Nutshell
Ian McEwan, 2016
Knopf Doubleday
208 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385542074
Summary
Trudy has betrayed her husband, John. She's still in the marital home—a dilapidated, priceless London townhouse—but John's not there.
Instead, she's with his brother, the profoundly banal Claude, and the two of them have a plan.
But there is a witness to their plot: the inquisitive, nine-month-old resident of Trudy's womb.
Told from a perspective unlike any other, Nutshell is a classic tale of murder and deceit from one of the world’s master storytellers. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—June 21, 1948
• Where—Aldershot, England, UK
• Education—B.A., University of Sussex; M.A. University of East Anglia
• Awards—(see blow)
• Currently—lives in Oxford, England
Ian Russell McEwan is an English novelist. He was born in Aldershot, Hampshire, the son of David McEwan and Rose Lilian Violet (nee Moore). His father was a working class Scotsman who had worked his way up through the army to the rank of major. As a result, McEwan spent much of his childhood in East Asia (including Singapore), Germany and North Africa (including Libya), where his father was posted. His family returned to England when he was twelve.
McEwan was educated at Woolverstone Hall School; the University of Sussex, receiving his degree in English literature in 1970; and the University of East Anglia, where he was one of the first graduates of Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson's pioneering creative writing course.
Career
McEwan's first published work was a collection of short stories, First Love, Last Rites (1975), which won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1976. He achieved notoriety in 1979 when the BBC suspended production of his play Solid Geometry because of its alleged obscenity. His second collection of short stories, In Between the Sheets, was published in 1978.
The Cement Garden (1978) and The Comfort of Strangers (1981) were his two earliest novels, both of which were adapted into films. The nature of these works caused him to be nicknamed "Ian Macabre." These were followed by The Child in Time (1987), winner of the 1987 Whitbread Novel Award; The Innocent (1990); and Black Dogs (1992). McEwan has also written two children's books, Rose Blanche (1985) and The Daydreamer (1994). His 1997 novel, Enduring Love, about the relationship between a science writer and a stalker, was popular with critics and adapted into a film in 2004.
In 1998, he won the Man Booker Prize for Amsterdam. His next novel, Atonement (2001), received considerable acclaim; Time magazine named it the best novel of 2002, and it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2007, the critically acclaimed movie Atonement, directed by Joe Wright and starring Keira Knightley and James McAvoy, was released in cinemas worldwide. His next work, Saturday (2005), follows an especially eventful day in the life of a successful neurosurgeon. Saturday won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 2005, and his novel On Chesil Beach (2007) was shortlisted for the 2007 Booker Prize.
McEwan has also written a number of produced screenplays, a stage play, children's fiction, an oratorio and a libretto titled For You with music composed by Michael Berkeley.
In 2008 at the Hay Festival, McEwan gave a surprise reading of his then novel-in-progress, eventually published as Solar (2010). The novel includes a scientist hoping to save the planet from the threat of climate change and got its inspiration from a 2005 Cape Farewell expedition. McEwan along with fellow artists and scientists spent several weeks aboard a ship near the north pole.
McEwan's twelfth novel, Sweet Tooth (2012), is historical in nature and set in the 1970. In an interview with the Scotsman newspaper, McEwan revealed that the impetus for writing the novel was a way for him to write a "disguised autobiography." McEwan's 13th novel, The Children Act (2014), is about a high court judge.
Controversy
In 2006 McEwan was accused of plagiarism, specifically a passage in Atonement that closely echoed one from a 2012 memoir, No Time for Romance, by Lucilla Andrews. McEwan acknowledged using the book as a source for his work; in fact, he had included a brief note at the end of the book referring to Andrews's autobiography, among several other works. Writing in the Guardian in November 2006, a month after Andrews' death, McEwan professed innocence of plagiarism while acknowledging his debt to the author.
The incident recalled critical controversy over his debut novel The Cement Garden, key plot elements that closely mirrored some of those in Our Mother's House, a 1963 novel by Julian Gloag, which had also been made into a film. McEwan denied charges of plagiarism, claiming he was unaware of the earlier work.
In 2011 McEwan caused controversy when he accepted the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. In the face of pressure from groups and individuals opposed to the Israeli government, specifically British Writers in Support of Palestine (BWISP), McEwan wrote a letter to the Guardian in which he said...
There are ways in which art can have a longer reach than politics, and for me the emblem in this respect is Daniel Barenboim's West-Eastern Divan Orchestra—surely a beam of hope in a dark landscape, though denigrated by the Israeli religious right and Hamas. If BWISP is against this particular project, then clearly we have nothing more to say to each other.
He announced that he would donate the ten thousand dollar prize money to Combatants for Peace, an organization that brings together Israeli ex-soldiers and Palestinian ex-fighters.
Recognition
McEwan has been nominated for the Man Booker prize six times to date, winning the Prize for Amsterdam in 1998. His other nominations were for The Comfort of Strangers (1981, Shortlisted), Black Dogs (1992, Shortlisted), Atonement (2001, Shortlisted), Saturday (2005, Longlisted), and On Chesil Beach (2007, Shortlisted). McEwan also received nominations for the Man Booker International Prize in 2005 and 2007.
He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, in 1999. He is also a Distinguished Supporter of the British Humanist Association. He was awarded a CBE in 2000. In 2005, he was the first recipient of Dickinson College's Harold and Ethel L. Stellfox Visiting Scholar and Writers Program Award, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, U.S. In 2008, McEwan received an honorary degree of Doctor of Literature by University College, London, where he used to teach English literature. In 2008, The Times (of London) featured him on their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Personal
McEwan has been married twice. His 13-year marriage to spiritual healer and therapist Penny Allen ended in 1995 and was followed by a bitter custody battle over their two sons. His second wife, Annalena McAfee, was formerly the editor of the Guardian's Review section.
In 2002, McEwan discovered that he had a brother who had been given up for adoption during World War II when his mother was married to a different man. After her first husband was killed in combat, McEwan's mother married her lover, and Ian was born a few years later. The brothers are in regular contact, and McEwan has written a foreword to Sharp's memoir. (Excerpted and adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/4/2014.)
Book Reviews
A narrator who speaks to us from his mother’s womb—spouting off about philosophy, politics, and the state of the world. And one other little matter: he frets over his mother’s plans to murder his father. If you can accept the outlandish premise, you’ll find Ian McEwan’s newest book a brilliant, thrilling, often hilarious ride. READ MORE.
Molly Lundquist - LitLovers
Ian McEwan has performed an incongruous magic trick, mashing up the premises of Shakespeare's Hamlet and Amy Heckerling's 1989 movie, Look Who's Talking, to create a smart, funny and utterly captivating novel…Nutshell is a small tour de force that showcases all of Mr. McEwan's narrative gifts of precision, authority and control, plus a new, Tom Stoppard-like delight in the sly gymnastics that words can be perform. The restrictions created by the narrator's situation…seem to have stimulated a surge of inventiveness on Mr. McEwan's part, as he mischievously concocts a monologue…that plays on Hamlet, even as it explores some of his own favorite themes (the corruption of innocence, the vulnerability of children and the sudden skid of ordinary life into horror).... It's preposterous, of course, that a fetus should be thinking such earthshaking thoughts, but Mr. McEwan writes here with such assurance and élan that the reader never for a moment questions his sleight of hand.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Nutshell is an orb, a Venetian glass paperweight of a book.... It is a consciously late, deliberately elegiac masterpiece, a calling together of everything McEwan has learned and knows about his art.
Guardian (UK)
In Nutshell, McEwan is a pentathlete at the top of his game, doing several very different things equally well. Current literary culture rarely awards gold medals for comedy, but this is one performance—agile, muscular, swift—you should not miss.
Sunday Times (UK)
A creative gamble that pays off brilliantly. Witty and gently tragic, this short, bewitching novel is an ode to humanity’s beauty, selfishness and inextinguishable longing.
Mail on Sunday (UK)
There is far more going on in this fiercely intelligent novel than first meets the eye. At once playful and deadly serious, delightful and frustrating, it is one of McEwan's hardest to categorize works, and all the more interesting for it.
London Times (UK)
McEwan has thrown in Gone Girl intrigue with The Girl on the Train suspense and given us his take on how toxic a marriage can get when spliced with a Shakespearean cast. Who knew McEwan could mix high and low literary genres to create such a bizarrely readable mash-up?
Independent (UK)
(Starred revicew.) McEwan’s latest novel is short, smart, and narrated by an unborn baby.... Packed with humor and tinged with suspense, this gem resembles a sonnet the narrator recalls hearing his father recite: brief, dense, bitter, suggestive of unrequited and unmanageable longing, surprising, and surprisingly affecting.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred revicew.) [McEwan's most ]rovocative work to date.... [A]n expansive meditation on stability and identity from a confined perspective. —Joshua Finnell, Los Alamos National Lab., NM
Library Journal
(Starred revicew.) McEwan can be counted on to make the implausible plausible and the outrageous reasonable, and his talent in that regard is put to its consummate test in his latest novel.... [An] ingenious tour de force.... As soon as words gets out, any new novel by this best-selling, Booker Prize–winning novelist causes a reader frenzy.
Booklist
Speaking from the womb of his 28-year-old mother, this slim entertainment’s precocious narrator tells of sex and booze and something rotten in London.... Catching those allusions [to Hamlet] can be a fun sort of parlor game, but what they add up to, if anything, is unclear. Clever, likable, and yet unsatisfying, this tale too often bears out the narrator’s early claim: "I take in everything, even the trivia—of which there is much."
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Nutshell...then take off on your own:
1. One obvious place to start a discussion is with the entire conceit: a brilliant, verbally gifted fetus talking to us from his mother's womb. Does McEwan pull it off? Are you able to suspend your disbelief in order to be drawn into baby Hamlet's nutshell of a world? Or are you put off by the whole conceit?
2. Another discussion opener would be the many allusions to Shakespeare's Hamlet. The title itself is taken from a line in the Act II, in which Hamlet says,
Oh god, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.
Beyond the obvious (i.e., womb = nutshell), how else does does Hamlet's line resonate in Ian McEwan's novel? What, for instance, are this neonatal Hamlet's "bad dreams"? What are some of the other parallels to the Bard's play, especially the play Hamlet's famous "to be or not to be" dilemma. Many other literary allusions can be found within—can you identify some of them (i.e., John Donne, Macbeth, Lolita, Kafka, to name a few)?
3. Describe the three adult characters: John, Trudy, and Claude. Do you find any of them likable? Who is the Ophelia?
4. Our narrator also comments on the world at large. Consider, for instance, "Europa's secular dreams of union may dissolve before the old hatreds." What other disasters or fears are on his horizon? And what else does McEwan, as a satirist, take aim at. How do modern-day Londoners come off?
7. By virtue of his location in the womb, this miniature Hamlet has a "front row" seat in his mother's life: he has access to her most intimate conversations and actions, including her sexual relationship with Claude. Would you consider him a reliable narrator...or unreliable? In other words, does he fully comprehend the outside world? Is he objective in his observations and judgments, or do his own interests cloud his understanding?
7. Did you laugh?
8. Consider reading this interview with McEwan in the Wall St. Journal for some thoughts about the author's inspiration for his fetus as a narrator.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Here I Am
Jonathan Safran Foer, 2016
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
592 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374280024
Summary
In the book of Genesis, when God calls out, "Abraham!" before ordering him to sacrifice his son, Isaac, Abraham responds, "Here I am." Later, when Isaac calls out, "My father!" before asking him why there is no animal to slaughter, Abraham responds, "Here I am."
How do we fulfill our conflicting duties as father, husband, and son; wife and mother; child and adult? Jew and American? How can we claim our own identities when our lives are linked so closely to others’?
These are the questions at the heart of Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel in eleven years—a work of extraordinary scope and heartbreaking intimacy.
Unfolding over four tumultuous weeks in present-day Washington, D.C., Here I Am is the story of a fracturing family in a moment of crisis. As Jacob and Julia Bloch and their three sons are forced to confront the distances between the lives they think they want and the lives they are living, a catastrophic earthquake sets in motion a quickly escalating conflict in the Middle East.
At stake is the meaning of home—and the fundamental question of how much aliveness one can bear.
Showcasing the same high-energy inventiveness, hilarious irreverence, and emotional urgency that readers loved in his earlier work, Here I Am is Foer’s most searching, hard-hitting, and grandly entertaining novel yet. It not only confirms Foer’s stature as a dazzling literary talent but reveals a novelist who has fully come into his own as one of our most important writers. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 21, 1977
• Where—Washington, D.C., USA
• Education—B.A., Princeton University
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Jonathan Safran Foer is an American novelist. He is best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). He teaches creative writing at New York University.
Early life and education
Foer was born in Washington, D.C., the son of Albert Foer, a lawyer and president of the American Antitrust Institute, and Esther Safran Foer, a child of Holocaust survivors born in Poland, who is now Senior Advisor at the Sixth & I Historic Synagogue.
Foer is the middle son in this Jewish family; his older brother, Franklin, is a former editor of The New Republic and his younger brother, Joshua, is the founder of Atlas Obscura and author of Moonwalking with Einstein (2011). Jonathan was a "flamboyant" and sensitive child who, at the age of 8, was injured in a classroom chemical accident that resulted in "something like a nervous breakdown drawn out over about three years," during which "he wanted nothing, except to be outside his own skin."
Foer attended Princeton and in 1995, while a freshman at Princeton University, he took an introductory writing course with author Joyce Carol Oates. Oates took an interest in his writing, telling him that he had "that most important of writerly qualities, energy."
Foer later recalled that "she was the first person to ever make me think I should try to write in any sort of serious way. And my life really changed after that." Oates served as the advisor to Foer's senior thesis, an examination of the life of his maternal grandfather, the Holocaust survivor Louis Safran. For his thesis, Foer received Princeton's Senior Creative Writing Thesis Prize.
After graduating from Princeton in 1999, Foer attended briefly the Mount Sinai School of Medicine before dropping out to pursue his writing career.
Writing
In 2001, Foer edited the anthology A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by the Work of Joseph Cornell, to which he contributed the short story, "If the Aging Magician Should Begin to Believe."
He also traveled to Ukraine to expand his Princeton senior thesis, which grew into his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated. The book was published in 2002, winning a National Jewish Book Award and a Guardian First Book Award. In 2005, Liev Schreiber adapted the book to film (writing and directing); the movie starred Elijah Wood.
The year 2005 also saw the release of Foer's second novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. With 9/11 as a backdrop for the story, Foer uses a technique known as "visual writing" by including photographs of doorknobs and other oddities, and ending the novel with a 14-page flipbook. The technique garnered both praise and criticism. This book was adapted to film in 2012; Tom Hanks, Thomas Horn, and Sandra Bullock starred.
Foer wrote the libretto for an opera titled Seven Attempted Escapes From Silence, which premiered at the Berlin State Opera in 2005. In 2006 he recorded the narration for the documentary If This is Kosher..., an expose of the kosher certification process that advocates Jewish vegetarianism.
In 2009, Foer published a work of nonfiction, Eating Animals, an examination of factory farming. The book asks how humans can be so loving to our companion animals while simultaneously indifferent to others. Foer explores what this inconsistency tells us about ourselves.
Foer published his third novel, Tree of Codes, to mixed reviews in released in 2010. His fourth novel, Here I Am, came out in 2016—this one to high praise. Publishers Weekly claimed it showed "the mark of a thrillingly gifted writer."
Other
In 2006 Foer recorded the narration for "If This Is Kosher...", PETA's undercover investigation of the world's largest glatt kosher slaughterhouse. The New York Times referred to the 30-minute video as "grisly." Foer also serves as a board member for Farm Forward, a nonprofit organization that implements innovative strategies to promote conscientious food choices, reduce farm animal suffering, and advance sustainable agriculture.
In 2008, Foer taught writing as a visiting professor of fiction at Yale University. He is currently a writer-in-residence in the graduate creative writing program at New York University.
Personal
Foer married writer Nicole Krauss in 2004. They lived in Park Slope in Brooklyn, New York, with their children. The couple separated amicably in 2014 and now live in different homes elsewhere in Brooklyn, but in proximity to one another. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 9.5.2016.)
Book Reviews
Brilliant, always original.... Certain set pieces...show a masterly sense of timing and structure and deep feeling.... Foer strews small, semiprecious comic and gnomic gems all along the trail he is breaking.... "Here I Am" is not only the novel's title but also, maybe, an announcement of its ambitious and crazy-talented author's literary residence―an announcement that not only his location but his basic sensibility and very identity are to be found in this work.
Daniel Menaker - New York Times Book Review
Dialogue pings, as animated as an Aaron Sorkin script, and is often, very, very funny.
Jonathan Dean - Sunday Times (UK)
"[A] startling and urgent novel.... There are scenes so sad and so funny and so wry that I texted a friend repeatedly as I was reading it, just to say "goodness me!"... [T]he soul, if you will, of this novel is not in its technique, but in its soulfulness. It is a novel about why we love and how we love and how we might stop loving. It is humane in that no character is a caricature. Foer has become the novelist we deserve.... [He has] stretched and expanded the possibilities of the novel without losing either intellectual integrity or emotional honesty. Here I Am is not just bold, it is brave.... That this book is not on the Man Booker shortlist is nothing short of a disgrace: it will be remembered when all the second-rate crime fiction and dinner party novels are long forgotten
Stuart Kelly - Scotsman (UK)
Here I Am, an epic of family and identity...offers an unflinching, tender appraisal of cultural displacement in an uncertain age.
Rebecca Swirsky - Economist (UK)
Here I Am is one of those books, like Middlemarch, or for that matter Gone Girl, which lays bare the interior of a marriage with such intelligence and deep feeling and pitiless clarity, it’s impossible to read it and not re-examine your own family, and your place in it.
Lev Grossman - Time
Foer tests his own boundaries of spirituality and sexuality, ambition and sacrifice, originality and influence, revisiting themes and techniques from his earlier books. With this novel, he is stepping up to compete for his place in literary history.... Foer rises to the rhetorical challenges of this plot, paying full attention to its comic, apocalyptic, psychological, emotional and historic possibilities. It’s an exciting, masterful performance and his energy and power of invention never flags.
Elaine Showalter - Prospect (UK)
Brilliant.... The book ends on a sorrowful and deeply poignant scene, but even the moments of pain and loss do not diminish the vital spirit, so authentically Jewish, that is the real glory of Here I Am.
Jonathan Kirsch - Jewish Journal
[Here I Am] is at once painfully honest and genuinely hilarious―and full of emotional surprises that will leave you reeling.
Elle
(Starred review.) [A] teeming saga.... [Foer's] dark wit drops in zingers of dialogue, leavening his melancholy assessments of the loneliness of human relationships and a world riven by ethnic hatred.... [A]t once poignant, inspirational, and compassionate...the mark of a thrillingly gifted writer.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Julia and Jacob Bloch's marriage, once buoyed by the determination always to act with purpose, has been worn thin by a slow withholding and the demands of daily life.... Verdict: Rigorous questions within an accessible story; highly recommended. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Foer’s....polyphonic, and boldly comedic tale of one family’s quandaries astutely and forthrightly confronts humankind’s capacity for the ludicrous and the profound, cruelty and love.
Booklist
[Here I Am] showcases Foer's emotional dexterity even as it takes place across a wider canvas than his previous books.... This is great stuff, written with the insight of someone who has navigated the crucible of family, who understands how small slights lead to crises, the irreconcilability of love.... Sharply observed
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. From Isaac and Irving to Jacob and Sam to Tamir and Barak, the male characters of Here I Am complicate simple notions of Jewish masculinity. How do the expectations of manhood differ across generations and nationalities? What do the Bloch and Blumenberg men all have in common?
2. Jacob and Julia are not traditionally religious, but early in their relationship they practiced a "religion for two"—their own Friday Shabbat, Wednesday strolls, and Rosh Hashanah rituals, among others. What do rituals mean for the characters of Here I Am? How important are rituals—in religion, in relationships, and in everyday life—for you?
3. Irv tells his son, Jacob, "Without context, we’d all be monsters" (page 24). What are the contexts that the characters refer to in order to explain their behavior? Are they being honest when they do this? Does the context for behavior make a person more or less responsible for his or her actions?
4. What did you think of Julia’s reaction upon discovering Jacob’s secret cell phone? How would you have reacted?
5. Technology is central to the lives of the characters of Here I Am: texting, virtual worlds, tablets, the Internet, television, Skype, podcasts, blogs, and so on. What are the different roles that technologyplays in the lives of these characters? How does technology affect your own life and the ways you communicate?
6. What do Sam and Billie learn about love and conflict at Model UN? How does the students’ imaginary leadership differ from the responses of world leaders when an actual crisis erupts in the Middle East?
7. In the chapter "Maybe It Was the Distance" (beginning on page 219), we learn that Isaac and Benny (Tamir’s grandfather) were the only siblings out of a family of seven brothers who survived the Shoah. After a few years together in a displaced persons camp, Isaac settles in America, and Benny in Israel. Foer writes, "Isaac never understood Benny. Benny understood Issac, but never forgave him." Did Isaac evade his responsibilities to the Jewish homeland by moving to Washington, D.C.? What did you think of Jacob’s decision not to go to Israel? Was he being cowardly or courageous? How do the other characters, like Tamir and Irv, define courage?
8. "Before [Jacob and Julia] had kids, if asked to conjure images of parenthood they would have said things like ‘Reading in bed,’ and ‘Giving a bath,’ and ‘Running while holding the seat of a bicycle.’ Parenthood contains such moments of warmth and intimacy, but isn’t them. It’s cleaning up. The great bulk of family life involves no exchange of love, and no meaning, only fulfillment. Not the fulfillment of feeling fulfilled, but of fulfilling that which now falls to you" (page 466). If you are a parent, do you agree? Did this vision of family life ring true to you?
9. At Isaac’s funeral, the rabbi says: "And so it is with prayer, with true prayer, which is never a request, and never praise, but the expression of something of extreme significance that wouldotherwise have no way to be expressed. As Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, ‘Prayer may not save us. But prayer may make us worthy of being saved.’ We are made worthy, made righteous, by expression" (page 350). What is the role of prayer for the characters in the novel? What does prayermean in your own life?
10. Compare the early version of Sam’s bar mitzvah speech, which begins on page 101, to the final version, which begins on page 450. How has his view of the world, and of himself, been transformed?
11. The novel takes its title from passages in Genesis in which God calls out, "Abraham!" before ordering him to sacrifice his son, Isaac. Abraham dutifully responds, "Here I am." When do the novel’s characters let each other know "Here I am," bound by duty? How does this kind of duty both make us free and constrain us?
12. How does Jacob and Julia’s divorce affect their three sons? Does it bring them together? What did you think of the "family conversation" between the brothers that begins on page 437?
13. After viewing a documentary on concentration camps, Sam is wracked with the notion that "his life was, if not the result of, then at least inextricably bound to, the profound suffering, and that there was some kind of existential equation, whatever it was and whatever its implications, between his life and their deaths. Or no knowledge, but a feeling.... The feeling of being Jewish, but what was that feeling?" (pages 338–39). How does the legacy of the Holocaust affect the Blochs? How do they define their Jewish identity?
14. How did you react to Jacob’s terrifying, exhilarating experience in the lion’s den (page 390)? What was Tamir’s motivation in insisting that Jacob make the leap? How does that moment serve as a metaphor for their adult lives?
15. Discuss the "How to Play" instructions that make up part VII, "The Bible." What autobiographical details do they reveal about Jacob? Has everyone in his family spent their lives performing an invented role? How do the different characters use humor to express their feelings?
16. Should Julia have run away from Mark, or should she have run to him even sooner? Could Jacob and Julia have saved their marriage? Was it the texts that undid their marriage, or was it something else? Why do you think Jacob wrote the texts?
17. "More than a thousand 'constructed languages' have been invented—by linguists, novelists, hobbyists—each with the dream of correcting the imprecision, inefficiency, and irregularity of natural language. Some constructed languages are based on the musical scale and sung. Some are color-based and silent. The most admired constructed languages were designed to reveal what communication could be, and none of them is in use" (pages 427–28). The characters of Here I Am struggle to express outside what they feel inside, to overcome the inadequacy of language and say what they really mean. What conflicts in the book are rooted in failures of communication? Do you struggle, like Julia, Jacob, Sam, Isaac, and the others, to express yourself, to speak hard truths?
18. Do you think the book stakes out a position on Israel and its relationship with the United States?
19. What makes Argus’s story a fitting conclusion to the novel? What has Argus taught Jacob about
finding fulfillment in life?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Commonwealth
Ann Patchett, 2016
HarperCollins
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062491831
Summary
The enthralling story of how an unexpected romantic encounter irrevocably changes two families’ lives.
One Sunday afternoon in Southern California, Bert Cousins shows up at Franny Keating’s christening party uninvited. Before evening falls, he has kissed Franny’s mother, Beverly—thus setting in motion the dissolution of their marriages and the joining of two families.
Spanning five decades, Commonwealth explores how this chance encounter reverberates through the lives of the four parents and six children involved.
Spending summers together in Virginia, the Keating and Cousins children forge a lasting bond that is based on a shared disillusionment with their parents and the strange and genuine affection that grows up between them.
When, in her twenties, Franny begins an affair with the legendary author Leon Posen and tells him about her family, the story of her siblings is no longer hers to control. Their childhood becomes the basis for his wildly successful book, ultimately forcing them to come to terms with their losses, their guilt, and the deeply loyal connection they feel for one another.
Told with equal measures of humor and heartbreak, Commonwealth is a meditation on inspiration, interpretation, and the ownership of stories. It is a brilliant and tender tale of the far-reaching ties of love and responsibility that bind us together. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 2, 1963
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Raised—Nashville, Tennessee
• Education—B.A., Sarah Lawrence College; M.F.A., University of Iowa
• Awards—Guggenheim Fellowship; PEN/Faulkner Award; Orange Prize
• Currently—lives in Nashville, Tennessee
Ann Patchett is an American author of both fiction and nonfiction. She is perhaps best known for her 2001 novel, Bel Canto, which won her the Orange Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award and brought her nationwide fame.
Patchett was born in Los Angeles, California, and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. Her mother is the novelist Jeanne Ray. Her father, Frank Patchett, who died in 2012 and had been long divorced from her mother, served as a Los Angeles police officer for 33 years, and participated in the arrests of both Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan. The story of Patchett's own family is the basis for her 2016 novel, Commonwealth, about the individual lives of a blended family spanning five decades.
Education and career
Patchett attended St. Bernard Academy, a private Catholic school for girls run by the Sisters of Mercy. Following graduation, she attended Sarah Lawrence College and took fiction writing classes with Allan Gurganus, Russell Banks, and Grace Paley. She managed to publish her first story in The Paris Review before she graduated. After college, she went on to the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa
For nine years, Patchett worked at Seventeen magazine, writing primarily non-fiction; the magazine published one of every five articles she wrote. She said that the magazine's editors could be cruel, but she eventually stopped taking criticism personally. She ended her relationship with the magazine following a dispute with one editor, exclaiming, "I’ll never darken your door again!"
In 1990-91, Patchett attended the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It was there she wrote The Patron Saint of Liars, which was published in 1992 (becoming a 1998 TV movie). It was where she also met longtime friend Elizabeth McCracken—whom Patchett refers to as her editor and the only person to read her manuscripts as she is writing.
Although Patchett's second novel Taft won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in fiction in 1994, her fourth book, Bel Canto, was her breakthrough novel. Published in 2001, it was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and won the PEN/Faulkner Award and Britain's Orange Prize.
In addition to her other novels and memoirs, Patchett has written for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Oprah Magazine, ELLE, GQ, Gourmet, and Vogue. She is the editor of the 2006 volume of the anthology series The Best American Short Stories.
Personal
Patchett was only six when she moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and she lives there still. She is particularly enamored of her beautiful pink brick home on Whitland Avenue where she has lived since 2004 with her husband and dog. When asked by the New York Times where would she go if she could travel anywhere, Patchett responded...
I've done a lot of travel writing, and people like to ask me where I would go if I could go anyplace. My answer is always the same: I would go home. I am away more than I would like, giving talks, selling books, and I never walk through my own front door without thinking: thank-you-thank-you-thank-you.... [Home is] the stable window that opens out into the imagination.
In 2010, when she found that her hometown of Nashville no longer had a good book store, she co-founded Parnassus Books with Karen Hayes; the store opened in November 2011. In 2012, Patchett was on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. She is a vegan for "both moral and health reasons."
In an interview, she once told Barnes and Noble that the book that influenced her writing more than any other was Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow.
I think I read it in the tenth grade. My mother was reading it. It was the first truly adult literary novel I had read outside of school, and I read it probably half a dozen times. I found Bellow's directness very moving. The book seemed so intelligent and unpretentious. I wanted to write like that book.
Books
1992 - The Patron Saint of Liars
1994 - Taft
1997 - The Magician's Assistant
2004 - Truth and Beauty: A Friendship
2001 - Bel Canto
2007 - Run
2008 - What Now?
2011 - State of Wonder; The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life
2013 - This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
2016 - Commonwealth
2019 - The Dutch House
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/5/2016.)
Book Reviews
In her gorgeous, masterly new novel, Ann Patchett examines how the heavy weight of the past hangs on the present—the effect of a single action barreling down the decades, shaping lives for better or worse. The event might be as innocent as dancing with a priest at a party, simply because no other man is available. Or it might be far less innocent but no less surprising—a stolen kiss between two otherwise married people. It's that stolen kiss we're concerned with… READ MORE
Molly Lundquist - LitLovers
Patchett’s language is generally plain but occasionally soars satisfyingly; her observations about people and life are insightful; and her underlying tone is one of compassion and amusement. If Commonwealth lacks the foreign intrigue of Bel Canto or State of Wonder, both of which took place in South America and contained more suspense, this novel, much of which unfolds in American suburbs, recognizes that the passage of time is actually the ultimate plot.... Patchett also skillfully illustrates the way that seemingly minor, even arbitrary decisions can have long-lasting consequences and the way that we often fear the wrong things.
Curtis Sittenfeld - New York Times Book Review
Commonwealth bursts with keen insights into faithfulness, memory and mortality.… [An] ambitious American epic.
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
(Starred review.) [A] funny, sad, and ultimately heart-wrenching family portrait: a collage of parents, children, stepchildren, siblings, and stepsiblings.... Patchett elegantly manages a varied cast of characters....[showing] her at her peak in humor, humanity, and understanding.
Publishers Weekly
In this new novel by the beloved New York Times best-selling Patchett, Bert Cousins arrives uninvited at Franny Keating's christening party, recalling Sleeping Beauty's bad fairy and wreaking just as much havoc.
Library Journal
Indeed, this is Patchett’s most autobiographical novel, a sharply funny, chilling, entrancing, and profoundly affecting look into one family’s "commonwealth," its shared affinities, conflicts, loss, and love.
Booklist
(Starred review.) The prose is lean and inviting, but the constant shifts in point of view, the peripatetic chronology, and the ever growing cast of characters will keep you on your toes. A satisfying meat-and-potatoes domestic novel from one of our finest writers.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. How is each child—Cal, Caroline, Holly, Jeanette, Franny, and Albie—affected by the divorce and neglect that results?
2. What does it mean to become a family again in the wake of divorce? How does each child grow to respond to the family difficulties?
3. In what ways are the siblings good for and to each other?
4. Bert believes that his divorce, all the difficulties for the children, and his marriage to Beverly were inevitable.
"We’re magic," he says to her. In what ways might this be true? To what extent does romantic love justify their decision?
5. What influence did the time periods, especially the '60s and '70s, have on the behavior and decisions of the characters?
6. What’s added to the novel by the presence of Lomer, Fix’s first partner on the police force?
7. How does the ageing of the four parents—Beverly, Fix, Teresa, and Bert—affect their feelings and behavior regarding each other and the children?
8. Franny falls for Leon Posen because of "the brightness in him." What might this mean? Why do you think Franny and Leo were willing to overlook their age difference?
9. As adults, Jeanette suggests to Albie, perhaps in jest, that they create a family therapy plan for Holly and their mother. What does it take to repair and rebuild family relationships after so much division and tragedy?
10. What do the various literary allusions (David Copperfield, The Return of the Native, The English Patient, T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock) bring to the novel?
11. After writing his novel based on the life stories of the siblings, Leon Posen says "it’s my book," while Albie asks, "how did he end up with my life?" What are the ethical and legal issues of the situation? Should there be regulations for writing about others without their consent?
12. Fix believes, "There’s no protecting anyone…keeping people safe…is a story." To what extent is this true? Why does he believe this?
13. Holly chooses meditation over medication as a way of dealing with her suffering and stress. In what ways is this a healthy response to her life? What of her mother’s question of whether it’s "a real life"?
14. Among other things, Holly is attempting to find inner peace. To what extent does childhood experience determine who we become? How can an unsatisfying or unhealthy self be transformed?
15. Beverly admits late in her life that "other people’s children are too hard." What does she mean? In what ways is this true or not?
16. Discussing their difficult past, Holly says to Teresa, "you got through it." What’s the value of this? In what ways does each character go beyond this to remake his or her life?
17. Bert and Beverly’s kiss sets everything in motion for a lot of people who had no choice in the matter. How does that single decision shape everyone else’s life?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
News of the World
Paulette Jiles, 2016
HarperCollins
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062409201
Summary
It is 1870 and Captain Jefferson Kyle Kidd travels through northern Texas, giving live readings to paying audiences hungry for news of the world. An elderly widower who has lived through three wars and fought in two of them, the captain enjoys his rootless, solitary existence.
In Wichita Falls, he is offered a $50 gold piece to deliver a young orphan to her relatives in San Antonio. Four years earlier, a band of Kiowa raiders killed Johanna’s parents and sister; sparing the little girl, they raised her as one of their own.
Recently rescued by the U.S. army, the ten-year-old has once again been torn away from the only home she knows.
Their 400-mile journey south through unsettled territory and unforgiving terrain proves difficult and at times dangerous. Johanna has forgotten the English language, tries to escape at every opportunity, throws away her shoes, and refuses to act “civilized.
Yet as the miles pass, the two lonely survivors tentatively begin to trust each other, forging a bond that marks the difference between life and death in this treacherous land.
Arriving in San Antonio, the reunion is neither happy nor welcome. The captain must hand Johanna over to an aunt and uncle she does not remember—strangers who regard her as an unwanted burden.
A respectable man, Captain Kidd is faced with a terrible choice: abandon the girl to her fate or become—in the eyes of the law—a kidnapper himself. Exquisitely rendered and morally complex, News of the World is a brilliant work of historical fiction that explores the boundaries of family, responsibility, honor, and trust. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1943
• Where—Salem, Missouri, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Missouri
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives near San Antonio, Texas
Poet, memoirist, and novelist Paulette Jiles was born and raised in the Missouri Ozarks and moved to Canada in 1969 after graduating with a degree in Romance languages from the University of Missouri at Kansas City.
She spent eight years as a journalist in Canada, before turning to writing poetry. In 1984, she won the Governor General's Award (Canada's highest literary honor) for Celestial Navigation, a collection of poems lauded by the Toronto Star as "...fiercely interior and ironic, with images that can mow the reader down."
In 1992, Jiles published Cousins, a beguiling memoir that interweaves adventure and romance into a search for her family roots. Ten years later, she made her fiction debut with Enemy Women (2002), the survival story of an 18-year-old woman caged with the criminally insane in a St. Louis prison during the Civil War. Janet Maslin raved in the New York Times, "This is a book with backbone, written with tough, haunting eloquence by an author determined to capture the immediacy of he heroine's wartime odyssey." The book won the Willa Literary Award for Historical Fiction (U.S.) and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize (Canada).
In her second novel, 2007's Stormy Weather, Jiles mined another rich trove of American history. Set in Texas oil country during the Great Depression, the story traces the lives of four women, a widow and her three daughters, as they struggle to hold farm and family together in a hardscrabble world of dust storms, despair, and deprivation. In its review, the Washington Post praised the author's lyrical prose, citing descriptions that "crackle with excitement."
A dual citizen of the United States and Canada, Jiles currently lives on a ranch near San Antonio, Texas.
Books
1973 - Waterloo Express (poetry)
1984 - Celestial Navigation (poems)
1985 - The Golden Hawks (children)
1986 - Sitting in the Club Car Drinking Rum and Karma Kola
1986 - The Late Great Human Road Show
1988 - The Jesse James Poems
1988 - Blackwater (short stories)
1989 - Song to the Rising Sun (poems)
1992 - Cousins (memoir)
1995 - North Spirit: Travels Among the Cree and Ojibway Nations and Their Star Maps (memoir)
2002 - Enemy Women
2005 - Flying Lesson: Selected Poems
2007 - Stormy Weather
2009 - The Color of Lightning
2013 - Lighthouse Island
2016 - News of the World
2020 - Simon the Fiddler
Awards
Governor General’s Award for Poetry,Canada (Celestial Navigation)
Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, Canada (Enemy Women)
Willa Literary Award for Historical Fiction, U.S. (Enemy Women)
Extras
From a 2007 Barnes & Noble interview:
• When I lived in Nelson, British Columbia, there were three or four of us women who were struggling writers; we were very poor and we had a great deal of fun. We shared writing and money and wine. Woody (Caroline Woodward) had a great, huge Volkswagen bug—green—named Greena Garbo. When any of us managed to publish something there were celebrations. It was a wonderful time. They always managed to show up at my place just when I'd baked bread. One time Meagan and Joanie arrived to share with me a horrible dinner they had made of cracked wheat and onions—we were actually all short of food. I had just made lasagna—and they ate all of my lasagna and left me with that vile dish of groats and onions. And then we all got married and went in different directions.
• I have a small ranch that keeps me busy—two horses, a donkey, a cat, a dog, fences, a pasture—I and spend lots of time preventing erosion, clearing cedar, etc.
• When asked what book most influenced her career as a writer, here is her response:
Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays by Northrop Frye gives a clear and cogent analysis of the various sorts of imaginative narratives, among them the quest story. It does not assign value to any one type of story. I came upon Frye's The Well-Tempered Critic in college and loved it. It has the same sort of descriptive brilliance as Anatomy. It was a relief from the contemporary insistence that only the novel of psychological exploration was of literary value."
Other influential books include The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway; All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
Stripped down to its bare bones, News of the World is the tale of a hero and heroine's journey. The bond that forms between Kidd and Johanna is visceral, no matter how many times Kidd near kicks himself for taking on responsibility for the wild child.... The last few pages gave me quite a sigh of relief, and that's all I'll say about how the journey of a wise old man and a wise-beyond-her-years young child turns out. I will be passing this fine book on to as many friends as possible and also think it would be a marvelous book club read. READ MORE.
Keddy Ann Outlaw - LitLovers
This Western is not to be missed by Jiles's fans and lovers of Texan historical fiction. The final chapter's solid resolution will satisfy those who like to know what ultimately becomes of beloved characters. —Wendy W. Paige, Shelby Cty. P.L., Morristown, IN
Library Journal
In post-Civil War Texas, a 10-year-old girl makes an odyssey back to her aunt and uncle's home after living with the Kiowa warriors who had killed her parents four years earlier.... Lyrical and affecting, the novel succeeds in skirting clichés through its empathy and through the depth of its major characters.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for News of the World...then take off on your own:
1. Talk about the ways in which Johanna Leonberger's life among the Kiowa Indians has shaped her identity, for better and for worse.
2. Captain Kidd is reluctant at first to be saddled with Johanna. What changes his mind: why does he agree to take her to San Antonio? What does it say about the kind of man he is? What kind of man, in fact, is he?
3. How does Paulette Jiles depict post-Civil War Texas? What kind of place is it? Talk about the landscape and the type of people Johanna and Captain Kidd encounter. Also, consider the effects of the Civil War on the populace: is the war actually over?
4. Trace the development of the bond that develops between Johanna and Kidd. What cements their relationship? Whom do you think benefits more from the other? Or is their relationship equally symbiotic?
5. Captain Kidd makes a living traveling through north Texas, reading the news to audiences who pay to hear hear him. Obviously, the novel's title refers to this activity, but what else might "the news of the world" refer to in the novel?
6. All literary journeys follow the arc of the hero's journey. How does this novel adhere to that ancient narrative? Who is the hero—and in what way? How do both Johanna and Kidd change or grow as individuals during the course of their travels?
7. Where you satisfied by the novel's ending? Does Captain Kidd do the right thing for Johanna? Would you have made the same choice, or a different one?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
I'm Thinking of Ending Things
Iain Reid, 2016
Gallery/Scout Press
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501126925
Summary
I’m thinking of ending things. Once this thought arrives, it stays. It sticks. It lingers. It’s always there. Always.
Jake once said, "Sometimes a thought is closer to truth, to reality, than an action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can’t fake a thought."
And here’s what I’m thinking: I don’t want to be here.
In this compelling literary thriller, debut novelist Iain Reid explores the depths of the human psyche, questioning consciousness, free will, the value of relationships, fear, and the limitations of solitude.
Reminiscent of Jose Saramago’s early work, Michel Faber’s cult classic Under the Skin, and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is an edgy, haunting debut.
Tense, gripping, and atmospheric, this novel "packs a big psychological punch with a twisty story line and an ending that will leave readers breathless" (Library Journal, starred review). (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1981
• Where—Ottowa, Ontario, Canada
• Education—B.A., Queen’s University
• Awards—RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award
• Currently—lives in Kingston, Ontario
Iain Reid is a Canadian writer of two memoirs and a novel, who won the RBC Taylor Emerging Writer Award in 2015.
Reid is a graduate of Queen’s University where he studied history, English literature, and philosophy. Following graduation, he established his writing career by publishing articles and columns in national magazines and newspapers. He drew the attention of the National Post, garnering a weekly column assignment. In 2015 he began appearing in US magazine and The New Yorker.
In 2014 Reid was one of six international young authors invited to teach at the inaugural Iceland Writers Retreat.
His first memoir, One Bird's Choice: A Year in the Life of an Over-educated, Underemployed Twentysomething Who Moves Back Home, was published in 2010, and was followed by The Truth About Luck: What I Learned on my Road Trip with Grandma in 2013.
His debut novel, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, an edgy suspense thriller, was published in 2016. He lives in Kingston, Ontario. (Adapted from Wickipedia. Retrieved 8/31/2016.)
Book Reviews
Iain Reid has written a creepy but enthralling new novel.... It’s a psychological thriller that keeps readers guessing.
NPR's Weekend Edition
Reid’s gradually building spookiness and plainspoken intellectualism make I’m Thinking of Ending Things a smart and unexpectedly fun book.
New York Journal of Books
This is the boldest and most original literary thriller to appear in some time.
Chicago Tribune
Your dread and unease will mount with every passing page.
Entertainment Weekly
This is a deliciously frightening novel, Reid has a light, idiosyncratic touch but never lets his vice-like grip of suspense slacken for a second. Once finished, you will be hard pressed not to start the whole terrifying journey all over again.
Independent (UK)
(Starred review.) Nonfiction author Reid fuses suspense with philosophy, psychology, and horror in his unsettling first novel set in an unspecified locale.... Capped with an ending that will shock and chill, this twisty tale invites multiple readings.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [T]he unnamed narrator is traveling with her new boyfriend Jake to visit his parents at the family farm. The novel's vague title seems to become clearer as the narrator repeatedly ponders calling off their relationship.... This slim first novel packs a big psychological punch with a twisty story line and an ending that will leave readers breathless. —Portia Kapraun, Delphi P.L., IN
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Reid's preternaturally creepy debut unfolds like a bad dream, the kind from which you desperately want to wake up yet also want to keep dreaming.... Reid's tightly crafted tale toys with the nature of identity and comes by its terror honestly, building a wall of intricately layered psychological torment so impenetrable it's impossible to escape.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
SPOILER ALERT—proceed with caution.
1. Discuss the significance of the title. Why does Reid choose to call his novel "I’m Thinking of Ending Things"?
2. Who is the "Caller"? Describe the calls he makes to the girlfriend. How do these calls help to further the plot? Why doesn’t the girlfriend tell Jake about the caller? Do you agree with her decision to keep the calls secret? Why or why not?
3. Why is the "Girlfriend" unnamed throughout the novel? What were your original impressions of her? When you finished reading I’m Thinking of Ending Things, did your feelings about her change? If so, in what ways and why?
4. There are conversations between strangers interspersed through the girlfriend’s narration. What’s the effect of including these conversations in the novel? How do they help you understand the story? Who do you think is speaking during these conversations?
5. Were you surprised by the ending of I’m Thinking of Ending Things? If so, were there any parts you found particularly shocking? What were they?
6. The girlfriend says, "I think a lot of what we learn about others isn’t what they tell us. It’s what we observe" (p. 29). Do you agree? What do you learn about Jake and the girlfriend by seeing their interactions with Jake’s parents? Are there other examples in I’m Thinking of Ending Things where the actions of a character tell you something about him or her? Discuss them with your book club.
7. When the girlfriend asks Jake if he thinks "secrets are inherently unfair, or bad or immoral in a relationship," his answer is, "I don’t know. It would depend on the secret" (p. 30). What do you think? Are there circumstances where keeping a secret from your significant other is permissible? What are they? What secrets do Jake and the girlfriend keep from each other?
8. Jake describes himself as a "cruciverbalist" to the girlfriend when they first meet. Does his description give you any insight into his personality? If so, what does it tell you about Jake? What, if any, puzzles exist in the book that Jake attempts to solve? Is he successful?
9. Describe Jake’s parents’ farm. Was it what you expected? When Jake takes the girlfriend on a tour of the farm, she sees a chilling sight outside. How does this sight affect the girlfriend? Compare her reaction to seeing this sight to her reaction to Jake’s story about how his father had to put the pigs on the farm down. Why do you think Jake tells her about the pigs?
10. In describing the events at the school, an unnamed speaker says, "This isn’t about us" (p. 89). Do you agree with this statement? Why or why not?
11. While she is trapped in the school, the girlfriend says that "before tonight, when anyone asked me about the scariest thing that happened to me, I told them the same story. I told them about Ms. Veal. Most people I tell don’t find this story scary" (p. 172). Why does the girlfriend think the incident with Ms. Veal was scary? Did you find it frightening? If so, why?
12. The girlfriend tells Jake, "I’m glad we don’t know everything.... Questions are good. They’re better than answers" (p. 35). Why does the girlfriend feel this way? Do you agree with her? Explain your answer. Are there any questions that the girlfriend should have asked as she was getting to know Jake? What would you have asked?
13. Describe the basement in Jake’s parents’ house. Why does Jake tell the girlfriend that there is nothing in the basement? What does she find? When the girlfriend is in the basement, she remembers having a conversation with Jake where he told her, "We depend on symbols for meaning" (p. 107). What do you think makes her think of this particular conversation while she is in the basement? Are there any recurring symbols in I’m Thinking of Ending Things? Discuss them with your book club.
14. The girlfriend asks Jake, "How do we know when a relationship becomes real?" (p. 69). Discuss Jake’s answer. What do you think it takes for a relationship to be "real"? Do you consider the relationship between Jake and the girlfriend to be a real one? Why or why not?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)