Howards End
E.M. Forster, 1910
~300-350 pp. (varies by publisher)


Summary
"To me," D. H. Lawerence once wrote to E. M. Forster, "you are the last Englishman."

Indeed, Forster's novels offer contemporary readers clear, vibrant portraits of life in Edwardian England. Published in 1908 to both critical and popular acclaim, A Room with a View is a whimsical comedy of manners that owes more to Jane Austen that perhaps any other of his works.

The central character is a muddled young girl named Lucy Honeychurch, who runs away from the man who stirs her emotions, remaining engaged to a rich snob. Forster considered it his 'nicest' novel, and today it remains probably his most well liked. Its moral is utterly simple. Throw away your etiquette book and listen to your heart. But it was Forster's next book, Howards End, a story about who would inhabit a charming old country house (and who, in a larger sense, would inherit England), that earned him recognition as a major writer.

Centered around the conflict between the wealthy, materialistic Wilcox family and the cultured, idealistic Schlegel sisters-and informed by Forester's famous dictum "Only connect"—it is full of tenderness towards favorite characters.

Howards End is a classic English novel...superb and wholly cherishable...one that admirers have no trouble reading over and over again,' said Alfred Kazin. (From Penguin Classics Edition.)

More
The Schlegels are intellectuals, devotees of art and literature. The Wilcoxes are practical and materialistic, leading lives of "telegrams and anger."

When the elder Mrs. Wilcox dies and her family discovers she has left their country home—Howards End—to one of the Schlegel sisters, a crisis between the two families is precipitated that takes years to resolve. Howards End is a symbolic exploration of the social, economic, and intellectual forces at work in England in the years preceding World War I, a time when vast social changes were occurring. In the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes, Forster perfectly embodies the competing idealism and materialism of the upper classes, while the conflict over the ownership of Howards End represents the struggle for possession of the country’s future.

As critic Lionel Trilling once noted, the novel asks, "Who shall inherit England?" Forster refuses to take sides in this conflict. Instead he poses one of the book’s central questions: In a changing modern society, what should be the relation between the inner and outer life, between the world of the intellect and the world of business? Can they ever, as Forster urges, "only connect"? (From Barnes & Noble.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 1, 1879
• Where—London, UK
• Death—June 7, 1970
• Where—Coventry, UK
• Education—B. A., (two: in classics and in history); M.A.,
   Cambridge


Edward Morgan Forster was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect." His 1908 novel, A Room with a View, is his most optimistic work, while A Passage to India (1924) brought him his greatest success.

Early years
Forster was born into an Anglo-Irish and Welsh middle-class family at 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, London NW1, in a building that no longer exists. He was the only child of Alice Clara "Lily" (nee Whichelo) and Edward Morgan Llewellyn Forster, an architect. His name was officially registered as Henry Morgan Forster, but at his baptism he was accidentally named Edward Morgan Forster. To distinguish him from his father, he was always called Morgan. His father died of tuberculosis in 1880, before Morgan's second birthday.

He inherited £8,000 (£659,300 as of 2013) from his paternal great-aunt Marianne Thornton (daughter of the abolitionist Henry Thornton), who died in 1887. The money was enough to live on and enabled him to become a writer. He attended the notable public school Tonbridge School in Kent as a day boy. The theatre at the school has been named in his honour.

At King's College, Cambridge, between 1897 and 1901, he became a member of a discussion society known as the Apostles (formally named the Cambridge Conversazione Society). Many of its members went on to constitute what came to be known as the Bloomsbury Group, of which Forster was a peripheral member in the 1910s and 1920s. There is a famous recreation of Forster's Cambridge at the beginning of The Longest Journey.

After leaving university, he travelled in continental Europe with his mother. In 1914, he visited Egypt, Germany and India with the classicist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, by which time he had written all but one of his novels. In the First World War, as a conscientious objector, Forster volunteered for the International Red Cross, and served in Alexandria, Egypt.

Forster spent a second spell in India in the early 1920s as the private secretary to Tukojirao III, the Maharajah of Dewas. The Hill of Devi is his non-fictional account of this period. After returning to London from India, he completed his last novel, A Passage to India (1924), for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

After A Passage to India
In the 1930s and 1940s Forster became a successful broadcaster on BBC Radio and a public figure associated with the Union of Ethical Societies. He was awarded a Benson Medal in 1937.

Forster was a closeted homosexual and lifelong bachelor. He developed a long-term, loving relationship with Bob Buckingham, a married policeman. Forster included Buckingham and his wife May in his circle, which included J. R. Ackerley, a writer and literary editor of The Listener, the psychologist W. J. H. Sprott and, for a time, the composer Benjamin Britten. Other writers with whom Forster associated included the poet Siegfried Sassoon and the Belfast-based novelist Forrest Reid.

From 1925 until his mother's death at age 90 in 1945, Forster lived with her at West Hackhurst, Abinger Hammer, finally leaving in 1946. His London base was 26 Brunswick Square from 1930 to 1939, after which he rented 9 Arlington Park Mansions in Chiswick until at least 1961.

Forster was elected an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge in 1946 and lived for the most part in the college, doing relatively little. He declined a knighthood in 1949 and was made a Companion of Honour in 1953. In 1969 he was made a member of the Order of Merit. Forster died of a stroke at the Buckinghams' home in Coventry on June 7, 1970. He was 91.

Novels
Forster had five novels published in his lifetime. Although Maurice was published shortly after his death, it had been written nearly sixty years earlier. He never finished a seventh novel Arctic Summer.

His first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), is the story of Lilia, a young English widow who falls in love with an Italian man, and of the efforts of her bourgeois relatives to get her back from Monteriano (based on San Gimignano). Philip Herriton's mission to retrieve her from Italy has features in common with that of Lambert Strether in Henry James's The Ambassadors. Forster discussed that work ironically and somewhat disapprovingly in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927). Where Angels Fear to Tread was adapted to film in 1991.

Next, Forster published The Longest Journey (1907), an inverted bildungsroman following the lame Rickie Elliott from Cambridge to a career as a struggling writer and then to a post as a schoolmaster, married to the unappealing Agnes Pembroke. In a series of scenes on the hills of Wiltshire, which introduce Rickie's wild half-brother Stephen Wonham, Forster attempts a kind of sublime related to those of Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence.

Forster's third novel, A Room with a View (1908), is his lightest and most optimistic. It was started as early as 1901, before any of his others; its earliest versions are entitled "Lucy." The book explores the young Lucy Honeychurch's trip to Italy with her cousin, and the choice she must make between the free-thinking George Emerson and the repressed aesthete Cecil Vyse. George's father Mr Emerson quotes thinkers who influenced Forster, including Samuel Butler. A Room with a View was adapted as a film in 1985 by the Merchant-Ivory team.

Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View can be seen collectively as Forster's Italian novels. Both include references to the famous Baedeker guidebooks and concern narrow-minded middle-class English tourists abroad. The books share many themes with his short stories collected in The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment.

Howards End (1910) is an ambitious "condition-of-England" novel concerned with different groups within the Edwardian middle classes, represented by the Schlegels (bohemian intellectuals), the Wilcoxes (thoughtless plutocrats) and the Basts (struggling lower-middle-class aspirants). Critics have observed that numerous characters in Forster's novels die suddenly. This is true of Where Angels Fear to Tread, Howards End and, most particularly, The Longest Journey.

Forster achieved his greatest success with A Passage to India (1924). The novel takes as its subject the relationship between East and West, seen through the lens of India in the later days of the British Raj. Forster connects personal relationships with the politics of colonialism through the story of the Englishwoman Adela Quested, the Indian Dr. Aziz, and the question of what did or did not happen between them in the Marabar Caves. Forster makes special mention of the author Ahmed Ali and his Twilight in Delhi in his Preface to its Everyman's Library Edition.

Maurice (1971) was published posthumously. It is a homosexual love story which also returns to matters familiar from Forster's first three novels, such as the suburbs of London in the English home counties, the experience of attending Cambridge, and the wild landscape of Wiltshire. The novel was controversial, given that Forster's homosexuality had not been previously known or widely acknowledged. Today's critics continue to argue over the extent to which Forster's sexuality and personal activities influenced his writing.

Critical reception
In the United States, interest in, and appreciation for, Forster was spurred by Lionel Trilling's E. M. Forster: A Study, which began:

E. M. Forster is for me the only living novelist who can be read again and again and who, after each reading, gives me what few writers can give us after our first days of novel-reading, the sensation of having learned something. (Trilling 1943).

Key themes
Forster was President of the Cambridge Humanists from 1959 until his death and a member of the Advisory Council of the British Humanist Association from 1963 until his death. His views as a humanist are at the heart of his work, which often depicts the pursuit of personal connections in spite of the restrictions of contemporary society.

His humanist attitude is expressed in the non-fictional essay "What I Believe." When Forster’s cousin, Philip Whichelo, donated a portrait of Forster to the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association (GLHA), Jim Herrick, the founder, quoted Forster's words: "The humanist has four leading characteristics—curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and belief in the human race."

Two of Forster's best-known works, A Passage to India and Howards End, explore the irreconcilability of class differences. A Room with a View also shows how questions of propriety and class can make human connection difficult. The novel is his most widely read and accessible work, remaining popular long after its original publication. His posthumous novel Maurice explores the possibility of class reconciliation as one facet of a homosexual relationship.

Sexuality is another key theme in Forster's works. Some critics have argued that a general shift from heterosexual to homosexual love can be observed through the course of his writing career. The foreword to Maurice describes his struggle with his homosexuality, while he explored similar issues in several volumes of short stories. Forster's explicitly homosexual writings, the novel Maurice and the short story collection The Life to Come, were published shortly after his death.

Forster is noted for his use of symbolism as a technique in his novels, and he has been criticised (as by his friend Roger Fry) for his attachment to mysticism. One example of his symbolism is the wych elm tree in Howards End. The characters of Mrs. Wilcox in that novel and Mrs. Moore in A Passage to India have a mystical link with the past, and a striking ability to connect with people from beyond their own circles. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/25/2013.)

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

Over the years, Howards End has remained one of Forster's most beloved novels. Few works combine social comedy and political commentary with the skillful characterizations seen in the Schlegel sisters. Writing during a time of lively discussion about his country's socioeconomic conditions, Forster conceived the work as a "condition-of-England novel," a work designed to enter Edwardian debates about wealth and poverty, art and pragmatism, country life and urban sprawl that would not have sounded unfamiliar in Thatcher's England or Reagan's America. Forster, with a comic suspicion of the dogmas championed by liberals and conservatives alike, provides a distinctly humanistic perspective on some of the central debates of his time and ours.
David Lodge - Penguin Classics Edition

Howards End is undoubtedly Forster's masterpiece; it develops to their full the themes and attitudes of [his] early books and throws back upon them a new and enhancing light.
Lionel Trilling (critic)

Book Club Discussion Questions
1. The differences between the two Schlegel sisters are highlighted in their reactions to Beethoven: Helen "can see heroes and shipwrecks in the music's flood," while Margaret "can see only the music." Discuss the disparity in their outlooks and how this leads to disagreements, for example, over Leonard Bast and Henry Wilcox.

2. Given Forster's portrayal of Henry Wilcox, what do you think attracts Margaret to him? Why does she accept his proposal of marriage, even though she admits to her sister that she does not love him? Does she grow to love him in the end?

3. Compared to more radical modernist contemporaries like D. H. Lawrence and Ford Madox Ford, Forster's retention of the omniscient narrator appears conservative and traditional. Yet the narrator's "omniscience" is distinctively qualified and tentative: "It is rather a moment when the commentator should step forward. Ought the Wilcoxes to have offered their home to Margaret? I think not." Whose viewpoint (or viewpoints) does the narrator convey?

4. The juxtaposition of masculine principles (money, logic, conquest, the external life) and feminine principles (spirit, intuition, accommodation, the inner life) is perhaps best embodied in the characters of Henry and Helen. Margaret, however, is less stereotypically feminine and maternal, saying "I do not love children. I am thankful I have none." The narrator tells us that "On the whole she sided with men as they are." When Margaret ultimately "charged straight through these Wilcoxes" and united Helen and Henry at Howards End, was it a victory in the masculine or feminine mode?

5. Leonard Bast is portrayed as a spiritual orphan, "sucked into the town" and loosed from the moorings of his working-class origins. Are the Wilcoxes and the Schlegels responsible for his death? To what extent is his ascent from poverty hindered by his own personal limitations and ambitions?

6. Although Forster's work is not conventionally religious, he frequently expresses a deep spirituality. Discuss the spiritual outlook expressed in Margaret's contemplation on love (Chapter XX), Mrs. Wilcox's bond with the English countryside, and Helen's "mind that readily shreds the visible."

7 "I'm broken—I'm ended," says Henry Wilcox as he contemplates his son's imminent arrest near the end of the book. Has Henry in fact changed at the end of the novel? Have his values been transformed by his marriage to Margaret? Before their marriage the narrator asserts that Henry "did alter her character—a little." Is that true?

8. In the final chapter, Margaret and Helen's vista from Howards End is spoiled only by the "red rust" in the distance, the mark of London encroaching on the pristine landscape. Discuss Forster's view of technology and his hope for a civilization that will "rest on the earth."

9. Images of water are repeatedly evoked in Howards End to suggest the dynamic ebb and flow of life, "progress," and the rush of time. London is a place where "all the qualities, good, bad, and indifferent, [are] streaming away." Contrast these images with the farm house, wych-elm, and meadow that bind the characters to the earth and the past.

10 "More and more," Margaret protests, "do I refuse to draw my income and sneer at those who guarantee it.... Hurray for riches!" Margaret's vigorous defense of the material basis of her lifestyle, a defense that shocks some of her family and friends, reflects Forster's own reexamination of the antibusiness, antimaterialist sentiments he had imbibed during his university education. How do her comments highlight the limitations of both the intellectuals' and the capitalists' attitudes toward wealth? Why can't she and her family ultimately help the Leonard Basts of the world— let alone the "unthinkable" poorer classes—financially?

11. On the surface, Ruth Wilcox is very different from Margaret Schlegel: unworldly, apolitical, more easily accepting of her husband's ways and views. On what basis does she sense such a close bond with Margaret and come to see her as the proper "spiritual heir" of Howards End? What does Margaret mean when she says to Helen, "I feel that you and I and Henry are only fragments of that woman's mind"?
(Questions from Penguin Classics Edition.)

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The Centaur 
John Updike, 1963
Random House
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780449912164


Summary  
Winner, National Book Award

In a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1940s, schoolteacher George Caldwell yearns to find some meaning in his life. Alone with his teenage son for three days in a blizzard, Caldwell sees his son grow and change as he himself begins to lose touch with his life.

Interwoven with the myth of Chiron, the noblest centaur, and his own relationship to Prometheus, The Centaur is one of John Updike's most brilliant and unusual novels. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—March 18, 1932
• Where—Reading, Pennsylvania, USA
• Death—January 27, 2009
• Where—Danvers, Massachusetts
• Education—A.B., Harvard University; also studied at the
   Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England
• Awards—National Book Award for The Centaur, 1964;
   Pulitzer Prizer, National Book Critics Circle Award, and
   National Book Award for Rabbit Is Rich, 1982; Pulitzer Prize
   and National Book Critics Circle Award for Rabbit at Rest,
   1990


With an uncommonly varied oeuvre that includes poetry, criticism, essays, short stories, and novels, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John Updike has helped to change the face of late-20th-century American literature.

Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Updike graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954. Following a year of study in England, he joined the staff of The New Yorker, establishing a relationship with the magazine that continues to this day. Since 1957, he has lived in two small towns in Massachusetts that have inspired the settings for several of his stories.

In 1958, Updike's first collection of poetry was published. A year later, he made his fiction debut with The Poorhouse Fair. But it was his second novel, 1960's Rabbit, Run, that forged his reputation and introduced one of the most memorable characters in American fiction. Former small-town basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom struck a responsive chord with readers and critics alike and catapulted Updike into the literary stratosphere.

Updike would revisit Angstrom in 1971, 1981, and 1990, chronicling his hapless protagonist's jittery journey into undistinguished middle age in three melancholy bestsellers: Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. A concluding novella, "Rabbit Remembered," appears in the 2001 story collection Licks of Love.

Although autobiographical elements appear in the Rabbit books, Updike's true literary alter ego is not Harry Angstrom but Harry Bech, a famously unproductive Jewish-American writer who stars in his own story cycle. In between—indeed, far beyond—his successful series, Updike has gone on to produce an astonishingly diverse string of novels. In addition, his criticism and short fiction remain popular staples of distinguished literary publications.

Extras
• Updike first became entranced by reading when he was a young boy growing up on an isolated farm in Pennsylvania. Afflicted with psoriasis and a stammer, he escaped from his into mystery novels.

• He decided to attend Harvard University because he was a big fan of the school's humor magazine, The Harvard Lampoon.

• Updike has basically won every major literary prize in America, including the Guggenheim Fellow, the Rosenthal Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the O. Henry Prize, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Union League Club Abraham Lincoln Award, the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, and the National Medal of the Arts. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
A brilliant achievement...No one should need to be told that Updike has a mastery of the language matched in our time only by the finest poets.
Saturday Review

Unsurpassed...Natural, pertinent, fresh, subtle, and superbly written
Newsweek

Updike is one of the most exquisite masters of prose style produced by 20th century America. Yet, his novels have been faulted for lacking any sense of action or character development. It appears at times that his ability to spin lovely phrases of delicate beauty and nuance overwhelm his desire to tell a simple, important story in the lives of his characters. Updike's novels raise the question of whether beauty of expression, the lyrical telling of a captured moment of human time is, itself, enough to justify a great work of art.In contrast, his short stories are seen by many as masterful in every respect, both for their prose style that approaches poetic expression and for the stories they convey. Some critics believe that had Updike produced only short stories and poems, his role in American letters would be even more celebrated. But it is Updike's novels that have brought him the greatest fame and attention and which resulted in his appearance on the covers of TIME magazine two times during his career.
Wikipedia

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

But also consider these LitLover talkiing points for The Centaur:

1. What contributes to George Caldwell's poor opinion of himself? Why does he feel he is about to die? Does George exasperate you or inspire sympathy?

2. What is Peter's view of his father? How does that view change during the course of the novel? How does their relationship develop? How are both father and son changed—or what do both come to learn—by the novel's end?

3. What role does the blizzard play in this work?

4. In what way is this story a retelling of the myth of Chiron? According to Greek mythology, a centaur was one of a race of creatures with the head, arms and trunk of a man and the body and legs of a horse. Chiron was considered the noblest of the centaurs. (if you don't have it in your library, dear reader, do pick up a copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology. It's a must!)

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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Horse Heaven
Jane Smiley, 2000
Random House
614 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780449005415


Summary
Spanning two years on the circuit, from Kentucky and California to New York and Paris, Horse Heaven puts us among trainers and track brats, horse-obsessed girls, nervy jockeys, billionaire owners and restless wives.

Here is the trainer of dazzling integrity and his opposite: a wicked prince of the tract, headed for still another swindle; here are the gamblers and hangers-on. And in an amazing feat of imagination, here are the magnificent Thoroughbreds themselves, from the filly orphaned at birth to the brown horse who always wins by a nose, a lovable "claimer" who passes from owner to owner on a heartwrenching journey down from the winner's circle.


All the constant excitement of racing courses through a novel that opens up a fascinating world even as it moves us with its exploration of wanting, loving, and striving; of our mysterious bond with animals; and, above all, of our profound desire to connect—emotionally, sexually, spiritually—with each other. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—September 26, 1949
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Rasied—Webster Grove, Missouri
• Education—B.A., Vassar College; M.A., M.F.A, and Ph.D., Iowa University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize, 1992; National Book Critics Circle Award, 1991
• Currently—lives in Northern California

Jane Smiley is the author of numerous works of fiction, including The Age of Grief, The Greenlanders, Ordinary Love & Good Will, A Thousand Acres (for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize), and Moo. She lives in northern California. (From the publisher.)

More
Jane Smiley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist.

Born in Los Angeles, California, Smiley grew up in Webster Groves, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, and graduated from John Burroughs School. She obtained a B.A. at Vassar College, then earned an M.F.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. While working towards her doctorate, she also spent a year studying in Iceland as a Fulbright Scholar.

Smiley published her first novel, Barn Blind, in 1980, and won a 1985 O. Henry Award for her short story "Lily", which was published in the Atlantic Monthly. Her best-selling A Thousand Acres, a story based on William Shakespeare's King Lear, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1992. It was adapted into a film of the same title in 1997. In 1995 she wrote her sole television script produced, for an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street. Her novella The Age of Grief was made into the 2002 film The Secret Lives of Dentists.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel (2005), is a non-fiction meditation on the history and the nature of the novel, somewhat in the tradition of E. M. Forster's seminal Aspects of the Novel, that roams from eleventh century Japan's Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji to twenty-first century Americans chick lit.

From 1981 to 1996, she taught undergrad and graduate creative writing workshops at Iowa State University. She continued teaching at ISU even after moving her primary residence to California.

In 2001, Smiley was elected a member of The American Academy of Arts and Letters. (From Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Witty, energetic.... It's deeply satisfying to read a work of fiction so informed about its subject and so alive to every nuance and detail.... [Smiley's] final chapters have a wonderful restorative quality.
New York Times Book Review

One of the premier novelists of her generation, possessed of a mastery of craft and an uncompromising vision that grow more powerful with each book.... Racing's eclectic mix of classes and personalities provides Smiley with fertile soil...expertly juggling storylines, she investigates the sexual, social, psychological, and spiritual problems of wealthy owners, working-class bettors, trainers on the edge of financial ruin, and, in a typically bold move, horses.
Washington Post

The tension and frustration of the racing life can be waring in Horse Heaven, and yet Ms. Smiley dispenses happiness at the novel's conclusion. Her skill at psychological probing is splendid; her images...a colt's nostrils round and open like the blossoms of a fox glove are even better. Ms. Jane Smiley's chunky book Horse Heaven resembles a bale of hay. Chewable, fragrant and thick, this is the good stuff, the first cutting.
Sally Eckhoff - Wall Street Journal

The Chinese calendar aside, 2000 may be the Year of the Horse. Almost neck and neck with Alyson Hagy's Keeneland, this novel about horses and their breeders, owners, trainers, grooms, jockeys, traders, bettors and other turf-obsessed humans is another winner. Smiley, it turns out, knows a prodigious amount about Thoroughbreds, and she is as good at describing the stages of their lives, their temperaments and personalities as she is in chronicling the ambitions, financial windfalls and ruins, love affairs, partings and reconciliations of her large cast of human characters. With settings that range from California and Kentucky to Paris, the novel covers two years in which the players vie with each other to produce a mount that can win high-stakes races. Readers will discover that hundreds of things can go wrong with a horse, from breeding through birth, training and racing, and that every race has variables and hazards that can produce danger and death, as well as the loss of millions of dollars. (A scene in which one horse stumbles and sets off a chain reaction of carnage is heartbreaking.) Characters who plan, scheme, connive and yearn for a winner include several greedy, impetuous millionaires and their wives; one trainer who is a model of rectitude, and another who has found Jesus but is crooked to the core; two per-adolescent, horse-obsessed kids; a knockout black woman whose beauty is the entrance key to the racing world; the horses themselves (cleverly, Smiley depicts a horse communicator who can see into the equine mind); and one very sassy Jack Russell dog. Written with high spirits and enthusiasm, distinguished by Smiley's wry humor (as in Moo), the novel gallops into the home stretch without losing momentum. Fans of A Thousand Acres may feel that Smiley has deserted the realm of serious literature for suspense and romance, but this highly readable novel shows that she can perform in both genres with elan.
Publishers Weekly

Smiley, author of nine earlier works of fiction including The Age of Grief and A Thousand Acres (a Pulitzer Prize winner), has written the Gone with the Wind of horse books. Those involved in the equestrian world will experience a thrill of recognition when hearing about the various types of trainers, owners, and, of course, the horses themselves. The trainers include a Zen practitioner who considers each horse a koan to be solved; a crooked trainer who gets religion and repents, however briefly; and a married trainer who falls in love with the wife of an owner. The horses are a rogue stallion, a timid mare, and an amazingly focused gelding named Limitless. The horses and people are both talented and flawed yet all find redemption. Mary Beth Hurt is an exceptional reader. Highly recommended for all public libraries. —Patsy Gray, Huntsville P.L.
Library Journal

Book Club Discussion Questions 

1. Introducing her work as a "comic epic poem in prose," Ms. Smiley warns her readers that the characters and events in Horse Heaven are no more than "figments of the author's imaginings," and that "their characteristics as represented bear no relation to real life." Discuss the levels of irony in her remark. Also, howdoes the description of genre fit or mislead?

2. Most characters in Horse Heaven are struggling with the issue of identity. What makes the matter more pressing for some than for others? What approaches frustrate or facilitate attempts at clarity? How is the issue different for the horses than for the humans? What role do places and other beings play as a character tries to navigate the world within?

3. Ms. Smiley plays with many modes of humor throughout Horse Heaven, from slapstick to the absurd to keen satire. Provide examples of each. How do they blend into one another? Are there moments of gallows humor? If not, why? To what use does Ms. Smiley put her comedic turns? How much do they color the novel?

4. What cherished American myths does Horse Heaven satirize, if not debunk? Which myths does it uphold? Does Ms. Smiley tell a distinctly American story as well as one capable of resonating elsewhere? If so, what allows her subject to transcend place and time?

5. Ms. Smiley has discussed the primacy of the individual in the world of horse racing, yet her novel is replete with relationships of every sort. Discuss the connection that exists between the social and private realms. How does one shape and define the other? What themes surface in exploring the connection between the two?

6. Fate and fortuity are opposing forces in Horse Heaven. Which characters choose to see themselves as players in a destiny authored by some mysterious other? Which see the exercise of their individual will as the shaping force in their lives? How do self-deception and honesty factor into each perspective? Explain how the ways and world of horses shed light on these matters.

7. What motivates characters such as Farley Jones and Buddy Crawford to turn to religion? How does their work express or contradict their beliefs? Where else does religion surface in the novel? Should the benevolent force apparently at work throughout the novel be construed in religious terms?

8. Explain how desire operates as a persistent, enigmatic force throughout Horse Heaven. Which characters bow to it, and which manage to control it? Is there more joy in the wanting or the receiving? Does Oscar Wilde's quip about the tragedy of getting what one wants apply? How and to whom?

9. Ms. Smiley has celebrated the racetrack as a storyteller's paradise. Which characters prove most adept at spinning fact into fiction? How do they use that talent? What motivates the mythologizing and romanticizing of horses—and some humans—that takes place throughout the novel? What is it about the world of horses that makes possible, if not credible, such an array of tall tales?

10. Ms. Smiley has stressed the need for novelists to engage readers by imaginatively explicating the social, cultural, economic, and political reality of a particular moment. What is the significance of her choice of historical moment in Horse Heaven? What themes are amplified in Ms. Smiley's handling of the years 1997 through 1999? Where do the worlds of horses and politics meet? How do race and gender factor into the novel? Does the world of horses offer a complete and complex microcosm? If not, what's missing?

11. After describing thoroughbreds as exuberant and sensitive creatures of many opinions and a deep intelligence, the omniscient narrator informs us that they have "too much of every lively quality rather than too little." How do characters such as Epic Steam and Residual live up to this description?

12. Discuss the arc of Justa Bob's life. Who are his literary forerunners? How does Ms. Smiley's handling of the character achieve pathos while avoiding bathos?

13. Which points outlined in Farley's "The Tibetan Book of Thoroughbred Training" are validated by the novel's close? Which prove wanting? How would you amend the list to capture the spirit of Horse Heaven?

14. How does Ms. Smiley's careful chronicling of the ins and outs of horse breeding and training, compare with our insoluble debates about the roles of genetics and environment in shaping who we are? Do you believe that nature or nurture has the upperhand in defining a horse? A human? Why?

15. Ms. Smiley has encouraged those readers overwhelmed by the array and number of characters simply to keep an eye on the horses. Thus, time with the novel evokes time at the racetrack. How else does the structure of the novel complement its content? Provide examples.

16. One is tempted to credit much of the drama in Horse Heaven to coincidence, yet the intricacies of the plot suggest something else. What does Ms. Smiley's chronicling of many individuals' wills in conflict say about that which we often lazily call luck?

17. Many have lauded the complexity and pluck of Ms. Smiley's horses by comparing them to humans. Do her horses maintain their, well, horseness, or are they—through an act of anthropomorphism—transformed into creatures defined by human fears, desires, frustrations, etcetera? Discuss the dynamic relationship between horses and humans.

18. Find and discuss the passages in Horse Heaven where you see Ms. Smiley working in the grand tradition of the novel's heyday—the middle of the nineteenth century. Can you detect the influence of Dickens, Trollope, or Balzac? Where? To what other writers and literary traditions does Ms. Smiley tip her hat? How is Horse Heaven a novel of our time and of another?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Off Season
Anne Rivers Siddons
Grand Central Publishing
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446698290

Summary
For as long as she can remember, they were Cam and Lilly—happily married, totally in love with each other, parents of a beautiful family, and partners in life.

Then, after decades of marriage, it ended as every great love story does...in loss. After Cam's death, Lilly takes a lone road trip to her and Cam's favorite spot on the remote coast of Maine, the place where they fell in love over and over again, where their ghosts still dance. There, she looks hard to her past—to a first love that ended in tragedy; to falling in love with Cam; to a marriage filled with exuberance, sheer life, and safety—to try to figure out her future.

It is a journey begun with tender memories and culminating in a revelation that will make Lilly re-evaluate everything she thought was true about her husband and her marriage. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—January 9, 1936
• Where—Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Education—B.A., Auburn University; Atlanta School of Art
• Currently—lives in Charleston, South Carolina and Maine

Born in 1936 in a small town near Atlanta, Anne Rivers Siddons was raised to be a dutiful daughter of the South — popular, well-mannered, studious, and observant of all the cultural mores of time and place. She attended Alabama's Auburn University in the mid-1950s, just as the Civil Rights Movement was gathering steam. Siddons worked on the staff of Auburn's student newspaper and wrote an editorial in favor of integration. When the administration asked her to pull the piece, she refused. The column ran with an official disclaimer from the university, attracting national attention and giving young Siddons her first taste of the power of the written word.

After a brief stint in the advertising department of a bank, Siddons took a position with the up and coming regional magazine Atlanta, where she worked her way up to senior editor. Impressed by her writing ability, an editor at Doubleday offered her a two-book contract. She debuted in 1975 with a collection of nonfiction essays; the following year, she published Heartbreak Hotel, a semi-autobiographical novel about a privileged Southern coed who comes of age during the summer of 1956.

With the notable exception of 1978's The House Next Door, a chilling contemporary gothic compared by Stephen King to Shirley Jackson's classic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House, Siddons has produced a string of well-written, imaginative, and emotionally resonant stories of love and loss —all firmly rooted in the culture of the modern South. Her books are consistent bestsellers, with 1988's Peachtree Road (1988) arguably her biggest commercial success. Described by her friend and peer, Pat Conroy, as "the Southern novel for our generation," the book sheds illuminating light on the changing landscape of mid-20th-century Atlanta society.

Although her status as a "regional" writer accounts partially for Siddons' appeal, ultimately fans love her books because they portray with compassion and truth the real lives of women who transcend the difficulties of love and marriage, family, friendship, and growing up.

Extras
• Although she is often compared with another Atlanta author, Margaret Mitchel, Siddons insists that the South she writes about is not the romanticized version found in Gone With the Wind. Instead, her relationship with the region is loving, but realistic. "It's like an old marriage or a long marriage. The commitment is absolute, but the romance has long since worn off...I want to write about it as it really is: I don't want to romanticize it."

• Siddons' debut novel Heartberak Hotel was turned into the 1989 movie Heart of Dixie, starry Ally Sheedy, Virginia Madsen, and Phoebe Cates. (From Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
(Audio version.) In Siddons's stirring novel, the recently widowed Lily Constable returns to her childhood summer home in Maine to sift through formative memories of her parents and her first love. It's difficult to imagine a more marvelous performance than Jane Alexander's. Alexander captures the strength and vulnerability of Lily from childhood to late middle age, and perfectly renders the physical weight of Lily's grief at her losses. She skillfully navigates the novel's cast of characters, from the slow, deep and thoughtful drawl of Lily's father to the high-pitched, false charm of the vicious young neighbor whose poison darts put tragic events in motion. Alexander also brings to life the great unnamed character in the book—the natural world, giving voice to birds and even a talking cat, and intuitively understanding the life-giving power of the sea. This is an example of how a good novel can become magnificent when it is beautifully told.
Publishers Weekly

Returning to her beloved Maine home to scatter her husband's ashes, Lilly reconstructs her past and makes peace with her future. Fourtime OscarA Award nominee Jane Alexander uses her acting chops to keep New York Times bestselling author Siddons's sweetly sentimental story from toppling into sappiness. She imbues Lilly's childhood voice with selfabsorbed innocence, gradually morphing it into that of an adult. When Lilly's husband arrives, her father's importance dwindles-a good thing, since their voices were indistinguishable. While this isn't Siddons's best, her descriptions will have listeners hearing the birds and smelling the ocean.
Library Journal

Her family’s cottage on the coast of Maine is haunted, and that suits Lilly Constable just fine. Returning to Edgewater after the death of her beloved husband, Cam, Lilly takes comfort in carrying on detailed conversations with the spirit that she feels pervades the site of so much joy, and yet so much tragedy, in her life. Revisiting the happy times of her marriage and their unconventional courtship also propels Lilly further down memory lane, however, forcing her to recall the years spent living in isolation with her widowed father after her mother’s death from breast cancer, and the summer she turned 11 and her first love, Jon, died in a tragic boating accident. As Lilly works through her grief for her husband, mother, and old friend, she uncovers startling revelations about the very people she thought she knew best. With a powerhouse ending dazzling in its stealth and ambiguity, master storyteller Siddons delivers a dramatically evocative tale that magically summons a bygone time of innocence and intrigue. —Carol Haggas
Booklist

A widow returns to her family cottage in Maine, her late husband's ashes and ornery cat in tow, and ponders her first experience of love and loss. Siddons frames the story around the sudden death of Cam McCall, Virginia architect, while at his wife Lilly's Maine seashore cottage, Edgewater. Though portrayed as eminently trustworthy, Cam has, unbeknownst to Lilly, visited the unheated cottage many times during the Off Season while supposedly traveling elsewhere on business. After wrangling about the disposition of Cam's cremains with her spoiled yuppie daughters, Lilly heads north with Silas, Cam's cranky, subliminally conversational cat, and the urn. In her cottage, Lilly revisits the pivotal summer of 1962, when, a wiry 11-year-old tomboy, she led a gang of other kids on a spate of mostly wholesome outdoor activities, occasionally ruffling feathers in this WASP-ruled vacation enclave. Lilly's preadolescence is thorny. She's overshadowed by her charismatic painter mother, who yearns to enter Jackie Kennedy's social circle, and her father, a professor at George Washington University, is too supportive to rebel against. On a lonely ramble to a nearby cliff, Lilly encounters a boy named Jon and is immediately smitten. The two are inseparable until a prissy, meddlesome neighbor child, Peaches, exposes the fact that Jon's father is Jewish, a secret his father had kept from him and his mother. Shocked by the deception, Jon sails into a fog in Lilly's sailboat, and drowns. Lilly retreats into a cocoon of denial and becomes obsessed with underwater swimming. Her isolation is exacerbated when her mother dies of breast cancer and her father keeps her cloistered in benevolent but stifling domesticity as the turbulent '60s unfold. In contrast to Siddons's usual heroine, who struggles to achieve self-sufficiency, Lilly is overcome by passivity, which deepens as she's repeatedly blindsided by loss. The inadequately foreshadowed surprise ending involves an ultimate betrayal that will dismay readers almost as much as it does Lilly.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. What is your first impression of Elizabeth, Lilly’s mother? Does your opinion of her change throughout the course of the novel? How so? Discuss how Lilly’s discovery of her mother and Brooks Burns during the summer of 1962 changes Lilly’s view of her mother? How does it change Lilly?

2. The epigraph that opens the book quotes Dylan Thomas: “After the first death, there is no other.” How do you understand this quote? Does this quote apply in any way to your own life?

3. Lilly narrates the book as an adult, looking back at her life. The novel is, in part, about adolescence and the ways in which that period of our lives is so defining. How does Lily change and grow as a character throughout the book? How does she stay the same?

4. Siddons writes, “It was the full flowering of Camelot, the New Frontier, and the glamour and rigor of the young Kennedy administration brought with it strong feelings...It was, too, a time of exploration and flaming new cultural concepts, and the sound of tumbling mores was loud in the land.” How does the historical and social context manifest itself throughout the novel? Is it meaningful that Siddons chose to set this book during the 1960s? Why or why not?

5. Lilly’s mother believes that “magic is just as necessary for human beings as food and shelter, but most of us have forgotten it.” It can be said that there are moments of magic in this book, and Edgewater, in particular, seems to be a magical place for many of the characters. Do you agree that magic is a ‘necessary’ part of life? What do you think Siddons means by this?

6. Midway through the novel Lilly says, “Never think that the very young cannot love. Never think that. They love with a fierce, direct love.” Jon and Lilly have a very mature relationship for such young people. Do you think it’s possible for the ‘very young’ to experience mature and enduring love?

7. What do you make of Peaches? Is Lilly too hard on her when they are younger?

8. It can be said that Edgewater is its own "character" in Off Season and early in the novel Lilly tells Cam that she was a different person at Edgewater, “a creature of water and wind and tides and rock.” What role does Edgewater play in Lilly’s life? Do you agree with Lilly that certain places have the power to completely change a person?

9. Is Lilly’s father too protective of Lilly after her mother dies? Do you think he is a good parent to Lilly? How does Lilly’s relationship with her father affect her relationship with Cam?

10. Lilly falls in love with Cam instantly. Is their love believable? Do you believe that love at first sight is possible?

11. Why doesn’t Lilly tell Cam about Jon? Why doesn’t Cam tell Lilly about his sister? Do you think it’s sometimes necessary keep childhood secrets even from those closest to you in adulthood?

12. The characters in this novel love very deeply. What price do they pay for this love? Does the novel suggest that it is important to love this deeply despite the risks involved in doing so?

13. When Lilly begins dating Cam she thinks, “Love and safety. Love and safety forever. I had never dreamed I could find both outside [my father’s] house.” What role does ‘safety’ play in Lilly’s marriage to Cam? Why does Lilly place so much value on safety?

14. The novel has a surprising ending. Discuss what happens in the final chapters and what the ending means for Lilly, her life, and her marriage.
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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