The Soul Thief
Charles Baxter, 2009
Knopf Doubleday
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400034406
Summary
As a graduate student in upstate New York, Nathaniel Mason is drawn into a tangle of relationships with people who seem to hover just beyond his grasp. There's Theresa, alluring but elusive, and Jamie, who is fickle if not wholly unavailable.
But Jerome Coolberg is the most mysterious and compelling. Not only cryptic about himself, he seems also to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel's past that Nathaniel cannot remember having told him about. In this extraordinary novel of mischief and menace, we see a young man's very self vanishing before his eyes. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—May 13, 1947
• Where—Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
• Education—B. A., Macalester College; Ph.D., State University
of New York, Buffalo
• Awards—Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and
Letters; Prix St. Valentine for The Feast of Love
• Currently—lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota
Charles Baxter lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of eight other works of fiction, including most recently Believers, Harmony of the World, and Through the Safety Net. The Feast of Love was a finalist for the National Book Award. (From the publisher.)
More
Although his body of work includes poetry and essays, award-winning writer Charles Baxter is best known for his fiction—brilliantly crafted, non-linear stories that twist and turn in unexpected directions before reaching surprising yet nearly always satisfying conclusions. He specializes in portraits of solid Midwesterners, regular Joes and Janes whose ordinary lives are disrupted by accidents, chance encounters, and the arrival of strangers; and his books have garnered a fierce and loyal following among readers and critics alike.
Born in Minneapolis in 1947, Baxter was barely a toddler when his father died. His mother remarried a wealthy attorney who moved the family onto a sprawling estate in suburban Excelsior. From prep school, Baxter was expected to attend Williams, but instead he chose Macalester, a small, liberal arts college in St. Paul. Intending to pursue a career in teaching and writing, he enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the State University of New York at Buffalo, attracted by a faculty that included such literary luminaries of the day as John Barth and Donald Barthelme.
After grad school, Baxter moved to Michigan to teach at Wayne State University in Detroit. He spent more than a decade concentrating on writing poetry, but after a particularly discouraging dry spell, he decided to try his hand at fiction. He labored long and hard over three novels, none of which was accepted for publication. Then, just as he was about to give up altogether, he attempted one last trick. He whittled the three novels down to short stories, replacing epic themes, extraordinary characters, and ambitious story arcs with the small, quiet stuff of ordinary life. It was a good decision, In 1984, his first collection of short fiction, Harmony of the World, was published. Another anthology followed, then a debut novel. Published in 1987, First Light charmed readers with its unusual structure (the story unfolds backwards in time) and a cast of richly, draw, fully human characters.
Baxter continued to publish throughout the 1990s, alternating between short and full-length fiction, and with each book he garnered larger, more appreciative audiences and better reviews. His breakthrough occurred in 2000 with The Feast of Love, a novel composed of many small stories that form a single, cohesive narrative. Described by the New York Times as "rich, juicy, laugh-out-loud funny and completely engrossing," The Feast of Love was nominated for a National Book Award.
"Every time I've finished a book, it feels to me as if the washrag has been rung out," Baxter confessed in a 2003 interview. Yet he keeps on crafting absorbing stories infused with quiet (sometimes absurdist) wit and a compassionate understanding of the human condition. A longtime director of the creative writing program at the University of Michigan, he is known as a generous mentor, and several of his students have gone on to forge successful literary careers of their own.
Extras
From a 2003 interview with Barnes & Noble:
• My novels are sometimes criticized for being episodic, or structurally weird. And they are! I like them that way. It's fairly late in the day — 2003 as I write — in the history of the novel, and I think it's fair for writers to mess around with that form, and to stop thinking that they have to write books that move smoothly from the first act to the second act, and then to the climax and the denouement. I like digressions, asides, intrusions, advice, anything that gets in the way of a smooth narcotic flow. New novels should not look like old novels, except when they want to.
• My father died when I was eighteen months old, and I expect the unexpected to happen in life and in art, and my fiction is full, or loaded down, with unexpected fatalities of one kind or another. For me, that's realism."
• I had an unhappy childhood that I thought was happy, and I dove into books as inspiration and relief and comfort and security and information about what people did and how they thought. I can still get happy and sentimental just over the thought of libraries — the image of a woman sitting quietly and reading is a terrifically sexy image for me.
• Like many writers, I'm private and quiet and observant and bookish. For a physical outlet, I lift weights at the gym two or three times a week, and I don't quit unless and until I've worked up a fairly good sweat. Many writers need an outlet like that to counter the sedentary nature of what they do. I don't have any wild delusions about the greatness of my work: I am happy to work humbly in this field where so many writers have created so many immortal manifestations of the mind and spirit. As Henry James said, you work in the dark; you do what you can; the rest is the madness of art.
• When asked what book most influenced his life as a writer, he answered:
For many writers, the experience of falling in love with a book has to happen in high school, or it won't happen at all. Love at that age is mad love. The book that did it for me at that period in my life was Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, with its voluptuous melancholy; I don't think I had ever imagined that the word "sorrow" could be deployed in so many densely lyrical ways. The book's dramatic idea of the outsider struck a chord in me, since in those days I felt as if I was outside everything of any importance. The other book that did it for me was Melville's Moby-Dick, whose language struck me as wonderfully over-the-top. I found myself pleasurably lost in it and never wanted it to end. (Bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Gloriously done.... It's like watching fire slowly travel up a curtain, waiting for the moment the whole cloth will be engulfed.
New York Times
Delicious.... Entirely original.... The Soul Thief is so craftily constructed that to appreciate how liberally Baxter plants creepy hints of what's to come a reader really should savor this book twice.
Washington Post Book World
Though a much trickier and more cerebral book than his previous novels, this is a dandy psychological thriller in which proliferating mirrors will make your head spin. Baxter has given us the writer's version of that famous M.C. Escher print in which one hand is drawing the other.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Examines love and lust and the various permutations and cries in between.... Few American writers handle those compelling subjects with a more sure touch or more worthy insight.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
With a prose style lyrical, accessible and warmly humorous, Charles Baxter has been quietly building a reputation as one of America's favorite literary authors.... His newest novel teems with the same good-natured empathy and wry humor that imbues his earlier works.... [I]t surely will delight.
St. Louis Post Dispatch
Opening in gritty, nineteen-seventies Buffalo, Baxter’s suspenseful fifth novel concerns a mildmannered graduate student, Nathaniel, who falls under the spell of a cerebral but affected outsider, the aptly named Coolberg. Drawn to Coolberg’s sneering persona (and to that of his girlfriend, Theresa, who relishes Coolberg’s performances), Nathaniel begins to unravel when he learns that Coolberg is appropriating his identity: a burglar steals clothes from Nathaniel that Coolberg ends up wearing, and Coolberg begins claiming Nathaniel’s history for his own. Baxter’s talent for creating uncanny settings and telling details and his inventive way with language (a similarly dressed couple are "umbilicaled") are both on display here, but the conceptual twist at the novel’s end feels unequal to the dramatic tension that precedes it.
The New Yorker
Critics’ reactions depended on how well they tolerated [Baxter's] inventiveness. Those who enjoyed it found The Soul Thief a compelling investigation into how identities are lost and found over a lifetime. Those who were less patient...left the novel feeling robbed of solid characters.
Bookmarks Magazine
The author of the National Book Award–nominated The Feast of Love, Baxter returns with this ninth book, an assay into the limits of character, fictional and otherwise. The first half of the novel follows the brief arc of Nathaniel Mason's graduate career in 1970s Buffalo, N.Y., which centers on his friendship with the sexy but self-dramatizing Teresa (which she pronounces Teraysa, as if she were French) and her lover Jerome Coolberg, a virtuoso of cast-off ideas. Coolberg, obsessed with Nathaniel, begins taking his shirts and notebooks, and claiming that episodes from Nathaniel's life happened to him. Coolberg drops a hint that something bad will happen to Jamie, Nathaniel's sometime lover; when it actually comes to pass, Nathaniel's world begins to collapse. In the novel's second half, decades after these events have occurred, Coolberg enters Nathaniel's life again for a final, dramatic confrontation. Baxter has a great, registering eye for the real pleasures and attritions of life, but the book gets hung up on metafictional questions of identity (the major one: who is writing this first-person narrative?). The results cheat readers out of identifying with any of the characters, perhaps intentionally.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
1. Is The Soul Thief a work of “metafiction”? What aspects of its narrative structure—and of the narrators themselves—might be considered metafictional? How does it differ from more conventional, naturalistic novels?
2. A fellow grad student, Bob Rimjky, says of Jerome Coolberg: “Really, all he wants to do is acquire everyone's inner life” [p. 15]. Why would Coolberg want to possess other people's inner lives? In what ways is this kind of appropriation similar to what novelists do?
3. Coolberg accuses Nathaniel of “willful incomprehension. And convenient amnesia. You're just like this country...a champion of strategic forgetting” [p. 193]. Is this true of Nathaniel? In what ways is America a champion of “strategic forgetting”?
4. After it is revealed that Coolberg himself is “the author” of Nathaniel's story, the narrator says that “the point cannot be that one person can take on another's life.... The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything” [p. 203]. In what ways is The Soul Thief about love and forgiveness?
5. The Soul Thief exhibits a sharp satirical wit. What are Baxter's chief satirical targets in the novel? What does his satire reveal about these subjects?
6. In his role as host of the radio show, American Evenings, Coolberg guides his guests to a revelatory moment that uncovers “the story's secret heart” [p. 156]. What is the secret heart of The Soul Thief? How is it revealed?
7. In what ways does the act of telling stories save both Nathaniel and his sister? What is Baxter suggesting here about the power of stories?
8. When Nathaniel's sister regains her powers of speech, Nathaniel rejects the idea that this was a miracle. Instead, he attributes her recovery to “the force of compassion, which under certain circumstances can bring the dead to life.” He goes on to say that “though a prejudice exists in our culture against compassion, there being little profit in it, the emotion itself is ineradicable” [p. 153]. Why would compassion have the power to bring the dead to life? Is Nathaniel right in suggesting that there's a prejudice against compassion in our culture?
9. Why does Nathaniel fall in love with Theresa and Jamie? In what ways is his love for Jamie more real, even though she is a lesbian, than his love for Theresa? Why isn't Nathaniel ever able to get over Jamie?
10. Coolberg asserts that we're all copycats and that what he's done is really no different than what everyone does. Is he right? Are we all adopting other people's personalities or identities? How should Coolberg finally be judged?
11. Nathaniel asserts that identities are nothing more than “a pile of moldering personal clichés given sentimental value by the fact that someone owns them” [p. 87]. Does the sense of personal identity have any inherent value beyond the sentimental, either in the novel or in “real” life? Does the novel make a distinction between a soul and an identity?
12. Nathaniel wonders why Gertrude Stein keeps intruding on his consciousness. Why won't Stein leave him alone? In what ways is Stein relevant to The Soul Thief?
13. Why does Baxter end the novel with Nathaniel offering “blessings on everybody. Blessings without limit” [p. 210]? What has brought him to this sense of gratitude, forgiveness, and all-inclusive love?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Maisie Dobbs (Maisie Dobbs series #1)
Jacqueline Winspear, 2003
Penguin Group USA
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780142004333
Summary
Maisie Dobbs entered domestic service in 1910 at thirteen, working for Lady Rowan Compton. When her remarkable intelligence is discovered by her employer, Maisie becomes the pupil of Maurice Blanche, a learned friend of the Comptons.
In 1929, following an apprenticeship with Blanche, Maisie hangs out her shingle: M. DOBBS, TRADE AND PERSONAL INVESTIGATIONS. She soon becomes enmeshed in a mystery surrounding The Retreat, a reclusive community of wounded WWI veterans. At first, Maisie only suspects foul play, but she must act quickly when Lady Rowan's son decides to sign away his fortune and take refuge there.
Maisie hurriedly investigates, uncovering a disturbing mystery, which, in an astonishing denouement, gives Maisie the courage to confront a ghost that has haunted her for years. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 30, 1955
• Where—Weald of Kent, England, UK
• Education—University of London's Institute of Education
• Awards—Alex Award for Best First Novel
• Currently—lives in Ojai, California, USA
Lovers of British mysteries and historical novels will find something to appreciate in Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs books. Maisie, a housemaid-turned-student-turned-nurse-turned private investigator in early 20th-century London, manages to straddle Britain's class system by being a woman of exceptional "bearing" and intellect who happens to come from working-class stock. As an investigator, she's green, but sharp and ambitious. She's also surrounded by vividly sketched secondary players, such as her benefactor, Lady Rowan, and mentor Maurice Blanche.
In Winspear's first Maisie story, we learn the character's background: Forced by family circumstances to go to work as a housemaid at an early age, Maisie Dobbs' curiosity and intellect are noticed by her employer, Lady Rowan. Rowan takes care of her education, and she makes it to university but the Great War interrupts her ambitions. She serves as a nurse in France, then returns to England and starts her career as a private investigator in 1929. Her first case seems like a simple investigation into infidelity; it grows into something larger when it leads realizes there's something amiss at a convalescent home for war veterans called The Retreat.
Winspear's talent didn't go unnoticed when her first novel was published in July 2003. Maisie Dobbs was named in "best" lists in both the New York Times and Publishers Weekly. It was also nominated in the best novel category for an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. There was an almost palpable sense of relief in the reviews, pleasant surprise that someone had offered not only a solid addition to the historical mystery genre, but had given it further depth and breadth. As an NPR reviewer put it, "[The book's] intelligent eccentricity offers relief."
Telling Maisie's stories using a warm third-person narrator, Winspear charms with her ability to convey the historical context surrounding her characters, particularly regarding the impact of the Great War. For this reason, and because her mysteries steer clear of graphic violence or sex, her books are often recommended for younger readers also. Far from hardboiled, Winspear's characters are very human, and she delivers a little romance and heartache along with the criminal wrongdoing.
Part of the appeal in Winspear's books also lies in her ability to bring a deeper, more philosophical atmosphere to the proceedings. Maisie is trained in Freudian psychology and is as interested in helping as she is in solving. A case referenced in the second Maisie story, Birds of a Feather, for example, "would not be filed away until those whose lives were touched by her investigation had reached a certain peace with her findings, with themselves, and with one another." Reading Winspear's Dobbs series may not bring inner peace, but there is something relaxing about spending time with her appealing characters.|
Extras
From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview
• Winspear also works as a creative coach. She writes on her web site, "As a coach I am engaged by those who want to establish clear intentions for their artistic endeavors, to support and encourage so that they sustain a level of energy and empowerment which is demonstrated in work that is rewarding, inspiring—and finished!" Winspear also writes about international education.
• Winspear loves outdoor pursuits such as horseback riding, hiking, sailing, and mountain biking; she's also an avid traveler, according to her web site bio.
• Her first ever job after college was as a flight attendant. "I wanted to travel and could not afford it, so I decided to get myself a job where I could travel. I did it for two years and had great fun."
• Her worst-ever job was in an egg-packing factory when she was 16.
• She love dogs, horses and generally all animals. "I will always stop to check on stray dogs—I once ended up in the emergency room with a tick embedded in me which had jumped off a dog I had rescued from a busy road. It was a deer tick, which carries Lyme Disease, so I wasn't taking any chances. Funnily enough, when I opened the only magazine in the emergency room, it was to a page carrying an article on tick bites and disease. It stated that you have six hours after the tick embeds itself, before it begins to release the bacteria that cause disease. I counted the hours from rescuing the dog, and by the time the doctor came in I was pleading, 'Get this thing out of me!!!'"
• Her favorite way to unwind is to go for a walk with her husband and the dog at the end of the working day, then they go to their local health club for a swim and to sit by the pool and read for a while. "I love time with family and friends, but completely relish time on my own when I have no agenda to follow, no to-do's, just me and time alone."
• When asked what book most influenced her life or career as a writer, here is what she said:
I love to read and have been an avid reader since the age of about three. However, I cannot say any one book ever impacted my writing career. I never read a book that made me want to be a writer per se; rather it was the love of words and what I could do with them that made me want to be a writer. So in that way my reading and writing were inextricably mixed. I cannot say that a book has ever influenced my life in a broader sense. This is always a tricky question, because "influence" suggests that it made you do something differently, or take a path not previously considered. Certainly there are books that have touched me, books that I thought about for days on end, but not that influenced me in the grand scheme of things, or made me do things differently. (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
There's something strange about the title character of Jacqueline Winspear's deft debut novel, Maisie Dobbs, which opens in London in 1929. For a clever and resourceful young woman who has just set herself up in business as a private investigator, Maisie seems a bit too sober and much too sad. Romantic readers sensing a story-within-a-story won't be disappointed at the sensitivity and wisdom with which Maisie resolves her first professional assignment, an apparent case of marital infidelity that turns out to be a wrenching illustration of the sorrowful legacies of World War I.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Time
In Winspear's inspired debut novel, a delightful mix of mystery, war story and romance set in WWI-era England, humble housemaid Maisie Dobbs climbs convincingly up Britain's social ladder, becoming in turn a university student, a wartime nurse and ultimately a private investigator. Both na ve and savvy, Maisie remains loyal to her working-class father and many friends who help her along the way. Her first sleuthing case, which begins as a simple marital infidelity investigation, leads to a trail of war-wounded soldiers lured to a remote convalescent home in Kent from which no one seems to emerge alive. The Retreat, specializing in treating badly deformed battlefield casualties, is run by an apparently innocuous former officer who requires his patients to sign over their assets to his tightly run institution. At different points in her remarkable career, Maisie crosses paths with a military surgeon to whom she's attracted despite his disfigurement from a bomb blast at the front. A refreshing heroine, appealing secondary characters and an absorbing plot, marred only by a somewhat bizarre conclusion, make Winspear a new writer to watch.
Publishers Weekly
From its dedication to the author's paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother, who were both injured during World War I, to its powerful conclusion, this is a poignant and compelling story that explores war's lingering and insidious impact on its survivors. The book opens in spring 1929 as Maisie Dobbs opens an office dedicated to "discreet investigations" and traverses back and forth between her present case and the long shadows cast by World War I. What starts out as a plea by an anxious husband for Maisie to discover why his wife regularly lies about her whereabouts turns into a journey of discovery whose answers and indeed whose very questions lie in a quiet rural cemetery where many war dead are buried. In Maisie, Winspear has created a complex new investigator who, tutored by the wise Maurice Blanche, recognizes that in uncovering the actions of the body, she is accepting responsibility for the soul. British-born but now living in America, first novelist Winspear writes in simple, effective prose, capturing the post-World War I era effectively and handling human drama with compassionate sensitivity while skillfully avoiding cloying sentimentality. At the end, the reader is left yearning for more discreet investigations into the nature of what it means to feel truth. Highly recommended.—Caroline Hallsworth, City of Greater Sudbury, Ont. Canada
Library Journal
(Adult/High School) Maisie is 14 when her mother dies, and she must go into service to help her father make ends meet. Her prodigious intellect and the fact that she is sneaking into the manor library at night to read Hume, Kierkegaard, and Jung alert Lady Rowan to the fact that she has an unusual maid. She arranges for Maisie to be tutored, and the girl ultimately qualifies for Cambridge. She goes for a year, only to be drawn by the need for nurses during the Great War. After serving a grueling few years in France and falling in love with a young doctor, Maisie puts up a shingle in 1929 as a private investigator. She is a perceptive observer of human nature, works well with all classes, and understands the motivations and demons prevalent in postwar England. Teens will be drawn in by her first big case, seemingly a simple one of infidelity, but leading to a complex examination of an almost cultlike situation. The impact of the war on the country is vividly conveyed. A strong protagonist and a lively sense of time and place carry readers along, and the details lead to further thought and understanding about the futility and horror of war, as well as a desire to hear more of Maisie. This is the beginning of a series, and a propitious one at that. —Susan H. Woodcock, Fairfax County Public Library, Chantilly, VA
School Library Journal
A romance/investigation debut novel set firmly in the spiritual aftermath of WWI. Maisie Dobbs, recently turned private investigator in 1929 England, had been a nurse back during the war to end all wars, so she knows about wounds-both those to the body and those to the soul. It's just a month after she sets up shop that she gets her first interesting case: What initially looks like just another infidelity matter turns out to be a woman's preoccupation with a dead man, Vincent Weathershaw, in a graveyard. Flashback to Maisie's upbringing: her transition from servant class to the intellectual class when she shows interest in the works of Hume, Kierkegaard, and Jung. She doesn't really get to explore her girlhood until she makes some roughshod friends in the all-woman ambulance corps that serves in France, and she of course falls for a soldier, Simon, who writes her letters but then disappears. Now, in 1929, Maisie's investigation into Vincent Weathershaw leads her to the mysterious Retreat, run like a mix between a barracks and a monastery, where soldiers still traumatized by the war go to recover. Maisie knows that her curiosity just might get her into trouble—yet she trusts her instincts and sends an undercover assistant into the Retreat in the hopes of finding out more about Vincent. But what will happen, she worries, if one needs to retreat from the Retreat? Will she discover the mystery behind her client's wife's preoccupation with a man who spent time there? And by any chance, albeit slight, might she encounter that old lover who disappeared back in 1917 and who she worried might be dead? Winspear rarely attempts to elevate her prose past the common romance, and what might have been a journey through a strata of England between the wars is instead just simple, convenient and contrived. Prime candidate for a TV movie.
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 Maisie Dobbs:
1. How would you describe Maisie Dobbs? What do you most admire (or not) about her character? Is she psychologically complex...or superficially drawn?
2.. Why does the author structure the book as she does: three sections, with the middle section veering back into Mashie's past, while the first and third revolve around the present-day mystery?
3. Follow-up to Question 2: At What point do the mysterious allusions in the first part become clearer?
4. In many ways, Maisie Dobbs is an historical novel, as well as a mystery. What are the ways in which world War I and its horrors impact the story? Which was of greater interest to you—the background of London drawing rooms and vivid depictions of the war...or the current-day mystery?
5. When Christopher Davenham initially comes to Maisie with his case, she is reluctant to accept it. Why? Why does she later accept the case—what makes her change her mind?
6. How much of Maisie's investigative work relies on her almost supernatural powers? Is that...well, an easy way out for the author? Doesn't a good detective story rely on logical thinking and empirical evidence—the detective's intellectual prowess? Or is Maisie's intuition what makes the story so enjoyable?
7. Talk about Lady Compton's and Maurice Blanche's influence on Maisie Dobbs. What does Dr. Blanche mean when he says, "truth walks towards us on the paths of our questions"? What are some of his other pronouncements?
8. What prompts Maisie to question the goings-on at The Retreat?
9. How is Maisie representative of the changing role of women in the 1920's, after the War?
10. How do you feel about the ending? Some reviewers feel it unearned...or hokey...or thin. Others find it totally satisfying. Where do you stand?
11.Overall, does this book deliver? Is the mystery engaging and surprising...or flat and predictable? Does it inspire you to read other books in the Maisie Dobbs series?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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Other People's Children
Joanna Trollope, 1998
Penguin Group USA
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425174371
Summary
With The Best of Friends, American readers have taken Joanna Trollope into their hearts. That critically-acclaimed novel has climbed bestseller lists around the country and garnered raves from reviewers like Good Housekeeping who said that she "captures the poignant rituals of family attachment and detachment with delicious wryness and large doses of empathy."
But with Other People's Children—a number 1 bestseller in England—she brings her work to a bold, new level, with a novel of rare seriousness and depth, about a subject that hits readers right where they live. Here, she delves fearlessly into the emotional dynamics of family life—or rather, life in that ever-expanding unit, the stepfamily.
With her sensitive eye and unerring ear, she explores the hard-won truths and often harder-to-overcome difficulties of coping with present and former husbands and wives, and above all, with other people's children. And sometimes it becomes painfully clear that good intentions—and even love—are not enough.
Joanna Trollope's understanding of the human condition and empathy with the frailties of her characters are unmatched. No one goes more fearlessly into the emotional and practical dynamics of family life, nor offers such bittersweet truths mixed with hopeful solutions. So moving, so provocative, and so unforgettable is the portrait she has created in Other People's Children that American readers and reviewers are sure to fall in love with Joanna Trollope all over again. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Aka—Carolyn Harvey (pen name)
• Birth—December 9 1943
• Where—Gloucestershire, England, UK
• Education—B.A., Oxford University
• Awards—Order of the British Empire (OBE), 1996
• Currently—lives in London, England
Joanna Trollope (born in her grandfather's rectory in Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire), is an English novelist. She was educated at Reigate County School for Girls, followed by St Hugh's College, Oxford. She is distantly related to Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope and is a cousin of the writer and broadcaster James Trollope.
From 1965 to 1967, she worked at the Foreign Office. From 1967 to 1979, she was employed in a number of teaching posts before she became a writer full-time in 1980. Trollope was formerly married to the television dramatist Ian Curteis. Trollope's books are generally upmarket family dramas and romances that somewhat transcend these genres via striking realism in terms of human psychology and relationships. Several of her novels have been adapted for television. The best-known is The Rector's Wife.
Trollope is the author of the novels Girl from the South, Next of Kin, Marrying the Mistress, Other People's Children, The Best of Friends, and A Spanish Lover, as well as The Choir and The Rector's Wife, which were both adapted for Masterpiece Theatre. Writing as Caroline Harvey, she is also the author of the historical novels The Brass Dolphin, Legacy of Love, and A Second Legacy. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
As set of vulnerable, maddening, often likable characters goes about the work of forging new families amid the disruptions that come when people remarry and are forced to raise — and love — kids who have little reason to love or trust them in return.
Linda Barrett Osborne - New York Times Book Review
Trollope is an observant chronicler of middle-class domestic mess, and she knows how to turn a tale....There are no heroes in this novel and no obvious villains, either. Just believably normal people trying to get it right. The endings are not necessarily happy, but they have the ring of truth.
Linda Mallon - USA Today
Her characters are at once vexing and endearing, which is to say fully human.
Richard Yardley - Washington Post
A skilled artisan of nuance and insight reveals a vigorous new edge as she explores the painful and contentious arena of stepfamilies. Here Trollope focuses on three women and two men who wrestle with new family configurations, along with their six children, ranging from eight to 28. When Josie marries Matthew, she already has experience as both a mother and stepmother, and she feels prepared for the impending battles with Matthew's difficult and bitter ex-wife, Nadine. But her patient determination crumbles as Matthew's three children turn sullen, mutinous and downright nasty to Josie and her eight-year-old son, Rufus. "Has it ever struck you that stepchildren can be quite as cruel as stepmothers are supposed to be?" Josie asks her sister-in-law, who later observes, "Everyone seems to expect so much of women it nearly drove you mad." Things seem at first to be a lot easier for Josie's ex-husband, Tom, an architect who has two other children besides Rufus (Tom's first wife died suddenly when his children were small). In no time Tom has a fianc e, the calm and reasonable Elizabeth, whom Rufus (who visits Tom regularly) seems to like rather well. It is Tom's 25-year-old daughter, Dale, who can't bear to see her father passionately in love. The narrative moves back and forth between Josie and Elizabeth as the latter finds her new life in sudden turmoil; the spare, dramatic revelation of Dale's psychological hold on Tom injects Hitchcockian suspense. Though Trollope's wry intelligence supports the plot, her command of raw emotional content--her portraits of the children, for example--is equally impressive. The urgency of her vision adds clout to this affecting drama.
Publishers Weekly
Best-selling English writer Trollope, who has a following here as well, has the knack of rendering people's lives with infinite clarity and truth. Here she plumbs the effects of divorce and remarriage on children, as Josie and Matthew marry and try to create a family with her son and his three children. This is no Brady bunch, but the emotionally messy world of children (and adults) is so palpably real that the reader will know them as well or better than their own children. Those who have read Trollope (The Best of Friends) know that her endings are never simple, happily ever after, and one outcome here seems similar to that in Trollope's The Men and the Girls (1992). Nevertheless, her writing and characterization place her far above the commonplace. Highly recommended.
Francine Fialkoff - Library Journal
From acclaimed Britisher Trollope (The Best of Friends, 1998), a bittersweet tale of the painfully divided affections created whenever a stepfamily is formed. An adroit choreographer of the baffled dance of the contemporary English family, Trollope now details the confusions caused as old marriages end and new alliances solidify. When Josie Carver marries Matthew Mitchell, a deputy-school principal, its a second marriage for each. Both have children from their first: for Josie, its eight-year-old Rufus, while Matthew has three: Becky, 15, Rory, 12, and 10-year old Claire. The previous marriages were mutually unsatisfactory. Josie, married to widower Tom, with grown children of his own, found him decent but dull. Matthew, hitched to volatile, self-absorbed Nadine, tired of coping with her eccentric behavior. But, though stepmothers are traditionally regarded as malevolent forces, stepchildren can also behave badly. And while the Mitchell trio found mother Nadine difficult to deal with, loyalty demands that they now make Josies life difficult (as well as their fathers). In fact, Toms adult daughter Dale deliberately destroys his new romance with thirtysomething civil servant Elizabeth because Dale never got over the death of her own mother when she was a child. The parents are also tugged by loyalties to their children. Josies new marriage undergoes increasing strain as Nadine blackmails her children emotionally, the children fail at school, and Becky runs away. When Matthews three move back with him, Josie feels not just even more stressed but alienated from Matthew (who takes his children's side instead of supporting her). Still, Nadines emotional breakdown and a professional crisis for Matthew bring the family closer together, and Josies Rufus begins to feel as much a part of the new family as his half-siblings. Family ties affirmed with warmth and wisdom.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. It's often said that "Blood is thicker than water." How does this truism relate to the step-family? Discuss the ways in which being related by marriage, rather than blood, can be advantageous.
2. All three of the families in Other People's Children have their strengths and weaknesses. Which family, at the beginning of the book, would you rather belong to? Did that change by the end?
3. Do you think Elizabeth was inflexible as a result of a lifetime on her own? Or did you find her well-adjusted and too secure to adapt to a troubled household?
4. All of the men in this book show a certain weakness of character. Discuss the similarity in their shortcomings.
5. How do you think Tom should have dealt with Dale? Did you find it surprising that this seemingly placid and affluent family would fall apart?
6. Nadine obviously loves her children, yet there's no doubt she's ill-suited to motherhood. What should happen in a situation like this one? How much blame does Matthew share for not protecting his children from her volatility?
7. Do you think Tom's inability to stand up to Dale, and Matthew's failure to take a stand on behalf of Josie are similar in any way? Why is Tom's weakness fatal to his new relationship? Why does Matthew's failure not doom his new family?
8. When Lucas's relationship with Amy ends, it's clear that he has been conditioned to put Dale's needs above his own, just as Tom has. Did you feel hopeful that moving away from Dale would help him to change?
9. Discuss the complexity of Becky's loyalty to Nadine, despite her mother's instability. Do you think Josie handled Matthew's children as well as could be expected, given their complicated issues with Nadine?
10. Divorce is an extremely upsetting event for children. How could Matthew and Nadine have made theirs easier on the children? Discuss the issue money plays in this story. In what way does it contribute to strife in Matthew and Nadine's homes? How does it ease things for Rufus? Or does it?
11. Josie's determination and flexibility were not enough to save her marriage to Tom because of a lack of feeling. Elizabeth has finally met, in Tom, the man who makes her feel(yet she can't make the relationship work either. Did Dale doom both of these marriages? Pauline's ghost? Or did Tom? Or is Trollope suggesting a more complex set of issues?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Sotah
Naomi Ragen, 2002
St. Martin's Press
512 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312570248
Summary
Beautiful, fragile Dina Reich, a young woman in Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox haredi enclave, stands accused of the community’s most unforgivable sin: adultery.
Raised with her sisters to be an obedient daughter and a dutiful wife, Dina secretly yearned for the knowledge, romance, and excitement that she knew her circumscribed life would never satisfy. When her first romance is tragically thwarted, she willingly enters into an arranged marriage with a loving but painfully quiet man.
Dina’s deeply repressed passions become impossible to ignore, finding a dangerous outlet in a sudden and intense obsession with a married man, with terrible consequences. Exiled to New York City, Dina meets Joan, a modern secular woman who challenges all she knows of the world and herself.
Set against the exotic backdrop of Jerusalem’s glistening white stones and ancient rituals, Sotah is a contemporary story of the struggle to reconcile tradition with freedom, and faith with love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 10, 1949
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Brooklyn College; M.A., Hebrew University
of Jerusalem
• Currently—lives in Jerusalme, Israel
Naomi Ragen is the author of seven novels, including several international bestsellers, and her weekly email columns on life in the Middle East are read and distributed by thousands of subscribers worldwide. An American, she has lived in Jerusalem for the past thirty-nine years and was recently voted one of the three most popular authors in Israel. (From the publisher.)
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Ragen’s first three novels, which described the lives of ultra-Orthodox Jewish women in Israel and the United States, dealt with themes that had not previously been addressed in that society's literature: wife-abuse (Jephte’s Daughter: 1989), adultery (Sotah: 1992) and rape (The Sacrifice of Tamar: 1995). Reaction to these novels in the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities was mixed. Some hailed her as a pioneer who for the first time exposed and opened to public discussion problems which the communities had preferred to pretend did not exist, while others criticized her for “hanging out the dirty laundry” for everyone to see, thus embarrassing the rabbis who were believed by many to be effectively dealing with these problems “behind the scenes” and also putting “ammunition in the hands of the anti-Semites.”
Her next novel (The Ghost of Hannah Mendes: 1998) told the story of a Sephardic family brought back from the abyss of assimilation by the spirit of their ancestor Gracia Mendes (a true historical figure), a 16th century Portuguese crypto-Jew who risked her life and her considerable fortune to practice her religion in secret.
Chains Around the Grass (2002) is a semi-autobiographical novel of the author’s childhood which dealt with the failure of the American dream for her parents.
In The Covenant (2004) Ragen dealt with the contemporary theme of an ordinary family sucked into the horror of Islamic terrorism.
The Saturday Wife (2007), the story of a rabbi's wayward wife, is loosely based on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and is a satire of modern Jewish Orthodoxy.
Ragen is also known as a playwright. Her 2001 drama, Women’s Minyan, tells the story of an ultra-Orthodox woman who, upon fleeing from her adulterous and abusive husband, finds that he has manipulated the rabbinical courts to deprive her of the right to see or speak to her twelve children. The story is based on a true incident. Women’s Minyan ran for six years in Israel's National Theatre and has been staged in the United States, Canada and Argentina. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Most non-Jewish and many nonorthodox Jews have a skewed view of what life is like in the Haredi (ultra-orthodox) Jewish communities. For the most part, these communities are viewed as one homogeneous stereotypical prototype. The result of this is that the diversity and vibrancy of the different communities tend to become blended into a monotone image. This distorted ideal is often found in literature. Naomi Ragen has written a number of books that look at the lives of Haredi women, and which do not adhere to the common stereotypical banalities. In Sotah, Naomi Ragen takes an honest and unapologetic look at the lives led by three sisters in one close-knit community. In this book she paints a portrait that is as varied as the players portrayed, and which shows both positive and negative aspects of the culture.
Rochelle Caviness - The Jewish Eye.com
Ragen's second novel (after Jephte's Daughter) revisits the insular world of ultrareligious Jews, focusing on the Reich family's three daughters and how they fare in the elemental rite of passage—marriage. In the Haredi community (made up of Jews who observe "the tiniest dictate of law" and have "boundless contempt" for all things secular), a matchmaker handles—and sometimes mishandles—nuptials based on dowry, piety and family ties, and only incidentally on love or compatibility. Harsh as these customs may seem, Ragen's detailed and thoughtful evocations of daily life in such an enclave offer insights into its members' beliefs. The drama centers on the Reichs' devout middle daughter, Dina, who tries to reconcile her desires and dreams within the confines of her narrow world. How she becomes a sotah (a woman suspected of adultery), her banishment from seeing her husband and young child, and the ultimate reconciliation of her strict faith with the meaningful aspects of a secular society form the heart of this very readable, but at times simplistic novel. Ragen is most successful when she tells the story from the vantage point of the haredi world, less so when her characters are secular Jews. A stronger work of fiction than Jephte's Daughter, the narrative holds the reader's attention throughout.
Publishers Weekly
Love-conquers-all genre takes on deep philosophical questions as Ragen (Jephte's Daughter, 1989) continues her exploration of orthodox Jewish life in this story of a woman accused of adultery—the sotah. The setting is the ultraorthodox milieu of Jerusalem, where the men study the Torah in yeshivas while their wives bear numerous children, clean and cook, and find outside work to supplement their meager incomes. Here, heroine Dina's struggle to be independent and still religiously observant provides the more profound concerns of a story that, despite its religious background, is basically your typically rosy fade-out into a technicolor sunset, with all problems—and they are not insubstantial—wrapped up in the last chapter. Dina Reich, the beautiful and dutiful daughter of Rabbi Reich and his remarkably energetic and saintly wife, yearns for love, for knowledge of a wider world than the narrow one she is confined to. A brief romance, ended because her family could not pay the requisite dowry, means that Dina must accept a husband chosen by the sect's matchmaker and approved by her parents. She marries good but painfully inarticulate Judah, a carpenter; bears a child; then, bored and lonely, begins a relationship with a more worldly neighbor. Though it's not consummated, religious vigilantes threaten her, and at their behest she flees to New York, where she works as a maid for a wonderful family, who, when she breaks down, do all they can to bring about the inevitable happy ending. Not only is Dina reunited with Judah, whose virtues she now appreciates, but she also finds a satisfactory compromise between the comforting security of religion and tradition and the more fulfilling aspects of sectarian life. Richness of faith and family lovingly.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The Sotah was a woman accused of adultery who had to go through a purifying ritual to prove her innocence, or ascertain her guilt. Read Numbers 5, 11-28. How do the events in Sotah parallel the biblical ritual? What is Dina Reich guilty of? Does she reach purification, or teshuva?
2. Female family relationships are very important in Sotah. Describe the relationship between Dina and her sisters, the girls and their mother.
3. Joan opens Dina's eyes to the greater world, but Dina open's Joan's eyes and her heart to many things this modern woman is equally ignorant of. Describe their relationship and what they teach each other.
4. In the beginning of Sotah, we encounter Dina Reich as a young girl. In the course of the story she matures and changes. How would you describe the kind of transformation that takes place in her?
5. The word "sift" describes a pivotal concept in Sotah. Can you describe when the word is used, and what it means in terms of the story?
6. Attempts to find Dina a husband without the use of a matchmaker result in disaster. Describe the positive role of the matchmaker in the haredi world.
7. Compared to modern Western rituals of dating and marriage, the haredi world seems very narrow. Can you see anything positive in the haredi customs?
8. Statistics show that haredi women have a lower life expectancy than their husbands do. What elements in the life of Dina's mother and her sisters do you think could lead to that?
9. Moishe writes Dina: "I guess being a Chasid is pretty good training " (for being a soldier). What does he mean? Do you agree with him?
10. The idea of "chesed" is very important in Sotah. What is "chesed?" Can you describe acts of chesed in the book?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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Glorious
Bernice L. McFadden, 2010
Akashic Books
250 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781936070114
Summary
Glorious is set against the backdrops of the Jim Crow South, the Harlem Renaissance, and the civil rights era. Blending the truth of American history with the fruits of Bernice McFadden’s rich imagination, this is the story of Easter Venetta Bartlett, a fictional Harlem Renaissance writer whose tumultuous path to success, ruin, and revival offers a candid portrait of the American experience in all its beauty and cruelty.
Glorious is ultimately an audacious exploration into the nature of self-hatred, love, possession, ego, betrayal, and, finally, redemption. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
• Education—NYC Fashion College - Laboratory Institute of
Merchandising; Marymount College, Fordham University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York
Bernice L. McFadden is the author of seven critically acclaimed novels, including the classic Sugar, Nowhere Is a Place, (a 2006 Washington Post Best Fiction title), and Gathering of Waters in 2012.
She is a two time Hurston/Wright award fiction finalist as well as the recipient of two fiction honor awards from the BCALA. McFadden lives in Brooklyn, New York. (From the publisher.)
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Bernice L. McFadden was born, raised and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the eldest of four children and the mother of one daughter, R'yane Azsa. Ms. McFadden attended grade school at P.S. 161 in Brooklyn and Middle School at Holy Spirit, also in Brooklyn. She attended high school at St. Cyril Academy an all-girls boarding school in Danville, Pa.
In the Fall of 1983 she enrolled in the noted NYC fashion college: Laboratory Institute of Merchandising, with dreams of becoming an international clothing buyer.
She attended LIM for two semesters and then took a position at Bloomingdale's and later with Itokin, a Japanese owned retail company.
Disillusioned and frustrated with her job, she signed up for a Travel & Tourism course at Marymount College where she received a certificate of completion. After the birth of her daughter in 1988, Bernice McFadden obtained a job with Rockresorts a company then owned by the Rockefeller family.
The company was later sold and Ms. McFadden was laid off and unemployed for one year. She sights that year as the turning point in her life because during those twelve months Ms. McFadden began to dedicate herself to the art of writing. During the next nine years she held three jobs, always looking for something exciting and satisfying. Forever frustrated with corporate America and the requirements they put on their employees, Ms. McFadden enrolled at Fordham University. Her intention was to obtain a degree that would enable her to move up another rung on the corporate ladder.
She signed up for courses that concentrated on Afro-American history and literature, as well as creative writing, poetry and journalism. She credits the two years spent under the guidance of her professors as well as the years spent lost in the words of her favorite author's, to the caliber of writer she has become.
During those years, Ms. McFadden made a conscious effort to write as much as possible and began to send out hundreds of query letters to agents and publisher's attempting to sell one of her short stories or the novel she was working on.
In 1997, Ms. McFadden quit her job and dedicated seven months to re-writing the novel that would become, Sugar. In May of 1998, after depleting her savings, she took her last and final position within corporate America.
On Feb 9th, 1999, her daughter's eleventh birthday (and Alice Walker's birthday—one of Ms. McFadden's favorite author's) she sent a query letter to an agent who signed her two weeks later and the rest is literary history!
Bernice L. McFadden also writes racy, humorous fiction under the pseudonym, Geneva Holliday. (From the author's website.)
Book Reviews
McFadden's lively and loving rendering of New York hews closely to the jazz-inflected city of myth.... [She] has a wonderful ear for dialogue, and her entertaining prose equally accommodates humor and pathos.
Gregory Beyer - New York Times
McFadden, in her powerful seventh novel, tells the story of Easter Bartlett as she journeys from the violent Jim Crow South to the promise of the Harlem Renaissance and the civil rights movement. Along the way, Easter forms relationships with both products of McFadden's imagination and actual historical figures: Rain, the sensuous and passionate dancer in Slocum's Traveling Brigade, a troupe that traveled the backwoods “entertaining negroes”; Colin, Easter's husband, who is provoked by a duplicitous friend into assassinating the Universal Negro Improvement Association leader, Marcus Garvey; Meredith, Easter's untrustworthy benefactor; and many more, including poet Langston Hughes, pianist Fats Waller, and shipping heiress Nancy Cunard. McFadden (Sugar) weaves rich historical detail with Easter's struggle to find peace in a racially polarized country, and she brings Harlem to astounding life: “The air up there, up south, up in Harlem, was sticky sweet and peppered with perfume, sweat, sex, curry, salt meat, sautéed chicken livers, and fresh baked breads.” Easter's hope for love to overthrow hate—and her intense exposure to both—cogently stands for America's potential, and McFadden's novel is a triumphant portrayal of the ongoing quest.
Publishers Weekly
After her sister's rape and her mother's death of a broken heart, Easter walked away from Waycross, Georgia, and spent most of the rest of her life trying to walk away from pain and hate..... McFadden interweaves fiction with the historic period of the Harlem Renaissance in this novel about a woman's struggle against hate and disappointment. —Vanessa Bush
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. Why did the author choose to name the protagonist Easter? How does her name relate to the story?
2. Describe the setting of Glorious. Why might the author have chosen to write about this time period and these places and events?
3. Why do you think Easter continuously chooses to walk away from people, places and situations instead of confronting them head-on?
4. McFadden chooses to incorporate historical figures in a fictional context. Who does she include? Does her portrayal of them match historical accounts?
5. What does the historical narrative of Glorious reveal about contemporary society?
6. The quest for love and acceptance is a key theme of Glorious. How does the author use the cast of characters to highlight the complexity of this quest?
7. The characters in Glorious are from different classes, backgrounds, and ethnic groups but they share may commonalities. What are some of those shared characteristics?
8. What imagery does the author use in the prologue to set the scene? Does this imagery appear again in the story?
9. Why is Easter attracted to Mama Rain and then later, Getty Wisdom? Do the two have common qualities that draw Easter to them? Did her husband Colin Gibbs have any of those same qualities?
10. In Harlem, Easter tells Rain that she was writing to "Keep a grip on life." At the end of the book though, when Easter has given up writing, does this mean that she has also given up on life?
11. The author presents many representations of friendship and relationships. Describe some. Which are most successful? Why do you think these relationships are able to endure?
12. The story begins and ends in Waycross, Georgia. Why did the author choose to close the story in a place that held so many bad memories for Easter? Is there symbolism in this?
13. Does Easter Bartlett obtain justice? What does she sacrifice in the process?
14. Why do you think that the author chose the quotations by T.S. Eliot and Zora Neale Hurston as the novel's epigraphs? What do they signify?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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