The Weekend
Bernhard Schlink, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307378156
Summary
Old friends and lovers reunite for a weekend in a secluded country home after spending decades apart. They excavate old memories and pass clandestine judgments on the wildly divergent paths they’ve taken since their youth.
But this isn’t just any reunion, and their conversations about the old days aren’t your typical reminiscences: After twenty-four years, Jorg, a convicted murderer and terrorist, has been released from prison. The announcement of his pardon will send shock waves through the country, but before the announcement, his friends—some of whom were Baader-Meinhof sympathizers or those who clung to them—gather for his first weekend of freedom.
They have been summoned by Jorg’s devoted sister, Christiane, whose concern for her brother’s safety is matched only by the unrelenting zeal of Marko, a young man intent on having Jorg continue to fight for the cause.
Bernhard Schlink is at his finest as The Weekend unfolds. Passions are pitted against pragmatism, ideas against actions, and hopes against heartbreaking realities. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 6, 1944
• Where—Bielefeld, Germany
• Awards—Hans Fallada Prize (Italy); Prix Laure Bataillon
(France); Glauser Prize (Germany)
• Currently—New York, New York
Bernhard Schlink is the author of the internationally best selling novel The Reader and of four crime novels, The Gordian Knot, Self Deception, Self-Administered Justice, and Self Slaughter, which are currently being translated into English. He is a professor at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, in New York. (From the publisher.)
More
Bernhard Schlink is a German writer with a legal background. He became a judge at the Constitutional Court of the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1988 and is a professor for public law and the philosophy of law at Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany as of January 2006.
His career as a writer began with several detective novels with a main character named Selb—a play on the German word for "self"— (the first, Self's Punishment, co-written with Walter Popp is available in the UK). One of these, Die gordische Schleife, won the Glauser Prize in 1989.
In 1995 he published The Reader (Der Vorleser), a partly autobiographical novel about a teenager who has an affair with a woman in her thirties who suddenly vanishes but whom he meets again as a law student when visiting a trial about war crimes. The book became a bestseller both in Germany and the United States and was translated into 39 languages.
The Reader, translated by Carol Brown Janeway, was the first German book to reach the number one position in the New York Times bestseller list. In 1997 it won the Hans Fallada Prize, an Italian literary award, and the Prix Laure Bataillon for works translated into French. In 1999 it was awarded the "WELT - Literaturpreis" of the newspaper Die Welt. In 2000, Schlink published a collection of short fiction called Flights of Love.
In 2010, Schlink published The Weekend, about a pardoned German terrorist from the late 1960's, who meets with old friends and comrades in a weekend country house to recall old times. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Schlink's latest novel...is again an ernest effort to combine high seriousness with literary appeal. It is a good sujbect.... [T]he main fault in Schilnk's novel [is] the tendency fo lecture, without humor or much element of surprise.... But good intentions are not sufficient to creat an interesting story.
Ian Buruma - New York Times Book Review
Old friends cautiously reunite at an isolated German estate after one of them is released from prison in Schlink's (The Reader) meditative novel on the past's grip on the present and the possibility—or impossibility—of redemption. Convicted of quadruple murder and numerous acts of terrorism on behalf of the radical left, Jorg spent 24 years in prison before being unexpectedly pardoned. His sister, Christiane--whose obsessive concern for her brother's welfare has turned her into a borderline recluse—arranges a gathering to welcome Jorg back into society. Among those assembled are journalist Henner, whom Jorg believes betrayed him to the police; quiet Ilse, using the weekend to begin a novel about a common friend's alleged suicide; and Marko, a young revolutionary keen on convincing Jorg to use his newly earned freedom to speak out against the current government. Schlink avoids the easy route of condemnation and salvation, never lingering too long on Jorg's crimes—though the ties to the RAF aren't cloaked—and though the past is admirably handled (sketched in, but not overbearing), the book's real strength is the finely wrought dynamics among the characters, whose relationships and histories are fraught with a powerful sense of tension and possibly untoward potential
Publishers Weekly
Would you die for a cause? Would you killfor one? Jorg was willing to kill, going after capitalists and anyone else who got in his way back in Eighties Germany. Now, after 24 years in prison, he's being released. Is he contrite? Still a firebrand? In Schlink's probing new work, it's more complicated than that. Jorg's sister Christiane has planned a get-together with old friends at the country house she shares with Margarete—a welcome-home party for a murderer. There's Henner, whom Jorg suspects of having betrayed him; Ulrich, who baits Jorg and whose daughter tries to seduce him; Karin, now an irritatingly patient and loving minister; quiet Ilse, who's writing a fictional account about another member of their group; and assorted spouses. Enter Marko, a crafty young revolutionary who wants Jorg to rejoin the cause, and an anonymous visitor who turns out to have a shattering connection to Jorg. Verdict: Schlink (The Reader) deftly manages his characters' interlocking stories yet refuses to give readers an easy answer to the central dilemma: How are we supposed to feel about Jorg? That might frustrate some readers, but the ambiguity is realistic and the book itself a beautifully crafted and stimulating read. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. The book opens with Christiane picking Jorg up from the prison entrance. His sister has visited him every two weeks for the last twenty-four years, yet their first meeting is tense and restrained. Do you think Jorg is concerned about the way people are going to see him, or is it simply dealing with the feeling of freedom?
2. Although there are others present when Henner arrives at the estate, he is the first of Jorg’s friends to be introduced. Do you think Henner’s profession as a journalist makes him more objective when looking at Jorg’s life?
3. During the first meal at which everyone is gathered, Ulrich is particularly harsh toward Jorg. While everyone else making polite conversation, Ulrich wants to know, “What was the worst thing about jail?” When people object to Ulrich’s questions, he defends himself by saying, “Why shouldn’t I ask him about his life? He chose it—just as you chose yours and I chose mine.” Do you think Ulrich is correct? Do we have so much choice in life?
4. Ilse’s writings about Jan are a parallel plot to the main story. She seems to be trying to grant herself closure by giving Jan’s life meaning. How do you feel about her suggesting Jan had something to do with 9/11, and still giving him an emancipating end?
5. Ulrich’s daughter, Dorle, makes a big scene near the beginning of the book, but she was not one of Jorg’s friends, and seems to completely change after her initial commotion. How does the character of Dorle fit with the rest of the characters, and why do you think the author included her?
6. Jorg’s son, Ferdinand, arrives late to the gathering. He and his father haven’t been in contact, and Christiane says, “He’s become the person they brought up.” Yet Ferdinand does come for the weekend, despite his feelings about his father’s past. Do you think Jorg and Ferdinand will have a relationship afterwards?
7. Christiane has had a relationship with Henner and Margarete, but her real love is for her brother. Do you think Henner and Margarete are attracted to each other in spite of Christiane, or because of her? Has so much time passed for all of them that the past relationships don’t matter anymore?
8. Marko Hahn believes that Jorg can still live as a symbol to the revolutionary cause. Christiane believes Jorg can change his life and become something separate from his past. Andreas just wants to keep his friend out of public dealings. Do you think any of these things are possible?
9. Karin, as the vicar, tries to keep peace among the parties, but even she is torn by memories of what the friends did in their youth in the name of revolution, of passion and belief in truth. Is it moral responsibility that has changed their beliefs, or, as Marko claims, complacency in life?
10. Jorg claims that he doesn’t remember the murders he committed, and several of the others seem to have forgotten the details of what happened twenty-five years before. Do you think it is possible to thoroughly block out the details of such terrible events? Do you think, from the victim’s standpoint, it is acceptable to let them be forgotten?
11. It is revealed that Christiane was the one who led police to Jorg, because she wanted to protect him. Marko seems more angry about this betrayal than Jorg himself. What do you think about Christiane’s act?
12. Jorg claims he has paid enough for the murders, but his son disagrees. “You haven’t paid for what you did—you’ve forgiven yourself for it. Presumably even before you did it. But only the others can forgive you. And they don’t.” Jorg killed in the name of the revolution, but his son sees the individuals that were affected. Is killing in the name of truth ever acceptable?
13. What do you think of Jorg’s revelation at the end? Do you feel sorry for him? Do you think he has paid for what he has done?
14. Looking back at your own life, was there a cause that you felt passionately about that you barely remember now? Why did you let that cause go? How do you feel about it now?
15. How do you think the characters will be changed by the weekend? Who do you think will be most affected?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath
Kate Moses, 2003
Knopf Doubleday
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400035007
Summary
This is the story of a woman forging a new life for herself after her marriage has foundered, shutting up her beloved Devonshire house and making a home for her two young children in London, elated at completing the collection of poems she foresees will make her name. It is also the story of a woman struggling to maintain her mental equilibrium, to absorb the pain of her husband's betrayal and to resist her mother's engulfing love. It is the story of Sylvia Plath.
In this deeply felt novel, Kate Moses recreates Sylvia Plath's last months, weaving in the background of her life before she met Ted Hughes through to the disintegration of their relationship and the burst of creativity this triggered. It is inspired by Plath's original ordering and selection of the poems in Ariel, which begins with the word 'love' and ends with 'spring,' a mythic narrative of defiant survival quite different from the chronological version edited by Hughes.
At Wintering's heart, though, lie the two weeks in December when Plath finds herself still alone and grief-stricken, despite all her determined hope. With exceptional empathy and lyrical grace, Moses captures her poignant, untenable and courageous struggle to confront not only her future as a woman, an artist and a mother, but the unbanished demons of her past. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—April 9, 1962
• Where— San Francisco, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of the Pacific
• Awards—American Book Award
• Currently—lives in San Francisco, California
In her words
From a Barnes & Noble interview
• I'm a seventh-generation Californian, and my great-great-grandmother, great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, daughter, and myself were all born in San Francisco — my mother, daughter, and myself all at the same hospital.
• I decided I would be a writer when I was four years old, while sitting at my mother's feet as she sewed on her mother's old Singer sewing machine and told family stories with her mother and sisters (my grandmother and aunts). As little snips of fabric snowed down on me and I listened — unobserved — to the stories told by the women in my family, I suddenly realized that's all I wanted to do with my life: to tell stories.
• I have never been to a writing workshop, retreat, or residency program. The only writing class I ever took was as a sophomore in college, and I ended up dropping out of school for the semester and getting an Incomplete for the class. After college graduation I talked my way into a job as an editor at a small literary trade publishing house called North Point Press in Berkeley, California: My strategy was to learn to write, surreptitiously, by working with 'real' writers. I published my first short story when I was 23; the story was part of a fiction competition and was published with my photograph. Someone recognized me in the grocery store and I was so appalled to have my imagination made so public and personal that I didn't submit another piece of fiction to a publisher until Wintering, 14 years later.
• Though childhood convinced me that I was going to be a writer, motherhood is what gave me my subject. I don't think I had anything worth writing about until I started re-experiencing the world through the eyes of my children; it is the assembly of the self — through childhood, through relationships with other people, through parenthood — that fascinates me as a writer as well as a reader.
• When asked what book most influenced her life as a writer, here is what she said:
The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. This was the first "adult" book that I ever read. I was 12 years old, and though I had decided by the age of 4 that I wanted to be a writer — a "storyteller" is how I thought of it then — it wasn't until I read The Yearling that I felt the imprint of an author's voice and heart and conscience on the story being told. The Yearling was my first exposure to the idea of a writer's craft: that a story is told through a writer's imagining of it, that the story didn't merely exist as a complete and separate entity.
As I read, I could detect how Mrs. Rawlings got inside the hearts and minds of each of her characters, and that they came alive, with all their frailties and dreams and losses, through her. Not only did the story of Jody and his love for his fawn, for his suffering parents and neighbors, lift off the pages for me, but so did their author. This, I realized for the first time, is what a genuine writer can do — put blood in the veins of characters who could not exist without her, and transmit them, feeling and alive, to a reader, and all of it through words. Many years later it sank in that this literary epiphany was given to me by a woman writer, making this book and what it means to me all the sweeter. (Author interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
This exceptional first novel, shot through with a fierce poetic luminosity that almost matches that of Moses's much-written-about subject, covers the last few months of the poet's life as she cares for her sick children in the middle of a brutal London winter, struggling to write her last poems and recover from the defection of husband Ted Hughes. Moses is frank, in a long afterword, about her sources—which include Plath's letters and journals—and about what she has made up or merely surmised. But the key question is whether the book succeeds as a compelling piece of fiction, and the answer is that it does, triumphantly. Moses moves deftly back and forth in time, from the couple's last months in their beloved but moldering Devonshire hideaway through Plath's first suspicions of Hughes's infidelities to her arrival in London. Moses catches the quality of English life, particularly its austere inconveniences and its moody weather, with remarkable fluency, and her habitation of Plath's body and mind feels complete. At the same time, she offers scenes that show how awkward and bloody minded the poet could sometimes be. It is not a sentimental book, but rather one that evokes Plath's fierce joy in words and images and her huge motherly courage in the face of crippling adversity, with lacerating episodes like the one in which she makes a desperate call from a phone box in the rain while her children peer in at her uncomprehendingly. In the end one wonders not how Plath came to kill herself but how she survived so long. This beautifully written novel may offend literary purists, but most readers will find it moving almost beyond words.
Publishers Weekly
Moses traces the source of Plath's unsustainable drive and sensitivity and their tragic consequences with empathic artistry. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
The last days of poet Sylvia Plath, as seen by a co-editor of the anthology Mothers Who Think (as well as co-founder of Salon.com s feature of the same name). Plath s tragic end has been so horribly romanticized that it has almost overshadowed the life and work that led up to it. A poetic prodigy, Plath (1932-63) won a scholarship to Smith College and began publishing verse while still a student. Her first mental breakdown (vividly described later in her novel The Bell Jar) came during her junior year at Smith, but she quickly made a name for herself as a poet and, in 1955, won a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge. There, she met and married English poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had two children. Moses concentrates her entire story on the winter of 1962, when Plath was facing the recent collapse of her marriage (Hughes had fallen in love with another woman) along with the first full flowering of her success as a major poet. Having published her first book of verse (The Colossus) in 1960, Plath had now begun writing in a more intensely personal style, composing works that depicted and arose from the failure of her marriage. As Plath moved back and forth between her house in Devon and her London flat, her life became increasingly scattered and disorienting. First-novelist Moses convincingly portrays the stress that finally overcame the poet as she went about her daily routines recording for the BBC, looking after her children, receiving visits from literary friends and from her mother haunted by her husband s rejection of her and by her growing discomfort at the necessity of constructing her poetry from the raw elements of an increasingly unhappy life. We don't see the suicide, but by the story's end it is clear that Plath has painted herself into an emotional corner leaving no other way out. Rich and harrowing, told with none of the sensationalism or cheap sentiment that has undermined so many accounts of Plath s life and end.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Sylvia Plath's Ariel poems are almost all written from the first person point of view, yet Wintering's narrative is told in the third person. Why do you think the author chose this perspective? What role does perspective play in the novel?
2. Describe Ted Hughes as portrayed in Wintering. Do you think he is fully committed to his marriage to Sylvia? How do you account for his decision to enter into an affair with Assia?
3. In Chapter 29, "The Moon and the Yew Tree", Ted hesitates to tell Sylvia what he really thinks of her poem. What are the consequences of his hesitation, and of Sylvia's refusal to acknowledge the darkness of her world view as she expresses it in her poem? What do Ted and Sylvia's choices in this chapter tell us about each of them, about their marriage, and about the idea of faith?
4. What symbolic role does the ocean play in Sylvia's imagination? How does it relate to her relationship with her mother?
5. What do you think is Sylvia's opinion of herself as a mother? How does Sylvia's longing for fertility — both as a mother and as an artist — impact her sense of self as she assembles her Ariel manuscript?
6. The telephone plays an important role — almost that of a character — in Wintering. How does the telephone affect Sylvia's sense of personal success and failure, and of "solving the problem of herself"?
7. There are various references to religion in Wintering. For example, Sylvia's voyeuristic desire to attend services at the church next to Court Green in Chapter 29, "The Moon and the Yew Tree"; her belief that "her god is dead, again" in Chapter 15, "Ariel"; her walk through the rainy churchyard in Chapter 12, "Elm"; her recalling of the famous lines about faith, hope and charity from I Corinthians in Chapter 19, "The Other"; her memory of an old Catholic chorale about the Christmas rose in Chapter 40, "The Swarm." What is the author telling us about Sylvia's relationship to organized religion? To faith?
8. The chapter titles in Wintering are taken directly from the poem titles, in Sylvia Plath's intended order, of Ariel and Other Poems. Yet Wintering's chapters do not necessarily refer in overt ways to their poetic counterparts. Think about the chapter titles and what the author might be telling us about Sylvia and her relationship to the story she is constructing through her manuscript. For example, what is the author saying about Chapter 3, "Thalidomide"? Or Chapter 10, "The Jailor"? Or Chapter 30, "A Birthday Present"?
9. In Chapter 1, Sylvia thinks of herself as a "poet at rest." The author tells us that the real Sylvia Plath began writing poetry again at the very end of December 1962, within days of the confrontation at Ted's borrowed apartment depicted in Chapter 40, "The Swarm." What does the novel tell us about why Sylvia would be moved to begin writing poetry again? Do you think the poems written during the last weeks of Sylvia Plath's life came from the same inspiration that produced her artistic output of the fall of 1962?
10. "The ones you love will leave you": this is the statement that Sylvia believes is her intuitive gift of understanding in Chapter 15, "Ariel". How does this relate to the themes of faith and fate that are threaded throughout Wintering? What relationship does it have to Chapter 20, "Stopped Dead," in which the myth of Arachne and Sylvia's viewing of the film "Through a Glass Darkly" are entwined?
11. We are told that the anagram Sylvia imagines at the end of Chapter 40, "The Swarm," tells her "you are ash." How does this symbolic statement relate to Sylvia's defiant independence in Chapter 15, "Ariel", when she rides at sunrise on the morning of her thirtieth birthday?
12. In Chapter 34, "Daddy," Sylvia's father appears only remotely. What is the author telling us about Sylvia Plath's notorious poem?
13. The locations depicted in Wintering are all real, and interestingly, most are on hilltops: Cawsand Hill in Dartmoor, the setting of Sylvia's ride on the horse Ariel; Court Green and its neighboring church and the local playground overlooking the village of North Tawton; Smith College; the Primrose Hill neighborhood in London. In an autobiographical essay the real Plath wrote for the BBC just weeks before her death, she stated that the pride of mountains terrified her, and she found the stillness of hills stifling. What do these hilltop settings, where so many of the most significant events of her life occur, tell us about Sylvia's character?
14. Sylvia Plath has long been considered a feminist icon. Yet Sylvia's relationship to most of the female characters in Wintering — her mother, Dido Merwin, Assia Wevill, her neighbors in North Tawton and in Primrose Hill — can be described as conflicted at best. "I so rarely get any girl talk," Sylvia says to Assia while talking in the garden in Chapter 6, "Barren Woman." What do you think of the statement about Wintering made by biographer Diane Middlebrook: "I've never read a more womanly book"? Do you think Sylvia is a feminist?
15. Wintering opens with an image of golden sight and a metaphoric ocean, and ends with a related image of golden sight and another imagined ocean. What is the author telling us with this pair of symbols?
16. One of the themes that runs through Wintering is that of different art forms responding to each other: fiction to poetry, poetry to film, poetry to music, poetry to visual art. How does the fictional aspect of Wintering respond to the poetry that was its inspiration?
17. Sylvia Plath's manuscript for Ariel and Other Poems, which she told Ted Hughes began with the word "love" and ended with the word "spring", has never been published. Now that you know how Sylvia Plath envisioned Ariel, does it change the way you think of Plath as an artist or as a woman? As a mother?
18. The author has chosen not to depict Sylvia's suicide in Wintering, ending the novel a few weeks before her death. Why? Plath biographer Anne Stevenson has written of Wintering that "Everyone who seeks a valid, impartial explanation for Plath's suicide should read this book." Does Wintering aid in your understanding of why the real Sylvia Plath killed herself?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Noah's Compass
Anne Tyler, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
277 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345516596
Summary
From the incomparable Anne Tyler, a wise, gently humorous, and deeply compassionate novel about a schoolteacher, who has been forced to retire at sixty-one, coming to terms with the final phase of his life.
Liam Pennywell, who set out to be a philosopher and ended up teaching fifth grade, never much liked the job at that run-down private school, so early retirement doesn't bother him.
But he is troubled by his inability to remember anything about the first night that he moved into his new, spare, and efficient condominium on the outskirts of Baltimore. All he knows when he wakes up the next day in the hospital is that his head is sore and bandaged.
His effort to recover the moments of his life that have been stolen from him leads him on an unexpected detour. What he needs is someone who can do the remembering for him. What he gets is—well, something quite different.
We all know a Liam. In fact, there may be a little of Liam in each of us. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 25, 1941
• Where—Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
• Education—B.A., Duke University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize (see below)
• Currently—lives in Baltimore, Maryland
Anne Tyler is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published 20 novels, the best known of which are Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1983), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the third won it.
She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her "brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail" (New York Times), and her "rigorous and artful style" and "astute and open language" (also, New York Times). While many of her characters have been described as quirky or eccentric, she has managed to make them seem real through skillfully fleshing out their inner lives in great depth.
Her subject in all her novels has been the American family and marriage: the boredom and exasperating irritants endured by partners, children, siblings, parents; the desire for freedom pulling against the tethers of attachments and conflicted love; the evolution over time of familial love and sense of duty. Tyler celebrates unremarkable Americans and the ordinary details of their everyday lives. Because of her style and subject matter, she has been compared to John Updike, Jane Austen, and Eudora Welty, among others.
Childhood
The eldest of four children, she was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her father, Lloyd Parry Tyler, was an industrial chemist and her mother, Phyllis Mahon Tyler, a social worker. Both her parents were Quakers who were very active with social causes in the Midwest and the South. Her family lived in a succession of Quaker communities in the South until they settled in 1948 in a Quaker commune in Celo, in the mountains of North Carolina near Burnsville.
The Celo Community settlement was founded by conscientious objectors and members of the liberal Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends, with community labor needs shared by the residents. Tyler lived there from age 7 through 11 and helped her parents and others with caring for livestock and organic farming. While she did not attend formal public school in Celo, lessons were taught in art, carpentry, and cooking in homes and in other subjects in a tiny school house. Her early informal training was supplemented by correspondence school.
Her first memory of her own creative story-telling was of crawling under the bed covers at age 3 and "telling myself stories in order to get to sleep at night." Her first book at age 7 was a collection of drawings and stories about "lucky girls...who got to go west in covered wagons." Her favorite book as a child was The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton. Tyler acknowledges that this book, which she read many times during this period of limited access to books, had a profound influence on her, showing how the years flowed by, people altered, and nothing could ever stay the same."
This early perception of changes over time is a theme that reappears in many of her novels decades later, just as The Little House itself appears in her novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Tyler also describes reading Little Women 22 times as a child. When the Tyler family left Celo after four years to move to Raleigh, NC, 11-year-old Anne had never attended public school and never used a telephone. This unorthodox upbringing enabled her to view "the normal world with a certain amount of distance and surprise."
Raleigh, North Carolina
It also meant that Tyler felt herself to be an outsider in the public schools she attended in Raleigh, a feeling that has followed her most of her life. She believes that this sense of being an outsider has contributed to her becoming a writer:
I believe that any kind of setting-apart situation will do [to become a writer]. In my case, it was emerging from the commune…and trying to fit into the outside world.
Despite her lack of public schooling prior to age 11, Anne entered school academically well ahead of most of her classmates in Raleigh. With access now to libraries, she discovered Eudora Welty, Gabriel García Márquez, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others. Welty remains one of her favorite writers, and she credits Welty with showing her that books could be about the everyday details of life, not just about major events.
During her years at N. B. Broughton High School in Raleigh, she was inspired and encouraged by a remarkable English teacher, Phyllis Peacock. Peacock had previously taught the writer Reynolds Price, under whom Tyler would later study at Duke University. She would also later teach the writer Armistead Maupin. Seven years after high school, Tyler would dedicate her first published novel to "Mrs. Peacock, for everything you’ve done."
Education
Tyler won a full scholarship to Duke University, which her parents urged her to go accept it because they also needed money for the education of her three younger brothers. At Duke, Tyler enrolled in Reynolds Price's first creative writing class, which also included a future poet, Fred Chappell. Price was most impressed with the sixteen-year-old Tyler, describing her as "frighteningly mature for 16," "wide-eyed," and "an outsider." Years later Price would describe Tyler as "one of the best novelists alive in the world,… who was almost as good a writer at 16 as she is now."
While an undergraduate, Tyler published her short story "Laura" in the Duke literary journal Archive, for which she won the newly created Anne Flexner award for creative writing. She wrote many short stories, one of which impressed Reynolds Price so that he later stated that it was the "most finished, most accomplished short story I have ever received from an undergraduate in my thirty years of teaching." "The Saints in Caesar’s Household" was published in Archive also and won her a second Anne Flexner award. This short story led to her meeting Diarmuid Russell, to whom Price had sent it with kudos. Russell, who was an agent for both Reynolds Price and for Tyler’s "crowning influence" Eudora Welty, later became Tyler’s agent.
Tyler majored in Russian Literature at Duke—not English—and graduated in 1961, at age 19, having been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. With her Russian Literature background she received a fellowship to graduate school in Slavic Studies at Columbia University although she left after a year without her master's degree. She returned to Duke where she got a job in the library as a Russian bibliographer. It was there that she met Taghi Modarressi, a resident in child psychiatry in Duke Medical School and a writer himself, and they were married a year later (1963).
Early writing
While working at the Duke library—before and after marrying Modarressi—Tyler continued to write short stories, which appeared in The New Yoker, Saturday Evening Post, and Harpers. She also started work on her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, eventually published 1964, followed by The Tin Can Tree in 1965. Years later she disowned both of these novels, as well as many of the short stories she wrote during this period, going so far as to say she "would like to burn them." She feels that most of this early work suffers from the lack of thorough character development and her failure to rework material repeatedly.
After the birth of two children (1965 and 1967), followed by a move from Montreal, Canada, to Baltimore in the U.S., Tyler had little time or energy for writing. She published nothing from 1965 to 1970. By 1970, however, she began writing again and published three more novels by 1974—A Slipping-Down Life, The Clock Winder, and Celestial Navigation. In her own opinion, her writing improved considerably during this period; with her children entering school, she was able to devote more time—and focus more intensely—than at any time since her undergraduate days.
National recognition
With Celestial Navigation, Tyler began to get wider recognition. Morgan's Passing (1980) won her the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction and was nominated for both the American Book Awards and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
With her next novel (her ninth), Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Tyler truly arrived as a recognized artist in the literary world. (She considers Homesick her best work.) Her tenth novel, The Accidental Tourist, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1985. It was also made into a 1988 movie starring William Hurt and Geena Davis. The popularity of this well-received film further increased the growing public awareness of her work. Her 11th novel, Breathing Lessons, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989 and was Time magazine’s "Book of the Year." It was adapted into a 1994 TV movie, as eventually were four other of her novels.
Since her Pulitzer Prize with Breathing Lessons, Tyler has written 9 more novels, all of favorably reviewed, many Book of the Month Club Main Selections and New York Times Bestsellers.
Analysis
In Tyler’s own words, the characters are the driving forces behind the stories and the starting point for her writing:
I do make a point of writing down every imaginable facet of my characters before I begin a book, trying to get to know them so I can figure out how they’ll react in any situation…..My reason for writing now is to live lives other than my own, and I do that by burrowing deeper and deeper….till I reach the center of those lives.
The magic of her novels starts with her ability to create those characters in the reader’s mind through the use of remarkably realistic details. The late Canadian author Carol Shields, writing about Tyler's characters, observes:
Tyler has always put her characters to work. Their often humble or eccentric occupations, carefully observed and threaded with humor, are tightly sewn to the other parts of their lives, offering them the mixed benefit of tedium and consolation, as well as a lighted stage for the unfolding of their dramatic selves. She also allows her men and women an opportunity for redemption.
Tyler has clearly spelled out the importance of her characters to her stories: "As far as I’m concerned, character is everything. I never did see why I have to throw in a plot, too."
Stylistically, Tyler's writing is difficult to categorize or label. Novelist Cathleen Schine describes how her "style without a style" manages to pull the reader into the story:
So rigorous and artful is the style without a style, so measured and delicate is each observation, so complex is the structure and so astute and open the language, that the reader can relax, feel secure in the narrative and experience the work as something real and natural.
The San Francisco Chronicle made a similar point: "One does not so much read a Tyler novel as visit it.
While Tyler herself does not like to think of her novels in terms of themes, numerous reviewers and scholars have noted the importance of family and marriage relationships to her characters and stories. Reviewing Noah's Compass, New York Times' Mitchiko Kakutani noted that
The central concern of most of this author’s characters has always been their need to define themselves in terms of family—the degree to which they see themselves as creatures shaped by genetics, childhood memories and parental and spousal expectations, and the degree to which they are driven to embrace independent identities of their own.
Tyler is not without her critics. The most common criticism is that her works are "sentimental," "sweet," and "charming and cosy." Even Kakutani has also occasionally bemoaned a "cloying cuteness," noting that "her novels—with their eccentric heroes, their homespun details, their improbable, often heartwarming plots—have often flirted with cuteness." In her own defense, Tyler has said,
For one thing I think it is sort of true. I would say piss and vinegar for [Philip] Roth and for me milk and cookies. I can’t deny it…. [However] there’s more edge under some of my soft language than people realize.
Also, because almost all of Tyler’s work covers the same territory—family and marriage relationships—and are located in the same setting, she has come under criticism for being repetitive and formulaic.
Tyler’s advice to beginning writers:
They should run out and buy the works of Erving Goffman, the sociologist who studied the meaning of gesture in personal interactions. I have cause to think about Erving Goffman nearly every day of my life, every time I see people do something unconscious that reveals more than they’ll ever know about their interiors. Aren’t human beings intriguing? I could go on writing about them forever."
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/10/2015.)
Book Reviews
Perhaps Tyler intends Liam’s desire for what he calls “someone else to experience your life for you” to justify the lengths to which she forces this slow-moving, passive man in his attempt to finagle a transaction with a stranger glimpsed at a doctor’s office. But the madcap nature of the quest feels out of character and doesn’t succeed as comedy.... What this novel needs is a heroine.... If Bootsie doesn’t arrive in time to save Noah’s Compass, she...shows us what we’ve been missing: a female voice that can’t be ignored or dismissed.
Katherine Harris - New York Times Book Review
A small story that provides an interesting variation on those dismal tales of aging by [Philip] Roth & Co…"Just trying to stay afloat"—neither sinking into Roth's existential despair nor ascending into Oprah's blinding self-delight—that's the difficult, totally unhip theme that Tyler takes clear to the end of this understated novel. In fact, Noah's Compass is likely to dissatisfy many of the author's fans, who have come to count on her for more fully resolved tragedies or more satisfying personal insights. Instead, with Liam, she has articulated the melancholy stasis of many older people's lives.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Noah’s Compass is immensely readable. It displays many of Tyler’s finest qualities: her sharp observation of humanity, her wry comedy; the luminous accuracy of her descriptions.... Hers is a fine-grained art, whose comedy could easily coarsen into the self-consciously quirky. If it does not, this is because her surprises are rooted in character: it is human nature that she evidently finds infinitely fascinating and surprising, with its constantly unforeseeable capacity for change.... [A] novel by Anne Tyler is cause for celebration.
Caroline Moore - The Sunday Telegraph
Tyler reveals, with unobtrusive mastery, the disconcerting patchwork of comedy and pathos that marks all our lives.
Wall Street Journal
Tyler’s artistry and intelligence are both firmly in evidence in her newest novel – as are the compassion and deep well of melancholy that run through her best work. The action in Noah’s Compass is as muted as its hero, but its drab, meandering exterior hides something profound. Tyler has crafted a novel in which very little changes, and yet a man is completely transfigured.
Yvonne Zipp - Christian Science Monitor
Everyone loves Anne Tyler...and her 18th novel will doubtless supply another reason.
San Francisco Chronicle
Tyler's gift is to make the reader empathize with this flawed but decent man, and to marvel at how this determinedly low-key, plainspoken novelist achieves miracles of insight and understanding.
Publishers Weekly
Unlike similar Updike and Roth characters, who worry more about their inability to perform sexual athletics any longer, Tyler's character struggles with the visceral loss of identity brought on by forced retirement and the indignities of memory loss. Verdict: Another winning effort by Tyler.
Library Journal
[D]eceptively rich and enigmatically titled.... Beneath the comedy on the surface of any Tyler novel lies an undercurrent of existential melancholy.... By the end of the novel, the particulars of Liam's life really haven't changed that much, but he is utterly transformed. And so will be the reader.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. When Anne Tyler was just starting to write Noah’s Compass, a journalist asked her what it was about. She replied, “I’d like to write about a man who feels he has nothing more to expect from his life; but it’s anybody’s guess what the real subject will turn out to be in the end.” Did that turn out to be the real subject of the book?
2. What does the title mean?
3. After reading the first chapter, did you have any idea where the story would lead?
4. On page 26, Tyler writes, “The distressing thing about losing a memory, he thought, was that it felt like losing control.” Why is Liam so interested in control?
5. Is this really the first memory he’s lost?
6. At the top of page 49, Liam thinks about his true self, and how it seemed to have disappeared after the incident. What does Liam consider to be his “true self”? Is he right?
7. Why does Liam become so obsessed with Ishmael Cope?
8. Discuss Liam’s attitude toward women. Does he treat his blood relatives differently from Barbara and Eunice? Why or why not?
9. Why does Liam’s initial impression of Eunice transform into something completely different? Why does he keep their relationship a secret from his daughters?
10. What does religion represent in the novel?
11. On page 186, Eunice insists, “I’m not...devious, Liam!” What does she mean by this? Does she actually believe it?
12. What does the palm-reading scene on page 204–5 tell us about Liam? What point is Tyler making?
13. Reread Barbara’s description of Liam on page 224. Is it accurate? Why or why not?
14. Ultimately, why does Liam turn Eunice away, soon after telling her, “You’re the woman I love, and life is too short to go through it without you!” (page 230)?
15. When does Liam stop wishing he could remember the break-in? Why?
16. On page 243 Liam wonders, “Why was it that he had known so many sad women?” How would you answer this question?
17. What is the meaning of the Epictetus quote on page 266? What does Liam intend by reciting it?
18. Discuss the ending. Is Liam happy?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
Summary | Author | Book Reviews | Discussion Questions
How to Read the Air
Dinaw Mengestu, 2010
Penguin Group USA
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594487705
In Brief
Dinaw Mengestu's first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, earned him comparisons to Bellow, Fitzgerald, and Naipaul, and garnered ecstatic critical praise for its haunting depiction of the immigrant experience in America. Now he enriches the themes that defined his debut in a novel that follows two generations of an immigrant family.
One September afternoon, Yosef and Mariam, Ethiopian immigrants who have spent all but their first year of marriage apart, set off on a road trip from their home in Peoria, Illinois, to Nashville, Tennessee, in search of a new identity as an American couple. Just months later, their son, Jonas, is born in Illinois.
Thirty years later, Yosef has died, and Jonas is desperate to make sense of the volatile generational and cultural ties that have forged him. How can he envision his future without knowing what has come before?
Leaving behind his marriage and his job in New York, Jonas sets out to retrace his parents' trip and, in a stunning display of imagination, weaves together a family history that takes him from the war-torn Ethiopia of his parents' youth to a brighter vision of his life in the America of today, a story—real or invented—that holds the possibility of reconciliation and redemption. (From the publisher.)
top of page
About the Author
• Birth—1978
• Where—Addis Ababa, Ethiopa
• Raised—USA
• Education—B.A., Georgetown University; M.F.A., Columbia
University
• Awards— (see below)
• Currently—lives in New York City
Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980, he and his family came to the United States. A graduate of Georgetown University and Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction, he lives in New York City. (From the publisher.)
Awards
Guardian First Book Award: Winner 2007
National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" Award
New York Times Notable Book
Dylan Thomas Prize Shortlist
Los Angeles Times Book Prize
Lannan Literary Fellowship
Prix du Premier Roman
Young Lions Fiction Award Finalist
NAACP Image Award Finalist
(From the publisher.)
top of page
Critics Say . . .
[D]eeply thought out, deliberate in its craftsmanship and in many parts beautifully written.... In How to Read the Air, [Mengestu] has forged something meaningful from his cultural perspective. The book lingers in the mind as personal—not in the characters' specifics, but in their frustrated dislocation in the world.
Miguel Syjuco - New York Times Book Review
[Mengestu]makes us rethink the tropes of immigrant literature .... At a time when some of our most powerful, and popular, stories are narrated by foreigners (and some of our most contentious public debates concern foreigners' rights to be in this country), Mengestu's novel keenly explores our complicated relationship with the idea of the immigrant experience.
Newsweek
[Q]uiet and beautiful.... [T]hanks to uncanny empathy and a deep understanding of history, Mengestu transcends heartbreak and offers up the hope that despite all obstacles, love can survive.
O, The Oprah Magazine
(Starred review) Mengestu (The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears) stunningly illuminates the immigrant experience across two generations. Jonas Woldemariam's parents, near strangers when they marry in violence-torn Ethiopia, spend most of the early years of their marriage separated, eventually reuniting in America, but their ensuing life together devolves into a mutual hatred that forces a contentious divorce. Three decades later, Jonas, himself moving toward a divorce, retraces his parents' fateful honeymoon road trip from Peoria, Ill., to Nashville in an attempt to understand an upbringing that turned him into a man who has "gone numb as a tactical strategy" and become a fluent and inveterate liar—a skill that comes in handy at his job at an immigration agency, where he embellishes African immigrants' stories so that they might be granted asylum. Mengestu draws a haunting psychological portrait of recent immigrants to America, insecure and alienated, striving to fit in while mourning the loss of their cultural heritage and social status. Mengestu's precise and nuanced prose evokes characters, scenes, and emotions with an invigorating and unparalleled clarity.
Publishers Weekly
The characters in Mengestu's triumphant second novel (after the award-winning The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears) are forever having what one of them calls a "leaving experience." Ethiopian immigrant Yosef passed many borders before arriving in America; wife Miriam continually walks away from her abusive husband (even leaving their wrecked car in a ditch) before finally achieving permanent escape; and their diffident son, Jonas, the story's narrator, leaves dreams unfulfilled and eventually leaves his marriage—though, says his wife, he was never really there in the first place. The well-constructed narrative parallels Jonas's story and that of his parents, deftly cutting from the slow fizzle of Jonas's marriage to his parents' troubled lives to their iconic car trip from Peoria to Nashville before he was born. After his marriage ends, Jonas reconstructs that trip—a device that frames the novel, though it's really the emotional journey that matters. Verdict: In authoritative prose that flows like liquid gold, Mengestu tells an absorbing story of how we learn that simply going forward is in fact to triumph. Highly recommended. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
top of page
Book Club Discussion Questions
1. Should Mariam and Yosef have stayed married to each other? Can a relationship survive a long separation?
2. Who is more responsible for the failure of Jonas and Angela's marriage, Jonas or Angela?
3. Was it wrong of Jonas to lie to the board member? Or was it more wrong of him to invent a story for his students? Do you agree or disagree with the school's handling of his fabrications?
4. Do you think reenacting his parents' trip will help Jonas?
5. Jonas is mostly estranged from his father before he dies, and mostly estranged from his mother before the end of this novel. Is there ever a reason to cut family members out of your life, or is it better to maintain close relationships whenever possible?
6. Given all she had suffered at the hands of Yosef, was Mariam justified in causing the car accident in Missouri? Why or why not? Is there ever an instance in which violence should be answered with violence? How did the violent episodes in Jonas's parents' marriage shape him?
7. Why did Jonas lie to Angela about his position at the academy?
8. Why does Jonas get so swept away with rewriting the personal statements of the immigrants seeking asylum? In what other ways does he reimagine his world and the world around him? Does this tendency help him cope, or does it hurt him?
9. Where do you think Jonas's trip takes him in the end? What kind of future do you see for him?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
top of page
The Confession
John Grisham, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
418 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780739377895
Summary
An innocent man is about to be executed. Only a guilty man can save him.
For every innocent man sent to prison, there is a guilty one left on the outside. He doesn’t understand how the police and prosecutors got the wrong man, and he certainly doesn’t care. He just can’t believe his good luck. Time passes and he realizes that the mistake will not be corrected: the authorities believe in their case and are determined to get a conviction. He may even watch the trial of the person wrongly accused of his crime. He is relieved when the verdict is guilty. He laughs when the police and prosecutors congratulate themselves. He is content to allow an innocent person to go to prison, to serve hard time, even to be executed.
Travis Boyette is such a man. In 1998, in the small East Texas city of Sloan, he abducted, raped, and strangled a popular high school cheerleader. He buried her body so that it would never be found, then watched in amazement as police and prosecutors arrested and convicted Donte Drumm, a local football star, and marched him off to death row.
Now nine years have passed. Travis has just been paroled in Kansas for a different crime; Donte is four days away from his execution. Travis suffers from an inoperable brain tumor. For the first time in his miserable life, he decides to do what’s right and confess.
But how can a guilty man convince lawyers, judges, and politicians that they’re about to execute an innocent man? (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 8, 1955
• Where—Jonesboro, Arkansas, USA
• Education—B.S., Mississippi State; J.D., University of Mississippi
• Currently—lives in Oxford, Mississippi and Albermarle, Virginia
John Ray Grisham, Jr. is an American lawyer, politician, and author, best known for his popular legal thrillers. He has written more than 25 novels, a short story collection (Ford County), two works of nonfiction, and a children's series.
Grisham's first bestseller was The Firm. Released in 1991, it sold more than seven million copies. The book was later adapted into a feature film, of the same name starring Tom Cruise in 1993, and a TV series in 2012 which "continues the story of attorney Mitchell McDeere and his family 10 years after the events of the film and novel." Eight of his other novels have also been adapted into films: The Chamber, The Client, A Painted House, The Pelican Brief, Skipping Christmas, The Rainmaker, The Runaway Jury, and his first novel, A Time to Kill. His books have been translated into 29 languages and published worldwide.
As of 2008, his books had sold over 250 million copies worldwide. Grisham is one of only three authors to sell two million copies on a first printing; the others are Tom Clancy and J.K. Rowling.
Early life and education
Grisham, the second oldest of five siblings, was born in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to Wanda Skidmore Grisham and John Grisham. His father was a construction worker and cotton farmer; his mother a homemaker. When Grisham was four years old, his family started traveling around the South, until they finally settled in Southaven in DeSoto County, Mississippi. As a child, Grisham wanted to be a baseball player. neither of his parents had advanced education, he was encouraged to read and prepare for college.
As a teenager, Grisham worked for a nursery watering bushes for $1.00 an hour. He was soon promoted to a fence crew for $1.50 an hour. At 16, Grisham took a job with a plumbing contractor. Through a contact of his father, he managed to find work on a highway asphalt crew in Mississippi at the age of 17.
It was during this time that an unfortunate incident made him think more seriously about college. A fight broke out among the crew with gunfire, and Grisham ran to the restroom for safety. He did not come out until after the police had "hauled away rednecks." He hitchhiked home and started thinking about college.
His next work was in retail, as a salesclerk in a department store men's underwear section, which he described as "humiliating." He decided to quit but stayed when he was offered a raise. He was given another raise after asking to be transferred to toys and then to appliances. A confrontation with a company spy posing as a customer convinced him to leave the store. By this time, Grisham was halfway through college.
He went to the Northwest Mississippi Community College in Senatobia, Mississippi and later attended Delta State University in Cleveland. Grisham drifted so much during his time at the college that he changed colleges three times before completing a degree. He graduated from Mississippi State University in 1977, receiving a BS degree in accounting.
He later enrolled in the University of Mississippi School of Law planning to become a tax lawyer. But he was soon overcome by "the complexity and lunacy" of it. He decided to return to his hometown as a trial lawyer, but his interest shifted to general civil litigation. He graduated in 1983 with a JD degree.
Law and politics
Grisham practiced law for about a decade and also won election as a Democrat in the Mississippi House of Representatives from 1983 to 1990 at an annual salary of $8,000. By his second term at the Mississippi state legislature, he was the vice-chairman of the Apportionment and Elections Committee and a member of several other committees.
With the success of his second book The Firm, published in 1991, Grisham gave up practicing law. He returned briefly in 1996 to fight for the family of a railroad worker who had been killed on the job. It was a commitment made to the family before leaving law to become a full-time writer. Grisham successfully argued his clients' case, earning them a jury award of $683,500—the biggest verdict of his career.
Writing
Grisham said that, sometime in the mid-1980s, he had been hanging around the court one day when he overheard a 12-year-old girl telling the jury how she been beaten and raped. Her story intrigued Grisham, so he began to watch the trial, noting how members of the jury wept during her testimony. It was then, Grisham later wrote in the New York Times, that a story was born. Musing over "what would have happened if the girl's father had murdered her assailants," Grisham took three years to complete his first book, A Time to Kill.
Finding a publisher was not easy. The book was rejected by 28 publishers before Wynwood Press, an unknown publisher, agreed to give it a modest 5,000-copy printing. It was published in June 1989. The day after Grisham completed A Time to Kill, he began work on his second novel, the story of an ambitious young attorney "lured to an apparently perfect law firm that was not what it appeared." The Firm remained on the the New York Times' bestseller list for 47 weeks and became the bestselling novel of 1991.
Beginning with A Painted House in 2001, the author broadened his focus from law to the more general rural South, but continued to write legal thrillers. He has also written sports fiction and comedy fiction.
In 2005, Grisham received the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award. The award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
In 2010, Grisham started writing legal thrillers for children 9-12 years old. The books featured Theodore Boone, a 13-year-old boy, who gives his classmates legal advice—everything from rescuing impounded dogs to helping their parents prevent their house from being repossessed. His daughter, Shea, inspired him to write the Boone series.
Marriage and family
Grisham married Renee Jones in 1981, and the couple have two grown children together, Shea and Ty. The family spends their time in their Victorian home on a farm outside Oxford, Mississippi, and their other home near Charlottesville, Virginia.
The Innocence Project
Grisham is a member of the Board of Directors of The Innocence Project, which campaigns to free unjustly convicted people on the basis of DNA evidence. The Innocence Project argues that wrongful convictions are not isolated or rare events but instead arise from systemic defects. Grisham has testified before Congress on behalf of the Project and appeared on Dateline on NBC, Bill Moyers Journal on PBS, and other programs. He also wrote for the New York Times in 2013 about an unjustly held prisoner at Guantanamo.
Libel suit
In 2007, former legal officials from Oklahoma filed a civil suit for libel against Grisham and two other authors. They claimed that Grisham and the others critical of Peterson and his prosecution of murder cases conspired to commit libel and generate publicity for themselves by portraying the plaintiffs in a false light and intentionally inflicting emotional distress. Grisham was named due to his publication of the non-fiction book, The Innocent Man. He examined the faults in the investigation and trial of defendants in the murder of a cocktail waitress in Ada, Oklahoma, and the exoneration by DNA evidence more than 12 years later of wrongfully convicted defendants Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz. The judge dismissed the libel case after a year, saying, "The wrongful convictions of Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz must be discussed openly and with great vigor."
Misc.
The Mississippi State University Libraries maintains the John Grisham Room, an archive containing materials related to his writings and to his tenure as Mississippi State Representative.
Grisham has a lifelong passion for baseball demonstrated partly by his support of Little League activities in both Oxford, Mississippi, and Charlottesville, Virginia. He wrote the original screenplay for and produced the 2004 baseball movie Mickey, starring Harry Connick, Jr. He remains a fan of Mississippi State University's baseball team and wrote about his ties to the university and the Left Field Lounge in the introduction for the book Dudy Noble Field: A Celebration of MSU Baseball.
In an October 2006 interview on the Charlie Rose Show, Grisham stated that he usually takes only six months to write a book and that his favorite author is John le Carre. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/6/2013.)
Book Reviews
[T]he kind of grab-a-reader-by-the-shoulders suspense story that demands to be inhaled as quickly as possible. But it's also a superb work of social criticism in the literary troublemaker tradition of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.... For more than a decade, in his novels...and on editorial pages, Grisham has ruminated over the efficacy and morality of the death penalty. The Confession bangs the gavel and issues a clear verdict. As an advocacy thriller, it will rile some readers, shake up conventional pieties and, no doubt, change some minds. Whatever your politics, don't read this book if you just want to kick back in your recliner and relax.
Maureen Corrigan - Washiangton Post
Grisham's recent slump continues with another subpar effort whose plot and characters, none of whom are painted in shades of gray, aren't able to support an earnest protest against the death penalty. In 2007, almost on the eve of the execution of Donte Drumm, an African-American college football star, for the 1998 murder of a white cheerleader whose body was never found, Travis Boyette, a creepy multiple sex offender, confesses that he's guilty of the crime to Kansas minister Keith Schroeder. With Drumm's legal options dwindling fast and with the threat of civil unrest in his Texas hometown if the execution proceeds, Schroeder battles to convince Boyette to go public with the truth—and to persuade the condemned man's attorney that Boyette's story needs to be taken seriously. While the action progresses with a certain grim realism, Schroeder's superficial responses to the issues raised undercut the impact. As with The Appeal, the author's passionate views on serious flaws in the justice system don't translate well into fiction.
Publishers Weekly
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for The Confession:
1. How is your reading of this novel affected by the knowledge that much in the book is based on actual events, not just in Texas but in other states as well?
2. What evidence is used to charge and convict Donte Drumm of Nicole Yarber's murder?
3. Enumerate the flaws in the justice system that Grisham's book illuminates, starting with the police officers and their technique of attaining Drumm's confession.
4. What other parts of the system come under Grisham's criticism?
5. What are the pressures that come to bear on the legal system when a murder takes place—pressures that might force an indictment and conviction unfairly?
6. Do you find the sections dealing with Drumm's years on death row believable? Talk about this revealing passage:
You count the days and watch the years go by. You tell yourself, and you believe it, that you'd rather just die. You'd rather stare death boldly in the face and say you're ready because whatever is waiting on the other side has to be better than growing old in a six-by-ten cage with no one to talk to. You consider yourself half-dead at best. Please take the other half....
But Drumm's thoughts end with "no one really wants to die," even if his life is so miserably confined. Talk about the will to live despite life's circumstances.
7. What role does race play in this story?
8. Was this book suspenseful? Was the ending—with all the twists & turns along the way—surprising or predictable? Did you have an idea of how it would end? (Okay, be honest: did you skip ahead to read the ending?)
9. At one point, Schroeder wonders whether he would believe in the death penalty if Boyette rather than Drumm were scheduled for execution. What do you think?
10. Grisham has received criticism that his characters are one-dimensional—either all good or all bad, depending on which side of the death penalty issue they fall on. Do you agree? Or do you feel his characters are fully drawn? What about Keith Schroeder?
11. Grisham has also been criticized for straying from his signature suspense fiction to push his views on the death penalty. Do you agree with those critics? Should Grisham, as a writer of fiction, stay away from hot button political issues? Or should he to use his popularity as a fiction writer to speak out? Does your answer to that question align with your attitude toward the death penalty?
12. Have you learned anything new about the working of the legal system in this country? Do you see it in a different light because of Grisham's book?
13. What are your views regarding the death penalty? Has your perspective been changed by reading this book? Do you see Grisham's book as a fair—or unfair—portrayal of the legal system and death penalty issue?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.