Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Co.
Maria Amparo Escandon, 2005
Crown Publishing
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400097357
Summary
Serving a sentence in a prison in Mexico, Libertad Gonzalez finds a clever way to pass the time with the weekly Library Club, reading to her fellow inmates from whatever books she can find in the prison’s meager supply.
The story that emerges, though, has nothing to do with the words printed on the pages. She tells of a former literature professor and fugitive of the Mexican government who reinvents himself as a trucker in the United States. There he falls in love with a wild woman with whom he shares his truck and his life—that is until Joaquin Gonzalez unexpectedly finds himself alone on the road with a baby girl and Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Co. is born.
Joaquin and his daughter make the cab of an 18-wheeler their home, sharing everything—adventures, books, truck-stop chow, and memories of the girl’s mother—until one day the girl grows into a woman, and a chance encounter with one man causes her to rebel against another.
With her stories, Libertad enthralls a group of female prisoners every bit as eccentric as the tales she tells. In Gonzalez and Daughter Trucking Co., bestselling author Maria Amparo Escandon seamlessly blends together these elements into one compelling and unexpected conclusion that will have you cheering for Libertad and filled with joy. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 19, 1957
• Where—Mexico City, Mexico
• Education—N/A
• Awards—Film awards for Santitos (see below)
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California, USA
Maria Amparo Escandon is a Mexican born, US resident, best-selling bilingual novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and film producer. Her award-winning work is known for addressing bicultural themes that deal with the immigration experience of Mexicans crossing over to the United States.
Her stories concentrate on family relationships, loss, forgiveness, faith, and self-discovery. A linguist with a sharp ear for dialogue, she explores the dynamics of language in border sub-cultures and the evolution of Spanglish. Her innovative style of multiple voice narrations and her cleverly humorous, quirky, and compassionate stories with a feminine angle capture the magical reality of everyday life and place her among the top Latin American female writers. Her work has been translated into over 21 languages and is currently read in more than 85 countries.
Short Stories
Maria Amparo Escandon developed her career in the early 1970s during the Latin American Boom. Her first published short story appeared in the Mexican literary journal Plural in 1973 when she was sixteen. The works of masters Julio Cortazar, Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Pablo Neruda, Mario Benedetti, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Alejo Carpentier, and others influenced her work. Convinced that men had better opportunities to succeed as writers than women, she wrote her first short stories from the male perspective. It was until she moved to Los Angeles in 1983 when she discovered women writers like Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros that she shifted her perspective and focused on women's issues and the Mexican American experience in the US.
Novels
Living in California, Escandon began to view her culture of origin from an expatriate distance that provided her a deeper analysis of ingrained traditions, like the Mexicans' unique practice of Catholicism influenced by Pre-Columbian beliefs, women's position in society, female identity, illegal immigration, US-Mexico relations, and government corruption, all topics that she later drew on to write her novels and non-fiction work.
Her first novel published in 1999, Esperanza's Box of Saints (Santitos—Spanish version), deals with the universal fear of losing a child, with a woman's search for identity and a journey—both geographical and spiritual—that take Esperanza, the lead character, through sordid brothels throughout Mexico and into Los Angeles. Escandon's novel achieved the number one spot on the Los Angeles Times best sellers list. Both Newsweek (1999) and Los Angeles Times (2000) named her the writer to watch.
Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Co., (Transportes Gonzalez e Hija—Spanish version) her second novel, was published in 2005. It is set in a Mexican prison and the roads of America. It deals with women's relationships, guilt, crime, passion, corruption and forgiveness in a context of a hybrid border culture. In this novel Escandon approaches her personal relationship with her own father who died of a heart attack three days after she finished writing her manuscript. She addresses paternal possessiveness and gender double standards in the Mexican society. The novel also reflects a linguistic reality in bicultural California exploring the vernacular merge of Spanish and English (Spanglish), as well as different sub-culture lingoes.
Aside from teaching Creative Writing at UCLA Extension, Escandon has been an advisor at the Sundance Screenwriters Labs in Mexico and Brazil, as well as at the Fundacion Contenidos de Creacion Fiction Workshops in Barcelona, and participates as a mentor for young upcoming minority writers at the PEN Center's Emerging Voices Program. Additionally, she is one of the original members of Frijolywood, the official Mexican Filmmakers' association in Hollywood.
Film career
Escandon wrote the screenplay Santitos, based on her novel Esperanza’s Box of Saints at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. The film was produced by John Sayles and directed in Mexico by Alejandro Springall. The film was the third largest grossing Mexican film in Mexico in 1999 and was successfully released in Spain and Latin America in January 2000.
To date, the film has received awards in 14 film festivals around the world, such as the Latin Cinema Award at the Sundance Film Festival, Best Film at the Guadalajara Film Festival, Best Actress at the Latin American Film Festival in Lima, Peru, Best Film at the Los Angeles Latino Film Festival, Best Actress at the Festival International du Film d'Amiens, Best Film at the Santa Fe International Film Festival, Grand Jury Award at the Cartagena International Film Festival, Best Opera Prima at the Heraldos Awards in Mexico, Special Jury Award at the Rencontres Cinemas de Toulouse, and Best Opera Prima by the Critique Francaise (Decouverte de la Critique Francaise).
Escandon has recently completed the screenplay based on her novel Gonzalez & Daughter Trucking Co. and the film is currently in active development at her own production company, The Other Truth Productions.
Wings for the Soul
In addition to her writing career, Escandon launched the first-ever prison book club and author series in 2005, Wings for the Soul, at the California Institution for Women in Corona, CA, made possible by the Women and Criminal Justice Network. Wings for the Soul gave inmates the opportunity to meet four times a year to read and discuss a particular book with the author. The books were primarily written by and about women. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
(This work has few mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon or Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
[A] semi-surreal tale of Libertad Gonzalez, imprisoned in the Mexicali Penal Institute for Women...[who] decides to start a book club.... This highly readable novel is a paean both to storytelling and to freedom. —Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist
Discussion Questions
1. Warden Guzmán takes advantage of her position for her own gain and is sometimes motivated by her desire for money rather than her strict responsibilities as a warden,but she also displays an understanding of her prisoners that leads her to recognize Chapopota’s rehabilitation and at times, also kindness. How much do you think the warden cares about the women under her watch? Is her system, such as it is, effective in promoting the inmates’ welfare?
2. When Libertad is greeted at the prison gates by her father and Martin, the inmates remark that Martin is not handsome enough to be the man in the story—revealing that Libertad’s account of her past in Library Club is perhaps not the strictest truth. Are there any other parts of her story you would doubt? Is there anything you suspect she’s left out?
3. What portion of the Library Club do you think believes that Libertad’s story is a work of fiction? Are those that believe she is truly reading from books written by others gullible to believe this, or is this a willful delusion?
4. The book begins with Libertad’s wish that she could bring back all the people she killed. What was your initial impression of her crime? How did our suspicions evolve over the course of the book?
5. Was Libertad’s arranging to have her father beaten an act of kindness, or was there some malice involved? Do you think she forgave him for his mistakes?
6. Many of the women in the prison seem to have invented names to use in prison. What does this say about the culture in the prison? What do the inmates’ names—Matriarca, Maciza, Diva, Libertad—say about the women themselves?
7. How do you envision Libertad’s life after her release? Will her relationship with Martin be happy? Will she continue on the road? How do you think her relationship with her father will change?
8. Do you think Maciza will be a good mother to her son, Pollito? Why or why not?
9. When the Vietnamese prisoners ask to stay in prison rather than go free, the warden is unsurprised. In fact, this is not the first time in the course of the book that a woman has made such a request. Why would they want to remain incarcerated? What do they—and what do you—find appealing about the prison?
10. When Libertad saw high heels in Martin’s tidied-up house, what do you think the real story was? Was there another woman? Is that, as Libertad explains it, only natural given her own long absence and silence, or is there a more innocuous explanation?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Story of Beautiful Girl
Rachel Simon, 2011
Grand Central Publishing
346 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446574464
Summary
It is 1968. Lynnie, a young white woman with a developmental disability, and Homan, an African American deaf man, are locked away in an institution, the School for the Incurable and Feebleminded, and have been left to languish, forgotten.
Deeply in love, they escape, and find refuge in the farmhouse of Martha, a retired schoolteacher and widow. But the couple is not alone-Lynnie has just given birth to a baby girl. When the authorities catch up to them that same night, Homan escapes into the darkness, and Lynnie is caught. But before she is forced back into the institution, she whispers two words to Martha: "Hide her."
And so begins the 40-year epic journey of Lynnie, Homan, Martha, and baby Julia—lives divided by seemingly insurmountable obstacles, yet drawn together by a secret pact and extraordinary love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1959
• Where—Newark, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Bryn Mawr College; M.F.A, Sarah
Lawrence College
• Awards—several philanthropical (below)
• Currently—lives in Wilmington, Delaware
Rachel Simon is an American author of both fiction and non-fiction. Her six books include the 2011 novel The Story of Beautiful Girl and the 2002 memoir Riding The Bus With My Sister. Her work has been adapted for film, television, radio, and stage.
Simon was born in New Jersey and spent most of her first sixteen years in the New Jersey towns of Newark, Millburn, Irvington, and Succasunna. During that time, she began writing short stories and novels, which she shared widely with friends and teachers but never submitted to editors. When Rachel was eight, her parents split up. She and her three siblings remained with their mother for eight years, and then moved to Easton, Pennsylvania to live with their father, with Rachel also becoming a boarding student at Solebury School in New Hope, PA.
Rachel studied anthropology at Bryn Mawr College and graduated in 1981. She then moved to the Philadelphia area and worked at a variety of jobs, including supervisor of researchers for a television study at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College in 1988.
Just before graduating, she won the Writers At Work short story contest, and when she attended the Writers At Work conference that June in Park City, Utah, she decided to be more courageous than she’d been as a teenager. She brought multiple copies of a collection of short stories, Little Nightmares, Little Dreams, that she’d just completed and handed them to every agent and editor who was interested. An editor from Houghton Mifflin bought the manuscript six weeks later and published it to critical acclaim in 1990.
Career
Until 2011, when The Story of Beautiful Girl was published, Rachel Simon was best known for her memoir, Riding The Bus With My Sister (2002). A national bestseller, it became a seminal book in the disability community and a frequent selection on high school reading lists. It was also adapted for a Hallmark Hall of Fame movie in 2005 and has been rebroadcast frequently on the Hallmark Channel. The film stars Rosie O' Donnell as Rachel’s sister Beth and Andie McDowell as Rachel, and was directed by Anjelica Huston.
The success of the book and adaptation of Riding The Bus With my Sister led to Rachel becoming a widely sought-after speaker around the country. The book has also received numerous awards, including a Secretary Tommy G. Thompson Recognition Award for Contributions to the Field of Disability from the US Department of Health and Human Services; a TASH Image Award for positive portrayals of people with disabilities; and a Media Access Award from California Governor's Committee for Employment of People with Disabilities.
Other adaptations of Rachel Simon’s work include the title story from Little Nightmares, Little Dreams (1990), which has been adapted for both the National Public Radio program Selected Shorts, and the Lifetime program “The Hidden Room.” Another story from that collection, “Paint,” was adapted for the stage by the Arden Theatre Company (Philadelphia).
Rachel’s other titles are the novel The Magic Touch (Viking, 1994), the memoir The House on Teacher's Lane (2010); and an inspirational book for writers, The Writer's Survival Guide (1997). She has received creative writing fellowships from the Delaware Division of the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts, and the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.
Personal life
She is married to Hal Dean, an architect whom she met shortly after she graduated from college. Their highly unusual, nineteen-year-long path to marriage, is recounted in The House On Teacher’s Lane. They now live in Wilmington, Delaware. Rachel visits frequently with her sister Beth, whose love of bus riding is chronicled in Riding The Bus With My Sister, and who does still ride the buses. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
In this enthralling love story, Lynnie, a young white developmentally disabled woman with limited speech, and Homan, a deaf African-American man, meet at the Pennsylvania State School for the Incurable and Feebleminded in the late 1960s. Despite strict rules, poor conditions, an abusive staff, and the couple's lack of language, Lynnie and Homan share tender moments. After their escape, a few days of freedom not only enables the secretly pregnant Lynnie to give birth outside the walls of the corrupt institution, it also secures the couple's admiration for one another. Fears of discovery force them to leave the baby in the hands of a nurturing widow, Martha Zimmer. Soon after, the school's staff apprehend Lynnie, while Homan flees. Although their stories diverge and unfold independently of one another, memories of their short time together sustain them for more than 40 years as they develop the confidence to eventually parent, learn to sign and speak, and finally, reunite. Simon (Riding the Bus with My Sister) who grew up with a developmentally disabled sister, has written an enormously affecting read, and provided sensitive insight into a complex world often dismissed by the "abled."
Publishers Weekly
Simon, author of the best-selling memoir Riding the Bus with My Sister, returns with a touching novel about three lives forever intertwined as the result of a quick meeting. Homan, black and deaf, and Lynnie, white and developmentally delayed, have fallen in love and escape together from the miserable confines of a 1960s Pennsylvania institution for the "feeble-minded," The School. They seek refuge at the farmhouse of Martha, a retired schoolteacher and widow. Employees of The School track down Lynnie and Homan, but before Lynnie is forced to return, she reveals to Martha a precious secret: she has given birth. The novel covers the decades following Lynnie's return to The School, Homan's escape, and Martha's life after she decides what to do with the child. Verdict: At times tender, at times heartbreaking, this novel will appeal to fans of Simon's previous work and anyone interested in the deplorable treatment in the not-so-distant past of those with disabilities. —Shaunna Hunter, Hampden-Sydney Coll. Lib., VA
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. What did you learn that you didn’t already know about the history of people with disabilities and the ways in which they were routinely treated by society? What did you learn about how people with disabilities might live today? Consider the lives of people you know who have a disability. Did the experiences of Lynnie and Homan change or shed light on your understanding of them?
2. Martha’s former students provide her with support for the first several years of Julia’s life. Was there a teacher in your life who meant as much to you as Martha meant to her students?
3. Why do you think Martha took on the incredible responsibility of raising another woman’s child instead of contacting the proper authorities? What would you have done in her place?
4. At the time Lynnie was a child, it wasn’t uncommon for parents to place their children with disabilities in an institution. Do you know anyone who had a child who was like Lynnie at that time? What choice did they make for their child, and how did that decision play out in their lives?
5. Kate breaks rules for Lynnie, doing such things as letting her draw pictures in her office and giving her a private place to see Buddy. When is it appropriate for professionals to go against official policy?
6. Lynnie does not want Kate to go in search of the baby and Kate says she will honor Lynnie’s wishes. What do you think of Kate’s decision to do this? Kate also secretly goes against Lynnie’s wishes, but does not tell her. Was this the right thing to do?
7. Homan is up against incredible odds in making his way in the world, especially once his uncle Blue dies. Discuss the ways that race, impairment, illiteracy, and institutionalization play a part in how he interacts with the world and how the world reacts to him.
8. Homan does not have a mental disability, yet he gets stuck in an institution for those who do. When he’s out in the world, people often shout at him, as if that will help him understand or even hear them. Discuss an interaction you’ve observed between a person with a disability and someone he didn’t know, where incorrect assumptions made real understanding impossible.
9. Homan realizes in the faith healing scene that he isn’t so sure he wants to be “fixed.” Why does he have so little interest? Sam also does not pursue healing, and the subject of being healed never even comes up for Lynnie. What do you think Rachel Simon is saying through her characters’ indifference to being “fixed”?
10. What do you think happened between Sam and Strawberry that led him to cry, and then to lose his interest in the free-wheeling life he and Homan had been living? Why do you think the man in the house at the top of the long front steps closed the door in Homan’s face?
11. When Julia is a baby in the stroller, Martha thinks about the history of words like “pajamas.” Later, when Julia is nearing school age, she collects wigs that she uses to spell words. How do these references to language foreshadow what happens when Julia is a teenager?
12. Do you think Julia’s lack of knowledge about her parents plays a part in her emotional development as a teenager, and as an adult? Was it right for Martha not to tell her the truth?
13. How does art create links between the characters throughout the book, and what is the role it plays in the final chapter?
14. In the Author’s Note at the end of the book, readers learn that the character of Homan was based on a real person. How does this knowledge affect your experience of the book?
15. Each character has a relationship to spirituality. Discuss how and if each changes over time. What do you think Rachel Simon was trying to say by including this aspect of all the characters’ lives?
16. Discuss the symbolism of the lighthouse man. Is it meant to be taken purely literally, or is there a metaphorical aspect to it as well?
17. Rachel Simon has said in interviews that the character of Homan follows a journey that has some overlaps with the episodes Odysseus went through in The Odyssey. What similarities do you see between the stories of Homan and Odysseus? Does The Story of Beautiful Girl conjure up other myths, folk tales, or fairy tales?
18. Romantic relationships between characters with disabilities are rare in fiction. How is the romance between Homan and Lynnie like the romances of characters in fiction who don’t have disabilities? How is it different?
19. The Story of Beautiful Girl is ultimately a story about love—romantic love, familial love, the love between friends. In what ways are the characters of the novel transformed by love, both given and received?
20. The epigraph of the novel is “Telling our stories is holy work.” Who does the “our” refer to in this book? What other groups of people can you think of whose stories have been hidden from society?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
Aimee Bender, 2010
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385501125
Summary
On the eve of her ninth birthday, unassuming Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents’ attention, bites into her mother’s homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother’s emotions in the cake.
She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother—her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother—tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes a peril and a threat to Rose.
The curse her gift has bestowed is the secret knowledge all families keep hidden—her mother’s life outside the home, her father’s detachment, her brother’s clash with the world. Yet as Rose grows up she learns to harness her gift and becomes aware that there are secrets even her taste buds cannot discern.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is a luminous tale about the enormous difficulty of loving someone fully when you know too much about them. It is heartbreaking and funny, wise and sad. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 28, 1969
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A., University of California, San Diego;
M.F.A., University of California, Irvine.
• Awards—2 Pushcart Prizes
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles
Aimee Bender is an American novelist and short story writer known for her surreal plots and characters.
Bender received her undergraduate degree from the University of California at San Diego, and a Master of Fine Arts from the distinguished creative writing MFA program at University of California at Irvine. While at UCI she studied with Judith Grossman and Geoffrey Wolff. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California and heads a class in surrealist writing at the UCLA Extension Writers' Program.
She has named Oscar Wilde, Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm and Anne Sexton as influences on her writing. A native of Los Angeles, Bender is a close friend of fellow UCI alumni Alice Sebold.
Her first book was The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, a collection of short stories, published in 1998. The book was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of 1998 and spent seven weeks on the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. Her novel An Invisible Sign of My Own was published in 2000, and was named as an L.A. Times pick of the year.
In 2005 she published another collection of short stories, Willful Creatures, which was nominated by The Believer magazine, owned by McSweeney's, as one of the best books of the year. Her novella "The Third Elevator" was published in 2009 by Madras Press.
Bender has received two Pushcart Prizes, and was nominated for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award in 2005. In 2009 Bender became the sitting judge for the Flatmancrooked Writing Prize, a writing award from Flatmancrooked Publishing for new short fiction. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Bender is sparing with the pixie dust...what really interests her is the sympathy Rose feels for her family, shown in a series of small, delicate scenes that convey the loneliness of these lives…the most moving section comes in the latter half as Rose grows more aware of her brother's troubles.... It's here, in a climactic scene that's creepy and delicate, that the real magic of Bender's writing takes place, a tribute to the struggles of people who feel the world too much.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
The fairy-tale elements in her writing, far from seeming outlandish, highlight the everyday nature of her characters' flaws and struggles. In Ms. Bender's stories and novels, relationships and mundane activities take on mythic qualities.
Wall Street Journal
Hemingway on an acid trip; her choices are twisted, both ethereal and surprisingly weighty.... Terrifyingly lovely
Los Angeles Times
Haunting.... Bender's prose delivers electric shocks...rendering the world in fresh, unexpected jolts. Moving, fanciful and gorgeously strange.
People
[T]his novel seems more informed by a kind of magical realism that struggles with transformation and sometimes—fleetingly—succeeds, as in the case of the novel’s vividly realized Los Angeles setting. But the effect soon fades, and the reader is left only with a lingering feeling of emptiness and the realization that sadness tastes a lot like bitterness. —Michael Cart
Booklist
Taking her very personal brand of pessimistic magical realism to new heights (or depths), Bender’s second novel (following An Invisible Sign of My Own) careens splendidly through an obstacle course of pathological, fantastical neuroses. Bender’s narrator is young, needy Rose Edelstein, who can literally taste the emotions of whoever prepares her food, giving her unwanted insight into other people’s secret emotional lives—including her mother’s, whose lemon cake betrays a deep dissatisfaction. Rose’s father and brother also possess odd gifts, the implications of which Bender explores with a loving and detailed eye while following Rose from third grade through adulthood. Bender has been called a fabulist, but emerges as more a spelunker of the human soul; carefully burrowing through her characters’ layered disorders and abilities, Bender plumbs an emotionally crippled family with power and authenticity. Though Rose’s gift can seem superfluous at times, and Bender’s gustative insights don’t have the sensual potency readers might crave, this coming-of-age story makes a bittersweet dish, brimming with a zesty, beguiling talent.
Publishers Weekly
Rose Edelstein is nearly nine when she first tastes her mother's feelings baked into a slice of birthday cake. Her "mouth was filling up with the taste of smallness…of upset." Meals become an agony for Rose, and she subsists on junk food from the school vending machine. When her mother begins an affair, Rose can taste that, too. Her brilliant older brother, Joseph, seems to have some type of autism spectrum disorder, though it is never named. Rose grows up and manages what she now considers her food skill, discerning not only the city of production but also the personality and temperament of the growers and pickers. She also draws closer to her father, finally understanding his prepossessions. This is an unusual family, even by California standards. Verdict: Bender deconstructs one of our most pleasurable activities, eating, and gives it a whole new flavor. She smooths out the lumps and grittiness of life to reveal its zest. Highly recommended for readers with sophisticated palates. —Bette-Lee Fox
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
1. Rose goes through life feeling people’s emotions through their food. Many eat to feel happy and comforted. Does this extreme sensory experience bring any happiness to Rose or only sadness?
2. What does Rose mean when she says her dad always seemed like a guest to her? How does this play out in the rest of the novel?
3. “Mom's smiles were so full of feeling that people leaned back a little when she greeted them. It was hard to know just how much was being offered.” What does Rose mean and how does this trait affect the mother’s relationships?
4. Why do you think the dad like medical dramas but hate hospitals?
5. Rose says, “Mom loved my brother more. Not that she didn’t love me-- I felt the wash of her love everyday, pouring over me, but it was a different kind, siphoned from a different, and tamer, body of water. I was her darling daughter; Joseph was her it.” Do you think Rose is right in her estimation and why do you think the mother might feel this way?
6. What does the grandmother suggest when she tells Rose “you don’t even know me, How can you love me?” How has the grandmother’s relationship with Rose’s own mother affected the family dynamic?
7. What is Joseph trying to accomplish by drawing a ‘perfect’ circle when it, by very definition, is impossible? How does George’s idea to create wallpaper out of the imperfections affect him? How does validation and affection through art recur in the novel and what does it signify?
8. Why does George suddenly conclude Rose’s gift isn’t really a problem and stops investigating it?
9. What is the significance of the mother’s commitment to carpentry (compared to other, short-lived hobbies)? How does this play out in the rest of the novel?
10. What is the impact of Rose's discovery about her father's skills? Did this change the way you see the father?
11. Joseph is described as a desert and geode while Rose is a rainforest and sea glass. Discuss the implications.
12. Why does Rose want to keep the thread-bare footstool of her parents’ courtship instead of having her mother make her a new one?
13. Are the family dinners—with Joseph reading, the dad eating, Rose silently trying to survive the meal and the mom talking non-stop—emblematic of the family dynamic? How has it evolved over the years?
14. How did you experience the scene in Joseph's room, when Rose goes to see him? What did that experience mean to Rose? Is there any significance to Joseph choosing a card table chair?
15. What does the last image about the trees have to do with this family? How do you interpret the last line of the novel?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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Talk Talk
T.C. Boyle, 2006
Penguin Group USA
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143112150
Summary
Over the past twenty-five years, T.C. Boyle has earned wide acclaim and an enthusiastic following with such adventurous, inimitable novels as The Tortilla Curtain, Drop City, and The Road to Wellville.
For his riveting eleventh novel, Boyle offers readers the closest thing to a thriller he has ever written, a tightly scripted page turner about the trials of Dana Halter, a thirty-three-year-old deaf woman whose identity has been stolen. Featuring a woman in the lead role (a Boyle first), Talk Talk is both a suspenseful chase across America and a moving story about language, love, and identity from one of America's most versatile and entertaining novelists. (From the publishers .)
More
Readers of T. C. Boyle’s The Tortilla Curtain will recognize a familiar satiric target in his latest novel Talk Talk—the American dream. What better way to parody America’s ideology of self-reinvention, a vital component to the American dream, than with a story about identity theft? The subject also allows for Boyle to reexamine another bete noire, our culture’s crass consumerism, as well as address the anxieties of living in the information age, where one’s legal and financial identity is more vulnerable than ever before. But Talk Talk, while full of Boylesque humor, is not a satire at all. It is instead a book that reads with all the breathless, headlong pace of a thriller, while at the same time examining deeper questions of language and identity.
Talk Talk is centered on three main characters: Dana Halter, a deaf teacher of English literature; Bridger Martin, her boyfriend; and Peck Wilson, the career thief who steals Dana’s identity. The novel opens with Dana being pulled over for a routine traffic violation. A check on her driver’s license reveals Dana Halter to be a dangerous fugitive with a long rap sheet that includes auto theft and assault with a deadly weapon. Her identity has been stolen and, for the time being, she is powerless to prove it. After a weekend of incarceration, stripped of her rights, her clothes, and her dignity, Dana sees not only the idiocy of the justice system but also the fluid and fragile nature of identity. Prior to this episode her issues of selfhood dealt mainly with trying to pass for “normal” in a world of hearing. Now, viewed as “just another perp” by her jailors and cellmates, she is forced to restore her legal and financial identity, a process that will entail an intimate self-examination. Since the law enforcement agencies prove incapable or unwilling to apprehend the identity thief she decides to track him down herself.
Although aurally challenged, Dana has a mind for detective work. Her interest in the etymological roots of words (e.g. “disrespect” in the slang word “dis”) mirrors her search for the base identifier (in this case, the true name) of her assailant. Yet, at her journey’s end she discovers much more than the thief’s identity.
Bridger Martin, Dana’s boyfriend, joins her on this cross-country search for her criminal double. Issues of self-identity also plague Bridger. He spends most of his time working at a special-effects company under the alias of “Sharper.” His imagination and sense of reality is informed with the products of popular visual culture—film, TV, video games. When he learns of Dana’s incarceration he immediately conjures up stock scenes of prison films, such as slop being fed to prisoners out of a bucket. (Dana is actually fed bologna sandwiches.) Reality eventually confronts Bridger in the form of a real emotion—hate—upon seeing the face of Dana’s assailant for the first time. Suddenly, as Boyle suggestively phrases it, “the film has slipped off the reel.” The dangerous journey he takes also forces Bridger to confront real violence, not the celluloid kind to which he is accustomed. It is an experience that leaves him quite literally speechless.
Finally, there is William Peck Wilson, Dana’s assailant. Ever since he served a prison sentence for assaulting his ex-wife’s boyfriend, Peck has been a criminal, assuming so many identities it is hard for him to keep track of who he is at a given moment—Peck Wilson, Frank Calabrese, Dana Halter, Bridger Martin. His motto, taken from his prison mentor Sandman, is a corruption of the Army recruiting slogan (“Be anybody you can be”). As “Dana,” he resides in a lavish condo in Marin County with his sexy, if naïve, Russian girlfriend, Natalia, and her daughter, Madison. When he’s not devising new ways to pay for this lifestyle, he spends his time cultivating the refined tastes and sensibilities of the upper class. However, his California dream comes to an abrupt end when Dana and Bridger arrive at his home, forcing Peck to flee back east, where Sandman has secured him a stately house on the Hudson River, not far from the town he grew up in. His journey east mimics Dana’s as they both prepare to confront their mothers (Dana’s mother also lives in New York) and their past lives, with startlingly different results. For Dana, she learns to accept her deafness as her base identifier. For Peck, while recalling the life he had as a restaurant owner, husband, and father to his only daughter, Sukie, he painfully realizes the only identity he longs to (re)possess is that of fatherhood. Sadly, this identity has been irrevocably lost to him. ("More" from the publisher's Introduction.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 2, 1948
• Where—Peekskill, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., State University of New York at Potsdam; Ph.D., Iowa University
• Awards—PEN/Faulkner Award, 1998
• Currently—lives near Santa Barbara, California
T. Coraghessan Boyle (kuh-RAGG-issun) received his doctorate in nineteenth-century English literature from the University of Iowa in 1977. Since 1977, Boyle has taught creative writing at the University of Southern California. While in college, Boyle exchanged his middle name, John, for the unusual Coraghessan (kuh-RAGG-issun), the name of one of his Irish ancestors.
Boyle is the author of Descent of Man (1979), Water Music (1982), Budding Prospects (1984), Greasy Lake (1985), World's End (1987, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction), If the River Was Whiskey (1989), East Is East (1990), The Road to Wellville (1993), which was made into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins, and Without a Hero (1994). His work has appeared in major American magazines, including The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's, Paris Review, and Atlantic Monthly. Boyle lives with his wife, Karen, and their three children near Santa Barbara, California, in a house designed in 1909 by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
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In the interest of time and space, it might be easier to note the writers that T. C. Boyle isn't compared to. But let's give the reverse a try: Donald Barthelme, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Evelyn Waugh, Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Kingsley Amis, Thomas Berger, Robert Coover, Lorrie Moore, Stanley Elkin, Tom Robbins, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson, Don DeLillo, Flannery O'Connor. Oh, let's not forget F. Lee Bailey. And Dr. Seuss.
Boyle, widely admired for his acrobatic verbal skill, wild narratives and quirky characters (in one short story, he imagines a love affair between Dwight Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev's wife), has dazzled critics since his first novel in 1981.
Consider this example, from Larry McCaffery in a 1985 article for the New York Times:
Beneath its surface play, erudition and sheer storytelling power, his fiction also presents a disturbing and convincing critique of an American society so jaded with sensationalized images and plasticized excess that nothing stirs its spirit anymore.... It is into this world that Mr. Boyle projects his heroes, who are typically lusty, exuberant dreamers whose wildly inflated ambitions lead them into a series of hilarious, often disastrous adventures.
But as much as critics will bow at his linguistic gifts, some also knock him for resting on them a bit too heavily, hinting that the impressive showmanship attempts to hide a shortage of depth and substance. Craig Seligman, writing in the New Republic in 1993, pointed out that...
Boyle loves a mess. He loves chaos. He loves marshes and jungles, and he loves the jungle of language: luxuriant sentences overgrown with lianas of lists, sesquipedalian words hanging down like rare fruits. For all its exoticism, though, his prose is lucid to the point of transparency. It doesn't require much deeper concentration than a good newspaper (though it does require a dictionary).
Reviewing The Tortilla Curtain in 1995, New York Times critic Scott Spencer scratched his head over why Boyle had invited readers along for this particular ride:
Mr. Boyle's fictional strategy is puzzling. Why are we being asked to follow the fates of characters for whom he clearly feels such contempt? Not surprisingly, this is ultimately off-putting. Perhaps Mr. Boyle has received too much praise for his zany sense of humor; in this book, that wit often seems merely a maddening volley of cheap shots. It's like living next door to a gun nut who spends all day and half the night shooting at beer bottles.
Growing up, Boyle had no aspirations to be a writer. It wasn't until his studies at State University of New York, where he as a music student, that he bumped into his muse. "I went there to be a music major but found I really couldn't hack that at the age of 17," he told The Writer in 1999. "I just started to read outside my classes—literature and history. I wound up being a history and English major; when I wandered into a creative writing class as a junior, I realized that writing was what I could do."
He then started teaching, in part to avoid getting drafted into the Vietnam War, and later applied to the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop.
After a collection of short stories in 1979, he released his first novel, Water Music, called "pitiless and brilliant" by the New Republic, and has shuttled back and forth between novels and short stories, all known for their explosions of character imagination. Mr. Boyle's literary sensibility...thrives on excess, profusion, pushing past the limits of good taste to comic extremes," McCaffery wrote in his 1985 New York Times piece. "He is a master of rendering the grotesque details of the rot, decay and sleaze of a society up to its ears in K Mart oil cans, Kitty Litter and the rusted skeletons of abandoned cars and refrigerators."
In his review of Drop City, the 2003 novel set in California commune that won Boyle a National Book Award nomination, Dwight Garner joins the chorus of critical acclaim over the years—"Boyle has always been a fiendishly talented writer"—but he also acknowledges some of the criticism that Boyle has faced in these same years:
The rap against Boyle's work has long been that he's a sort of madcap predator drone, raining down hard nuggets of contempt, sarcasm and bitter humor on the poor men and women in his books while rarely giving us characters we're actually persuaded to feel anything about. This is partly a bum rap—and I'd hate to knock contempt, sarcasm and bitter humor—but there's enough truth in it that it's a joy to find, in Drop City that Boyle gives us a lot more than simply a line of bong-addled innocents led to slaughter.
But perhaps the neatest summary of Boyle's work would be from Lorrie Moore, one of the novelists to which he has been compared. In a 1994 New York Times review of Boyle's short story collection Without a Hero, she praised Boyle's "astonishing and characteristic verve, his unaverted gaze, his fascination with everything lunatic and queasy." She continues...
God knows, Mr. Boyle can write like an angel, if at times a caustic, gum-chewing one. And in this strong, varied collection maybe we have what we'd hope to find in heaven itself (by the time we begged our way there): no lessening of brilliance, plus a couple of laughs to mitigate all that high and distant sighing over what goes on below."
Extras
• Boyle changed his middle name from John to Coraghessan ( "kuh-RAGG-issun") when he was 17.
• He is known almost as much for his ego as his writing. "Each book I put out, I think, 'Goodbye, Updike and Mailer, forget it," the New Republic quoted him as saying. "I joke at Viking that I'm going to make them forget the name of Stephen King forever, I'm going to sell so many copies.
• Boyle's philosophy on reading and writing, as told to The Writer: "Good literature is a living, brilliant, great thing that speaks to you on an individual and personal level. You're the reader. I think the essence of it is telling a story. It's entertainment. It's not something to be taught in a classroom, necessarily. To be alive and be good, it has to be a good story that grabs you by the nose and doesn't let you go till The End." (From Barnes and Noble)
Book Reviews
Using his gift for manic invention and freewheeling, hyperventilated prose, Mr. Boyle does an antic job of recounting the cat-and-mouse-and-cat game played by Dana and Peck, wittily dancing around his theme of identity and identity theft, even as he orchestrates a sense of foreboding and suspense.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Considering Boyle's recent subjects—sex research (The Inner Circle), hippies (Drop City), environmental apocalypse (A Friend of the Earth)—it's remarkable that his most exciting novel yet should focus on the tedium of ruined credit scores and fraudulent drivers' licenses. But Talk Talk benefits from Boyle's highbrow/lowbrow style: He knows how to drill down through the surface of everyday life into our core anxieties, and he knows how to write constantly charging, heart-thumping chase scenes.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Bestseller and PEN/Faulkner Award-winner Boyle recasts the battle of good and evil as an identity theft suspense story in his 11th novel (following The Inner Circle). Dana Halter, a "slim, graceful, dark-eyed deaf woman of thirty-three," runs a stop sign and is hauled off to jail when a routine police check turns up multiple pending felony charges. As Dana disappears into the criminal justice system, her earnest and willing boyfriend, Bridger (on deadline doing a sci-fi film's special effects), isn't much help. Meanwhile, William "Peck" Wilson-a social parasite whose lifestyle includes Armani, a house in Marin County and a shopaholic bombshell girlfriend imported from a former Soviet republic—is actually the man behind the charges against Dana. Finally out on bail and reunited with Bridger, Dana lacks the resources to clear her name, but in the best tradition of the good guy willing to sacrifice everything for justice, Bridger chucks his job, and the two set off on Peck's trail. Boyle, always a risk taker, neatly manages the challenge of a deaf protagonist and a bad guy who is a gourmet cook, genuinely loves his bombshell and has a soft spot for children. As Dana and Bridger hurtle across the country and the tension mounts, Boyle drops crumbs of wisdom in signature style, and readers will be hot on the trail.
Publishers Weekly
In his latest work, Boyle (of Drop City) explores the nightmare of identity theft as deaf teacher Dana Halter is pulled over for running a four-way stop sign and suddenly finds her life turned upside down. After days in a California jail, Dana is released when it is discovered that the "Dana Halter" who committed various crimes in various jurisdictions is a man. Dana and her digital filmmaker boyfriend, Bridger Martin, piece together information on the other Dana (n William "Peck" Wilson) and follow him across the country in order to exact retribution for what the justice system deems a "victimless crime." Dana's childhood insecurities resurface as others react to her as a deaf person in a hearing world, and she questions her ability to communicate who she really is. Even her relationship with Bridger, who learned to sign after they met, begins to fray as their odyssey turns into a vendetta and listening to each other takes a backseat to rage. Alternating chapters offer Peck's take on how easy it is (is this fact or fiction?) to reinvent oneself from a local outcast into a successful (fill in the blank) via the Internet and a bit of time on a library computer. The continuity errors distracted this reviewer, and missing details make the novel more frustrating than riveting. Still, Boyle's many fans will probably want to go along for the ride. —Bette-Lee Fox.
Library Journal
On the surface, this novel of identity theft delivers page-turning suspense, but it also delves deeper into the essence of identity. Having explored the past for perspective on the present in recent novels (the Kinsey sex report in The Inner Circle, 2004; the hippie commune of Drop City, 2003), the prolific Boyle addresses the contemporary concern of identity theft, showing how easy it is for a cyber-criminal to appropriate someone else's identity and how difficult it can be for the victim to untangle the credit and criminal implications. Stopped for a traffic violation, deaf schoolteacher Dana finds herself jailed on charges she can't understand, for crimes committed in states she has never visited. Her only ally in clearing herself is Bridger, the boyfriend she recently met at a dance club. From her Kafkaesque predicament, Dana develops a Moby-Dick-sized obsession (both literary references are evoked within the novel) to find the criminal and regain her identity. When she and Bridger stumble upon some contact information on the perpetrator, they make a big mistake that threatens the novel's plausibility: They call the crook, letting him know they're onto him, rather than passing the information along for police to investigate. What results is a cross-country chase, as Dana and Bridger pursue a quarry who has serial identities, is totally self-centered (whatever self he has assumed) and is convinced that he is society's victim. He's a younger, psychopathic Gatsby, using his purloined wealth to forge an identity that attracts beautiful women whom he treats as identity accessories. The quest costs Dana her job and threatens Bridger's, as he discovers how little he really knows Dana, while she realizes how much she has defined her own identity as a deaf woman, as a daughter (her mother knows her in a way that Bridger never will) and as a victim. By the riveting climax, characters and readers alike recognize that the very concept of a fixed, static identity is a delusion.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. There is a great deal of brand-name dropping in this novel (e.g. Mercedes, Jetta), especially in scenes involving Peck and Natalia. Discuss Boyle’s satiric portrait of our culture’s conspicuous consumption. What is the relationship of designer brands and personal identity established in the novel?
2. “Base identifier” is a wonderfully suggestive phrase that is repeated throughout the novel. What are the base identifiers, in all senses of this phrase, of the main characters? How do the characters understand selfhood? How does the novel dramatize the fragile nature of personal identity?
3. Dana is post-lingually deaf (i.e. she was not born deaf), who refused surgical attempts to restore her hearing. Discuss her condition and her reasons for maintaining it. How does she understand her condition? How does Bridger; her mother? How does it contribute thematically to the novel?
4. Often in literature, film, or television, a character who doesn’t necessarily have many redeeming qualities will evoke pathos nonetheless. Although Peck Wilson is a man capable of brutal, calculated violence, he certainly arouses our interest, and at points, our sympathy. What was your opinion of Peck?
5. At four different points in the novel, Dana recites favorite poems to herself: Wallace Stevens’s “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.” What is the significance of each of these poems to the narrative?
6. While ostensibly a road novel, Talk Talk is really a bicoastal novel. Discuss Boyle’s juxtaposition of East Coast and West Coast culture. What are Peck’s attitudes toward each? Do they resonate with you?
7. Sandman’s corruption of an Army recruiting slogan into a motto for identity thieves (“Be anyone you can be”) is one example of how America’s obsession with self- reinvention is parodied. What other examples come to mind? What do you think the novel says about our capacity, or lack thereof, to reinvent ourselves?
8. The scene at Peck’s mother’s house is both humorous and deeply disturbing. The naïve Natalia, full of the expectations and anxieties of a future daughter-in-law, is finally going to meet the mother of the man she hopes to marry, the man whose name she doesn’t even know. Did Boyle intend for this to be a comic scene? Why do you think he chose to omit Peck’s mother entirely from the scene?
9. Discuss the confrontation at the end of the novel. Why did Peck suddenly lose his nerve, the only instance in the entire novel? How do you interpret Peck’s answer to Dana’s seemingly simple question: “What do you want?” What is it about the ending that surprised you the most?
10. Dana and Bridger’s relationship is unusual, but like most couples their problems are generally problems of communication. What makes them unique and typical as a couple? Why does Bridger decide to join Dana on this perilous journey to find her identity thief? What happens to their relationship along the way and why does it ultimately fail?
11. In some respects Talk Talk is a variant of the doppelganger novel, a long-established literary convention in which the protagonist is haunted by the apparition of his or her double. Compare Talk Talk with other classic examples of the genre, such as Dostoyevsky’s The Double, Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose,” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson.” Do you think Boyle has successfully updated this literary form for the twenty-first century?
12. Dana and Peck share a fascination with language, which isn’t matched by their respective partners. See for instance Peck’s recollection of the word “plebeian” and Dana’s interest in the etymology of “dis.” Besides this, do they have any other traits in common? At the end of the novel when they confront one another they are said to be “united, wedded.” What is it that unites them?
(Questions issued by publisher.)
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The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton, 1905
~360 pp. (varies by publisher)
Summary
A literary sensation when it was first serialized in Scribners magazine in 1905, The House of Mirth quickly established Edith Wharton as the most important American woman of letters in the twentieth century.
The first American novel to provide a devastatingly accurate portrait of New York's aristocracy, it is the story of the beautiful and beguiling Lily Bart and her ill-fated attempt to rise to the heights of a heartless society in which, ultimately, she has no part.
Wharton’s dark view of society, the somber economics of marriage, and the powerlessness of the unwedded woman in the 1870s emerge dramatically in this tragic nove. Faced with an array of wealthy suitors, Lily falls in love with lawyer Lawrence Selden, whose lack of money spoils their chances for happiness together. Dubious business deals and accusations of liaisons with a married man diminish Lily’s social status, and as she makes one bad choice after another, she learns how venal and brutally unforgiving the upper crust of New York can be. (Adapted from Penguin Classics edition and Barnes & Noble versions.)
Author Bio
• Birth—January 24, 1862
• Where—New York, NY
• Death—August 11, 1937
• Where—Paris, France
• Education: Educated privately in New York and Europe
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, 1921,
French Legion of Honor, 1916
One of America's most important novelists, Edith Wharton was a refined, relentless chronicler of the Gilded Age and its social mores. Along with close friend Henry James, she helped define literature at the turn of the 20th century, even as she wrote classic nonfiction on travel, decorating and her own life.
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Edith Newbold Jones was born January 24, 1862, into such wealth and privilege that her family inspired the phrase "keeping up with the Joneses." The youngest of three children, Edith spent her early years touring Europe with her parents and, upon the family's return to the United States, enjoyed a privileged childhood in New York and Newport, Rhode Island. Edith's creativity and talent soon became obvious: By the age of eighteen she had written a novella, and (as well as witty reviews of it) and published poetry in the Atlantic Monthly.
After a failed engagement, Edith married a wealthy sportsman, Edward Wharton. Despite similar backgrounds and a shared taste for travel, the marriage was not a success. Many of Wharton's novels chronicle unhappy marriages, in which the demands of love and vocation often conflict with the expectations of society. Wharton's first major novel, The House of Mirth, published in 1905, enjoyed considerable Literary Success. Ethan Frome appeared six years later, solidifying Wharton's reputation as an important novelist. Often in the company of her close friend, Henry James, Wharton mingled with some of the most famous writers and artists of the day, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, André Gide, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau, and Jack London.
In 1913 Edith divorced Edward. She lived mostly in France for the remainder of her life. When World War I broke out, she organized hostels for refugees, worked as a fund-raiser, and wrote for American publications from battlefield frontlines. She was awarded the French Legion of Honor for her courage and distinguished work.
The Age of Innocence, a novel about New York in the 1870s, earned Wharton the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921 — the first time the award had been bestowed upon a woman. Wharton traveled throughout Europe to encourage young authors. She also continued to write, lying in her bed every morning, as she had always done, dropping each newly penned page on the floor to be collected and arranged when she was finished. Wharton suffered a stroke and died on August 11, 1937. She is buried in the American Cemetery in Versailles, France.
Extras
• Surprisingly, in addition to her career as a fiction writer, Wharton was also a well-known interior designer. Her book, The Decoration of Houses was widely read and is today considered the first modern manual of interior design.
• Upon the publication of The House of Mirth in 1905, Wharton became an instant celebrity, and the the book was an instant bestseller, with 80,000 copies ordered from Scribner's six weeks after its release.
• Wharton had a great fondness for dogs, and owned several throughout her life. (From Barnes and Noble.)
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Book Reviews
(Classic works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)
Mrs. Wharton's serial in Scribner's [magazine], "The House of Mirth," develops in a rather grim fashion.... Nevertheless, we must be grateful for these glimpses of the inner social circle, given by one who has the magic password. "The House of Mirth," indeed, must be accepted as a "document" and it's descriptions of the functions and foibles of "our best society" will surely be treasured by historians as testimony.
New York Times (4/1/1905)
Lily's rather violent tumble down the social ladder provides a thumbnail sketch of the general injustices of the upper classes (which, incidentally, Wharton never quite manages to condemn entirely, clearly believing that such life is cruel but without alternative). From her start as a beautiful woman at the height of her powers to her sad finale as a recently fired milliner's assistant addicted to sleeping drugs, Lily Bart is heroic, not least for her final admission of her own role in her downfall. —Melanie Rehak
Editors - Amazon.com
Book Club Discussion Questions
1. Wharton took the title for her novel from a verse in Ecclesiastics—"The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in The House of Mirth." Does Lily Bart's allegiance to the follies and superficialities of society mean that she has the "heart of a fool" or is she trapped by the dictates of her upbringing and the expectations of the times?
2. What does Wharton mean when she describes Lawrence Selden as a man with "the stoic's carelessness of material things, combined with the Epicurean's delight in them" [p.152]? Are his scorn and aloofness attitudes only a man could assume in the society Wharton depicts? How genuine are they? Does his readiness to attend certain social events and to indulge in gossip and flirtations with Lily belie his chosen role as a "spectator"?
3. The people in Lily's circle disdain the "new" millionaires who acquired their money in business rather than through inheritance, yet in many ways their social world is predicated on a business ethic. How does the language of the novel reflect this? In what ways do the social "exchanges" among the characters mimic business dealings, even when they don't involve the actual exchange of money?
4. Lily rejects both Sim Rosedale, a fabulously rich man of "unacceptable" lineage, and Selden, a man she clearly admires who cannot support her in style. Do these rejections represent an unrealistic, perhaps inflated, view of her own worth and potential? Are they purely selfish or do they reflect an underlying sense of morality on Lily's part?
5. Even early in the novel, Wharton offers hints that foreshadow Lily's public humiliation by the Trenors and the Dorsets, her abandonment by Carry Fisher, and her aunt's decision to disinherit her. What events alert you to the true nature of the other character's feelings and attitudes toward her? Is Lily too naive to grasp the significance of these events? Does she genuinely misunderstand her financial arrangement with Gus Trenor or simply choose to ignore its "obvious" implications? When she agrees to accompany the Dorsets on the cruise, is she unaware of her role as a mask for Bertha's affair with Ned Silverton?
6. What does Lily's great success in the tableaux vivants symbolize within the context of the novel? Does it reveal, as Selden believes, "the real Lily Bart"? [p. 134] Why does Lily respond to his enthusiasm and his confession of love afterwards by saying, "Ah, love me, love me—but don't tell me so"? [p. 138] What other examples are there of Lily's consciously adopting a pose, either literally or figuratively, to please an audience?
7. Both Lily's cousin, Grace Stepney, and Selden's cousin, Gerty Farish, live in genteel poverty on margins of society. How are their attitudes about their positions reflected in the way they treat Lily?
8. Lily and Selden have five intimate conversations: at his apartment in the opening chapter; at Trenors' country home, Bellomont; at the Brys after Lily's stunning performance in the tableaux vivants; in Mrs. Hatch's hotel room; and once again at Selden's apartment, on the day before Lily dies. How do the tone and contents of their conversations change as Lily's circumstances change, and what does this reveal about their feelings for one another? Are either of them really capable of loving and being loved?
9. Are all the women in the novel passive "victims," dependent on the power and money of men? Who really creates the rules in Lily's circle and how do they wield their powers? Why does Rosedale ultimately turn Lily away, despite his previous persistence in courting her and his aggressiveness in making his way into society? Is he right in believing that his money alone is not enough to rescue her reputation?
10. Is Lily's descent inevitable? What opportunities does she have to turn things around and why does she reject them? Does her decision not to use Bertha Dorset's letters to regain her social standing make sense in society that unquestioningly accepts the manipulations of Gus Trenor, Carry Fisher, and Bertha herself?
11. Edith Wharton wrote "A frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implications lie in its power of debasing people and ideas." Do you think The House of Mirth is primarily a portrait of the frivolous and corrupt social world of New York or is it the story of Lily Bart's personal tragedy?
(Questions issued by Penguin Group; cover image, top-right.)
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