of Special Cases nonetheless presents a conundrum. Englander does in fiction what his absent God cannot: create a world. And then he peoples that world with characters that he treats better than history ever would. Such decency is not a large failing in a young novelist. If only the junta had been half so kind.
Will Blythe - New York Times Book Review
A mesmerizing rumination on loss and memory.... It's a family drama layered with agonized and often comical filial connections that are stretched to the snapping point by terrible circumstance...builds with breathtaking, perfectly wrought pacing and calm, terrifying logic.
Los Angeles Times
A tour-de-force....A few pages into The Ministry of Special Cases, it becomes clear how much [Englander] has to bring to the topic: pitch-black humor, a skeptical affection for his characters, and the narrative ability to trace the impact of fascism-with-a-modern-face on a cluster of lives.
Seattle Times
Wonderful.... Since much of the book’s power comes from its relentlessly unfolding plot, it’s not fair even to tell who disappears, let alone whether that person reappears.... Englander maintains an undertone of quirky comedy almost to the end of his country.
Newsweek
Englander's prose moves along with a tempered ferocity — simple yet deceptively incisive.... Englander’s book isn’t so much about the search for a lost boy. It’s about fathers and sons and mothers and faith and community and war and hope and shame. Yes, that’s a lot to pack into 339 pages. But not when a book reads at times with the urgency of a thriller.
Esquire
Resonates of Singer, yes, but also of Bernard Malamud and Lewis Carroll, plus the Kafka who wrote The Trial.... You will wonder how a novel about parents looking for and failing to find their lost son, about a machinery of state determined to abolish not only the future but also the past, can be horrifying and funny at the same time. Somehow...this one is.
Harper's
(Audio version.) Morey's dulcet theatrical tones offset the messy lives of the characters in Englander's first novel about Jewish residents of 1970s Buenos Aires who live in fear of Argentina's vicious military dictatorship. Against the backdrop of the dirty war conducted against leftists and activists, Kaddish Poznan scratches together a living vandalizing the gravestones of Jewish criminals who are embarrassments to their families, even in eternal slumber. Morey struggles manfully with the book's religious terminology and outbursts of Spanish, but his reading is too mannered to render the vibrancy of Englander's prose. His pauses are often too long, and his line readings sometimes lean awkwardly, and puzzlingly, on certain words. Nonetheless, Morey's professional assurance means that, certain flaws notwithstanding, his reading flows along without overly noticeable interruption, accurately conveying the menace lurking behind every word, every sentence of Englander's death-haunted tale.
Publishers Weekly
Kaddish Poznan, who's been scraping along at the edge of society, suddenly finds himself in the middle of Argentina's infamous Dirty War when his son disappears. We've waited many years for Englander to follow up his remarkable story collection, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, with a first novel.
Library Journal
This is a staggeringly mature work, gracefully and knowledgeably set in a milieu far from the author’s native New York.... Four p’s best describe this work: poignant, powerful, political, and yet personal.
Booklist
The fate of Argentina's Jews during the 1976-83 "Dirty War" is depicted with blistering emotional intensity in this stark first novel from the author of the story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges (1999). Englander focuses tightly on the family of Kaddish Poznan, who scrapes together a living by obliterating despised surnames (those of "the famous Jewish pimps of Buenos Aires . . . [and] their . . . whores") from gravestones in a cemetery unvisited by their scandalized relatives. This earns him little respect from his wife, Lillian, who works for a life-insurance firm, and their 19-year-old son Pablo (nicknamed "Pato"), a university student whose political idealism estranges him from his parents' strategies for survival, as their country's ruling junta hunts down "undesirables" and innocent citizens swell the ranks of "the disappeared." A context of uncertainty and terror is gradually defined: Lillian invests in a steel door for their apartment; Kaddish trades his services to a plastic surgeon for rhinoplasties that may make him and Lillian look "less Jewish"; and the precautionary burning of their son's books in the family's bathtub sends Pato angrily away from them and into the clutches of their oppressors. Englander's perfectly engineered plot then takes the distraught parents into the belly of the beast as they importune the police and the eponymous Ministry (a Kafkaesque nightmare of doubletalk and indifferent brutality). They have a chilling confrontation with a prosperous general and his heartless wife and more despairing encounters with a phlegmatic relief worker, a priest who can do good only by circumventing moral action and a self-described "monster" who survives by performing the dirty war's dirtiest deeds. One stunning twist discloses Pato's fate in a way neither parent will ever accept, and the novel climaxes where it began, in a cemetery, where Kaddish hopes, against hope, to beat the murderers at their own game. A political novel anchored, unforgettably, in the realm of the personal. Englander's story collection promised a brilliant future, and that promise is here fulfilled beyond all expectations.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Kaddish is the only one of the children of the Society of the Benevolent Self—“a disgrace beyond measure for every Argentine Jew”—who is willing to acknowledge his heritage. Yet he makes his living from obliterating the names on tombstones in the sealed-off cemetery that contains his heritage. How does Kaddish see himself: as a servant of the truth and of history, or as an opportunist with no particular loyalties?
2. Why does Kaddish force Pato to work with him in the graveyard, and why does he force him to strike the chisel that will obliterate the name from the stone? As they drive home from the hospital Pato tells Kaddish, “You're lazy. You're a failure. You've kept us down. You embarrass us. You cut off my finger. You ruined my life.” The narrator goes on to refer to “the grand Jewish tradition of the dayeinu.... And central to the form is the notion that each accusation, if that had been Kaddish's only shortcoming, still it would have been enough” [p. 61]. How complicated are Pato's feelings for his father? Why does Kaddish so often make poor decisions?
3. The Ministry of Special Cases is rooted in Argentina's history from the time of the Zvi Migdal—a criminal organization of Jewish gangsters who were active in Buenos Aires and ran the brothels—to the time of the military junta of 1976-1983, during which thousands of Argentine citizens, mostly young people, vanished without a trace. Do some research into this history, and discuss with your group how it affects your reading of the story.
4. Kaddish's mother, Favorita, was the victim of another kind of kidnapping, a form of white slavery [p. 21]. Beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, poor young women from Russian shetls were seduced into false marriages and sold into prostitution in the brothels of Buenos Aires. How much control do the people in this novel have over their lives? We're told that Kaddish had “never expected a happy life; only moments of joy to carry him through” [pp. 94-95]. How does Kaddish's background influence his approach to life?
5. Kaddish's negotiations with Mazursky, and the fallout from his acceptance of the offer of two nose jobs, constitute an absurdist episode in a largely tragic story. How does Englander manage to mingle comedy with his darker plot? What is the effect of his narrative style for you as a reader?
6. A chain of books including Chekhov, Lermontov, and Voltaire tells how Pato chose his patrimony: “Each book begat another. For a boy whose entire family history dead-ended on his father's side, this is how Pato traced his line” [pp. 93-94]. The second struggle—a fateful one—between father and son takes place after Kaddish has tried to burn Pato's books. What do the books tell us about Pato, and why does he attempt to save them even though he understands the risk to himself if these books are discovered? Why does Kaddish curse his son [p. 116]? What does Pato mean by his parting statement, “Fathers are always fathers. Sons always sons” [p. 122]?
7. Look closely at the descriptive prose, the tone, and the pacing of Chapter 17, and discuss what this passage demonstrates about Englander as a writer.
8. It is a matter of historical fact that during the junta young people suspected of having politically subversive views were arrested, interrogated and tortured, drugged and thrown out of airplanes. Infant children of the disappeared were sometimes adopted by military families—as happens here with the general and his wife [pp. 107-08]. These facts seem, perhaps, utterly surreal and fictional. How does Englander want his readers to experience history in this story?
9. Given the fact that no one (except the extremely brave woman in the bakery) will help Kaddish and Lillian recover their son, and that in their loss the parents too are negated, the novel implies that the Argentine people capitulated, in their silence, to the corruption and savagery of the junta. As Cacho says, “Everyone is sleeping deeply” [p. 126]. Does the novel imply that people get the government they deserve? What might cause such passivity and acquiescence in a population?
10. What are the key elements of Lillian's character, and how does she differ from Kaddish in her attempts to deal with Pato's disappearance? Do you identify more with her continuing hope than with Kaddish's belief that Pato is dead? Or the reverse?
11. What is ironic about the concept of habeus corpus as a legality by which the junta protects itself from accusations of kidnapping? Why do Kaddish and Lillian need a witness in order to get a writ of habeus corpus for Pato [pp. 209, 223-27]?
12. What strategies does The Ministry of Special Cases use in dealing with the families of the disappeared? What do the people who work there, including the military priest who takes Lillian's money, hope to achieve? How does Kaddish attempt to deal with the impossible demands being made by the priest and with Lillian's desire to meet them?
13. Discuss Englander's decision, in Chapter 43, to introduce the character of the unnamed girl who finds Pato's notes to his parents and dies without ever delivering these notes. “The memory is the girl's alone, and that's how it will stay. Still, in this horrible time when the junta would weave a nation's truth from lies, Lillian would have been happy and Kaddish would have been happy that, independent of them, one fine girl for one fine day believed in Pato Poznan—both living and dead” [p. 304]. What is interesting about this situation in which one desaparecido bears witness, silently, to the existence of another?
14. The novel is deeply concerned with the questions of identity: we see the changing or the removal of names, the alteration of faces and of the past. In contrast to all this, the girl who finds the notes on which Pato has written his name thinks, “It was such a civilized act, writing one's name, a concrete act. It made her think she could leave a history herself” [p. 302]. Why are these two sentences so important to the novel?
15. The rabbi who named Kaddish said, “Let his name be Kaddish to ward off the angel of death. A trick and a blessing. Let this child be the mourner instead of the mourned” [p. 8]. Does Kaddish's name suit him? What resonance do the rabbi's words take on, given the arc of the whole story?
16. The episode of the girl in the cell reveals the fact that Pato was held there as well, and that he undoubtedly shared the same fate as the girl who finds his notes in the foam mattress. So Kaddish is right about his son's fate, while Lillian is wrong. How does this knowledge affect your reading of the last final chapters?
17. Kaddish's desire to bury and to mourn his son meets with frustration when a rabbi tells him, in an ironic return to the habeus corpus problem, that he cannot bury his son if he has no body to bury. Does this constitute a final estrangement from the Jewish community for Kaddish, especially since the desire to give the dead the proper rites of burial accords with an ancient Jewish tradition? What do you make of Kaddish's attempt to trick Lillian into accepting the bones of a stranger for her son's?
18. Englander says that in writing the novel, “I became obsessed with the almost quantum-mechanical evil that is a byproduct of disappearing people. To kill a person is to deny that person a future—the basic act that is murder. To 'disappear' that same person is also, oddly, to reach in and undo the past. It's not to make them no-more. It's to make them, not-ever. It is to be undone. It's a way of fracturing the seeming unbreakable link between future and past. The question that flows through much of this novel, I guess, is: Despite the best intentions how do we–as individuals, or societies (take your pick)—contribute to our own undoing?” How would you address the ideas here, as well as the final question?
19. What is the effect of the novel's final pages? How do you imagine the rest of life for Kaddish and Lillian? Does the conclusion provide a sense of closure, or does it refuse to do so?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page
Shadow Tag
Louise Erdrich, 2010
HarperCollins
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061536106
Summary
When Irene America discovers that her husband, Gil, has been reading her diary, she begins a secret Blue Notebook, stashed securely in a safe-deposit box.
There she records the truth about her life and her marriage, while turning her Red Diary—hidden where Gil will find it—into a manipulative farce. Alternating between these two records, complemented by unflinching third-person narration, Shadow Tag is an eerily gripping read.
When the novel opens, Irene is resuming work on her doctoral thesis about George Catlin, the nineteenth-century painter whose Native American subjects often regarded his portraits with suspicious wonder. Gil, who gained notoriety as an artist through his emotionally revealing portraits of his wife—work that is adoring, sensual, and humiliating, even shocking—realizes that his fear of losing Irene may force him to create the defining work of his career.
Meanwhile, Irene and Gil fight to keep up appearances for their three children: fourteen-year-old genius Florian, who escapes his family's unraveling with joints and a stolen bottle of wine; Riel, their only daughter, an eleven-year-old feverishly planning to preserve her family, no matter what disaster strikes; and sweet kindergartener Stoney, who was born, his parents come to realize, at the beginning of the end.
As her home increasingly becomes a place of violence and secrets, and she drifts into alcoholism, Irene moves to end her marriage. But her attachment to Gil is filled with shadowy need and delicious ironies.
In brilliantly controlled prose, Shadow Tag fearlessly explores the complex nature of love, the fluid boundaries of identity, and one family's struggle for survival and redemption. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 7, 1954
• Where—Little Falls, Minnesota, USA
• Education—A.B., Dartmouth College; M.A., Johns Hopkins
• Awards—National Book Award; National Book Critics Circle Award; Nelson Algren Prize
• Currently—lives in Minnesota
Karen Louise Erdrich is an author of some 20 novels, as well as poetry, short stories, and children's books. She has some Native American ancestry and is widely acclaimed as one of the most significant writers of the second wave of what critic Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance.
In 1984, Erdrich won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her debut novel, Love Medicine. In 2009, her novel The Plague of Doves was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and three years later, in 2012, she won the National Book Award for Round House.
Erdrich is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The eldest of seven children, Erdrich was born to Ralph and Rita Erdrich in Little Falls, Minnesota. Her father was German-American while her mother was French and Anishinaabe (Ojibwa). Her grandfather Patrick Gourneau served as a tribal chairman for the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Erdrich grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota where her parents taught at the Bureau of Indian Affairs school.
She attended Dartmouth College in 1972-1976, earning an AB degree and meeting her future husband, the Modoc anthropologist and writer Michael Dorris. He was then director of the college’s Native American Studies program. Subsequently, Erdrich worked in a wide variety of jobs, including as a lifeguard, waitress, poetry teacher at prisons, and construction flag signaler. She also became an editor for The Circle, a newspaper produced by and for the urban Native population in Boston. Erdrich graduated with a Master of Arts degree in creative writing from Johns Hopkins University in 1979.
In the period 1978-1982, Erdrich published many poems and short stories. It was also during this period that she began collaborating with Dorris, initially working through the mail while Dorris was working in New Zealand. The relationship progressed, and the two were married in 1981. During this time, Erdrich assembled the material that would eventually be published as the poetry collection Jacklight.
In 1982, Erdrich's story "The World’s Greatest Fisherman" was awarded the $5,000 Nelson Algren Prize for short fiction. This convinced Erdrich and Dorris, who continued to work collaboratively, that they should embark on writing a novel.
Early Novels
In 1984, Erdrich published the novel Love Medicine. Made up of a disjointed but interconnected series of short narratives, each told from the perspective of a different character, and moving backwards and forward in time through every decade between the 1930s and the present day, the book told the stories of several families living near each other on a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation.
The innovative techniques of the book, which owed a great deal to the works of William Faulkner but have little precedent in Native-authored fiction, allowed Erdrich to build up a picture of a community in a way entirely suited to the reservation setting. She received immediate praise from author/critics such as N. Scott Momaday and Gerald Vizenor, and the book was awarded the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award. It has never subsequently been out of print.
Erdrich followed Love Medicine with The Beet Queen, which continued her technique of using multiple narrators, but surprised many critics by expanding the fictional reservation universe of Love Medicine to include the nearby town of Argus, North Dakota. Native characters are very much kept in the background in this novel, while Erdrich concentrates on the German-American community. The action of the novel takes place mostly before World War II.
The Beet Queen was subject to a bitter attack from Native novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, who accused Erdrich of being more concerned with postmodern technique than with the political struggles of Native peoples.
Erdrich and Dorris’ collaborations continued through the 1980s and into the 1990s, always occupying the same fictional universe.
Tracks goes back to the early 20th century at the formation of the reservation and introduces the trickster figure of Nanapush, who owes a clear debt to Nanabozho. Erdrich’s novel most rooted in Anishinaabe culture (at least until Four Souls), it shows early clashes between traditional ways and the Roman Catholic Church.
The Bingo Palace updates but does not resolve various conflicts from Love Medicine: set in the 1980s, it shows the effects both good and bad of a casino and a factory being set up among the reservation community. Finally, Tales of Burning Love finishes the story of Sister Leopolda, a recurring character from all the former books, and introduces a new set of white people to the reservation universe.
Erdrich and Dorris wrote The Crown of Columbus, the only novel to which both writers put their names, and A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, credited to Dorris. Both of these were set away from the Argus reservation.
Domestic Life
The couple had six children, three of them adopted. Dorris had adopted the children when he was single. After their marriage, Erdrich also adopted them, and the couple had three daughters together. Some of the children had difficulties.
In 1989 Dorris published The Broken Cord, a book about fetal alcohol syndrome, from which their adopted son Reynold Abel suffered. Dorris had found it was a widespread and until then relatively undiagnosed problem among Native American children because of mothers' alcohol issues. In 1991, Reynold Abel was hit by a car and killed at age 23.
In 1995 their son Jeffrey Sava accused them both of child abuse. Dorris and Erdrich unsuccessfully pursued an extortion case against him. Shortly afterward, Dorris and Erdrich separated and began divorce proceedings. Erdrich claimed that Dorris had been depressed since the second year of their marriage.
On April 11, 1997, Michael Dorris committed suicide in Concord, New Hampshire.
Later Writings
Erdrich’s first novel after divorce, The Antelope Wife, was the first to be set outside the continuity of the previous books. She has subsequently returned to the reservation and nearby towns, and has produced five novels since 1998 dealing with events in that fictional area. Among these are The Master Butchers Singing Club, a macabre mystery which again draws on Erdrich's Native American and German-American heritage, and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. Both have geographic and character connections with The Beet Queen.
Together with several of her previous works, these have drawn comparisons with William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha novels. The successive novels have created multiple narratives in the same fictional area and combined the tapestry of local history with current themes and modern consciousness.
In The Plague of Doves, Erdrich has continued the multi-ethnic dimension of her writing, weaving together the layered relationships among residents of farms, towns and reservations; their shared histories, secrets, relationships and antipathies; and the complexities for later generations of re-imagining their ancestors' overlapping pasts. The novel was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2009.
Erdrich's 2010 book, Shadow Tag, was a departure for her, as she focuses on a failed marriage.
Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Anishinaabe nation (also known as Ojibwa and Chippewa). Erdrich also has German, French and American ancestry. One sister, Heidi, publishes under the name Heid E. Erdrich; she is a poet who also resides in Minnesota. Another sister, Lise Erdrich, has written children's books and collections of fiction and essays. For the past few years, the three Erdrich sisters have hosted annual writers workshops on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota.
The award-winning photographer Ronald W. Erdrich is one of their cousins. He lives and works in Abilene, Texas. He was named "Star Photojournalist of the Year" in 2004 by the Texas Associated Press Managing Editors association. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[I]n places, Shadow Tag seems more like notes for a novel than fully realized fiction.... Elsewhere, though, Erdrich’s unbridled urgency yields startlingly original phrasing...as well as flashes of blinding lucidity.... [T]he character to whom, in the end, Erdrich assigns all agency, all authorial power, changes our understanding of everything that has come before. The choice feels wistful, possibly noble and almost unbearably sad.
Leah Hager Cohen - New York Times Book Review
[A] tense little masterpiece of marital strife that recalls [Erdrich's] tragic relationship with the poet Michael Dorris. Gossips will trace the story's parallels to the author's life, but for all its voyeuristic temptations, Shadow Tag is no roman a clef, no act of spousal revenge on her estranged husband, who committed suicide in 1997. Instead, Erdrich has done what so many writers can't or won't do in this age of self-exposure: transform her own wrenching experience into a captivating work of fiction that says far more about the universal tragedy of spoiled love than it reveals about her private life.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
A fast-paced novel of exceptional artistic, intellectual, and psychological merit.... Nowhere have love’s complications been better illustrated than in the raw honesty of Shadow Tag.
Boston Globe
Shadow Tag is hard to put down...It builds to a spectacular ending with a twist I didn’t see coming.... Erdrich has taken a tragedy and turned it into art.
Philadelphia Inquirer
Read this if: You’re looking for a well-written, well-told tale that is thought—and discussion—provoking.
Baltimore Sun
Erdrich's bleak latest (after The Plague of Doves) chronicles the collapse of a family. Irene America is a beautiful, introspective woman of Native American ancestry, struggling to finish her dissertation while raising three children. She is married to Gil, a painter whose reputation is built on a series of now iconic portraits of Irene, but who can't break through to the big time, pigeonholed as a Native American painter. Irene's fallen out of love with Gil and discovers that he's been reading her diary, so she begins a new, hidden, diary and uses her original diary as a tool to manipulate Gil. Erdrich deftly alternates between excerpts from these two diaries and third-person narration as she plots the emotional war between Irene and Gil, and Gil's dark side becomes increasingly apparent as Irene, fighting her own alcoholism, struggles to escape. Erdrich ties her various themes together with an intriguing metaphor—riffing on Native American beliefs about portraits as shadows and shadows as souls—while her steady pacing and remarkable insight into the inner lives of children combine to make this a satisfying and compelling novel.
Publishers Weekly
Irene America is a smart, beautiful Minneapolis Ojibwe. Too distracted to finish her doctoral degree, she musters the emotional resources needed to keep two journals. The "Red Diary" is bait, filled with adulterous scenes that Irene uses to push volatile artist husband Gil close enough to the brink that he'll leave her. She unleashes all her rage and frustration in the "Blue Notebook," which she keeps in a bank deposit box. Meanwhile, Gil believes that his obsessive graphic paintings of Irene will somehow lure her back to him. Caught in the crosshairs of their parents' cruel, messy unraveling are 13-year-old Florian, a genius who models his mother's excessive drinking habits; Riel, 11, who believes that only she can hold her disintegrating family together; and sunny little Stoney. Verdict: Erdrich's latest is a brilliant cautionary tale of the shocking havoc willfully destructive, self-centered spouses wreak not only upon themselves but also upon their children. Reading it is like watching a wildfire whose flames are so mesmerizingly beautiful that it's almost easy to ignore the deadly mess left behind. —Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI
Library Journal
An exquisite, character-driven tale...its piercing insights into sex, family, and power are breathtaking…A masterfully concentrated and gripping novel of image and conquest, autonomy and love, inheritance and loss. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
Taking a risky leap, Erdrich sets aside the magical-realist style of her many volumes about the Ojibwes to write a domestic tragedy set among sophisticated, assimilated, highly educated and successful Native Americans. Gil and Irene live with their kids Florian, Riel and Stony in a seemingly idyllic home in Minneapolis. Gil is a renowned painter, Irene the subject of his graphically revealing portraits. Also a gifted historian, she is currently doing research for her doctorate dissertation about the painter George Catlin. Self-consciously aware of their heritage, Gil (raised in poverty by his white mother after his Native American father's death in Vietnam) and Irene (given a middle-class upbringing by her AIM activist mother) know that observers consider them an iconic couple. But Gil has a habit of brutalizing the children he cherishes, and Irene cannot relinquish the glass of wine always in her hand to protect them. When Irene realizes that Gil has been reading her diary, she feels her soul has been invaded. She begins writing entries to play with his mind, torturing him about an affair he imagines she is having. Obsessed with his love for Irene, Gil thinks that he wants to save the marriage. Irene thinks that she wants to free herself from Gil. Both are lying to themselves. Erdrich's unsparing prose dissects these two deeply flawed characters to show their ugliest selves, yet she allows them each their moments of joy and spiritual respite alone, together and with their children. Into this deeply personal novel about marriage, family and individual identity, she also weaves broader questions about cause and effect in history—specifically the effect Catlin's painting of Native Americans had on them and on him—that resonate within her characters' lives. Readers familiar with Erdrich's personal life may suspect she has written close to the bone here, but she manages the rare achievement of rising above the facts she has incorporated to create a small masterpiece of compelling, painfully moving 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 Shadow Tag:
1. Start with the title....what is its significance within the scope of the story? What does it mean to step on a shadow?
2. Describe both Gil and Irene. What kind of people are they, and what is their relationship with one another? What does each character want from the other...or not want?
3. Care to comment on this passage?
They might hate each other, at least, Irene might hate Gil, while he had no idea how much he hated Irene because he was so focused on winning back her love.
Is this an accurate assessment? Do the two hate one another?
4. What kind of parents are Irene and Gil? Why doesn't Irene protect the children from Gil's abuse? How are Florian, Riel, and Stony protrayed...and how are they affected by the family's dysfunction?
5. Gil uses Irene as a model for his paintings...while Irene is studying a Native American painter whose subjects died soon after they were painted. Talk about this as a metaphor within the story—the affect that Gil's paintings have on Irene and her sense of identity?
6. Why does Irene keep two diaries? Who is at fault here when it comes to duplicity and/or stealth? Which is more important in a marriage—respect for privacy or transparency and truth?
7. Do you care about these characters—are either (or any of them) sympathetic? Does this book have a villain?
8. Does the 3rd-person narrator seem to side with Irene? If so, does it influence your attitude toward the characters? Is the narrator reliable?
9. What about the ending? Do you feel it is "almost unbearably sad" as the New York Times reviewer writes? Would you like to have seen it end differently? Would a different ending have maintained the novel's integrity?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page (summary)
Wrapped in Rain
Charles Martin, 2005
Thomas Nelson, Inc.
340 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781595541864
Summary
The only good thing Alabama business mogul Rex Mason ever did was hire Miss Ella Rain to take care of his mansion, Waverly Hall, and to keep his boys-Tucker and Mutt-out of sight. A single and childless black woman of abiding faith, Miss Ella raised the boys, loved them like her own, and did her best to protect them during Rex's drunken rages. After she died, however, Mutt's mental disorder rapidly deteriorated and Tucker, alone and overwhelmed, committed Mutt to a mental hospital.
Now Tucker hides behind a successful career—traveling the world as an international photographer. But he can only run for so long. When Mutt escapes from the mental hospital and a childhood friend, Katie, reappears with an abusive husband on her trail, he must face the demons of his childhood. Rather than sink into tragedy, he must consider facing his father and opening his heart once again.
Wrapped in Rain is a tough and tender novel about weathering adversity and recognizing the many faces of love, regardless of who, how, where, or why. Love is a risk—but it's far more dangerous to live without it. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 3, 1969
• Education—B.A., Florida State University; M.A., Ph.D.,
Regent University
• Currently—Jacksonville, Florida, USA
Charles Martin is the author of Where the River Ends, Chasing Fireflies, Maggie, When Crickets Cry, Wrapped in Rain, The Dead Don't Dance, and The Mountain Between Us.
He earned his B.A. in English from Florida State University, and his M.A. in Journalism and Ph.D. in Communication from Regent University. He served one year at Hampton University as an adjunct professor in the English department and as a doctoral fellow at Regent. In 1999, he left a career in business to pursue his writing.
He and his wife, Christy, live a stone's throw from the St. John's River in Jacksonville, Florida, with their three boys: Charlie, John T. and Rives. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
Charles Martin writes with the passion and delicacy of a Louisiana sunrise—shades of shepherd's warning and a promise of thunderbolts before noon.
John Dyson - Reader's Digest
Novelist Charles Martin has been compared to Nicholas Sparks and Don J. Snyder, but that doesn't give him his due. While his skills are similar to theirs, Martin also writes from a distinctive Southern perspective, injecting each scene with that meadering storytelling style that marked the work of Twain, Faulkner, and O'Conner.
Today's Christian
Martin's writing is strong, honest, and memorable. He's an author to discover now—and then keep your eye on.
Carol Fitzgerald - Bookreporter.com
In his second novel, Martin (The Dead Don't Dance) introduces Tucker Mason, the motherless son of a wealthy, abusive alcoholic in a small Alabama town. While Dad spends most of his time in an Atlanta high-rise, Tucker grows up in an enormous manse-complete with a "chandelier made from elk horns"—tutored by an African-American widow in common courtesy, love and the gospel. After a few years, an illegitimate son turns up at the Mason compound, Tucker's half-brother, Mutt. Although Tucker eventually overcomes his gothic childhood and becomes an acclaimed international photographer, he can't escape the home place. The story picks up with Tucker's adulthood, when he makes peace with several individuals from his past, including the schizophrenic Mutt and an ex-girlfriend who's on the run from a nasty husband. This group of Southern grotesques manages to make Christmas together and, readers sense, forge a kind of family. Martin spins an engaging story about healing and the triumph of love. The novel is filled with delightful local color—at Clark's Fish Camp, you can order shrimp or catfish, and you can have them fried or fried. While the evil characters are too caricaturish and one-dimensional, and the prose is clean but hardly luminous, this is a welcome cut above run-of-the-mill inspirational fiction.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. What is the meaning of the title? Discuss the apparent incongruity of being "wrapped" in something that is both transparent and wet, something that most of us try to avoid getting "caught" in.
2. What are some of the roles that actual rain plays in the story's events?
3. How does Miss Ella's surname represent her role in the story?
4. Note that Mutt's first act upon returning to Waverly is to drain the water tower of dirty, "putrid" water. What does this symbolize? Why had this chore been neglected by Tucker?
5. Two important passages about Jesus and children are found in the book of Matthew: "unless you . . . become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" and "let the little children come to me . . . for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." What do you think the author wants us to understand by naming the second brother Matthew? What is the real significance of his nickname?
6. Miss Ella tells the boys repeatedly that "love always wins." What does she mean by that? Discuss the ways in which love trumps the other forces at play in the story.
7. Tucker tells us that "if Mutt was good at one thing, it was hiding." But several of the characters in the story seem to be hiding something, or hiding from something. What must each of them find in order to resolve their own conflict?
8. The author often likens Waverly to hell, or purgatory, as indicated in the descriptions of the property—from the weeping mortar of the house, to the self-created quarry used to build it, to its owner Rex. Yet the property also contains a church, reminders of Miss Ella's love and care are all over the property, and Tucker, Mutt, and Katie are all drawn to it as if to a sanctuary. Discuss the conflicting role Waverly plays in the lives of the main characters.
9. Tucker refers often to the boat resting below the surface of the spring water that fills the quarry. What other issues in the story lay below the surface, yet in plain view?
10. Imagery of fathers and sons abounds, from the father and boys at the boat dock to the substitute father Tuck represents for Jason. Yet the predominant father image is the horrible one represented by Rex. Tucker is angry with his father for abandoning him, yet Miss Ella reminds him that "you've always had a Father." What does she mean?
11. Doc tells Tuck that as a photographer, "you see things that others don't." But Tuck seems blind to many things. What role does Doc play in the story?
12. Human suffering, particularly the agony of Jesus, is one of the most powerful messages in Christianity. Discuss the ways in which Mutt is a Christ-figure in the story, from his teaching to his suffering and rebirth.
13. In baseball, even the best hitters strike out more often than they hit home runs. Discuss the author's use of baseball as a metaphor for life. Why does Miss Ella admonish Tuck with "Why're you living your life so differently than you played baseball?"
14. Mutt tells his brother that home is where Tucker is. What are the various homecomings represented in the story?
15. Baptism, and the notion of rebirth, is the most important celebration in Christian life, and Waverly, in the object of the water tower, has its own baptismal font. What symbolic "baptisms" occur in the novel? What triggers each one, and what is the significance?
16. Miss Ella asks Moses to dig Tucker's grave for him and let him fill it in. Why does she do this?
17. Both Miss Ella and Tucker refer to the Twenty-fifth Psalm as a source of comfort. Review this passage and discuss the parallels to characters and trials in the book.
18. Isaiah 11:6 contains the passage "and a little child will lead them." Discuss the ways in which Jason leads Tucker to forgiveness, and the ways Mutt leads the reconstituted family to redemption. Look at the rest of this verse and consider the meaning as it relates to the novel.
19. Mutt's "root issue," as Gibby refers to it, stems from the night he watched Rex beat Miss Ella. How does Tucker's acknowledgement that it wasn't Mutt's fault affect Mutt's stability? How does it affect Tucker? Katie?
20. Miss Ella knows that both Tucker and Mutt will be destroyed if they allow themselves to hate Rex. What changes occur after Tucker verbalizes his forgiveness to Rex and leaves the baseball bat in his room? What other events in the storyline occur only because someone chose to forgive? How might the story have ended if any one of those people had chosen to hold on to hate or anger? H ow have you seen forgiveness affect people in your life?
21. Miss Ella knew with certainty that her calling in life was to care for and protect Tucker and Mutt. What was Tuck's calling? Mutt's? What is your calling?
22. The novel contains several non-beautiful, even grotesque, characters, such as Bessie, Whitey, the pierced waitress, Judge, and Miss Ella. What role do they play in the story? What is Miss Ella trying to teach Tucker as she constantly reminds him to look below the surface when he interacts with these people? Why are the lenses through which we view the world so important?
23. Mutt is the one who is certifiably insane, but both he and Tucker hear voices. Which of the brothers do you think is the most sane? What are the differences in the voices Mutt hears and the ones Tucker hears?
24. Tucker holds baseball in high regard, especially as an important experience in the father-son relationship. Why? What is the significance of him playing baseball with Jason?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page
Lord of Misrule
Jaimy Gordon, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307946737
Summary
Winner, 2010 National Book Award for Fiction
A brilliant novel that captures the dusty, dark, and beautiful world of small-time horse racing, where trainers, jockeys, grooms and grifters vie for what little luck is offered at a run-down West Virginia track.
Tommy Hansel has a plan: run four horses, all better than they look on paper, at long odds at Indian Mound Downs, then grab the purse—or cash a bet—and run before anyone’s the wiser. At his side is Maggie Koderer, who finds herself powerfully drawn to the gorgeous, used up animals of the cheap track. She also lands in the cross-hairs of leading trainer Joe Dale Bigg.
But as news of Tommy’s plan spreads, from veteran groom Medicine Ed, to loan shark Two-Tie, to Kidstuff the blacksmith, it’s Maggie, not Tommy or the handlers of legendary stakes horse Lord of Misrule, who will find what's valuable in a world where everything has a price. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 4, 1944
• Where—Baltimore, Maryland, USA
• Education—B.A., Antioch College; M.A., Ph.D.,
Brown Univeristy
• Awards—National Book Award
• Currently—lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan
Jaimy Gordon is an American writer. She graduated from Antioch College in 1966, received an M.A. in English from Brown University in 1972, and earned Doctor of Arts in Creative Writing in l975, also from Brown.
She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she teaches in the MFA program of Western Michigan University. She is author of the underground fantasy classic Shamp of the City-Solo. Her fourth novel, Lord of Misrule, won the 2010 National Book Award for fiction. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Perhaps Lord of Misrule would not be so startling if Ms. Gordon's other books had been more widely read. But this novel is so assured, exotic and uncategorizable, with such an unlikely provenance, that it arrives as an incontrovertible winner, a bona fide bolt from the blue…Ms. Gordon is magically adept at fusing the banal and the mythic…She's also keenly attuned to all the aspects of carnality and power that infuse this story, from the way horses feel in human hands to the way Tommy uses his physical magnetism both to dominate Maggie and to use her as a tease for others.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Gordon has completely mastered the language of the racetrack, and formed it into an evocative and idiosyncratic style. Lord of Misrule...abounds with observations and aphorisms about horses, money and luck. It's replete with the rhythm and wisdom of this way of looking at life, but Gordon has thought so thoroughly about her characters that each voice dips into racetrack lingo in a distinctive way. It is an impressive performance…such a beautifully written novel that I wish I could say that every element works to perfection; I can't. But for that sense of being steeped in a specific and alien world, it is remarkable.
Jane Smiley - Washington Post
National Book Award-finalist Gordon's new novel begins and ends at a backwoods race track in early-1970s West Virginia, where horse trainer Tommy Hansel dreams up a scam. He'll run four horses in claiming races at long odds and get out before anyone realizes how good his horses are. But at a track as small as Indian Mound Downs, where everyone knows everybody's business, Hansel's hopes are quickly dashed. Soon his luminous, tragic girlfriend, Maggie, appears, drawing the eye of everyone, including sadistic gangster Joe Dale Bigg. Though Maggie finds herself with an unexpected protector in family gangster Two-Tie, even he can't protect her from her own fascination with the track and its misfit members. While Gordon's latest reaches for Great American Novel status, and her use of the colloquial voice perfectly evokes the time and place, constant shifts in perspective make the novel feel over-styled and under-plotted. And Maggie's supposed charisma clashes with her behavior, leaving the feeling that something's missing whereas Hansel is more witnessed than examined, his character developing almost entirely through the eyes of others, creating uncertainty that often borders on indifference.
Publishers Weekly
This is not the world of Seabiscuit or Secretariat, where the right horse winning the right race makes everything good; this is a goofered world ruled by misrule. But sometimes, as Gordon tells it, the smell of pine tar and horse manure can function like a “devil’s tonic.” Words can do that, too, as this nearly word-perfect novel makes abundantly clear. —Bill Ott
Booklist
A novel of luck, pluck, farce and above all horse racing—not at tony and elegant sites like Churchill Downs and Ascot but rather at a rinky-dink racetrack in Indian Mound Downs, W.Va. Gordon (Bogeywoman, 1999, etc.) clearly loves the subculture of grifters and ne'er-do-wells whose lives center on a venue that obviously has never and will never bring them success. Her lowlifes have names like Two-Tie, Medicine Ed, Kidstuff and Deucey, and they're capable of speaking a kind of racetrack patois occasionally reminiscent of Damon Runyon characters: "So I want you should write me a race, well, not me personally, fellow from Nebraska, kid I used to know back when—actually I used to know his mother...She was very good to me. Alas, I fear I did not return the favor like I should have." At the center of the novel is Tommy Hansel, a horse trainer with a get-rich-quick scheme that he feels cannot fail. He plans to enter "sure-fire" winners in claiming races, benefit from the long odds, then get out of town quickly. Nothing, of course, goes according to plan, especially since everyone seems on to his scheme, and the horses aren't as cooperative as Tommy would like them to be. Complicating the issue is the quirky, intelligent Maggie Koderer, new to the horse-race business but nonetheless Tommy's love. Maggie is college-educated but is drawn to the seamy underbelly of the track and the broken-down beauty of the horses. Gordon structures the narrative around the four horses, the last best hope being Lord of Misrule, and she seamlessly moves the reader from one narrative consciousness to another without being manipulative or intrusive. The writing about the races themselves is a tour de force of energy and esprit. By the end of the novel none of the characters quite have what they want, but most of them get what they deserve. Exceptional writing and idiosyncratic characters make this an engaging read.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What does Maggie’s arrival at Indian Mound Downs establish about the way things work at the track? What do Medicine Ed and Deucey’s reactions to Maggie demonstrate about the pecking order at the track?
2. Why do Ed and Deucey put up with the deprivations and humiliations of their daily routines? What comforts or satisfactions does hanging out at the track provide?
3. What aspects of Maggie’s past and character account for her attraction to Tommy? What qualities make him appealing to her? What are the implications of her recognition that “He wasn’t quite right in the soul, really” [p. 22]?
4. Deucey tells Maggie, “I wrote the book on two-faced false-hearted luck, girlie, anything you want to know about going it on your own at the races, come to me” [p. 23]. What roles does Deucey assume in Maggie’s life? What does she teach Maggie, either directly or by example, about being a woman in a man’s world?
5. In what ways does Medicine Ed embody the characteristics of racetrack habitués at every level, from owners to grooms, petty crooks to inveterate fans? What does he demonstrate about the opposing pulls of actual experience and the fantasies and hopes that shape our lives?
6. Gordon has discussed the similarity between Medicine Ed and Two-Tie, describing them as “lonely and childless old men deeply tired of the daily work they do, facing their last years without the protection of family” [National Book Foundation interview with Bret Anthony Johnston]. What reasons does Two-Tie offer for the way his life turned out? In what ways does his Jewish background shape his identity and influence his worldview?
7. At the beginning of the novel, Maggie projects a girlish innocence and an eagerness to experience life. How does she change over the course of the novel? What light do her musings at the end of the novel [p. 289-90] shed on what she has lost and gained? What do her reactions to Tommy’s deterioration reveal about the woman she has become?
8. In a review in The Washington Post [November 16, 2010] Jane Hamilton wrote, “[Gordon’s] four horse characters—Mr. Boll Weevil, Little Spinoza, Pelter and Lord of Misrule—are bursting with personality.” From their names to their histories to their performances in races, how does Gordon bring out the distinctive qualities of each horse? Does she avoid anthropomorphizing them? What does the novel show about the gap between human assumptions and the horses’ innate intelligence and their accommodations to the regimens and expectations imposed by humans?
9. One critic called Maggie’s “relationship with horses the most erotic one in the book” [Bob Hoover, Philly.com 11/27/10]. Do the descriptions of Maggie’s tending to the horses (pp. 110, 133, and 199, for example) support this judgment
10. Luck is a central theme in Lord of Misrule:
For Tommy, “[luck] came because you called to it, whistled for it, because it saw you wouldn’t take no for an answer” [p 22]. According to Maggie, “A person had to see himself, or herself, as lucky not just once in a while, but plugged into a steady current of luck, like an electrical appliance.... People who thought they couldn’t lose—Joe Dale Bigg, for one—were some kind of machinery” [p. 159].
How are these different approaches or concepts reflected in the actions taken by Tommy and Bigg? Are any of the characters able to resist or defeat the whims of luck and chance? If so, what allows them to do so?
11. Most of the novel is written in the third person. How does Gordon make the thoughts and the conversational styles of each character distinct? Discuss her use of racetrack slang and nicknames, invented words, and dialect in bringing to life an unfamiliar milieu and its denizens.
12. Why does Gordon switch to the second person in the chapters devoted to Tommy? What are the benefits and the limitations of this unusual narrative voice? Does it bring Tommy into sharper focus? How does his self-image differ from the perceptions of others and in what ways does it confirm them? What do the intimate tone, uninhibited language, and graphic sexual descriptions of these sections add to the novel?
13. Does the structure of the novel—the chapter-by-chapter focus on particular horses and races—enhance the reader’s involvement with the story? Does it help to illuminate the diverse factors that influence the characters’ actions? How does it affect the progress of the plot and the build-up to the final race?
14. Gordon weaves many literary and religious allusions into the story. The name of Hansel’s horse, the Mahdi (the redeemer of the world in Islamic religion), is one example; what other references can you identify? What literary motifs or narrative traditions are evoked in the accounts of the horses’ lineage [p. 114]; Tommy’s obsession with a long-lost twin [pp. 22, 160] and the “might-could-be twin brothers” Mr. Boll Weevil and the Mahdi [p. 43]; the description of Lord of Misrule [p. 217-219]; and Two-Tie’s relationships with Maggie and Donald?
15. Gordon’s writing style—her use of metaphor, poetic imagery, literary and religious allusions and references—is unusual in a novel about lowlifes and violent acts. Do you find the seemingly incompatible juxtaposition effective?
16. The world of thoroughbred horse racing has been the subject of several popular books and films, including Laura Hillenbrand’s bestselling Seabiscuit. What does Lord of Misrule share with other depictions of racing you have read or seen? What new insights does it provide into the racing community?
(Questions issued by publisher.)