Home Safe
Elizabeth Berg, 2009
Random House
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780345487551


Summary
Beloved author Elizabeth Berg tells the story of the recently widowed Helen Ames and of her twenty-seven-year-old daughter Tessa. Helen is shocked to discover that her mild-mannered and loyal husband had been leading a double life.

The Ames’s had saved money for a happy retirement, planned in minute detail, but that money has disappeared in several big withdrawals—spent by Helen’s husband before he died. What could he possibly have been doing? And what is Helen to do now? Why does Helen’s daughter object to her mother’s applying for a job—and why doesn’t Tessa meet a nice man and get married?

What Helen’s husband did with all their money turns out to be provocative, revelatory—and leads Helen and her daughter to embark on new adventures, and change. (From the publisher.)

---

---

Author Bio
• Birth—December 2, 1948
• Where—St. Paul, Minnesota, USA
• Education—A.A.S, St. Mary’s College
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Chicago, Illinois


Before she became a writer, Elizabeth Berg spent 10 years as a nurse. It's a field, as she says on her website, that helped her to become a writer:

Taking care of patients taught me a lot about human nature, about hope and fear and love and loss and regret and triumph and especially about relationships—all things that I tend to focus on in my work.

Her sensitivity to humanity is what Berg's writing is noted for. As Publishers Weekly wrote in reviewing The Dream Lover, her 2015 portrayal of George Sand, "Berg offers vivid, sensual detail and a sensitive portrayal of the yearning and vulnerability" behind her main character.

Background
Berg was born in St. Paul Minneapolis. When her father re-enlisted in the Army, she and her family were moved from base to base—in one single year, she went to three different schools. Her peripatetic childhood makes it hard for Berg to answer the usually simple question, "where did you grow up?"

Berg recalls that she loved to write at a young age. She was only nine when she submitted her first poem to American Girl magazine; sadly, it was rejected. It was another 25 years before she submitted anything again—to Parents Magazine—and that time she won.

In addition to nursing, Berg worked as a waitress, another field she claims is "good training for a writer." She also sang in a rock band.

Writing
Berg ended up writing for magazines for 10 years before she finally turned to novels. Since her 1993 debut with Durable Goods, her books have sold in large numbers and been translated into 27 languages. She writes nearly a book a year, a number of which have received awards and honors.

Recognition
Two of Berg's books, Durable Goods and Joy School, were listed as "Best Books of the Year" by the American Library Association. Open House became an Oprah Book Club Selection.

She won the New England Booksellers Award for her body of work, and Boston Public Library made her a "literary light." She has also been honored by the Chicago Public Library. An article on a cooking school in Italy, for National Geographic Traveler magazine, won an award from the North American Travel Journalists Association.

Personal
Now divorced, Berg was married for over twenty years and has two daughters and three grandchildren. She lives with her dogs and a cat in Chicago. (Author bio adapted from the author's website.)

---

---

Book Reviews
Love, work and the absence of both figure prominently in Berg's latest, a rumination on loss and replenishment. Since novelist Helen's husband, Dan, died a year ago, she's been unable to write, and though her publisher and agent aren't worried, she is, particularly after a disastrous performance at a public speaking engagement leaves her wondering if her writing career will be another permanent loss. Meanwhile, daughter Tessa is getting impatient as Helen smothers her with awkward motherly affection. Tessa longs for distance and some independence, but Helen is unable to run her suburban Chicago home without continually calling on Tessa to perform the handyman chores that once belonged to Dan. And then Helen discovers Dan had withdrawn a huge chunk of their retirement money, and Helen's quest to find out what happened turns into a journey of self-discovery and hard-won healing. Berg gracefully renders, in tragic and comic detail, the notions that every life-however blessed-has its share of awful loss, and that even crushed, defeated hearts can be revived.
Publishers Weekly

Eleven months after her husband's sudden death, Helen Ames remains helpless about home repair, ignorant of finances, and stymied by writer's block. Lonely and unsuited to any job outside the home, Helen has nothing to do but exasperate her adult daughter, Tessa, by intruding, until the family accountant calls asking about a secret withdrawal of $850,000 her husband made before dying. The mystery is quickly resolved, but in the meantime, Helen reluctantly agrees to lead an adult writing workshop for pay. The story then proceeds comfortably through Helen's coming to terms with her husband's surprise, her daughter's well-meaning withdrawal, and Helen's journey of self-discovery—with the help of her students-outside of her roles as wife, mother, writer. Prolific novelist Berg (The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted) is an accomplished master of women's fiction. Her warmth, humor, and forgiving eye for human nature, mixing wry observation with heartwarming moments, make this a pleasant read. Recommended for popular fiction collections. —Laurie A. Cavanaugh
Library Journal

Berg is a tender and enchanting storyteller who wisely celebrates the simple, sustaining elements of life, from comfort food to birdsong to a good laugh. A keen and funny observer, she is the poet of kindness. And not only is this an insightful, graceful, and romantic novel of one charmingly contradictory woman’s path through grief, it is also a paean to the profound pleasures and revelations of reading and the adventure and catharsis of writing. Books, Berg affirms in her magical way, are a unifying force for good in the cosmos.
Booklist

Widow discovers an $850,000 crack in her nest egg in Berg's latest (The Day I Ate Whatever I Wanted, 2008, etc.). Helen, a bestselling author living in Chicago, is experiencing writer's block for the first time in her life. And no wonder: Her husband Dan died of a heart attack at the breakfast table. Her elderly father has cancer. Phobic about money matters, she's been dodging increasingly frantic calls from her accountant, Steve, and has toyed with taking holiday employment at Anthropologie, even going so far as to interview. A library program director is hounding her to teach a writer's workshop. Toxic fan mail from wannabe writer Margot attacks Helen's body of work as "insipid," "mawkish" and an insult to literature. When Steve finally reaches Helen it's to ask if she has any idea what her husband did with the 850 large he withdrew from the couple's retirement account before his death. Helen had preferred to let Dan handle all the finances, but she had no reason not to trust him. After some promising setups (At 59, would Helen be Anthropologie's oldest cashier? Was squeaky-clean Dan leading a double life?) Berg seems to fall back on her default worldview: Her characters are simply too nice, too timid or both, to get themselves into any interesting messes. Helen sabotages the job interview, and she learns early on (from well-preserved hunky architect Tom) that Dan siphoned off the funds to surprise Helen with the California retirement house of her dreams. The writing class adds the most spice-Helen's arch-rival, a catty novelist, is a co-instructor, and arch-rival-in training Margot brings a masterpiece to the workshop. Otherwise, stock minor players—Helen's skeptical daughter, Tessa,her wise-cracking best girlfriend, Midge, and Tom, a hot romantic prospect (and he's handy too!)—and a plot that ducks every conflict render this outing listless. Neither insipid nor mawkish but definitely phoned-in.
Kirkus Reviews

---

---

Book Club Discussion Questions
1. In the opening pages of Home Safe, we see Helen as a young girl, writing poetry to deal with the grief of losing a classmate: “With this, she was given peace” (page 4). What types of activities calm or fulfill you? How do they resonate emotionally?

2. Helen says that her favorite Christmas gift is the custom-mixed CD her daughter makes for her each year. Do you have a tradition of making homemade gifts? What have been some of your favorite or most memorable holiday gifts? What gift would you be thrilled to get from your child? From your parent?

3. As a diversion, Helen prepares an elaborate meal of “roast pork with cinnamon apple chutney, mashed sweet potatoes, green beans with crispy shallots,” and an apple crisp (page 26). If you were making such a meal just for yourself, what foods would you choose? What roles does food play in our lives? What types of situations and occasions do you associate with special meals? Discuss other creative pursuits that you might have or indeed have tried in a similar situation.

4. One writing exercise Helen uses as a teaching tool is for her students to write short stories using a number of given objects: “an old silver hairbrush, a blackened frying pan, a love letter from the 1930s, a pair of men’s shoes, a floppy-necked teddy bear, one dusty wing of a butterfly” (page 47). What sort of story might you construct about these objects? Who do these things belong to? If you had created this exercise, what objects might you have chosen?

5. Helen relates, on page 89, that Dan used a children’s book to illustrate his dream of sailing. Are there any particular children’s books that resonate with you as an adult? That influence you? Why?

6. The title’s title, Home Safe, appears in an expression Helen recalls on page 86. How did Helen and Dan use this phrase? What people or places in your life give you this feeling?

7. Helen wonders what she and Dan might have discussed in the tree house, recalling that a friend had wisely said,“It’s not the things you have in a tree house, it’s the things you think about there” (page 129). If you could have a special retreat of your own, what and where would it be, and why? What sorts of things would you discuss there, and with whom

8. When Helen considers moving to San Francisco, knowing that Tessa has accepted a job there, she wonders if Tessa will be upset about it, and asks herself if she “is allowed to make a decision that is for and about herself?” (page182). This question of whether an action is for Tessa or for Helen recurs throughout the novel. From where does this question stem? How does this issue affect their relationship? How would you advise each party? Do you know a mother-daughter pair, or a female pair with a different bond, who disagrees on such issues?

9. Helen thinks that “if you leave one home, you can find another” (page 202). Who or what makes a home? What qualities do you associate with home? Have you found Helen’s thought to be true in your own life?

10. The details and features of Helen’s dream house are carefully and delightfully described. What might your dream house look like? What features would it include? Where would it be located?

11. What parts of Helen’s journey are universal? What parts can you relate to your own life? What themes does Elizabeth Berg draw out of the characters?

12. The lush and detailed images in this novel are unique. Can you point out a few effective images that really conveyed the novel’s themes to you? What images did you most relate and respond to?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (Summary)

Of Mice and Men 
John Steinbeck, 1937
Penguin Group USA
112 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780140177398


Summary
An intimate portrait of two men who cherish the slim bond between them and the dream they share in a world marred by petty tyranny, misunderstanding, jealousy, and callousness.

Clinging to each other in their loneliness and alienation, George and his simple-minded friend Lenny dream, as drifters will, of a place to call their own—a couple of acres and a few pigs, chickens, and rabbits back in Hill Country where land is cheap.

But after they come to work on a ranch in the fertile Salinas Valley of California, their hopes, like “the best laid schemes o’mice an’ men,” begin to go awry.

Of Mice and Men also represents an experiment in form, as Steinbeck described his work, “a kind of playable novel, written in novel form but so scened and set that it can be played as it stands.” A rarity in American letters, it achieved remarkable success as a novel, a Broadway play, and three acclaimed films.

Steinbeck’s tale of commitment, loneliness, hope, and loss remains one of America’s most widely read and beloved novels. (From Penguin Classics.)

---

---

Author Bio 
• Birth—February 27, 1902
• Where—Salinas, California USA
• Death—December 20, 1968
• Where—New York, NY
• Education—Studied marine biology at Stanford University,
   1919-25
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, 1940;
   Nobel Prize, 1962.

John Ernst Steinbeck, Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winner, was born in Salinas, California February 27, 1902. His father, John Steinbeck, served as Monterey County Treasurer for many years. His mother, Olive Hamilton, was a former schoolteacher who developed in him a love of literature. Young Steinbeck came to know the Salinas Valley well, working as a hired hand on nearby ranches in Monterey County.

In 1919, he graduated from Salinas High School as president of his class and entered Stanford University majoring in English. Stanford did not claim his undivided attention. During this time he attended only sporadically while working at a variety jobs including on with the Big Sur highway project, and one at Spreckels Sugar Company near Salinas.

Steinbeck left Stanford permanently in 1925 to pursue a career in writing in New York City. He was unsuccessful and returned, disappointed, to California the following year. Though his first novel, Cup of Gold, was published in 1929, it attracted little literary attention. Two subsequent novels, The Pastures of Heaven and To A God Unknown, met the same fate.

After moving to the Monterey Peninsula in 1930, Steinbeck and his new wife, Carol Henning, made their home in Pacific Grove. Here, not far from famed Cannery Row, heart of the California sardine industry, Steinbeck found material he would later use for two more works, Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row.

With Tortilla Flat (1935), Steinbeck's career took a decidedly positive turn, receiving the California Commonwealth Club's Gold Medal. He felt encouraged to continue writing, relying on extensive research and personal observation of the human drama for his stories. In 1937, Of Mice and Men was published. Two years later, the novel was produced on Broadway and made into a movie. In 1940, Steinbeck won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Grapes of Wrath, bringing to public attention the plight of dispossessed farmers.

After Steinbeck and Henning divorced in 1942, he married Gwyndolyn Conger. The couple moved to New York City and had two sons, Thomas and two years later, John. During the war years, Steinbeck served as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. Some of his dispatches reappeared in Once There Was A War. In 1945, Steinbeck published Cannery Row and continued to write prolifically, producing plays, short stories and film scripts. In 1950, he married Elaine Anderson Scott and they remained together until his death.

Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962 "for his realistic as well as imaginative writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humor and keen social perception." In his acceptance speech, Steinbeck summarized what he sought to achieve through his works:

Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, their responsibilities have been decreed by our species.... Furthermore, the writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man's proven capacity of greatness of heart and spirit—gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and emulation. I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature...

Steinbeck remained a private person, shunning publicity and moving frequently in his search for privacy. He died on December 20, 1968 in New York City, where he and his family made a home. But his final resting place was the valley he had written about with such passion. At his request, his ashes were interred in the Garden of Memories cemetery in Salinas. He is survived by his son, Thomas. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble, courtesy of the National Steinbeck Center.)

---

---

Book Reviews
(Older works have few, if any, mainstream press reviews online. See Amazon and Barnes & Noble for helpful customer reviews.)

Of Mice and Men is a thriller, a gripping tale running to novelette length that you will not set down until it is finished. It is more than that; but it is that.... In sure, raucous, vulgar Americanism, Steinbeck has touched the quick in his little story.
New York Times

Brutality and tenderness mingle in these strangely moving pages.... The reader is fascinated by a certainty of approaching doom.
Chicago Tribune

 
A short tale of much power and beauty. Mr. Steinbeck has contributed a small masterpiece to the modern tough-tender school of American fiction.
Times Literary Supplement (London) 

---

---

Discussion Questions
1. Why does George "take so much trouble for another guy" (p. 21)? 
 
2. Why does George shoot Lennie?
 
3. Why is the dream recited repeatedly?
 
4. What does Slim mean when he says, "A guy got to sometimes" (p. 102)?
 
5. Why does the book begin and end at the pond?
 
6. Why does Candy feel he should have shot his dog himself?
 
7. Is Curley's wife to blame for Lennie's death?
 
8. Why doesn't Slim share in the other men's dreams?
 
9. Why does Carlson get the last word?
 
10. What is the meaning of the book's title?

11. Did migrant workers have any options for a better life?
 
12. Did George do the right thing by shooting Lennie?
(Questions from the publisher.)

top of page (summary)

 

The Surrendered
Chang-rae Lee, 2010
Penguin Group USA
435 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594489761

Summary
With his three critically acclaimed novels, Chang-rae Lee has established himself as one of the most talented writers of contemporary literary fiction. Now, with The Surrendered, Lee has created a book that amplifies everything we've seen in his previous works, and reads like nothing else. It is a brilliant, haunting, heartbreaking story about how love and war inalterably change the lives of those they touch.

June Han was only a girl when the Korean War left her orphaned; Hector Brennan was a young GI who fled the petty tragedies of his small town to serve his country. When the war ended, their lives collided at a Korean orphanage where they vied for the attentions of Sylvie Tanner, the beautiful yet deeply damaged missionary wife whose elusive love seemed to transform everything. Thirty years later and on the other side of the world, June and Hector are reunited in a plot that will force them to come to terms with the mysterious secrets of their past, and the shocking acts of love and violence that bind them together.

As Lee unfurls the stunning story of June, Hector, and Sylvie, he weaves a profound meditation on the nature of heroism and sacrifice, the power of love, and the possibilities for mercy, salvation, and surrendering oneself to another.

Combining the complex themes of identity and belonging of Native Speaker and A Gesture Life with the broad range, energy, and pure storytelling gifts of Aloft, Chang-rae Lee has delivered his most ambitious, exciting, and unforgettable work yet. It is a mesmeriz­ing novel, elegantly suspenseful and deeply affecting. (From the publisher.)

---

---

Author Bio
• Birth—July 29, 1965
• Where—Seoul, Korea
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.F.A., University of
   Oregon (USA)
• Awards—PEN/Hemingway Award; Anisfield-Wolf Prize;
   NAIBA Book Award
• Currently—lives in Princeton, New Jersey, USA

Chang-rae Lee landed on the literary scene in 1995 with Native Speaker, a detective story about much more than just another crime. Critics responded, and Lee's debut received a string of recognition, including a Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. Biography/Critical Appreciation. Everyone agreed that Chang-rae Lee was a writer to watch. Over the nearly two decades since then, he has published four more novels, all to wide acclaim.

Lee and his family emigrated from Seoul, South Korea to the United States in 1968. His family settled in Westchester, New York, and Lee eventually attended Yale and the University of Oregon, where he earned his M.F.A.

Lee's first novel, Native Speaker (1995), won numerous awards including the PEN/Hemingway Award. The novel centers around a Korean American industrial spy, explores themes of alienation and betrayal as felt or perpetrated by immigrants and first-generation citizens, and played out in local politics.

In 1999, he published his second novel, A Gesture Life. This elaborated on his themes of identity and assimilation through the narrative of an elderly Japanese-American doctor who remembers treating Korean comfort women during World War II. For this book, Lee received the Asian American Literary Award.

His 2004 novel Aloft received mixed notices from the critics and featured Lee's first protagonist who is not Asian American, but a disengaged and isolated Italian-American suburbanite forced to deal with his world. It received the 2006 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in the Adult Fiction category.

His 2010 novel The Surrendered won the 2011 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and was a nominated finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

In 2014 Lee published On Such A Full Sea, a dystopian novel set in a future version of the American city of Baltimore, Maryland called B-Mor where the main character, Fan, is a Chinese-American laborer working as a diver in a fish farm.

Lee a writer and a teacher, as well as the director of the M.F.A. Program at Hunter College of City University in New York City. Those fortunate enough to be his students get to learn from the man who knows the stuff of human nature—that the aftereffect of any act is the core of every great story, and that even the most conventional characters can bear the weight of unconventional story lines. (Adapted from Barnes & Noble and Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/12/2014.)

Extras
(From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview):

• If I weren't a writer," Lee reveals in our interview, "I'd probably be working in the food and/or wine business, perhaps running a wine or coffee bar—or even an Asian noodle soup shop."

• When asked what book most influenced his life or career as a writer, here is his response:

"The Book" doesn't quite exist for me—there are too many that influenced me in incalculable ways.... These, in no particular order, are several of my many, many favorites:

Dubliners by James Joyce—Stories so luminous that one would be instantly blinded by their beauty were it not for the revelatory poignancy of their narratives.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac—This is a wild and inspiring book, and was especially so for someone like me, a middle-class suburban kid who was always taught to color within the lines.

Rabbit Is Rich by John Updike—One of the few novels I might consider calling "perfect" —it's all here, in a virtuosic and utterly unified presentation: voice, characterization, narrative sequencing, keen social commentary, metaphorical/pictorial wizardry. Updike at the height of his powers.

The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron—A torrential display of Styron's prodigious imagination and lyricism.

The Names by Don DeLillo—A brilliant, complex, brooding inquiry into the uses—and essential position—of language. A "novel of ideas" that goes beyond rgumentation and ultimately soars with the force of poetry.
(Autho nterview from Barnes & Noble.)

---

---

Book Reviews
Searing.... With The Surrendered, Mr. Lee has written the most ambitious and compelling novel of his already impressive career—a symphonic work that reprises the themes of identity, familial legacies and the imperatives of fate he has addressed in earlier works, but which he grapples with here on a broader, more intricate historical canvas. Though the novel has its flaws, it is a gripping and fiercely imagined work that burrows deep into the dark heart of war, leaving us with a choral portrait of the human capacity for both barbarism and transcendence.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

Chang-rae Lee is fond of words like "accrete" and "accrue," words that try to name the slow, almost imperceptible processes by which experience acquires weight, mass and, if you're lucky, meaning. "Life, gathering," reads one full sentence in his ferocious and lyrical new novel, The Surrendered, and you couldn't ask for a better two-word description of what good fiction aspires to. This novel...gathers life greedily, hungrily, but with a certain stealth: Lee doesn't bolt it all down at once, as the refugee children in his story do. The Surrendered, his largest, most ambitious book, is about the horrors of war and the sorrows of survival, yet its manner is quiet, watchful, expectant, as if everyone, including Lee himself, were waiting to see what might accrue.
Terrence Rafferty - New York Times Book Review

Epic in scope, masterful in execution, heart stopping at times, and heartbreaking at others. The meticulous narrative unfolds over 52 years and across three continents. Nothing is rushed; nothing is overlooked. We can even feel the buzz of a window pane on our fingertips as rumbling Japanese military vehicles approach along a gravel road.... Lee understands that in art and in stories what is perhaps most valuable is not what can be explained but what can be felt.
Boston Globe

This is not a happy book, but it is a rewarding one. The Surrendered grabs your attention—sometimes terrifying you in the process—and doesn't let go until its final moment.... Its pages are breathtakingly alive.
The San Francisco Chronicle

Lee's masterful fourth novel (after Aloft) bursts with drama and human anguish as it documents the ravages and indelible effects of war. June Han is a starving 11-year-old refugee fleeing military combat during the Korean War when she is separated from her seven-year-old twin siblings. Eventually brought to an orphanage near Seoul by American soldier Hector Brennan, who is still reeling from his father's death, June slowly recovers from her nightmarish experiences thanks to the loving attention of Sylvie Tanner, the wife of the orphanage's minister. But Sylvie is irretrievably scarred as well, having witnessed her parents' murder by Japanese soldiers in 1934 Manchuria. These traumas reverberate throughout the characters' lives, determining the destructive relationship that arises between June, Hector and Sylvie as the plot rushes forward and back in time, encompassing graphic scenes of suffering, carnage and emotional wreckage. Powerful, deeply felt, compulsively readable and imbued with moral gravity, the novel does not peter out into easy redemption. It's a harrowing tale: bleak, haunting, often heartbreaking—and not to be missed.
Publishers Weekly

Beautiful, riveting, piercingly haunting.... The settings and times are masterfully interwoven to form an elegant, disturbing inquiry into courage, love, loyalty, and mercy.... This is a book to read in two or three long sittings, gulping pages, turning them as fast as possible to reach the perfect, inevitable ending.
Kate Christensen - Elle

June Singer is a middle-aged Korean woman living in the United States and dying of cancer, but before she dies, she wants to accomplish two things: find her son, who is drifting around Italy, and make a redemptive pilgrimage to the Chapel of Bones. She enlists the unwilling help of Hector, her son's father, whom she hasn't seen since the 1950s, when she was a child in a Korean orphanage and Hector was an ex-soldier working as the handyman. Throughout June and Hector's painful journey, we learn about the Tanners, the couple who ran the orphanage; Sylvie Tanner's childhood as a daughter of missionaries who were slain in front of her; the possessive love that June and Hector had for Sylvie; and the resulting calamity that has haunted them their whole lives. Verdict: This is a completely engrossing story of great complexity and tragedy. Lee's (Aloft) ability to describe his characters' sufferings, both physical and mental, is extraordinarily vivid; one is left in awe of the human soul's ability to survive the most horrific experiences. —Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA
Library Journal

With his signature empathy and artistry, Lee links emotionally complex events.... Profoundly committed to authenticity, and in command of a remarkable gift for multidimensional metaphors, Lee dramatizes the guilt and "mystery of survival" in scenes of scalding horror and breathtaking beauty.... Lee has created a masterpiece of moral and psychological imagination unsparing in its illumination of the consequences of bloodshed and war.
Booklist

The odyssey of a Korean War refugee becomes first the subject of, then a haunting overture to, the award-winning Korean-American author's fourth novel (Aloft, 2004, etc.). Lee's introspective and interrogatory novels seek the sources of their characters' strengths and weaknesses in their own, and their families' stories-nowhere more powerfully than in this exhaustive chronicle of three hopeful lives tempered in the crucibles of wars and their enduring aftermaths. In a patiently developed and intermittently slowly paced narrative that covers a 30-year span and whose events occur in four countries and on three continents, the entangled histories of three protagonists are revealed. We first encounter 11-year-old June Han, traveling with her twin siblings following the deaths of their parents toward safety with their uncle's family. June's willed stoicism and suppression of fear serve her well in extremity, but they will have a far different effect on her later life-shaped when she is rescued by American G.I. Hector Brennan (himself in flight from the memory of a painful loss). Hector brings June to Sylvie Tanner, a minister's wife who runs an orphanage (and whose own demons owe much to the savagery of history in another place and another time). Each character's past, motivations and future prospects are rigorously and compassionately examined, as the author follows them after the war. In its ineffably quiet way, there really is something Tolstoyan in this searching fiction's determination to understand the characters specifically as members of families and products of other people's influences. The characterizations of Hector and Sylvie are astonishingly rich and complex, and the risk taken in depicting the adult June as the woman readers will hope she would not become is triumphantly vindicated. A major achievement, likely to be remembered as one of this year's best books.
Kirkus Reviews

---

---

Discussion Questions
1. In the orphanage, June is a bully to the other children and shows affection only to Sylvie. Yet when we first meet her, she is incredibly caring to her sister and brother. What do you think caused this change in her personality? How did her experiences as a young girl shape the adult she became?

2. Hector seems to develop true feelings for Dora. If things had ended differently in the final scene with Dora, do you think he would still have gone off with June? Why or why not? Do you think his experience with Sylvie colored his relationship with Dora? How?

3. Do you think Sylvie and Tanner would have adopted June had things not happened the way they did turned out differently? Why or why not?

4. June seems fixated on finding Nicholas even after it becomes clear that he is not who he says he is. Why do you think she is so focused? Why do you think she needs to find him?

5. If you’ve read Chang-rae Lee’s work in the past, you know that he writes often of identity. How do these themes play out in The Surrendered? Of Hector, June, and Sylvie, which character do you think has the strongest sense of identity? The weakest?

6. Each character undergoes a traumatic experience that ends up shaping the course of his or her life: Hector’s father’s death, June’s loss of her family, and Sylvie’s experience in Manchuria. How do these events change their characters? Do you think each person’s life would be different had these traumatic events not occurred?

7. The book A Memory of Solferino recurs throughout the novel and is passed from Sylvie to June to Nicholas. What do you think the book means to each character and how does it influence the choices they make?

8. Although The Surrendered is very much about war, the events of the Korean War itself make up a very small part of the book. Why do you think the author chose this approach? What point do you think he was making? How does this relate to his choice of title?

9. Discuss the idea of mercy in the book. Which characters do you think most exemplify this trait? In which scenes does the idea of mercy seem to be the guiding force?

10. Hector is born in the town of Ilion and is named after Hector in the Iliad. Discuss heroism in the book. Are any of the characters heroes? Do they behave heroically?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page

How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly
Connie May Fowler, 2010
Grand Central Publishing
278 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446540681

Summary
How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly is the transcendent story of a young woman who, in a twenty-four hour period, journeys through startling moments of self-discovery that lead her to a courageous and life-altering decision. (From the publisher).

---

---

Author Bio
• Birth—Janury 3, 1958 
• Where—N/A 
• Education—B.A., University of Tampa; M.A., University of
   Kansas 
• Awards—Southern Book Critics Circle Award; League of
   American Pen Women - Frances Buck Award; Chataqua
   South Literary Award
• Currently—lives in the state of Florida, USA

Connie May Fowler is an essayist, screenwriter, and novelist. She is the author of several novels, including How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly; The Problem with Murmur Lee; and a memoir, When Katie Wakes. In 1996, she published Before Women Had Wings, which became a paperback bestseller and was made into a successful Oprah Winfrey Presents movie.

She founded the Connie May Fowler Women With Wings Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to aiding women and children in need. (From the publisher.)

More
Connie May Fowler is an American novelist, essayist, memoirist, screenwriter, and poet. She earned a Bachelor of Arts (English Literature) from University of Tampa and a Masters of Arts (English Literature with an Emphasis in Creative Writing) from University of Kansas where she studied with the novelist Carolyn Doty

Her semi-autobiographical novel, Before Women had Wings, received the 1996 Southern Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Buck Award (League of American Pen Women). She adapted the novel for Oprah Winfrey and the subsequent Emmy-winning film starred Winfrey, Ellen Barkin, Julia Stiles, and Tina Majorino.

Remembering Blue received the Chautauqua South Literary Award. Three of her novels were Dublin International Literary Award nominees.

Her other novels include Sugar Cage; River of Hidden Dreams; The Problem with Murmur Lee (Redbook’s premier book club selection); and How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly. Her memoir, When Katie Wakes, explores her family’s generational cycle of domestic violence. Her books have been translated into fifteen languages.

Fowler’s essays, touch on a wide range of topics such as family history, Sumo wrestling, popular culture, music, sex, and food. They have been published in a variety of publications including the New York Times, The Times, Japan Times, International Herald Tribune, Oxford American, Best Life, and Forum.

Her work has been characterized as southern fiction with a post-modern sensibility. It often melds magical realism with the harsh realities of poverty. It generally focuses on working class people of various racial backgrounds.

She has been cited in sources such as Advancing Sisterhood?: Interracial Friendships in Contemporary Southern Fiction; and Race Mixing: Southern Fiction Since the Sixties. She is considered part of a "fourth generation" of American writers—black and white—that explodes old notions of race, segregation, and interpersonal racial relationships.

Extras
• In 2007, Fowler performed at New York City’s The Player's Club with actresses Kathleen Chalfont, Penny Fuller, and others in a performance based on The Other Woman, an anthology that includes Fowler’s essay “The Uterine Blues.” In 2003, Fowler performed in a charity benefit performance of The Vagina Monologues with Jane Fonda and Rosie Perez.

• Fowler has held numerous jobs including bartender, caterer, nurse, television producer, TV show host, antique dealer, and construction worker.

• From 1997-2003 she directed the Connie May Fowler Women Wings Foundation, an organization that served at risk women and children. From 2003–2007, she was the Irving Bacheller Professor of Creative Writing at Rollins College and directed their author series “Winter With the Writers.”

• Fowler, a life-long resident of Florida, has set all of her books, thus far, in that state. ("More" and "Extras" from Wikipedia.)

---

---

Book Reviews
In this gloomy novel, Fowler (Before Women Had Wings) presents a day in the life of writer Clarissa Burden, stuck in a loveless marriage and preoccupied with a joyless childhood. Memories of a cruel mother aren't the only things haunting Clarissa; a number of ghosts, including the 19th-century biracial family who had lived in Clarissa's Florida home, also weave themselves into Clarissa's story. Plagued by writer's block and suspicious of her photographer husband (and the nude models he employs), Clarissa leaves home for a day filled with spooky cemeteries, near-death experiences, life-altering conversations, exhilaration, and frustration. The plot tends to meander, incorporating not just incorporeal spirits but occasional jaunts into the minds of Florida's animals; still, Fowler produces some singularly memorable characters. By the time Clarissa stands up to her husband, readers will have suffered mightily through a sweltering Florida solstice, listening to the heroine's witty, sometimes whiney, internal monologue, and wishing for some real action. Fortunately, Fowler delivers on that wish, bringing together all her characters—dead, alive, and imagined—for an explosive conclusion
Publishers Weekly

In the little town called Hope, FL, it's the summer solstice, not only the longest but the hottest day of the year. On this day, Clarissa Burden's life changes irrevocably. Supporting a brutal husband who makes no living sketching and wooing frolicking female nudes and who deeply resents her successful career as a novelist, Clarissa needs release. Badly. Unbeknownst to her, there are ghosts living in her rambling home who need a release of their own. For all parties, enough is enough, and during this solstice day's long hours, things change forever. In this novel by best-selling author Fowler (The Problem with Murmur Lee) past and present lives collide in magical and violent ways with surprising, liberating, and redeeming results. The colorful characters include an almost-angel, carnival dwarves, and anthropomorphic animals, and the result is folksy and sophisticated, and humorous yet at times grave and appalling, with the sins of the past clearly depicted. Verdict: A seductive and thoroughly satisfying read. —Jyna Scheeren, NYPL
Library Journal

Florida novelist Clarissa Burden is suffering from writer’s block...her mind is blank.... Fowler blurs the line between the written and the writer as we witness Clarissa’s brave discovery that the real truth is often the most risky tale to tell. —Annie Bostrom
Booklist

---

---

Book Club Discussion Questions
1. How Clarissa Burden Learned to Fly opens with vivid descriptions of the weather and wildlife of Hope, Florida: “this swampy southern outpost,” “the humidity-laden situation,” “its sundry wildlife…all steeling themselves against the inevitable onslaught of the day’s hellish heat” (1). How do the climate and geography of Hope affect the story? Could the events that take place have happened anywhere else in the country? In the world?

2. Recalling what she once thought of as a heroic move, Clarissa considers the way Iggy left his family and South Africa because of their different feelings about race. She did not ask, 'If a man walks away from his mother because he seriously disagrees with her politics, how deep is his allegiance to a wife?’” (6). Do you agree that one’s relationship with family can be an indicator of one’s relationship with a spouse? Why or why not?

3. A fly that is in love with Clarissa plays an important role in this story. We are also introduced to other insects and animals living in Clarissa’s home, truck, and other spaces around her that she doesn’t even know about. How does knowing about these creatures affect your perception of Clarissa, if at all? Would the story be different without them?

4. “Jane was, unknowingly, ticking off the list of the most asked, most useless questions thrown at writers” (43). Is it fair that Clarissa thinks of her interviewer’s questions this way? What questions would you want to ask a writer you admire? What questions would you want an interviewer to ask you?

5. Clarissa is described as not having much confidence or independence at the beginning of the book: “uncharacteristically courageous” (59), “Despite all that she had accomplished in her life, she was not a woman accustomed to doing things on her own” (62). How does Clarissa change as the day progresses? What was it about this one day that was so special?

6. “What was love if not an idea—abstract as wind, concrete as rain—an invisible homily so powerful that it propelled even the meekest souls to hold dear what they feared most?” (64). Do you agree that love drives you toward what you “fear most?” Why or why not? Have you experienced love that made you feel this way? What would the fly in the story think about this notion?

7. What is the significance of all the trash that piled up in Clarissa’s truck, and why is she so determined to get rid of it by herself on this day?

8. Why does Clarissa go to the cemetery, and in what way did it affect her? Do you think she is aware of the ghosts there, particularly the children who pull her out of the mud?

9. Clarissa realizes "...her marriage hung by a single tendril spun of stubbornness and fear" (115). What is she being stubborn about, and what is she fearful of? How does Iggy fit into this fragile arrangement?

10. Clarissa is harassed by the boys at the Treetop General Store, but Miss Lossie seems to get rid of them without a problem. "Surprised at their compliance, Clarissa wondered why she had commanded such little respect from the two-pint punks” (122). What is it about Miss Lossie that Clarissa doesn’t possess? How do Miss Lossie and Chester aid Clarissa in her spiritual journey?

11. How do the stories about the worm gruntin’ stob fit into the larger picture of Clarissa’s new life? Why do Chester and Miss Lossie regard worm gruntin’ so highly, and what does Clarissa take away from that devotion?

12. How do Clarissa’s perceptions and desires shift as she rides Chester’s motorcycle? “Hurtling down the highway on two wheels, she felt death’s presence...Duende...the Spanish notion of a creative force antithetical to the muse—a death dancer spinning a flamenco composed of carnality, sadness, and passion” (144-5). How does this awakening relate to the rest of her lessons of the day?

13. Despite all the excitement of buying a flashy new car, Clarissa notices the understated details of car salesman Raul:

Raul’s fingers resumed their dance. They were graceful fingers, tanned, and still bore the calluses of a man who used his hands to make a living. Clarissa wondered how long he had worked at the car lot and if he missed whatever it was that earned him those calluses. Maybe he understood the secrets of oak and pine, citrus and tomatoes, drywall and nails (152).

How could Clarissa spend so much time considering the back story of another when her own life is changing so wildly? Do you think that the mind of a writer naturally imagines the histories of those she encounters?

14. Iggy’s ire over the new car doesn’t surprise Clarissa, but she realizes, "Her life—all of its molehills and detours—she realized, was an enormous annoyance to him” (168). What kept her from having this awareness during their seven years of marriage? What gives Clarissa the strength to do something about her problems now?

15. "What good was hope if it remained nebulous? Hope was one of those abstractions, like love; for it to be meaningful, it had to be hitched to something real" (179). If this is true and it’s also true that love drives a person to what they fear most, what does hope motivate a person to do? According to Clarissa, how are the two similar and how are they different? What’s your opinion?

16. Compare Iggy and Adams. How do they perceive Clarissa, how do they treat her? In what ways does she respond to each of them?

17. Clarissa taught Adams that writing is scary and painful and dangerous, and now he has to re-explain that lesson back to her. What made Clarissa forget this essential part of her craft? How does she turn her writer’s block around?

18. Do you agree that Olga’s story is the one that Clarissa should focus on for her new book, as Adams says? Why or why not?

19. “She'd woken up that morning naive. And now she was not. Now the world was a different place. And Iggy was going to have to catch up” (236). Do you think it’s possible to turn a life around in one day? Have you ever had an epitome similar to Clarissa’s, whether it was about a relationship, a job, or another major life decision?

20. How do Larry Dibble/Lawrence Butler and the Villada-Archer family function in Clarissa’s alteration? Do you believe that spirits of the past can influence the present?

21. What do you think will happen next to Clarissa Burden?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page