A Scattered Life
Karen McQuestion, 2010
AmazonEncore
300 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781935597063
Summary
In A Scattered Life, Karen McQuestion proves to be an adept chronicler of unforgettable female characters. Poignantly written, she thoughtfully examines how women love, learn, and come to accept themselves and others, as well as life’s often harsh realities of deception and loss.
Skyla Plinka has all she could ask for—at least that’s what her mother-in-law Audrey thinks. On most days, Skyla agrees, yet there’s a part of her that longs for her free-spirited days before husband, child, and the humdrum life of rural Wisconsin.
Close friend Roxanne (and the five sons she can’t seem to keep tabs on), offers a reprieve, but it isn’t until Skyla takes a part time job at her local bookstore that she starts to feel at home in her own skin. Her growing independence causes conflicts with her husband, her in-laws, and even her best friend, but in the end, Skyla learns what it means to love and be loved in this unsure journey called life. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
Karen McQuestion’s essays have appeared in Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Christian Science Monitor and several anthologies. Originally self-published as a Kindle e-book, A Scattered Life became the first self-published Kindle book to ever be optioned for film. McQuestion lives with her family in Hartland, Wisconsin (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
McQuestion’s debut novel focuses on three women in a peaceful Wisconsin suburb.... A late-in-the-game tragedy feels engineered to invoke tears, but readers looking for a quiet tale about women learning to manage their expectations and find joy in unexpected places will enjoy this sweet read. — Kristin Huntley
Booklist
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 A Scattered Life:
1. What drew Thomas and Skyla together—and keeps them together—as a couple. Is it their differences or similarities that form their attraction to one another? What does each offer the other?
2. What is it about her life with Thomas that makes Skyla content? How has her childhood affected the way in which she thinks about her current life—about the things that bring her happiness, as well as the things she wants for her daughter?
3. From the first, how do Skyla and Thomas view the new neighbors? How do you view them, especially Roxanne? How would you describe Roxanne, and why does Skyla see Roxanne as the friend she had been looking for?
4. How does the job in Mystic Books change Skyla? What about Thomas's and Audrey's reactions—fair...or not?
5. What about Audrey, Skyla's mother-in-law? Is she interfering...or justifiably desirous of a closer relationship with her granddaughter? What kind of a mother has she been...and what kind of a mother-in-law is she?
6. McQuestion's book explores what it means to be a mother. What are the differing styles of motherhood that the three women—Skyla, Audrey, and Roxanne—represent. Which appeals to you...which fits you...or fits the way you were raised?
7. Do you believe, as Skyla says, that "most people have everything they need to be happy"? Does Skyla actually believe it?
8. Were you prepared for the tragedy at the heart of the story? Talk about the ways in which each character copes and learns from what happens.
9. How, by the end of the novel, are the characters changed? What do they learn about themselves and the world around them?
10. What is the significance of the book's title, "a scattered life"?
11. A Scattered Life as achieved some notoriety as the first self-published Kindle book to be optioned as a film. Does knowing that affect your reading of the story in any way? How would you cast the film—what actors would you like to see play which characters?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page
1984
George Orwell, 1949
~ 300 pp. (varies by publisher)
Summary
In 1949, on the heels of another literary classic, Animal Farm, George Orwell wrote 1984, his now legendary and terrifying glimpse into the future. His vision of an omni-present and ultra-repressive State is rooted in the ominous world events of Orwell's own time and is given shape and substance by his astute play on our own fears.
As the novel opens, we learn that in year 1984, the world has been divided into three states: Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia, all of which, it is said, are almost continually in battle with one another. This world structure has come about following a nuclear war which took place sometime in the 1950's. In the state of Oceania, a revolution has resulted in the rise of an all-seeing figurehead known only as Big Brother, and a secretive group of individuals referred to as The Party. Under this regime, basic freedoms of expression—even thought—are strictly forbidden. History and memory are actively erased and rewritten so as to support the omnipotence and infallibility of The Party and its pronouncements. To this end, the State even employs its own language, Newspeak, and its own thought process, Doublethink.
It's against this background that we are introduced to Winston Smith, a low-level Party member (not to be confused with the elite group which surrounds Big Brother) who works in the Ministry of Truth. His job here, paradoxically, is to destroy and rewrite news articles and State facts and figures so as to align them with the most current views of The Party. A resident of Airstrip One—formerly London, England—Smith lives in a world devoid of even the simplest liberties. In this repressive society, where thoughts themselves can be ascertained and monitored, Winston finds himself alone and in quiet "revolution" against Big Brother. Boldly, he even goes as far as to write his own thoughts down on paper— a crime worthy of abduction by the Thought Police.
Early in the novel, Winston meets Julia, another worker at the Ministry of Truth, whom he has been watching from afar. Secretly, the two begin a love affair. This liaison inspires Winston to indulge his ever-growing obsession with revolution, and he and Julia begin to discuss, however implausible, ideas for the overthrow of The Party. Winston's eventual (and inevitable) capture at the hands of the Thought Police leads to his purification and re-education by inner Party members
Orwell's strict attention to detail and realistic description of a world thirty-five years ahead of his own add validity to 1984, and make its larger conclusions all the more frightening. Even today, the novel remains a bleak and shadowy forewarning of what might someday occur. (From Penguin Classics—cover image, top-right.)
Author Bio
• Aka— Eric Arthur Blair
• Birth— June 25, 1903
• Where—Motihari, Bihar, India
• Death—January 21, 1950
• Where—London England
• Education—Eton, U.K.
Eric Arthur Blair (George Orwell) was born in 1903 in India, where his father worked for the Civil Service. The family moved to England in 1907 and in 1917 Orwell entered Eton, where he contributed regularly to the various college magazines. From 1922 to 1927 he served with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that inspired his first novel, Burmese Days (1934). Several years of poverty followed.
He lived in Paris for two years before returning to England, where he worked successively as a private tutor, schoolteacher and bookshop assistant, and contributed reviews and articles to a number of periodicals. Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933.
In 1936, he was commissioned by Victor Gollancz to visit areas of mass unemployment in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) is a powerful description of the poverty he saw there. At the end of 1936 Orwell went to Spain to fight for the Republicans and was wounded, and Homage to Catalonia is his account of the civil war. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1938 and from then on was never fully fit. He spent six months in Morocco and there wrote Coming Up for Air.
During the Second World War he served in the Home Guard and worked for the BBC Eastern Service from 1941 to 1943. As literary editor of the (London) Tribune he contributed a regular page of political and literary commentary, and he also wrote for the Observer and later for the Manchester Evening News.
His unique political allegory, Animal Farm, was published in 1945, and it was this novel, together with 1984 (1949), which brought him world-wide fame.
George Orwell died in London in January 1950. A few days before, Desmond MacCarthy had sent him a message of greeting in which he wrote: "You have made an indelible mark on English literature. . .you are among the few memorable writers of your generation." (From Wikipedia and Penguin Classics—cover image, top-right.)
Book Reviews
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Nineteen Eighty-Four is a work of pure horror, and its horror is crushingly immediate....The English language is transformed into something called Newspeak, a devastating bureaucratic jargon whose aim is to reduce the vocabulary to the minimum number of words so that ultimately there will be no tools for thinking outside the concepts provided by the state.... [The novel]... is a great examination into and dramatization of Lord Action's famous apothegm, "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Mark Schorer - New York Times (6/12/1949)
Discussion Questions
1. The world within which Winston lives is replete with contradictions. For example a, major tenet of the Party's philosophy is that War is Peace. Similarly, the Ministry of Love serves as, what we would consider, a department of war. What role do these contradictions serve on a grand scale? Discuss other contradictions inherent in the Party's philosophy. What role does contradiction serve within the framework of Doublethink? How does Doublethink satisfy the needs of The Party?
2. In the afterword, the commentator describes 1984 as "a warning." Indeed, throughout the text, Orwell plants both subtle and overt warnings to the reader. What do you think are some of the larger issues at hand here?
3. Describe the role that O'Brien plays in Winston's life. Why do you think that initially, Winston is drawn to O'Brien? Why does he implicitly trust him, despite the enormous dangers involved?
4. Discuss the significance and nature of Winston's dreams. Deconstruct the dream wherein O'Brien claims that they "shall meet in a place where there is no darkness" (page 22), and the dream in which Winston's mother and sister disappear (page 26). What are the underpinnings of these dreams? What deeper meanings do they hold? Why do you think the author devotes as much time as he does to Winston's dreams?
5. Discuss Winston as a heroic figure. What qualities does he posses that could define him as one?
6. Compare and contrast some of the other characters in Winston's world: Parsons, Syme, O'Brien. How does Winston view each one? How do they differ from Winston? What opinion do you think each one has of Winston?
7. On pages 147-148, Winston reflects on the omnipresence of The Party: "He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them….Facts at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive, but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make?" What, in essence, is Winston saying about the lone individual in relation to The State? Does this contention remain true throughout the novel?
8. Early on in the novel, we learn of Winston's belief in the proles as a liberating force. What accounts for Winston's almost blind faith in the proles? What are some of the characteristics of the proles that, in Winston's eyes, make them the ultimate means for overthrowing Big Brother?
9. From her first appearance as "the dark-haired girl," through to the end of the novel, Julia is a key figure in 1984. Trace the path of Julia in relation to Winston's life; in what ways does she influence him? Did you trust her, initially? Overall, do you feel she had a positive or negative impact upon him?
10. After his first formal meeting with O'Brien, Winston receives a book, ostensibly written by Emmanuel Goldberg. In reading passages from this book, Winston is further enlightened as to "how" the current society came into being. Focus on these passages, and in particular, on the theory of the High, Middle and Low classes (page 179). If true, what does this theory hold for the proles? Is Winston's plan for the proles now altered? Why or why not?
11. During Winston's interrogation, O'Brien explains that whereas preceding totalitarian regimes had failed, The Party was truly successful in its consolidation of power (page 226). How, according to O'Brien, does the The Party as an oligarchy differ from Nazism or Russian Communism? How does he define the role of the martyr, both in terms of The Party and the other totalitarian systems?
12. Following his capture in Mr. Charrington's spare room, Winston undergoes a process of "philosophical cleansing" and re-education against which he valiantly, but unsuccessfully fights. Discuss Winston's "capitulation" at the hands of O'Brien. How is Winston brought to "love Big Brother?" In sacrificing Julia, how has Winston, in essence, signaled his own end?
13. How would you describe the author's tone in 1984? Does it add to or detract from the character's discourse?
14. Discuss the role of sex and intimacy in 1984. What specific function does the Party's directive on sexual interaction serve?
15. In the final analysis, how accurate was Orwell in his vision of the future? In what ways does our contemporary society compare to his idea of society in 1984? Are there examples in which he was correct? What is most opposite? Do you see a potential for aspects of Orwell's "vision" to come true?
16. During his final encounter with O'Brien, Winston argues that, if all else fails, the inherent nature of the individual—the "spirit of man"—is strong enough to undermine a society such as that created by The Party. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Is Winston's belief applicable to the world we live in today? Can you cite examples in our own recent history that support or dismiss Winston's belief in the resiliency and righteousness of the human spirit?
17. Prior to meeting her, Winston fantasizes about Julia in violent, humiliating ways. Later, he describes in his diary an encounter with a middle-aged, toothless prostitute. How do you account for these thoughts? How does Winston's understanding of women change after his first liaison with Julia?
18. Given Winston's own acknowledgment that he is under constant surveillance, and that it would only be a matter of time before the Thought Police caught him, no one in his world could be trusted. Prior to his capture, which character or characters did you envision as betraying Winston? How did you foresee his ultimate demise? Did you, on the contrary, feel that by some chance he would overcome the forces aligned against him, and fulfill his wish to conquer The Party?
19. Imagine yourself as Winston Smith at the beginning of 1984. What would you do to undermine The Party? Knowing what you know now, how would you extricate yourself from the fate that awaits you?
20. Refer back to Winston's conversation with the old man at the pub (page 78). Why is Winston so determined in his approach to the old man? What is Winston hoping to learn from him?
(Questions from Penguin Modern Classics.)
Sundown, Yellow Moon;
Larry Watson, 2007
Random House
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780375758539
Summary
On an icy day in January 1961, in Bismarck, North Dakota, a sixteen-year-old boy walks home from high school with his best friend, Gene. The sudden sound of sirens startles and excites them, but they don’t have long to wonder what the sound could mean. Soon after seeing police cars parked on their street, the boys learn the shocking truth: hours before, Gene’s father, Raymond Stoddard, walked calmly and purposefully into the state capitol and shot to death a charismatic state senator. Raymond then drove home and hanged himself in his garage.
The horrific murder and suicide leave the community reeling. Speculation about Raymond’s motives run rampant. Political scandal, workplace corruption, financial ruin, adultery, and jealousy are all cited as possible catalysts. But in the end, the truth behind the day’s events died with those two men. And for Gene and his friend, the tragedy is a turning point, both in their lives and in their friendship.
Nearly forty years later, Gene’s friend, a writer, revisits the tragedy and tries to unravel the mystery behind one man’s inexplicable actions. Through his own recollections and his fiction—sometimes impossible to separate—he attempts to make sense of a senseless act and, in the process, to examine his youth, his friendship with Gene, and the love they both had for a beautiful girl named Marie.
Spare, haunting, lyrical, Sundown, Yellow Moon is a piercing study of love and betrayal, grief and desire, youth and remembrance. Using a brilliant, evocative fiction-within-fiction structure, Larry Watson not only brings to life a distinct period in history but, mostaffectingly, reveals the interplay of memory, secrets, and the passage of time. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1947
• Raised—Bismark, North Dakota, USA
• Education—B.A., M.F.A., Unversity of North Dakota; Ph.D.,
University of Utah
• Awards—Milkweed National Fiction Prize, Mountains and
Plains Bookseller Award, Friends of American Writers
Award, Banta Award, Critics Choice Award, ALA/YALSA
Best Books for Young Adults Winner
• Currently—lives in Milwaukee, Wisoconsin
Larry Watson was born in 1947 in Rugby, North Dakota. He grew up in Bismarck, North Dakota, and married his high school sweetheart. He received his BA and MFA from the University of North Dakota, his Ph.D. from the creative writing program at the University of Utah, and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Ripon College. Watson has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1987, 2004) and the Wisconsin Arts Board.
Watson is the author of five novels and a chapbook of poetry. His fiction has been published in more than ten foreign editions, and has received prizes and awards from Milkweed Press, Friends of American Writers, Mountain and Plains Booksellers Association, New York Public Library, Wisconsin Library Association, and Critics’ Choice. Montana 1948 was nominated for the first IMPAC Dublin International Literary Prize. The movie rights to Montana 1948 and Justice have been sold to Echo Lake Productions and White Crosses has been optioned for film.
He has published short stories and poems in Gettysburg Review, New England Review, North American Review, Mississippi Review, and other journals and quarterlies. His essays and book reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, and other periodicals. His work has also been anthologized in Essays for Contemporary Culture, Imagining Home, Off the Beaten Path, Baseball and the Game of Life, The Most Wonderful Books, These United States, and Writing America.
Watson taught writing and literature at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point for 25 years before joining the faculty at Marquette University in 2003. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
The unnamed, not-entirely-reliable narrator of this novel of obsession from Watson (In a Dark Time) aims his imaginative faculties at discovering, through fiction, the truth of an incident from his adolescence in Bismarck, N.Dak. In trying to figure out why, in 1961, his best friend's father shot a state senator and then hanged himself, the writer tries out a number of different scenarios via short fictions and simple speculation, including mental illness, romantic rivalry, a festering real estate swindle and a looming corruption scandal. The fictions-within-a-fiction are a clever conceit, but ponderous discussion of the pieces weakens it. More problematic is that the specifics of the larger tale aren't engineered to go as far as Watson wants to take them. The book's greatest strength, alongside its palpable sense of place, is its rich period detail—including the inescapability of cigarette smoking, in which nearly every character hungrily indulges. But even the narrator's own mother, initially absorbed by the case, loses interest in it rather swiftly, so it should be no surprise that the relentless analysis of minutiae comes to feel like harping.
Publishers Weekly
This novel is a literary murder mystery/coming of age tale/writer's memoir/love story that, perhaps understandably, struggles under the weight of its ambitions. The narrator of the novel is a successful fiction writer looking back on a traumatic event from his youth that has become seminal to his life and writing. This event is a murder and suicide: his best friend's father-a steady, solid, suburban dad-shot and killed an old acquaintance, a popular state senator, and then returned home and took his own life. Both young men are baffled and disturbed by this violence, and the novel examines the lingering damage it causes. Watson (Montana 1948) is at his best exploring the grief and confusion these events create for the two teen-age friends. Watson is less effective, however, as he moves past this event to the love story and the passages that link this event to the fictional narrator's literary work. The interior life of his characters becomes less convincing, and the exploration of how personal experience is transformed into art is, unfortunately, not fully realized.
Patrick Sullivan - Library Journal
A writer scours the past and his own false starts in an ultimately futile quest to explain the 1961 assassination of a charismatic North Dakota legislator. In his latest return to the Northern plains, Watson (Orchard, 2003, etc.) flouts the taboo against writer protagonists, no doubt in the interests of structure. Musing over a compendium of his earlier attempts to explicate the central drama of his life, the nameless writer-narrator recalls a January Wednesday in Bismarck, 1961, when he walked home from high school with his best friend, Gene Stoddard. At Gene's house, Gene's father Ray has, uncharacteristically, returned early from his job as a state employee at the nearby North Dakota capitol building. The narrator later learns that Ray shot, point-blank at the capitol, his own boyhood friend Monty Burnham, a state senator with Washington ambitions, then hurried home to hang himself in the family garage, leaving behind a confession to the crime but no inkling as to motive. Approaching the incident from the points of view of both pivotal and peripheral players, the narrator dispenses creative writing tips and quotes stories he's published in obscure literary journals. Several speculative vendetta scenarios emerge. Monty and Alma, Ray's beautiful wife, were high-school sweethearts, and rekindled an affair after her marriage, possibly during World War II, possibly during a high-school reunion, casting doubt on the paternity of the Stoddards' daughter. Monty bamboozled Ray's dying father into selling a beloved lake cabin, depriving Ray of his inheritance. Monty embroiled Ray, who works in purchasing, in a kickback scheme involving the state auto fleet, a scandal on the brink of exposure. Although everyone else, including his parents, has put the trauma to rest, the narrator has not. His obsession is complicated by his estrangement from Gene, and his (lifelong) infatuation with Gene's girlfriend, Marie. The soft-focus ending is only a momentary respite from the novel's preoccupation-the persistent, agonizing allure of the unknowable.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. What does Sundown, Yellow Moon say about the nature, source, and durability of young love?
2. Of the available possible explanations for Raymond Stoddard’s actions, which do you favor and why?
3. Each character seems to favor a particular explanation. What does that preference reveal about his or her character?
4. Does the explanation you favor reveal something about your character and experience?
5. The narrator writes stories to explain and understand what happened in his neighborhood. Is that a universal human response, or does it stem from his personal nature?
6. Does Sundown, Yellow Moon say that storytelling is a basic human impulse?
7. The narrator doesn’t emerge as an entirely likable character. Why? Is he made less than sympathetic because of what he says and does, or because of what he thinks and feels? Or because of what he writes?
8. What does Sundown, Yellow Moon say about the nature of memory? Of memory and imagination?
9. In some respects, the narrator is stuck in the past. What prevents him from living in the present?
10. How is the setting, both the time and the place, important to the action in the novel?
11. Because of the many stories within stories, it’s not always possible to determine what “really happened” in the narrative. How does that uncertainty figure in the novel’s themes?
12. If you knew the narrator based only on the stories he’s written, would you characterize him in the same way you would based on his behavior, speech, thoughts, and emotions?
13. Do you have a favorite character?
14. There have been many assassinations and attempted assassinations of politicians in the United States. How does this novel comment on the social, psychological, and cultural response to such events?
15. What does Sundown, Yellow Moon say about violence in America?
(Questions issued by publishers.)
top of page
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey, 1962
Penguin Group USA
312 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780141181226
Summary
An international bestseller and the basis for a hugely successful film, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was one of the defining works of the 1960s.
A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into the mental ward like a blast of fresh air and turns the place upside down, starting a gambling operation, smuggling in wine and women, and egging on the other patients to join him in open rebellion. But McMurphy's revolution against Big Nurse and everything she stands for quickly turns from sport to a fierce power struggle with shattering results. (From the publisher.)
More
Boisterous, ribald, and ultimately shattering, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is the seminal novel of the 1960s that has left an indelible mark on the literature of our time. Here is the unforgettable story of a mental ward and its inhabitants, especially the tyrannical Big Nurse Ratched and Randle Patrick McMurphy, the brawling, fun-loving new inmate who resolves to oppose her. We see the struggle through the eyes of Chief Bromden, the seemingly mute half-Indian patient who witnesses and understands McMurphy's heroic attempt to do battle with the awesome powers that keep them all imprisoned. (Also from the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 17, 1935
• Where—La Junta, Colorado, USA
• Death—November 10, 2001
• Where—Pleasant Hill, Oregon
• Education—B.A., University of Oregon; studied at Stanford
University
Ken Kesey was an American author, best known for his novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) and as a counter-cultural figure who considered himself a link between the Beat Generation of the 1950s and the hippies of the 1960s. "I was too young to be a beatnik, and too old to be a hippie," Kesey said in a 1999 interview with Robert K. Elder.
Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado to dairy farmers Frederick A. Kesey and Geneva Smith. In 1946, the family moved to Springfield, Oregon. A champion wrestler in both high school and college, he graduated from Springfield High School in 1953.
In 1956, while attending college at the University of Oregon in neighboring Eugene, Kesey eloped with his high-school sweetheart, Norma "Faye" Haxby, whom he had met in seventh grade. They had three children, Jed, Zane, and Shannon; Kesey had another child, Sunshine, in 1966 with fellow Merry Prankster Carolyn Adams.
Kesey attended the University of Oregon's School of Journalism, where he received a degree in speech and communication in 1957, where he was also a brother of Beta Theta Pi. He was awarded a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship in 1958 to enroll in the creative writing program at Stanford University, which he did the following year. While at Stanford, he studied under Wallace Stegner and began the manuscript that would become One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
Psychoactive drugs
At Stanford in 1959, Kesey volunteered to take part in a CIA-financed study named Project MKULTRA at the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital. The project studied the effects of psychoactive drugs, particularly LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, cocaine, AMT, and DMT on people. Kesey wrote many detailed accounts of his experiences with these drugs, both during the Project MKULTRA study and in the years of private experimentation that followed. It was this role as a medical guinea pig, as well as his stint working at a state veterans' hospital, that inspired him to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1962.
The success of this book, as well as the sale of his residence at Stanford, allowed him to move to La Honda, California, in the mountains south of San Francisco. He frequently entertained friends and many others with parties he called "Acid Tests" involving music (The Warlocks, later known as the Grateful Dead), black lights, fluorescent paint, strobes and other "psychedelic" effects, and, of course, LSD. These parties were noted in some of Allen Ginsberg's poems and are also described in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, as well as Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs by Hunter S. Thompson and Freewheelin Frank, Secretary of the Hell's Angels by Frank Reynolds.
Cuckoo's Nest
In 1959, Kesey wrote Zoo, a novel about the beatniks living in the North Beach community of San Francisco, but it was never published. In 1960, he wrote End of Autumn, about a young man who leaves his working class family after he gets a scholarship to an Ivy League school, also unpublished.
The inspiration for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest came while working on the night shift (with Gordon Lish) at the Menlo Park Veterans' Hospital. There, Kesey often spent time talking to the patients, sometimes under the influence of the hallucinogenic drugs with which he had volunteered to experiment. Kesey did not believe that these patients were insane, rather that society had pushed them out because they did not fit the conventional ideas of how people were supposed to act and behave.
Published in 1962, Cuckoo's Nest was an immediate success; in 1963, it was adapted into a successful stage play by Dale Wasserman; in 1975, Milos Forman directed a screen adaptation, which won the "Big Five" Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor (Jack Nicholson), Best Actress (Louise Fletcher), Best Director (Forman) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Lawrence Hauben, Bo Goldman).
Kesey was originally involved in creating the film, but left two weeks into production. He claimed never to have seen the movie because of a dispute over the $20,000 he was initially paid for the film rights. Kesey loathed the fact that, unlike the book, the film was not narrated by the Chief Bromden character, and he disagreed with Jack Nicholson being cast as Randle McMurphy (he wanted Gene Hackman). Despite this, Faye Kesey has stated that Ken was generally supportive of the film and pleased that it was made.
Merry Pranksters
When the publication of his second novel, Sometimes a Great Notion in 1964 required his presence in New York, Kesey, Neal Cassady, and others in a group of friends they called the "Merry Pranksters" took a cross-country trip in a school bus nicknamed "Furthur." The trip, described in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (and later in Kesey's own screenplay "The Further Inquiry") was the group's attempt to create art out of everyday life. In New York, Cassady introduced Kesey to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who then turned them on to Timothy Leary. Sometimes a Great Notion was made into a 1971 film starring and directed by Paul Newman; it was nominated for two Academy Awards, and in 1972 was the first film shown by the new television network HBO, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
Legal trouble
Kesey was arrested for possession of marijuana in 1965. In an attempt to mislead police, he faked suicide by having friends leave his truck on a cliffside road near Eureka, along with an elaborate suicide note, written by the pranksters. Kesey fled to Mexico in the back of a friend's car. When he returned to the United States eight months later, Kesey was arrested and sent to the San Mateo County jail in Redwood City, California, for five months. On his release, he moved back to the family farm in Pleasant Hill, Oregon, in the Willamette Valley, where he spent the rest of his life. He wrote many articles, books (mostly collections of his articles), and short stories during that time.
Twister
In 1994 he toured with members of the Merry Pranksters performing a musical play he wrote about the millennium called Twister: A Ritual Reality. Many old and new friends and family showed up to support the Pranksters on this tour that took them from Seattle's Bumbershoot, all along the West Coast including a sold out two-night run at The Fillmore in San Francisco to Boulder, Colorado, where they coaxed (or pranked) the Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg into performing with them. Kesey, always a friend to musicians since his days of the Acid Test, enlisted the band Jambay, one of the original bands of the jam band genre, to be his "pit orchestra." Jambay played an acoustic set before each Twister performance and an electric set after each show.
Final years
Kesey mainly kept to his home life in Pleasant Hill, preferring to make artistic contributions on the Internet, or holding ritualistic revivals in the spirit of the Acid Test.
In 1984, Kesey's son Jed, a wrestler for the University of Oregon, was killed on the way to a wrestling tournament when the team's bald-tired van crashed. This deeply affected Kesey, who later said Jed was a victim of conservative, anti-government policy that starved the team of proper funding. There is a memorial dedicated to Jed on the top of Mount Pisgah, which is near the Keseys' home in Pleasant Hill. At a Grateful Dead Halloween concert just days after promoter Bill Graham died in a helicopter crash, Kesey appeared on stage in a tuxedo and delivered a eulogy while the Grateful Dead was playing the song Dark Star, and he mentioned that Graham had paid for Jed's mountain-top memorial.
His last major work was an essay for Rolling Stone magazine calling for peace in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.
In 1997, health problems began to take their toll on Kesey, starting with a stroke that year. Then soon after his stroke he was diagnosed with diabetes. On October 25, 2001 Kesey had surgery on his liver to remove a tumor. He never recovered from the operation and died of complications on November 10, 2001, aged 66. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
The world of this brilliant first novel is Inside—inside a mental hospital and inside the blocked minds of its inmates. Sordid sights and sounds abound, but novelist Kesey has not descended to mere shock treatment or isolation-ward documentary. His book is a strong, warm story about the nature of human good and evil, despite its macabre setting.
Time
Kesey's new introduction to this anniversary edition could very well be the last thing he worked on before shuffling off this mortal coil in 2001. Additionally, 25 sketches he drew while working at a mental institution in the 1950s, the inspiration for the novel, are littered throughout. Critics are divided on the meaning of the book: Is it a tale of good vs. evil, sanity over insanity, or humankind trying to overcome repression amid chaos? Whichever, it is a great read.
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest:
1. In what way is Kensey's novel representative of the 1960s? (If you are too young to have experienced the '60s, you might want to do a little research into the era.) The book, issued in 1962, is nearly 50 years old. Are the thematic concerns of Cuckoo's Nest still relevant today, do they speak to the 21st century...or are they outdated?
2. Cuckoo's Nest centers around a classic plot device—the introduction of disorder into an ordered environment. How does Randlel McMurphy destabilize the psychiatric ward? First, discuss how "order" is maintained...who enforces it...and what form "order" takes. Then talk about what happens when McMurphy enters the story.
3. Was Chief Bromden mentally insane when he was committed to the hospital 10 years ago? How does he appear when we first meet him? What is the cause of his hallucinatory fog—his medications or his paranoia or...?
4. Trace the change in Bromden that occurs over the course of the novel. What does he come to understand about himself? Why he has he presented himself as "deaf and dumb"? Why does he believe he has lost his once prodigious strength? What effect does McMurphy have on him?
5. At one point, Bromden pleas with the reader to believe him. He says, "But it's the truth even if it didn't happen." What does he mean—how can something be true if it's not based in reality?
6. Is McMurphy crazy? Under what circumstances does he enter the hospital ward? If this is a parable...or allegory, what does McMurphy represent symbolically? Can he be seen as a Christ figure, one who sacrifices himself for the good of others? Yes...or no.
7. What is Dr. Spivey's theory of the Therapeutic Community—and how does McMurphy challenge it? What does he mean when he compares the process to a flock of chickens?
8. As a follow-up to Question 4, what does Nurse Ratched represent? What's funny, by the way, about her name? Talk about her ability to disguise her true "hideous self, which she shows readily to Bromden and the aides, from the patients. Bromden sees her as a combine...and nicknames her "Big Nurse." What are the implications of those words?
9. How does Ratched maintain power over her patients?
10. How does Ratched eventually gain control over McMurphy? Why does he gradually submit to her—and why does the newly subdued McMurphy confuse the other patients? What has he become to them?
11. Talk about the fishing trip that McMurphy arranges for the inmates. What does McMurphy teach the other patients about being on the outside? What's the symbolic significance of the fishing expedition?
12. Why doesn't McMurphy escape from the ward the night that Billy has his "date" with Candy?
13. Ultimately, Ratched looses her hold over the ward. Why?
14. What is this novel about? What dichotomy is being suggested by Ratched and the hospital vs. the patients? Good vs. evil? Power & authority vs. freedom. Repression vs. expression? Women vs. men? The machine vs. nature? War vs. humanity?
15. Why does Bromden narrate rather than McMurphy?
16. Ultimately, how does Ken Kensey challenge societal notions of sanity and insanity? Who is sick, according to Kensey?
17. Who is the book's hero?
18. What is the title's significance"
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
top of page (summary)
The Road Home
Rose Tremain, 2007
Little, Brown & Co.
432 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316002622
Summary
In the wake of factory closings and his beloved wife's death, Lev makes his way from Eastern Europe to London, seeking work to support his mother and his little daughter. After a spell of homelessness, he finds a job in the kitchen of a posh restaurant and a room in the house of an appealing Irishman who has already lost his family.
Never mind that Lev must sleep in a bunk bed surrounded by plastic toys—he has found a friend and shelter. However constricted his life in England remains, he compensates by daydreaming of home, by having an affair with a younger restaurant worker, and by trading gossip and ambitions via cell phone with his hilarious friend Rudi, who, dreaming of the wealthy West, lives largely for his battered Chevrolet.
Homesickness dogs Lev, not only for nostalgic reasons, but because he doesn't belong, body or soul, to his new country—but can he really go home again?
Rose Tremain's prodigious talents as a prose writer are on full display in The Road Home, and her novel never loses sight of what is truly important in the lives we lead. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1943
• Where—London, England, UK
• Education—Sorbonne, Paris; B.A., University of East Anglia
• Awards—James Tait Black Memorial Prize, Prix Fémina
Etranger, Whitbread Award, Orange Prize
• Currently—lives in East Anglia, UK
Rose Tremain was born Rosemary Jane Thomson in 1943 in London, the daughter of Viola (known as Jane) and Keith Thomson, a playwright.
She went to boarding school at Crofton Grange in Hertfordshire, an experience of which she later said in a Guardian interview, "It had all the horrors of boarding school— it was very cold and the food was disgusting. But the good thing about being sent away to school is that there’s a lot of what I would call dead time. You had to really use your own resources and what some of us did was to write our own plays and put them on. We starred in them, made the costumes, made the scenery, and it was thrilling."
After school she studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and then graduated with a degree in English from the University of East Anglia, where she later taught creative writing from 1988-1995.
She married Jon Tremain in 1971 and in 1972 had a daughter, Eleanor. Her second marriage was to the theatre director Jonathan Dudley. She now lives in East Anglia with the writer and biographer Richard Holmes.
Her first novel, Sadler’s Birthday, was published in 1976, and picked up by the editor Penelope Hoare, who later said, "I remember feeling utterly thrilled when I read it.... It was so unlike most people’s first novels, in the sense that it didn’t seem to be in the least bit autobiographical." Hoare has been Tremain’s editor ever since, working together on ten novels and several short story collections.
In the course of her writing career, Tremain has garnered a host of prizes, including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction) and the prestigious Prix Fémina Etranger, the Whitbread Novel Award, and several others. She has been nominated for the Booker and Orange Prize several times. She won the Orange Prize in 2008 for The Road Home. (Author bio from Chatto & Windus, a division of Random House, UK.)
Book Reviews
Journeys like Lev's are very much a part of Britain's present reality, with discussion of the Eastern European invasion appearing all over. But Tremain elevates the subject beyond its outlines by making Lev not a statistic or a caricature or the standard-bearer of a trend but simply a man—fully embodied, his ignoble and noble acts presented without exaggeration, without excessive praise or condemnation.... A less disciplined and agile author might have been tempted to ease Lev's transition from daydreamer to doer. Or she might have jollied Lev into a toque at London's River Cafe and set Rudi up as a chauffeur on Belisha Road. But Rose Tremain is in the business of inventing not so much fantasies as alternate realities.
Liesl Schillinger - New York Times
Rose Tremain brings the full tone and range of her novelist's imagination to bear on Lev, giving him, besides his enduring and endearing grief, humour, a romantic temperament, a genius for intimate male friendship and a poets' eye for images.
Times Literary Supplement (UK)
A classic work by the gifted Tremain.... She has the art of finding the improbable graces in human connection.
Guardian (UK)
This is a finely balanced novel of urgent humanity.... The Road Home should keep you gripped...and fraught with anxious sympathy.
Sunday Telegraph (UK)
The pleasure, the wit and the joy in humanity that Tremain brings to every page do what literature, at its best, should do: connect us, as E.M. Forester famously exhorted.
Stacey D'Erasmo - Los Angeles Times
It's not difficult to see why author Rose Tremain won the Orange Prize—a prestigious British fiction award--for her latest novel, The Road Home. From page one, Tremain plunges readers deep into the journey of Lev, an immigrant from an unnamed Eastern European country.... An unexpected, poignant story.
Allecia Vermillion - Chicago Sun Times
Tremain transforms this episodic road story into a gem of a novel, driven by a memorable character whose caring and ambition move him from a difficult personal situation and damaging historical past toward a positive new life.
Robert Allen Papinchak - Seattle Times
Why do I love Rose Tremain? It's not just the clarity of her prose, the liveliness of her plots, the precision of her settings, or the depth of her characters. I love Tremain because she is so compassionate. Her novels exemplify this moral quality, even as they excel at all the others.
Susan Balee - Philadelphia Inquirer
Tremain's protagonists are often faced with trials that have a fabled quality...and her latest novel is no exception...At once timeless and bitingly contemporary, this novel explores the life now lived by millions—when one's hope lies in one country and one's heart in another.
The New Yorker
Tremain (Restoration) turns in a low-key but emotionally potent look at the melancholia of migration for her 14th book. Olev, a 42-year-old widower from an unnamed former east bloc republic, is taking a bus to London, where he imagines every man resembles Alec Guinness and hard work will be rewarded by wealth. He has left behind a sad young daughter, a stubborn mother and the newly shuttered sawmill where he had worked for years. His landing is harsh: the British are unpleasant, immigrants are unwelcome, and he's often overwhelmed by homesickness. But Lev personifies Tremain's remarkable ability to craft characters whose essential goodness shines through tough, drab circumstances. Among them are Lydia, the fellow expatriate; Christy, Lev's alcoholic Irish landlord who misses his own daughter; and even the cruelly demanding Gregory, chef-proprietor of the posh restaurant where Lev first finds work. A contrived but still satisfying ending marks this adroit emigre's look at London.
Publishers Weekly
A displaced European's Candide-like progress through contemporary London is charted in this ambitious novel from the Whitbread Award-winning British author (The Colour, 2003, etc.). The protagonist is Lev, a recently widowed and also jobless former sawmill worker. He has left his young daughter and his (also widowed) mother behind (in a generically economically disadvantaged country that is and isn't Poland), hoping to find work and send money home. Debarking from the Trans-Euro bus on which he meets a similarly down-at-heels countrywoman (Lydia, who'll re-enter Lev's new life at variously crucial moments), Lev acquires a fragile living working as a distributor of leaflets, as a dishwasher, and so on, slowly ascending the ladder of minimal solvency, making a painstaking adaptation to a society that seems, to his bemused view, inexplicably self-indulgent, pampered and unmotivated. While sticking close to Lev's roiling thought processes, Tremain simultaneously constructs a subtly detailed mosaic of personal and cultural distinctions and conflicts-notably in Lev's cautious approach to reclaiming a sex life (perhaps even a love life?) and in generously developed conversations between Lev and his fulsome Irish landlord, bibulous plumber and compulsive worrywart Christy Slane. The novel's texture is further enriched by lengthy flashbacks spun from Lev's wistful memories, which acquaint us more fully with his warmhearted late wife Marina and his best friend Rudi, a resourceful hustler whose busy head is filled with visions of all things American, and foolproof scams by which such riches may be acquired. Rudi is an ingenious comic counterpart to Candide's annoyingly optimistic mentor Pangloss, and the novel dances into vigorous life whenever he takes hold of it. Still, Lev offers readers ample reason to get lost in this immensely likable novel's many pleasures. One of the best from the versatile Tremain, who keeps on challenging herself, and rewarding readers.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. "Through Lev’s eyes, we see London as the incomer views it and it is not an attractive sight: alternately moneyed and poverty-stricken, its inhabitants obsessed by status and success." (Edward Marriott, Observer)
Do you agree with Marriot’s assessment of how Lev views London, and do you feel Tremain paints a realistic picture?
2. In her author interview Rose Tremain says "I've deliberately built my fictions around characters who are distant from me, in gender, place or time—or all of these. The moment I get close to my own biography, I feel boredom (and even mild self-dislike) creeping up on me."
Does this reflect your own feelings as a reader? Do you prefer novels which reflect your own experiences or take you somewhere else? What do you think you have in common with Lev?
3. Food is a very important motif in the novel. How does Tremain illustrate Lev’s journey in terms of food? Why do you think she only begins to describe the food of his own country towards the end?
4. In the author interview Tremain says that in her view, "most Brits want to be welcoming to migrants, but have worries—or indeed extreme anxieties—of their own which sometimes prevent them from doing this."
Do you believe that is true in your country? What worries and anxieties do you think Tremain is referring to and how are these played out in the novel?
5. Have you ever lived in another country? If so, how far did your experiences reflect Lev’s? What did you find challenging about establishing a new life in a different culture? Did it affect the way you read the novel? If not, do you think you could ever do what Lev did? What would you find hardest to leave behind?
6. Lev’s relationship with Sophie becomes very dark when he turns violent towards her. Why do you think he has such difficult relationships with women?
7. In the end Lev returns to his family and builds a life with his new found skills and money. Why do you think that the novel has ended in such an idealistic way? Do you think that this ending is possible for immigrants?
(Questions issued by Chatto & Windus, a division of Random House, UK.)