---

Summary  |  Author  |  Book Reviews  |  Discussion Questions

---

How to Talk to a Widower
Jonathan Tropper, 2007
Random House
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385338912

In Brief  
When twenty-seven year old Doug Parker traded in his bachelor pad for a house in the suburbs, complete with a teenaged stepson, he never expected that two years later he would suddenly lose the woman who meant everything to him. Without beautiful, confident Hailey to guide him through the challenges of now becoming a true surrogate father to her son Russ, Doug is on his own to navigate their new course.

And while he knows he can't travel back to the way things were, it will take a bossy twin sister under his roof, and some colorful mistakes, before Doug will realize how far he has come, and appreciate how far he will go. (From the publisher.)

top of page  

---

About the Author 

• Birth—1970
• Where—Riverdale, New York, USA
• Education—N/A
• Currently—lives in Westchester, New York


Jonathan Tropper is also the author of This is Where I Leave You, How to Talk to a Widower, Everything Changes, and Plan B. He lives with his wife, Elizabeth, and their children in Westchester, New York, where he teaches writing at Manhattanville College.

How To Talk To A Widower, was the 2007 selection for the Richard and Judy Show in the United Kingdom. Everything Changes was a Booksense selection. Three of Tropper's books are currently being adapted into movies. Tropper is also currently working on a television series How to Talk to a Widower which was optioned by Paramount Pictures, and Everything Changes and The Book of Joe are also in development as feature films. (Adapted from the publisher and Wikipedia.)

top of page

---

Critics Say . . . 
A portrait of a modern guy in crisis, Tropper's third novel follows Doug Parker, whose life is frozen into place at 29 when Hailey, his wife of two years, is killed in a plane crash. Unable to leave the tony suburban house they once shared, he spends his days reliving their brief marriage from the moment he found her sobbing in his office over troubles with her first husband. At the same time, Doug's magazine column about grieving for his wife has made him irresistible to the media (book deals, television spots and the like are proffered) and to a wide array of women who find him "slim, sad and beautiful." Though stepson Russ is getting in trouble at school and Doug's pregnant twin sister, Claire, moves in, no amount of crying to strippers can keep Doug from the temptations of his best friend's wife or Russ's guidance counselor. Alternately flippant and sad, Tropper's book is a smart comedy of inappropriate behavior at an inopportune time.
Publishers Weekly

Doug Parker is having a bad year. After the death of his wife in a plane crash, the 29-year-old freelance magazine writer withdraws from family and friends and rarely leaves the home he shared with his wife and stepson in the New Radford suburb of New York. There, he medicates with alcohol, produces a much-lauded monthly column about his grief, and wages war on a band of insurgent neighborhood rabbits. With his life in shambles and the specter of his dead wife haunting every waking thought, Doug struggles to hold off the world-his dysfunctional family, a nagging agent hoping to cash in on the success of his magazine column, and his troubled teenage stepson in need of a surrogate father figure-while he navigates an unfamiliar landscape of pain and hopelessness. Eric Ruben's sometimes uneven reading captures well the jarring moments when Doug's seemingly impenetrable self-absorption is pierced by genuine compassion for and understanding of those around him-most notably his stroke-afflicted father, his domineering mother, and his two sisters-all of whom conspire at different moments to draw him out of his paralyzing grief. Ruben also deftly handles Doug's sexual misadventures with the right combination of passion, humor, and despair, as the wounded and irresistible widower agonizes over his longing for his dead wife and his growing need for companionship and love. Recommended for all general fiction collections.
Library Journal

Mixing pathos and comedy in equal measure, Tropper tells the story of "slim, sad, and beautiful" Doug Parker. A year after his wife Hailey's death in a plane crash, 29-year-old widower Doug is still grieving heavily and has abandoned all pretense at civility and discretion.... With superb comic timing, Tropper keeps the sappiness at bay by juxtaposing tender scenes that often feature Doug's reminiscences about meeting and marrying his wife with funny, often vitriolic dialogue. —Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist

Bereft hipster stuck in suburbia struggles to rejoin the world of the living after losing his wife in a plane crash. In a full-on retreat from human contact, 29-year-old Doug Parker passes the year following the death of his wife of two years in a numb Jack Daniel's-fueled haze. An anomaly in the upper-middle-class town of New Radford, the freelance writer only moved there to be with Hailey, a divorcee ten years his senior. Doug copes with the loss through his popular monthly "How to Talk to a Widower" magazine column, while fending off the advances of the local womenfolk, who yearn to ease his pain. Both hyper-aware of his unique situation, yet filled with self-loathing, he struggles mightily with the realization that his career success, comfortable home and affluence (via a fat airline settlement) all stem from Hailey's death. He also has to deal with conflicted feelings for Hailey's son Russ, a sensitive but troubled teenager who is in worse shape than Doug. Feeling unwelcome in the home of his womanizing dad, Jim, Russ dabbles in drugs and gets into fights. He needs a stable male figure in his life-a role Doug hardly feels qualified to take on. Meanwhile, Doug's bossy twin sister Claire suddenly moves in with him after her marriage falters, taking it upon herself to get her brother dating again, demanding that he begin to say "yes" to life. Doug goes out on a series of comically unsuccessful dates, while flirting with Russ's foxy guidance counselor Brooke. He also succumbs to the hottest of his desperate housewives, Laney Potter, setting off a chain of events culminating at the wedding of his baby sister Debbie, a brittle overachiever. With strong, impossibly beautiful female characters and naughty, unworthy men, Tropper's latest (Everything Changes, 2005) is a resigned yet hopeful examination of grief with a side of human absurdity. Warm and modestly knowing, with a wisecracking slacker hero.
Kirkus Reviews

top of page  

---

Book Club Discussion Questions 

1. Doug suffered a tragic and sudden loss, but in the fall-out of this event hasn't always behaved the way one would hope to if in his shoes. Do you empathize with Doug or is his self-destructive behavior a detriment to his character? What allowances would you give to someone who is grieving, and when do their actions become unforgivable?

2. What are Doug's views on marriage both before and after meeting Hailey? Do they change after he loses his spouse? Do you foresee him eventually remarrying?

3. Following his stroke, Doug's father underwent a personality change. Describe how this changed his relationship with his family, especially with his son. Does Doug see him as a role model; why or why not? Discuss the parallels between father and son after a traumatic event.

4. How would the story be different if it were not told in the first-person narrative? Is Doug's omniscient perspective at the heart of the novel? How would the tone change if it was being told from someone outside looking in at Doug?

5. How does the novel'ssuburban setting play a role? What is the author's attitude about living in the suburbs? Do you think the portrayal of the town is meant to be satirical?

6. The author is a man-were you reminded of this while reading the novel? Would a female author writing this story have as effectively portrayed the macho attitude and competitiveness that exists between the male characters?

7. "I had a wife. Her name was Hailey. Now she's gone. And so am I." This passage appears on pages 74, 141, 282, 329, and 330 and serves as a mantra. When Doug repeats it, do you think this "reality check" provides him with comfort or is it destructive to his recovery? Does its' meaning, or his reasons for evoking the mantra, evolve?

8. Do you feel that Doug overcomes his grief? Does it change him; if so, how? Does grieving necessarily change a person? Can it be treated like other ailments that one conquers, or is it a permanent part of the sufferer, something that continues to live within them, ever changing but present?

9. Discuss the significance of setting. How are family dynamics illustrated by their surroundings and locale? Is Hailey's home and her belongings another character that haunts this story-the bra left hanging on the bathroom doorknob, the bottles of perfume collecting dust on her dresser?

10. How do the author and his protagonist use humor both in the sense of it being a literary tool, and as a way the characters relate to each other?

11. Doug's extended family is as endearing as they are dysfunctional. How do they compare to your ideal definition of a family?

12. Compare Doug's relationships with his two sisters-Claire, his twin, and Debbie, the youngest. What role does being a twin serve in Doug's life? How does Debbie's wedding bring out the individual struggles of many of the characters in the novel?

13. Discuss betrayal as it manifests itself across a wide range of connections-between spouses, friends, and siblings.

14. "The course of true love is never straight." (page 338) This is true for several of the characters. Do you think it is a universal truth? Is love so simple that people turn it into something which is complicated, or is it as complex as the people it involves?

15. Are you optimistic at the end of the novel that life will improve for Doug?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page

Oscar and Lucinda
Peter Carey, 1988
Knopf Doubleday
443 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780679777502

Summary
Winner, 1988 Booker Prize

This sweeping, irrepressibly inventive novel, is a romance, but a romance of the sort that could only take place in nineteenth-century Australia. For only on that sprawling continent—a haven for misfits of both the animal and human kingdoms—could a nervous Anglican minister who gambles on the instructions of the Divine become allied with a teenaged heiress who buys a glassworks to help liberate her sex.

Only the prodigious imagination of Peter Carey could implicate Oscar and Lucinda in a narrative of love and commerce, religion and colonialism, that culminates in a half-mad expedition to transport a glass church across the Outback. (From the publisher.)

---

---

Author Bio
• Birth—May 7, 1943
• Where—Bacchus Marsh, Victoria, Australia
• Education—Monash University
• Awards—Booker Prize (twice); National Book Council Award;
  Commonealth Writers Prize (twice); Franklin Miles Award
  (thrice); Prix duMeilleur Livre Etranger; Colin Roderick Award
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York, USA

"My fictional project has always been the invention or discovery of my own country," the prizewinning Australian author Peter Carey has said. This postcolonial undertaking has sometimes led Carey to wrestle with the great works of English literature: The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994) draws on Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, while Jack Maggs (1997), a version of Dickens's Great Expectations, is told from the perspective of the convict who returns to England from Australia.

But although Carey went to what he calls "a particularly posh" Australian boarding school, he claims he didn't discover literature until he was out of school. He studied chemistry at Monash University for just a year before leaving to work in advertising. There, surrounded by readers and would-be writers, he discovered the great literature of the 20th century, including authors like Joyce, Faulkner and Beckett. "To read Faulkner for the first time was for me like discovering another planet," Carey said in an interview with The Guardian. "The pleasure of that language, the politics of giving voice to the voiceless."

Publishers rejected Carey's first three novels, so he began writing short stories. These, he later said, "felt like the first authentic things I had done." He was still working for an advertising agency when his first collection of short stories appeared in 1973, and he kept the part-time job after moving to an "alternative community" in Queensland. His first published novel, Bliss (1981), won a prestigious Australian literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award. The book is about an advertising executive who has a near-death experience and ends up living in a rural commune.

Carey's later novels ranged farther outside the bounds of his own experience, but he continued to develop his concern with Australian identity. 1988's Oscar and Lucinda, which tells the story of a colonial Australian heiress and her ill-fated love for an English clergyman, won the Booker Prize and helped establish Carey as one of the literary heavyweights of his generation. He won another Booker Prize for True History of the Kelly Gang (2000), the story of a notorious 19th-century outlaw whose legacy still shapes Australia's consciousness.

Though Carey now lives and teaches in New York City, his home country and its past still possess his imagination. ''History,'' he writes, ''is like a bloodstain that keeps on showing on the wall no matter how many new owners take possession, no matter how many times we paint over it.''

Extras
• Peter Carey and J. M. Coetzee are the only two-time Booker Prize winners to date.

• Carey caused a stir in the British press when he declined an invitation to meet Queen Elizabeth II. The royal invitation is extended to all winners of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, which Carey received in 1998 for Jack Maggs. He did meet the Queen after he won the award a second time, for True History of the Kelly Gang in 2001.

• Fans of Carey's work know that in 1997, Oscar and Lucinda was made into a critically acclaimed movie starring Ralph Fiennes and Cate Blanchett. But they may not know that Carey wrote the screenplay for the critically panned Wim Wenders film Until the End of the World (1991) as well as the screenplay adaptation of his own novel, Bliss (1991). (From Barnes & Noble.)

---

---

Book Reviews
Bursting with informed gusto, freewheeling comedy, pauses of pathos and moments of surreal poetry – swaggering streetboys ‘with their hands boasting against their braces,’ scared cockatoos flying up "like screeching feathers from a burst pillow"– Oscar & Lucinda is a creative explosion of delight at life’s wayward, diverse plentifulness.
Peter Kemp - Sunday Times (London)

Carey is one of the great story-tellers of our time, the kind who make you take the telephone off the hook, forget the television and ignore the doorbell.... He has the rare gift of making the written world more vivid than life. A magnificent book.
Evening Standard (UK)

Luminous and magical, Oscar and Lucinda dances with a shimmer of light and dark as its two noble gamblers play out dreams of God and glass. A spectacular achievement.
The Age (Australia)

It is Thomas Wolfe one is reminded of most when reading Peter Carey...they share that magnificent vitality, that ebullient delight in character, detail and language that turns a novel into an important book.
New York Times Book Review

A kind of rollercoaster ride...The reader emerges...gasping, blinking, reshaped in a hundred ways, conscious that the world is never going to look the same again.
Washington Post

We have a great novelist living on the planet with us, and his name is Peter Carey.
Los Angeles Times

As fine a love story and as fascinating an exploration as any reader could wish...Carey writes as if the world he has created, and his own private life, are at stake.
Chicago Tribune

The stuff of shimmering, transparent fantasy, held together by the struts of 19th-century history and the millions of painstaking details.
Time

If Illywhacker astounded us with its imaginative richness, this latest Carey novel does so again, with a masterly sureness of touched added. It's a story, in a sense the story, of mid-19th century England and Australia, narrated by a man of our time and therefore permeated with modern consciousness. Oscar is a shy, gawky, Oxford-educated Church of England minister with a tortured conscience; Lucinda is a willful, eccentric Australian who sinks her family inheritance into a glass factory; and the basis for the star-crossed love that develops between them is a shared passion for gambling. They meet on the boat to Sydney, Oscar becomes Lucinda's lodger after being defrocked for his "vice" and, finally, leaving a trail of scandal behind them, they construct a glass church in the Outback, their wildest gamble yet. The narrative techniques though which Carey dramatizes the effects of English religious beliefs and social mores upon frontier Australia smack of both Dickens and of Fowles's The French Lieutenant's Woman; but he doesn't lean upon his sources, he uses them, for his own subtle and controlled purposes. His prose (full of such flashes as "A cormorant broke from the surface, like an improbable idea tearing the membrane between dream and life") is an almost constant source of surprise, and he is clearly in the forefront of that literary brilliance now flowing out of Australia..
Publishers Weekly

As he demonstrated in Bliss (1981) and Illywhacker (1985), Carey is partial to eccentrics. Here, he provides a splendid array of cranks and monomaniacs — with two of them, the title characters, living out an odd and tender love story. Yet theirs is only the central plot in an astonishingly complex literary performance that moves between England and Australia in the 1860's. There are dozens of characters and at least five important storylines, two set in the Old World and three in the New. Mostly, though, this is a leisurely and witty fable about the two great enthusiasms of the 19th century — religion and science. Many great schemes were hatched to try to harmonize the two, and so it is here. Lucinda, an Australian heiress, consults Joseph Paxton, architect of London's Crystal Palace, and then she and Oscar, a clergyman, set out to erect a glass church — in darkest New South Wales. The whole book is also a literary parody. Here, the results are uneven, largely because Carey has made some errant choices. His first targets are Fielding and Sterne. But these were 18th-century writers who expressed the energy of a particular moment: the last gasp of Merrie Olde England, about to be submerged by piety, industrialism, and red plush draperies with ball fringe. Carey is off the mark here. He fares better when he begins to parody Trollope. His style then becomes more appropriate to the material; also less facetious and digressive. Oscar and Lucinda (582 pp.) is sometimes too slow, and its energetic whimsicality can be grating. Against that, though, set writing that is far more often lucid and fine, beautifully drawn characters, and a remarkably clever narrative scheme. A brave and original novel.
Kirkus Reviews

---

---

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

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

Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Oscar and Lucinda:

1. The earliest of the many arresting episodes in this book is the Christmas pudding incident. How does Oscar's delight in this new taste—and the subsequent anger of his father—set the stage for the events of the novel?

2. In relation to Question #1, many see the pudding scene as a retelling of Adam and the forbidden fruit in Genesis. Does that reading make sense to you? How might that interpreta-tion, the fall and expulsion from paradise, play itself out in the remainder of the story?

3. What explains Oscar's conversion from his father's fundamentalist sect to the Anglican Church? Discuss Oscar's hopscotch-like theology. Does God direct where the stone falls...or is it a game of chance? What does Oscar believe? What do you believe?

4. Talk about Oscar's religious beliefs. Is he good...or corrupt? Is he endangering his soul by gambling? Or does the fact that he devotes his winnings to charitable causes justify, or make right, his gambling obsession? What does Oscar believe?

5. In relation to Question #2: Peter Carey invokes 17th-century mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal in this novel. Pascal postulates that belief in God is a necessary bet: if you're right about the existence of God, you win. Even if you're wrong, and there is no God, you still win because you've led a good life. Oscar adheres to Pascal's ideas: belief in God is a gamble. What do you think? Is Oscar (or Pascal) right? Can faith be reduced to a bet—a matter of chance?

6. What kind of characters are Oscar and Lucinda? They're eccentric, of course, but how else might you describe them? What makes them fall in love? (Can you recall the moment when Lucinda suddenly realizes that she might be in love with Oscar?) Why aren't the two honest in their feelings with one another?

7. Discuss the ways Lucinda flouts prevailing societal codes for women of her day?

8. In what way do Oscar and Lucinda refuse to accept their society's racist views of Australia's Aboriginals?

9. Is it a flaw, or a strength, in their characters that neither Oscar nor Lucinda understands or cares (which?) how others view them?

10. Reviewer Aravind Adiga writes that "for Oscar and Lucinda, [gambling is] an expression of their desire for real change and reformation. In that sense, gambling is also an expression of their innocence." Thus the two make their fantastic wager on the glass church. Can you comment on Adiga's observation? Do you think he's right—that their gambling is not only a rebellion but also a way to right the wrongs of rigid societal codes—against Aboriginals, women and innovators? (See the full review in The Second Circle.)

11. What is Lucinda's fascination with glass? (Consider the name Lucinda...just for fun.)

12. Relating to Question #11: glass is obviously (clearly?) symbolic in this work. What does it represent? Carey has said in an interview with BBC World Book Club that glass is perfect and pure but also dangerous—when glass breaks, it cuts. How does that idea connect with a church of made of glass—which is being carried into the wilds of Australia? What might it mean, metaphorically, that Oscar bets he can carry the glass without breaking it?

12. Although it may be overly schematic, consider the metaphor of church and commerce betting against one another for the soul of Australia (or any society). What are the ramifications of such a bet by two powerful institutions— particularly for indigenous people?

13. Oscar comes to regard the trials of his journey through the outback as punishment for his sins. Do you think he's right? Will his suffering redeem him in God's eyes?

14. What affect does the use of shifting perspectives have on your reading of the novel? Did you find the varying points of view illuminating or confusing or interruptive?

13. What was your experience reading this book? Did you find it humorous, sad, funny, intriguing? Talk about Carey's writing style—his descriptive passages; insinuations and indirect sentences; and satirical eye. He has been compared by some to Charles Dickens in his idiosyncratic characters and convoluted plots. Do you see similarities?

14. Were you satisfied or disappointed by the novel's ending? Where were the plot's turning points—where different decisions by either Oscar or Lucinda might have changed the story's outcome?

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

top of page

Song Yet Sung 
James McBride, 2008
Penguin Group USA
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594483509


Summary
In the days before the Civil War, a runaway slave named Liz Spocott breaks free from her captors and escapes into the labyrinthine swamps of Maryland's eastern shore, setting loose a drama of violence and hope among slave catchers, plantation owners, watermen, runaway slaves, and free blacks.

Liz is near death, wracked by disturbing visions of the future, and armed with "the Code," a fiercely guarded cryptic means of communication for slaves on the run. Liz's flight and her dreams of tomorrow will thrust all those near her toward a mysterious, redemptive fate.

Filled with rich, true details—much of the story is drawn from historical events—and told in New York Times bestselling author James McBride's signature lyrical style, Song Yet Sung is a story of tragic triumph, violent decisions, and unexpected kindness. (From the publisher.)

---

---

Author Bio
• Birth—1957
• Where—New York, New York
• Education—Oberlin Conservatory of Music; M.A., Columbia
   University
• Awards—American Arts and Letters Richard Rodgers Award,
   1996; ASCAP Richard Rodgers Horizons Award, 1996;
   Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, 1997
• Currently—Bucks County, Pennsylvania, USA


James McBride's bestselling memoir, The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, explores the author's struggle to understand his biracial identity and the experience of his white, Jewish mother, who moved to Harlem, married a black man, and raised 12 children. His first novel, Miracle at St. Anna (film version by Spike Lee), followed a black regiment through turbulent events in Italy late in World War II. It was a book of considerable breadth and character diversity.

Readers may not know that the multitalented McBride has another dual identity: He's trained as a musician and a writer and has been highly successful in both careers.

After getting his master's degree in journalism from Columbia University at the age of 22, he began a career in journalism that would include stints as staff writer at the Boston Globe, People magazine, and the Washington Post. But McBride also loved writing and performing music, and at age 30, he quit his job as a feature writer at the Washington Post to pursue a music career in New York. After Anita Baker recorded a song he'd written, "Good Enough," McBride had enough contacts in the industry to spend the next eight years as a professional musician, writing, recording, and performing (he plays the saxophone).

He was playing tenor sax for jazz singer Little Jimmy Scott while he wrote The Color of Water "on airplanes and in hotels." Like the jazz music McBride plays, the book alternates voices, trading off between McBride's perspective and that of his mother. The Color of Water was a worldwide success, selling millions of copies and drawing high praise from book critics. "This moving and unforgettable memoir needs to be read by people of all colors and faiths," wrote Publishers Weekly. It now appears on reading lists at high schools and colleges around the country.

After the enormous success of The Color of Water, McBride felt some pressure to continue writing memoirs, or at least to continue with the theme of race relations in America. Instead, he turned to fiction, and although his second book draws part of its inspiration from family history, it isn't autobiographical. "My initial aim was to write a novel about a group of black soldiers who liberate a concentration camp in Eastern Europe," McBride explains on his web site. "I read lots of books and spent a lot of time researching the subject but soon came to the realization that I'm not qualified to write about the holocaust. It's too much." Instead, he recalled the war stories of his uncle and cousin, who served in the all-black 92nd Infantry Division, and began researching World War II in Italy—particularly the clashes between Italian Partisans and the German army.

The resulting novel, Miracle at St. Anna, is "an intricate mosaic of narratives that ultimately becomes about betrayal and the complex moral landscape of war" (the New York Times Book Review) and has earned high marks from critics for its nuanced portrayal of four Buffalo Soldiers and the Italian villagers they encounter. McBride, perhaps not surprisingly, likens writing fiction to playing jazz: "You are the soloist and the characters are the bandleaders, the Duke Ellingtons and Count Basies. They present the song, and you must play it as they determine.

Extras
• McBride has written songs for Anita Baker, Grover Washington Jr., Gary Burton, and the PBS television character Barney. He has also written the score for several musicals and currently leads a 12-piece jazz/R&B band.

• One of his most taxing assignments as a journalist was to cover Michael Jackson's 1984 Victory Tour for six months. "I thought I was going to lose my mind," he told USA Today.

• For a book fair, he performed with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock band made up of writers including Amy Tan, Mitch Albom, Stephen King, Dave Barry, and Ridley Pearson. (From Barnes & Noble.)

---

---

Book Reviews
Anyone handling such material runs the risk of reprising Uncle Tom's Cabin, which, however effective it was as propaganda, has no real claim to the truth of art. McBride's portrayal of the situation is more lucid, better controlled and in the end much more convincing…Edward P. Jones, who may be the first black American to have written about slavery without rancor, has said that his measured portrayal of the slave masters of Virginia in The Known World was like writing about Hitler from Hitler's mother's point of view. In Song Yet Sung, McBride has captured a version of Jones's dispassionate tone, which can deliver the cauterizing power of anger without the corrosive effects of bitterness. That's a radically new way of telling this old story, and it just might turn out to be balm for a wound that has so far stubbornly refused to heal.
Madison Smartt Bell - New York Times

In a complex, ever-tightening, increasingly suspenseful web that rises toward a dramatic climax..., McBride shows the complexity of his characters' inner lives and dilemmas — particularly his black characters. The cadence of their speech, the way they interact, the small details of their thoughts, desires, fears and hopes: These the author renders with exquisite ease. In scene after scene McBride shows the many ways blacks worked to aid each other to freedom. "The Code" is part of this, a secret language of actions, signs, symbols and words by which the slaves communicate messages of resistance right under their masters' noses. The novel does have its weaker moments. At times McBride's exposition seems rushed, as if he's got more information to give than time to give it. His action scenes can feel like stage directions for a film. Some may groan that Liz's prescience is forced, especially as she sees further and further into the future, right up to bejeweled rappers spitting violence and misogyny. And some may point out the convenience of Liz's only predicting a future up to our present.... [Nontheless,] McBride...does have the ability to captivate, compel and challenge those of us still working to shape those tomorrows
David Anthony Durham - Washington Post

Escaped slaves, free blacks, slave-catchers and plantation owners weave a tangled web of intrigue and adventure in bestselling memoirist (The Color of Water) McBride's intricately constructed and impressive second novel, set in pre-Civil War Maryland. Liz Spocott, a beautiful young runaway slave, suffers a nasty head wound just before being nabbed by a posse of slave catchers. She falls into a coma, and, when she awakes, she can see the future—from the near-future to Martin Luther King to hip-hop—in her dreams. Liz's visions help her and her fellow slaves escape, but soon there are new dangers on her trail: Patty Cannon and her brutal gang of slave catchers, and a competing slave catcher, nicknamed "The Gimp," who has a surprising streak of morality. Liz has some friends, including an older woman who teaches her "The Code" that guides runaways; a handsome young slave; and a wild inhabitant of the woods and swamps. Kidnappings, gunfights and chases ensue as Liz drifts in and out of her visions, which serve as a thoughtful meditation on the nature of freedom and offer sharp social commentary on contemporary America. McBride hasn't lost his touch: he nails the horrors of slavery as well as he does the power of hope and redemption.
Publishers Weekly

McBride's second novel, following Miracle at St. Anna (soon to be a Spike Lee-directed major motion picture), might better be titled Novel Yet Edited: the review copy, at least, reads like a very rough first draft. Its setting-a small Chesapeake Bay town just before the outbreak of the Civil War, a place where the reality of slavery was more ambiguous than in other parts of the country-certainly lends it potential. The mature reader, however, learns very little new about the slave trade, the Underground Railroad, or the feelings of either the oppressed or the oppressors. Indeed, the novel largely seems written for a YA audience. The pace of the action is slowed by implausibility, repetitive and often cartoonish description, fairly obvious anachronisms, and a tremendous amount of unnecessary detail to the exclusion of the feelings of the (mostly flat) main characters. This is particularly disappointing given McBride's poignant 1996 memoir, The Color of Water. Recommended with reservations to public libraries.
Library Journal

The slave-owning culture of Maryland's eastern shore in the 1850s comprises the world of McBride's second novel (following Miracle at St. Anna, 2002, and the bestselling memoir The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother, 1996). Recaptured runaway slave Liz Spocott, wounded by a musket blast and chained to fellow runaways in the attic of "trader"-crime boss Patty Cannon, learns "the Code" by which embattled slaves communicate and survive from a skeletal woman ("The old Woman With No Name") and, acting on a chance opportunity, escapes again. The novel then assumes the shape of a series of quests and pursuits. Liz wanders along a perilous route which she hopes will lead her to the Freedom Train, hence northward to safety-accompanied and bedeviled by prophetic "visions" that reach far into "the future of the colored race." The latter are often eerily compelling, but when "the Dreamer" Liz "sees" rap and hip-hop performances, and eventually Martin Luther King's "Free At Last" speech, the novel groans under the weight of forced Significance. Far more compelling are parallel tales: of the Woolman, a gigantic black who lives in a swamp and keeps an alligator named Gar; widowed landowner Kathleen Sullivan, unhinged by sexual longing for her handsome young slave Amber; and Denwood Long, a former slave-catcher lured out of retirement to return Liz to her irate owner Colonel Spocott. While its language is frequently stiff and unconvincing, the book has great compensatory strengths. McBride views the "peculiar institution" of slavery from an impressive multiplicity of involved characters' and observers' viewpoints. He describes emotionally charged, hurried actions superbly, and he makes expert use of folklore, legend and the eponymous unsung song (which we do eventually hear). In Denwood's grim, fatalistic pursuit of his destiny, McBride has fashioned a myth of retribution and sacrifice that recalls both William Faulkner's sagas of blighted generations and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. Explosively dramatic.
Kirkus Reviews

---

---

Discussion Questions 
1. When we first meet Liz, she is on the run from her master. Yet throughout the book she refuses offers of passage to the North, saying “I’m free here.” What do you think Liz’s plan was when she first ran away? If she was planning to go North, what changed her mind? Or did she simply wish to die in the wilds of Maryland?

2. Discuss the author’s use of language. How does he evoke the speech patterns of an earlier era? What techniques does he use to bring the rural Maryland eastern shore to life?

3. Although he is a notorious slave catcher, Denwood Long—“the Gimp”—commands a degree of respect even from those he has caught. But he himself claims, “I’m going to hell in spite of redemption.” Based on his actions in the book, do you think he is worthy of respect? Do you find him sympathetic? Do you think he has found any measure of redemption by the end of the story?

4. Late in the book, it becomes clear that the singer of the “song yet sung” is Martin Luther King. Given that Liz’s nightmare vision of tomorrow, with its evocation of rap music and gang culture, clearly postdates King, why do you think the author chose him to fill this role?

5. Discuss the death of the Woolman. What motivates Liz to kill him? Is it an act of mercy? Do you think she has any thought of saving the Gimp? If so, why?

6. Amber believes that “Some [people] is up to the job of being decent, and some ain’t.” What do you think of this assessment? Is decency an inherent trait, or is it a conscious choice? Based on the characters and events in this book, what do you think the author’s answer to this question would be?

7. Throughout the book, Liz becomes more and more attuned to the world around her: “a kind of clarity seemed to settle upon her… at times she felt so sensitive to the elements about her, she felt as if her skin were ready to fly off her body.” What is the connection, if any, between this growing sensitivity and Liz’s visions of the future? How does Liz’s “two-headedness” allow the author to develop the larger themes of the novel?

8. Consider the ending of the novel—the violent deaths and Liz’s precarious future. At the same time, Amber is free, Kathleen’s future is secure, and Woolman’s son offers a link to the far-off coming of the song yet sung. Overall, did this novel leave you with a sense of hope? Did it provide you with any new insights on human nature? On America?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

 

Close Range: Wyoming Stories (incl. Brokeback Mountain)
Annie Proulx, 1999
Simon & Schuster
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780684852225


Summary
Pulitzer Prize winning author Annie Proulx is one of the literary greats of her generation. Bestselling novels like The Shipping News and Postcards have been unmatched successes with critics and readers alike.

Her latest is Close Range , a collection of award-winning tales of the Western frontier, of desolate expanses of land and the vast spaces between people, of love and loss set against the endless sky.

Like The Shipping News, it's sure to make an indelible impression on each of millions of readers. Includes the award-winning stories "The Half-Skinned Steer" and "Brokeback Mountain." (From the publisher.)

"Brokeback Mountain" from this story collection, was adapted to film in 2005, starring jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger. The film won 3 Academy Awards (director, adapted screenplay, and musical score).

---

---

Author Bio
• Birth—August 22, 1935
• Where—Norwich, Connecticut, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Vermont; M.A., Sir George Williams University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, 1994; PEN/Faulkner, 1993
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington

 
Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx did not set out to be a writer. She studied history in school, acquiring both her bachelor's and her master's degrees and abandoning her doctorate only in the face of a pessimistic job market. Something of a free spirit, she married and divorced three times and ended up raising three sons and a daughter single-handedly. She settled in rural Vermont, living in a succession of small towns where she worked as a freelance journalist and spent her free time in the great outdoors, hunting, fishing, and canoeing.

Although she wrote prolifically, most of Proulx's early work was nonfiction. She penned articles on weather, farming, and construction, and contracted for a series of rural "how tos" for magazines like Yankee and Organic Gardening. She also founded the Vershire Behind the Times, a monthly newspaper filled with colorful features and vignettes of small-town Vermont life. All this left little time for fiction, but she averaged a couple of stories a year, nearly all of which were accepted for publication.

Prominent credits in two editions of Best American Short Stories led to the publication in 1988 of Heart Songs and Other Stories, a first collection of Proulx's short fiction. Set in blue-collar New England, these "perfectly pitched stories of mysterious revenges and satisfactions" (the Guardian) received rapturous reviews.

With the encouragement of her publisher, Proulx released her first novel in 1992. The story of a fractured New England farm family, Postcards went on to win the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. She scored an even greater success the following year when her darkly comic Newfoundland set piece, The Shipping News, scooped both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. One year before her 60th birthday, Proulx had become an authentic literary celebrity.

Since then, the author has alternated between short and long fiction, garnering numerous accolades and honors along the way. Giving the lie to the literary adage "write what you know," her curiosity has led her into interesting, unfamiliar territory: Before writing The Shipping News, she made more than seven extended trips to Newfoundland, immersing herself in the culture and speech of its inhabitants; similarly, she weaved staggering amounts of musical arcana into her 1996 novel Accordion Crimes. She is known for her keen powers of observation—passed on, she says, from her mother, an artist and avid naturalist—and for her painstaking research, a holdover from her student days.

In 1994, Proulx left Vermont for the wide open spaces of Wyoming—a move that inspired several memorable short stories, including the O. Henry Award winner "Brokeback Mountain." First published in The New Yorker and included in the 1999 collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories, this tale of a doomed love affair between two Wyoming cowboys captured the public imagination when it was turned into an Oscar-winning 2005 film by director Ang Lee.

Lionized by most critics, Proulx is, nevertheless, not without her detractors. Indeed, her terse prose, eccentric characters, startling descriptions, and stylistic idiosyncrasies (run-on sentences followed by sentence fragments) are not the literary purist's cup of tea. But few writers can match her brilliance at manipulating language, evoking place and landscape, or weaving together an utterly mesmerizing story with style and grace.

Extras
• Proulx was the first woman to win the prestigious Pen/Faulkner Award. (From Barnes & Noble.)

---

---

Book Reviews
Powerful....[W]hat drives Mr. Proulx's people mainly is lust and lechery, itch and obsession....[R]ead [these stories] for their absolute authenticity, the sense they convey that you are beyond fact or fiction in a world that could not be any other way....Besides, you have little choice about reading [them] once you've begun them....bleak but expressive.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - The New York Times

Ms. Proulx writes with all the brutal beauty of one of her Wyoming snowstorms. Her people not only "stand" the bad luck and heartbreak that comes their way; they stare it down with astonishing strength.
Michael Knight - Wall Street Journal

Give yourself about 10 days to read this new collection of short stories by Annie Proulx. She has the mantle of American realism about her in style and vision, yet in this book she has broken new ground. It's a book with the best qualities of long-lasting, salty beef jerky. Some things shouldn't be rushed, but savored.
Steven C. Ballinger - The Bloomsbury Review

Annie Proulx's Close Range is the strongest attempt since Richars Ford's Rock Springs to capture a place that started as a fairy tale sold to gullible adventurers, flourished as a national matinee, and lives on as an existential broken promise that its people cant quite stop believing in...[Her] folksy stoicism isn't a pose. Her stories are solid oak...Her style is all substance, with very little air in it, as though she's learned to use fewer vowels, somehow, and banish articles and prepositions...At its best, Proulx's drawl is better than perfect....If God talked cowboy, he'd sound like Proulx. She's brilliant.
Walter Kirn - New York Magazine

Proulx hits and maintains a stunning narrative pitch whenever she details the Wyoming wilderness....[P]eople try their best against often insurmountable odds, but she imbues their efforts with a genuine sense of tragedy.
Book Magazine

A vigorous second collection from Proulx: eleven nicely varied stories set in the roughhewn wasteland that one narrator calls a "97,000-square-miles dog's breakfast of outside exploiters, Republican ranchers and scenery.
Kirkus Reviews

---

---

Discussion Questions 
The Half Skinned Steer

1. In the story told by Mero's old man's girlfriend, the half-skinned steer becomes a terrible fate Tin Head knows he can't escape. What is Mero's half-skinned steer? How was he marked by it and by his Wyoming origins? What is the nature of Mero's journey?

The Mud Below

2. What drives Diamond, raised in town and meant for better things, to make himself into a rodeo bull rider? Are rodeo performers real cowboys? Does not knowing who his father is force him to invent a persona for himself? What are his feelings toward his mother, his young brother?

3. Do you agree with Pake when he says that Diamond sees the bulls he rides as role models rather than opponents? What did Pake mean when he told Diamond, "you can't have a fence with only one post"?

4. A fleeting clue to the identity of Diamond's father is in the story "Pair a Spurs." Does knowing that identity change your perception of the impasse relationship between Diamond and his mother?

Job History

5. Does the title, "Job History" hold any irony? What do the jobs the members of this rural family hold tell us about their lives and opportunities? Do we learn more about them than the story's brevity and matter-of-fact style would suggest?

6. What does this story say about the power of the home place over us?

The Blood Bay

7. This story is a twist on an old folk tale, but here given a Wyoming setting and characters. What does Proulx's adaptation of this tale tell you about the collection as a whole? Are you supposed to read these stories as a literal reflection of life in the west?

People in Hell Just Want A Drink ofWater

8. Compare the Dunmires and the Tinsleys—each family's character and sensibilities, what each values, how they see the world, etc. What do their differences say about the error of stamping all rural people as similar in nature?

9. Ras Tinsley falls victim to brutal vigilante action at the hands of the Dunmires. The Dunmires are stockmen. Is what the Dunmires do to Ras justifiable from their point of view as stockmen in this time and place? How is castrating Ras similar to culling an inferior animal from a herd? What is the flaw in that logic? 10. Discuss the final line of this story.

The Bunchgrass Edge of the World

11. Ottaline feels trapped in a world that seems to have nothing to offer her, and finds escapes by listening in on other people's conversations on a scanner. Discuss the options women have in isolated rural areas. Low population density and lack of public transportation are two background factors in this story. What are others?

12. After the tractor begins to talk to her, Ottaline learns that an accident that killed a ranch hand was intentional—an effort, the tractor claims, committed to "save" Ottaline from the young man. Ottaline replies, "I could a saved myself, if I wanted to." Do you agree? Is that what she accomplishes later by marrying Flyby Amendinger? What places, or whose place, does Ottaline claim for herself?

13. As the story develops Old Red seems pushed to the sidelines, yet he is never silenced by advanced age or the marginalization of his role in the family. Were you surprised that Old Red, along with Ottaline, is a survivor in this story?

Pair a Spurs

14. This story concerns complex relationships between men and women in a small community and prompts questions on the nature of love. The magic spurs infect Scrope with a strange and inescapable obsession. How does his changed behavior affect the other characters? What do the spurs represent?

A Lonely Coast

15. The world does not lack for women like Josanna Skiles who accept bad treatment from the men in their lives. Why cannot Josanna break out of the pattern? She sometimes thinks that she lives in "a miserable place." Why doesn't she leave and make a new life for herself somewhere else? How does the place she lives in define her sense of self?

16. Josanna has close female friends, yet Palma throws herself at Josanna's boyfriend, Elk. Why don't these women have more respect for each other?

17. Did this story's depiction of contemporary small-town Wyoming surprise you? Do you think of drugs as a rural problem? What are the hungers, behaviors, and social factors that drive this story?

The Governors of Wyoming

18. Why did Shy, a lifelong rancher, get involved with Wade Walls when it meant betraying his own community? What is the significance of the man stumbling through the waist-high grass who grants Shy his evil wish?

19. In what ways do Shy and Wade represent fringe positions on the complex issue of cattlemen versus environmentalists? Which characters in the story do you think represent current contemporary Wyoming ranching practice? Why does Roany make a success of her business while Shy fails?

55 Miles to the Gas Pump

20. What does this story say about the role imagination can play in lives defined by a remote setting and repetitive work? How does this brief story illuminate the collection as a whole?

Brokeback Mountain

21. Both Ennis and Jack convince themselves that they aren't gay, and tell one another lies about the women in their lives. Is either man threatened by the other's relationships with women? Why is it so hard for Ennis to ask Jack if he was with other men in Mexico? How does Jack's disclosure affect their relationship?

22. How can Jack and Ennis—both gay men—be homophobic? Does it seem possible to you that the two men might ever have lived together in rural Wyoming the way Jack wanted? How important is Ennis's tie to place and a rural life in this story?

23. Discuss the symbolism of Jack placing Ennis' shirt inside his own on a hanger—and Ennis's reaction to finding them after Jack's death. Why did Jack and Ennis never go back to Brokeback Mountain after the first summer?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)