The Soul Thief
Charles Baxter, 2009
Knopf Doubleday
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400034406

Summary
As a graduate student in upstate New York, Nathaniel Mason is drawn into a tangle of relationships with people who seem to hover just beyond his grasp. There's Theresa, alluring but elusive, and Jamie, who is fickle if not wholly unavailable.

But Jerome Coolberg is the most mysterious and compelling. Not only cryptic about himself, he seems also to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel's past that Nathaniel cannot remember having told him about. In this extraordinary novel of mischief and menace, we see a young man's very self vanishing before his eyes. (From the publisher.)

---

---

Author Bio
• Birth—May 13, 1947
• Where—Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
• Education—B. A., Macalester College; Ph.D., State University
   of New York, Buffalo
• Awards—Award in Literature, American Academy of Arts and
   Letters; Prix St. Valentine for The Feast of Love
• Currently—lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota

Charles Baxter lives in Minneapolis and teaches at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of eight other works of fiction, including most recently Believers, Harmony of the World, and Through the Safety Net. The Feast of Love was a finalist for the National Book Award. (From the publisher.)

More
Although his body of work includes poetry and essays, award-winning writer Charles Baxter is best known for his fiction—brilliantly crafted, non-linear stories that twist and turn in unexpected directions before reaching surprising yet nearly always satisfying conclusions. He specializes in portraits of solid Midwesterners, regular Joes and Janes whose ordinary lives are disrupted by accidents, chance encounters, and the arrival of strangers; and his books have garnered a fierce and loyal following among readers and critics alike.

Born in Minneapolis in 1947, Baxter was barely a toddler when his father died. His mother remarried a wealthy attorney who moved the family onto a sprawling estate in suburban Excelsior. From prep school, Baxter was expected to attend Williams, but instead he chose Macalester, a small, liberal arts college in St. Paul. Intending to pursue a career in teaching and writing, he enrolled in the Ph.D. program at the State University of New York at Buffalo, attracted by a faculty that included such literary luminaries of the day as John Barth and Donald Barthelme.

After grad school, Baxter moved to Michigan to teach at Wayne State University in Detroit. He spent more than a decade concentrating on writing poetry, but after a particularly discouraging dry spell, he decided to try his hand at fiction. He labored long and hard over three novels, none of which was accepted for publication. Then, just as he was about to give up altogether, he attempted one last trick. He whittled the three novels down to short stories, replacing epic themes, extraordinary characters, and ambitious story arcs with the small, quiet stuff of ordinary life. It was a good decision, In 1984, his first collection of short fiction, Harmony of the World, was published. Another anthology followed, then a debut novel. Published in 1987, First Light charmed readers with its unusual structure (the story unfolds backwards in time) and a cast of richly, draw, fully human characters.

Baxter continued to publish throughout the 1990s, alternating between short and full-length fiction, and with each book he garnered larger, more appreciative audiences and better reviews. His breakthrough occurred in 2000 with The Feast of Love, a novel composed of many small stories that form a single, cohesive narrative. Described by the New York Times as "rich, juicy, laugh-out-loud funny and completely engrossing," The Feast of Love was nominated for a National Book Award.

"Every time I've finished a book, it feels to me as if the washrag has been rung out," Baxter confessed in a 2003 interview. Yet he keeps on crafting absorbing stories infused with quiet (sometimes absurdist) wit and a compassionate understanding of the human condition. A longtime director of the creative writing program at the University of Michigan, he is known as a generous mentor, and several of his students have gone on to forge successful literary careers of their own.

Extras
From a 2003 interview with Barnes & Noble:

• My novels are sometimes criticized for being episodic, or structurally weird. And they are! I like them that way. It's fairly late in the day — 2003 as I write — in the history of the novel, and I think it's fair for writers to mess around with that form, and to stop thinking that they have to write books that move smoothly from the first act to the second act, and then to the climax and the denouement. I like digressions, asides, intrusions, advice, anything that gets in the way of a smooth narcotic flow. New novels should not look like old novels, except when they want to.

• My father died when I was eighteen months old, and I expect the unexpected to happen in life and in art, and my fiction is full, or loaded down, with unexpected fatalities of one kind or another. For me, that's realism."

• I had an unhappy childhood that I thought was happy, and I dove into books as inspiration and relief and comfort and security and information about what people did and how they thought. I can still get happy and sentimental just over the thought of libraries — the image of a woman sitting quietly and reading is a terrifically sexy image for me.

• Like many writers, I'm private and quiet and observant and bookish. For a physical outlet, I lift weights at the gym two or three times a week, and I don't quit unless and until I've worked up a fairly good sweat. Many writers need an outlet like that to counter the sedentary nature of what they do. I don't have any wild delusions about the greatness of my work: I am happy to work humbly in this field where so many writers have created so many immortal manifestations of the mind and spirit. As Henry James said, you work in the dark; you do what you can; the rest is the madness of art.

• When asked what book most influenced his life as a writer, he answered:

For many writers, the experience of falling in love with a book has to happen in high school, or it won't happen at all. Love at that age is mad love. The book that did it for me at that period in my life was Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native, with its voluptuous melancholy; I don't think I had ever imagined that the word "sorrow" could be deployed in so many densely lyrical ways. The book's dramatic idea of the outsider struck a chord in me, since in those days I felt as if I was outside everything of any importance. The other book that did it for me was Melville's Moby-Dick, whose language struck me as wonderfully over-the-top. I found myself pleasurably lost in it and never wanted it to end. (Bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

---

---

Book Reviews
Gloriously done.... It's like watching fire slowly travel up a curtain, waiting for the moment the whole cloth will be engulfed.
New York Times

Delicious.... Entirely original.... The Soul Thief is so craftily constructed that to appreciate how liberally Baxter plants creepy hints of what's to come a reader really should savor this book twice.
Washington Post Book World

Though a much trickier and more cerebral book than his previous novels, this is a dandy psychological thriller in which proliferating mirrors will make your head spin. Baxter has given us the writer's version of that famous M.C. Escher print in which one hand is drawing the other.
Minneapolis Star Tribune

Examines love and lust and the various permutations and cries in between.... Few American writers handle those compelling subjects with a more sure touch or more worthy insight.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

With a prose style lyrical, accessible and warmly humorous, Charles Baxter has been quietly building a reputation as one of America's favorite literary authors.... His newest novel teems with the same good-natured empathy and wry humor that imbues his earlier works.... [I]t surely will delight.
St. Louis Post Dispatch

Opening in gritty, nineteen-seventies Buffalo, Baxter’s suspenseful fifth novel concerns a mildmannered graduate student, Nathaniel, who falls under the spell of a cerebral but affected outsider, the aptly named Coolberg. Drawn to Coolberg’s sneering persona (and to that of his girlfriend, Theresa, who relishes Coolberg’s performances), Nathaniel begins to unravel when he learns that Coolberg is appropriating his identity: a burglar steals clothes from Nathaniel that Coolberg ends up wearing, and Coolberg begins claiming Nathaniel’s history for his own. Baxter’s talent for creating uncanny settings and telling details and his inventive way with language (a similarly dressed couple are "umbilicaled") are both on display here, but the conceptual twist at the novel’s end feels unequal to the dramatic tension that precedes it.
The New Yorker

Critics’ reactions depended on how well they tolerated [Baxter's] inventiveness. Those who enjoyed it found The Soul Thief a compelling investigation into how identities are lost and found over a lifetime. Those who were less patient...left the novel feeling robbed of solid characters.
Bookmarks Magazine

The author of the National Book Award–nominated The Feast of Love, Baxter returns with this ninth book, an assay into the limits of character, fictional and otherwise. The first half of the novel follows the brief arc of Nathaniel Mason's graduate career in 1970s Buffalo, N.Y., which centers on his friendship with the sexy but self-dramatizing Teresa (which she pronounces Teraysa, as if she were French) and her lover Jerome Coolberg, a virtuoso of cast-off ideas. Coolberg, obsessed with Nathaniel, begins taking his shirts and notebooks, and claiming that episodes from Nathaniel's life happened to him. Coolberg drops a hint that something bad will happen to Jamie, Nathaniel's sometime lover; when it actually comes to pass, Nathaniel's world begins to collapse. In the novel's second half, decades after these events have occurred, Coolberg enters Nathaniel's life again for a final, dramatic confrontation. Baxter has a great, registering eye for the real pleasures and attritions of life, but the book gets hung up on metafictional questions of identity (the major one: who is writing this first-person narrative?). The results cheat readers out of identifying with any of the characters, perhaps intentionally.
Publishers Weekly 

---

---

Discussion Questions
1. Is The Soul Thief a work of “metafiction”? What aspects of its narrative structure—and of the narrators themselves—might be considered metafictional? How does it differ from more conventional, naturalistic novels?

2. A fellow grad student, Bob Rimjky, says of Jerome Coolberg: “Really, all he wants to do is acquire everyone's inner life” [p. 15]. Why would Coolberg want to possess other people's inner lives? In what ways is this kind of appropriation similar to what novelists do?

3. Coolberg accuses Nathaniel of “willful incomprehension. And convenient amnesia. You're just like this country...a champion of strategic forgetting” [p. 193]. Is this true of Nathaniel? In what ways is America a champion of “strategic forgetting”?

4. After it is revealed that Coolberg himself is “the author” of Nathaniel's story, the narrator says that “the point cannot be that one person can take on another's life.... The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything” [p. 203]. In what ways is The Soul Thief about love and forgiveness?

5. The Soul Thief exhibits a sharp satirical wit. What are Baxter's chief satirical targets in the novel? What does his satire reveal about these subjects?

6. In his role as host of the radio show, American Evenings, Coolberg guides his guests to a revelatory moment that uncovers “the story's secret heart” [p. 156]. What is the secret heart of The Soul Thief? How is it revealed?

7. In what ways does the act of telling stories save both Nathaniel and his sister? What is Baxter suggesting here about the power of stories?

8. When Nathaniel's sister regains her powers of speech, Nathaniel rejects the idea that this was a miracle. Instead, he attributes her recovery to “the force of compassion, which under certain circumstances can bring the dead to life.” He goes on to say that “though a prejudice exists in our culture against compassion, there being little profit in it, the emotion itself is ineradicable” [p. 153]. Why would compassion have the power to bring the dead to life? Is Nathaniel right in suggesting that there's a prejudice against compassion in our culture?

9. Why does Nathaniel fall in love with Theresa and Jamie? In what ways is his love for Jamie more real, even though she is a lesbian, than his love for Theresa? Why isn't Nathaniel ever able to get over Jamie?

10. Coolberg asserts that we're all copycats and that what he's done is really no different than what everyone does. Is he right? Are we all adopting other people's personalities or identities? How should Coolberg finally be judged?

11. Nathaniel asserts that identities are nothing more than “a pile of moldering personal clichés given sentimental value by the fact that someone owns them” [p. 87]. Does the sense of personal identity have any inherent value beyond the sentimental, either in the novel or in “real” life? Does the novel make a distinction between a soul and an identity?

12. Nathaniel wonders why Gertrude Stein keeps intruding on his consciousness. Why won't Stein leave him alone? In what ways is Stein relevant to The Soul Thief?

13. Why does Baxter end the novel with Nathaniel offering “blessings on everybody. Blessings without limit” [p. 210]? What has brought him to this sense of gratitude, forgiveness, and all-inclusive love?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page

Maisie Dobbs (Maisie Dobbs series #1)
Jacqueline Winspear, 2003
Penguin Group USA
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780142004333


Summary 
Maisie Dobbs entered domestic service in 1910 at thirteen, working for Lady Rowan Compton. When her remarkable intelligence is discovered by her employer, Maisie becomes the pupil of Maurice Blanche, a learned friend of the Comptons.

In 1929, following an apprenticeship with Blanche, Maisie hangs out her shingle: M. DOBBS, TRADE AND PERSONAL INVESTIGATIONS. She soon becomes enmeshed in a mystery surrounding The Retreat, a reclusive community of wounded WWI veterans. At first, Maisie only suspects foul play, but she must act quickly when Lady Rowan's son decides to sign away his fortune and take refuge there.

Maisie hurriedly investigates, uncovering a disturbing mystery, which, in an astonishing denouement, gives Maisie the courage to confront a ghost that has haunted her for years. (From the publisher.)

---

Author Bio 
• Birth—April 30, 1955
• Where—Weald of Kent, England, UK
• Education—University of London's Institute of Education
• Awards—Alex Award for Best First Novel
• Currently—lives in Ojai, California, USA

Lovers of British mysteries and historical novels will find something to appreciate in Jacqueline Winspear's Maisie Dobbs books. Maisie, a housemaid-turned-student-turned-nurse-turned private investigator in early 20th-century London, manages to straddle Britain's class system by being a woman of exceptional "bearing" and intellect who happens to come from working-class stock. As an investigator, she's green, but sharp and ambitious. She's also surrounded by vividly sketched secondary players, such as her benefactor, Lady Rowan, and mentor Maurice Blanche.

In Winspear's first Maisie story, we learn the character's background: Forced by family circumstances to go to work as a housemaid at an early age, Maisie Dobbs' curiosity and intellect are noticed by her employer, Lady Rowan. Rowan takes care of her education, and she makes it to university but the Great War interrupts her ambitions. She serves as a nurse in France, then returns to England and starts her career as a private investigator in 1929. Her first case seems like a simple investigation into infidelity; it grows into something larger when it leads realizes there's something amiss at a convalescent home for war veterans called The Retreat.

Winspear's talent didn't go unnoticed when her first novel was published in July 2003. Maisie Dobbs was named in "best" lists in both the New York Times and Publishers Weekly. It was also nominated in the best novel category for an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. There was an almost palpable sense of relief in the reviews, pleasant surprise that someone had offered not only a solid addition to the historical mystery genre, but had given it further depth and breadth. As an NPR reviewer put it, "[The book's] intelligent eccentricity offers relief."

Telling Maisie's stories using a warm third-person narrator, Winspear charms with her ability to convey the historical context surrounding her characters, particularly regarding the impact of the Great War. For this reason, and because her mysteries steer clear of graphic violence or sex, her books are often recommended for younger readers also. Far from hardboiled, Winspear's characters are very human, and she delivers a little romance and heartache along with the criminal wrongdoing.

Part of the appeal in Winspear's books also lies in her ability to bring a deeper, more philosophical atmosphere to the proceedings. Maisie is trained in Freudian psychology and is as interested in helping as she is in solving. A case referenced in the second Maisie story, Birds of a Feather, for example, "would not be filed away until those whose lives were touched by her investigation had reached a certain peace with her findings, with themselves, and with one another." Reading Winspear's Dobbs series may not bring inner peace, but there is something relaxing about spending time with her appealing characters.|

Extras
From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview

• Winspear also works as a creative coach. She writes on her web site, "As a coach I am engaged by those who want to establish clear intentions for their artistic endeavors, to support and encourage so that they sustain a level of energy and empowerment which is demonstrated in work that is rewarding, inspiring—and finished!" Winspear also writes about international education.

• Winspear loves outdoor pursuits such as horseback riding, hiking, sailing, and mountain biking; she's also an avid traveler, according to her web site bio.

• Her first ever job after college was as a flight attendant. "I wanted to travel and could not afford it, so I decided to get myself a job where I could travel. I did it for two years and had great fun."

• Her worst-ever job was in an egg-packing factory when she was 16.

• She love dogs, horses and generally all animals. "I will always stop to check on stray dogs—I once ended up in the emergency room with a tick embedded in me which had jumped off a dog I had rescued from a busy road. It was a deer tick, which carries Lyme Disease, so I wasn't taking any chances. Funnily enough, when I opened the only magazine in the emergency room, it was to a page carrying an article on tick bites and disease. It stated that you have six hours after the tick embeds itself, before it begins to release the bacteria that cause disease. I counted the hours from rescuing the dog, and by the time the doctor came in I was pleading, 'Get this thing out of me!!!'"

• Her favorite way to unwind is to go for a walk with her husband and the dog at the end of the working day, then they go to their local health club for a swim and to sit by the pool and read for a while. "I love time with family and friends, but completely relish time on my own when I have no agenda to follow, no to-do's, just me and time alone."

• When asked what book most influenced her life or career as a writer, here is what she said:

I love to read and have been an avid reader since the age of about three. However, I cannot say any one book ever impacted my writing career. I never read a book that made me want to be a writer per se; rather it was the love of words and what I could do with them that made me want to be a writer. So in that way my reading and writing were inextricably mixed. I cannot say that a book has ever influenced my life in a broader sense. This is always a tricky question, because "influence" suggests that it made you do something differently, or take a path not previously considered. Certainly there are books that have touched me, books that I thought about for days on end, but not that influenced me in the grand scheme of things, or made me do things differently.  (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

---

---

Book Reviews
There's something strange about the title character of Jacqueline Winspear's deft debut novel, Maisie Dobbs, which opens in London in 1929. For a clever and resourceful young woman who has just set herself up in business as a private investigator, Maisie seems a bit too sober and much too sad. Romantic readers sensing a story-within-a-story won't be disappointed at the sensitivity and wisdom with which Maisie resolves her first professional assignment, an apparent case of marital infidelity that turns out to be a wrenching illustration of the sorrowful legacies of World War I.
Marilyn Stasio - New York Time


In Winspear's inspired debut novel, a delightful mix of mystery, war story and romance set in WWI-era England, humble housemaid Maisie Dobbs climbs convincingly up Britain's social ladder, becoming in turn a university student, a wartime nurse and ultimately a private investigator. Both na ve and savvy, Maisie remains loyal to her working-class father and many friends who help her along the way. Her first sleuthing case, which begins as a simple marital infidelity investigation, leads to a trail of war-wounded soldiers lured to a remote convalescent home in Kent from which no one seems to emerge alive. The Retreat, specializing in treating badly deformed battlefield casualties, is run by an apparently innocuous former officer who requires his patients to sign over their assets to his tightly run institution. At different points in her remarkable career, Maisie crosses paths with a military surgeon to whom she's attracted despite his disfigurement from a bomb blast at the front. A refreshing heroine, appealing secondary characters and an absorbing plot, marred only by a somewhat bizarre conclusion, make Winspear a new writer to watch.
Publishers Weekly


From its dedication to the author's paternal grandfather and maternal grandmother, who were both injured during World War I, to its powerful conclusion, this is a poignant and compelling story that explores war's lingering and insidious impact on its survivors. The book opens in spring 1929 as Maisie Dobbs opens an office dedicated to "discreet investigations" and traverses back and forth between her present case and the long shadows cast by World War I. What starts out as a plea by an anxious husband for Maisie to discover why his wife regularly lies about her whereabouts turns into a journey of discovery whose answers and indeed whose very questions lie in a quiet rural cemetery where many war dead are buried. In Maisie, Winspear has created a complex new investigator who, tutored by the wise Maurice Blanche, recognizes that in uncovering the actions of the body, she is accepting responsibility for the soul. British-born but now living in America, first novelist Winspear writes in simple, effective prose, capturing the post-World War I era effectively and handling human drama with compassionate sensitivity while skillfully avoiding cloying sentimentality. At the end, the reader is left yearning for more discreet investigations into the nature of what it means to feel truth. Highly recommended.—Caroline Hallsworth, City of Greater Sudbury, Ont. Canada
Library Journal


(Adult/High School) Maisie is 14 when her mother dies, and she must go into service to help her father make ends meet. Her prodigious intellect and the fact that she is sneaking into the manor library at night to read Hume, Kierkegaard, and Jung alert Lady Rowan to the fact that she has an unusual maid. She arranges for Maisie to be tutored, and the girl ultimately qualifies for Cambridge. She goes for a year, only to be drawn by the need for nurses during the Great War. After serving a grueling few years in France and falling in love with a young doctor, Maisie puts up a shingle in 1929 as a private investigator. She is a perceptive observer of human nature, works well with all classes, and understands the motivations and demons prevalent in postwar England. Teens will be drawn in by her first big case, seemingly a simple one of infidelity, but leading to a complex examination of an almost cultlike situation. The impact of the war on the country is vividly conveyed. A strong protagonist and a lively sense of time and place carry readers along, and the details lead to further thought and understanding about the futility and horror of war, as well as a desire to hear more of Maisie. This is the beginning of a series, and a propitious one at that. —Susan H. Woodcock, Fairfax County Public Library, Chantilly, VA
School Library Journal


A romance/investigation debut novel set firmly in the spiritual aftermath of WWI. Maisie Dobbs, recently turned private investigator in 1929 England, had been a nurse back during the war to end all wars, so she knows about wounds-both those to the body and those to the soul. It's just a month after she sets up shop that she gets her first interesting case: What initially looks like just another infidelity matter turns out to be a woman's preoccupation with a dead man, Vincent Weathershaw, in a graveyard. Flashback to Maisie's upbringing: her transition from servant class to the intellectual class when she shows interest in the works of Hume, Kierkegaard, and Jung. She doesn't really get to explore her girlhood until she makes some roughshod friends in the all-woman ambulance corps that serves in France, and she of course falls for a soldier, Simon, who writes her letters but then disappears. Now, in 1929, Maisie's investigation into Vincent Weathershaw leads her to the mysterious Retreat, run like a mix between a barracks and a monastery, where soldiers still traumatized by the war go to recover. Maisie knows that her curiosity just might get her into trouble—yet she trusts her instincts and sends an undercover assistant into the Retreat in the hopes of finding out more about Vincent. But what will happen, she worries, if one needs to retreat from the Retreat? Will she discover the mystery behind her client's wife's preoccupation with a man who spent time there? And by any chance, albeit slight, might she encounter that old lover who disappeared back in 1917 and who she worried might be dead? Winspear rarely attempts to elevate her prose past the common romance, and what might have been a journey through a strata of England between the wars is instead just simple, convenient and contrived. Prime candidate for a TV movie.
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 Maisie Dobbs:

1. How would you describe Maisie Dobbs? What do you most admire (or not) about her character? Is she psychologically complex...or superficially drawn?

2.. Why does the author structure the book as she does: three sections, with the middle section veering back into Mashie's past, while the first and third revolve around the present-day mystery?

3. Follow-up to Question 2: At What point do the mysterious allusions in the first part become clearer?

4. In many ways, Maisie Dobbs is an historical novel, as well as a mystery. What are the ways in which world War I and its horrors impact the story? Which was of greater interest to you—the background of London drawing rooms and vivid depictions of the war...or the current-day mystery?

5. When Christopher Davenham initially comes to Maisie with his case, she is reluctant to accept it. Why? Why does she later accept the case—what makes her change her mind?

6. How much of Maisie's investigative work relies on her almost supernatural powers? Is that...well, an easy way out for the author? Doesn't a good detective story rely on logical thinking and empirical evidence—the detective's intellectual prowess? Or is Maisie's intuition what makes the story so enjoyable?

7. Talk about Lady Compton's and Maurice Blanche's influence on Maisie Dobbs. What does Dr. Blanche mean when he says, "truth walks towards us on the paths of our questions"? What are some of his other pronouncements?

8. What prompts Maisie to question the goings-on at The Retreat?

9. How is Maisie representative of the changing role of women in the 1920's, after the War?

10. How do you feel about the ending? Some reviewers feel it unearned...or hokey...or thin. Others find it totally satisfying. Where do you stand?

11.Overall, does this book deliver? Is the mystery engaging and surprising...or flat and predictable? Does it inspire you to read other books in the Maisie Dobbs series?

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

top of page (summary)

 

Cold Mountain 
Charles Frazier, 1997
Grove/Atlantic
449 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780802142849


Summary 
Winner, 1997 National Book Award

Based on local history and family stories passed down by the author's great-great-grandfather, Cold Mountain is the tale of a wounded soldier Inman, who walks away from the ravages of the war and back home to his prewar sweetheart, Ada.

Inman's odyssey through the devastated landscape of the soon-to-be-defeated South interweaves with Ada's struggle to revive her father's farm, with the help of an intrepid young drifter named Ruby. As their long-separated lives begin to converge at the close of the war, Inman and Ada confront the vastly transformed world they've been delivered.

Charles Frazier reveals marked insight into man's relationship to the land and the dangers of solitude. He also shares with the great nineteenth-century novelists a keen observation of a society undergoing change. Cold Mountain recreates a world gone by that speaks eloquently to our time. (From the publisher.)

---

---

Author Bio 
• Birth—1950
• Where—Asheville, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill;
  M.A., Ph.D., Appalachian State University
• Awards—National Book Award for Fiction, 1997
• Currently—lives in Raleigh, North Carolina

 

Charles Frazier grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. Cold Mountain, his highly acclaimed first novel, was an international bestseller, and won the National Book Award in 1997. In 2006 Mr. Frazier published Thirteen Moons.

Frazier had been teaching University-level literature part-time when he first became spellbound by the story of his great-great uncle W. P. Inman. Inman was a confederate soldier during the Civil War who took a harrowing foot-journey from the ravaged battle fields back to his home in the mountains of North Carolina. The specifics of Inman's history were sketchy, indeed, but Frazier's father spun his tale with such enticing drama that Frazier began filling in the gaps, himself. Bits of the life of Frazier's grandfather, who also fought in the Civil War, helped flesh out the journey of William Pinkney Inman.

He also looked toward the legendary epic poem The Odyssey for inspiration. Slowly, a gripping tale of devotion, faith, redemption, and love coalesced in Frazier's mind. For six or seven years, he toiled away on the story that would ultimately become Cold Mountain, and with the novel's publication in 1997, the first-time author had a modern classic of American literature on his hands.

In Cold Mountain, Inman is a wounded confederate soldier who abandons the war to venture home to his beloved Ada. Along the way, he is confronted by various obstacles, but he journeys on valiantly, regardless. Frazier cleverly divides the narrative between Inman's trek and Ada's story as she struggles to make due in the wake of her father's death and the absence of her love.

When Frazier was only half finished with the book, he passed it along to friend and novelist Kaye Gibbons (Ellen Foster; A Virtuous Woman), who then got it into the hands of her agent. Much to his disbelief, Frazier's novel went on to become the smash sensation of the late-‘90s. Winning countless laudatory reviews from publications throughout the nation, Cold Mountain also became a must-read commercial smash. The novel ultimately won the coveted National Book Award for fiction and was adapted into an Oscar-winning motion picture starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman and best supporting actress Renee Zellweger.

Nearly ten years after the publication of Cold Mountain, Frazier published Thirteen Moons. While Thirteen Moons returns to a 19th century setting, 12-year old Will is quite a different protagonist from Inman. With only a horse, a key, and a map, the boy is prodded into Indian country with the mission of running a trading post. In this dangerous environment, Will learns to empathize with the Cherokees, who open his mind to a much broader world than he had ever seen before.

In 2011 Frazier published Nightwoods, the story of a young woman living alone in the Appalachians who takes on the care of her murdered sisters young children, traumatized, violent and mute.

Extras
• Frazier grew up not far from the mountain he immortalized in Cold Mountain in the Blue Ridge of North Carolina. Although the actual Cold Mountain exists, the town after which it is named in the novel is entirely fictional.

• Reportedly, Frazier was offered a whopping $8 million advance for Thirteen Moons. Sadly, the book never reached the sales potential Random House had expected.  (From Widkipedia.)

---

---

Book Reviews 
The story involves two related strands of plot: Inman, wounded during a Civil War battle, makes his way home to Cold Mountain and to his love, Ada Monroe; Ada, in the meantime, struggles to cultivate her failing farmland. Cold Mountain is usually tied to Odysseus and his journey home. But it's also a failed return to Eden; after all, Odysseus makes it back to Penelope and Ithaca while Inman, poor boy, is out.  His loss of innocence and experience of evil mean he can never gain re-entrance to paradise. (Ada specifically tells us her name is pronounced with a short, not long, vowel sound. Add the first initial of her last name, and you get AdaM. A little schematic, but there it is.
LitLovers - Great Adaptations
 

Rich in evocative physical detail and timeless human insight, this debut novel set in the Civil War era rural South considers themes both grand (humanity's place in nature) and intimate (a love affair transformed by the war) as a wounded soldier makes his way home to the highlands of North Carolina and to his pre-war sweetheart. Shot in the neck during fighting at Petersburg, Inman was not expected to survive. After regaining the strength to walk, he begins his dangerous odyssey. Just as the traumas of life on the battlefront have changed Inman, the war's new social and economic conditions have left their mark on Ada. With the death of her father and loss of income from his investments, Ada can no longer remain a pampered Charleston lady, but must eke out a living from her father's farm in the Cold Mountain community, where she is an outsider.Frazier vividly depicts the rough and varied terrain of Inman's travels and the colorful characters he meets, all the while avoiding Federal raiders and the equally brutal Home Guard. The sweeping cycle of Inman's homeward journey is deftly balanced by Ada's growing sense of herself and her connection to the natural world around the farm. In a leisurely, literate narrative, Frazier shows how lives of soldiers and of civilians alike deepen and are transformed as a direct consequence of the war's tragedy. There is quiet drama in the tensions that unfold as Inman and Ada come ever closer to reunion, yet farther from their former selves.
Publishers Weekly
 

This monumental novel is set at the end of the Civil War and follows the journey of a wounded Confederate soldier named Inman as he returns home. Interwoven is the story of Ada, the woman he loves. Ada, who was raised in genteel society, cannot cope with the rigors of war until a woman called Ruby arrives to help her. Inman comes across memorable characters like the goatwoman, who lives off the secret herbs in the woods and Sara, a woman stranded with an infant who is assaulted by Yankee soldiers whom Inman later kills. After a long, threatening journey, Inman finally arrives home to Ada, 'ravaged, worn ragged and wary and thin.' A remarkable effort that opens up a historical past that will enrich readers not only with its story but with its strong characters. —David A. Beron, University of New England, Biddeford, ME.
Library Journal

A grim story about a tough, resourceful Southern family in the Civil War is somewhat submerged by the weight of lyrical detail piled on the tale, and by the slow pace of the telling. There's no doubt that Frazier can write; the problem is that he stops so often to savor the sheer pleasure of the act of writing in this debut effort. Inman, seeing that the end of the war is near, decides to leave his regiment and go back home to Ada, the bright, stubborn woman he loves. His adventures traversing a chaotic, impoverished land, Ada's struggles to preserve her father's farm, and the harsh, often powerful tales of the rough-hewn individuals they encounter take up most of the narrative. The tragic climax is convincing but somewhat rushed, given the many dilatory scenes that have preceded it. Frazier has Cormac McCarthy's gift for rendering the pitch and tang of regional speech, and for catching some of the true oddity of human nature, but he doesn't yet possess McCarthy's ferocious focus. A promising but overlong, uneven debut.
Kirkus Reviews

---

---

Discussion Questions 
1. How would you describe the style, or the voice, in which Charles Frazier tells his story? Do you find it realistic or stylized? What does it add to the overall effect of the story?

2. Charles Frazier seems to imply that, because of the moral barrenness of the Civil War and the crimes committed on the battlefield in the name of honor, there is no moral onus attached to the act of desertion? Do you agree with him? Why has Frazier chosen to portray the deserters as good, the Home Guard as evil?

3. How have Inman's views on secession, slavery, and war changed by the time he finds himself in the military hospital? What has he come to believe of both sides, the Federals and the Confederates, their leaders, and their motivations for fighting? Is he being overly cynical? How does the fighting and the level of blind violence in the Civil War compare with other, more recent wars?

4. Inman remembers a conversation he had with a boy he met after the battle of Fredericksburg, when he pointed out Orion's principal star. The boy replied, "That's just a name we give it.... It ain't God's name." We can never know God's name for things, the boy continues; "It's a lesson that sometimes we're meant to settle for ignorance" [p. 117]. How does this statement correspond with the lessons learned by Ada and Ruby? What point does Cold Mountain make about the nature and limitations of human knowledge?

5. Inman has little use for conventional religion, but he liked one sermon of Monroe's: "That which shows God in me, fortifies me. That which shows God out of me, makes me a wart and a wen. There is no longer a necessary reason for my being. Already the long shadows of untimely oblivion creep over me, and I shall decrease forever" [p. 77]. What notion of "God" does this quotation endorse? What about the voice that spoke to Ruby when, as a child, she was in despair: Was this God's voice, and if so, in what does God consist? What do you conclude Frazier's ideas to be, and how do they differ from conventional Christianity?

6. How, finally, does Frazier portray the natural world: as benign, treacherous, cruel, or indifferent? Famous contemporaries of Inman and Ada--thinkers like Darwin, Wordsworth, and Emerson—were expressing new ideas, in poetry and prose, about nature. How do these ideas influence Monroe's thinking? "Monroe had commented that, like all elements of nature, the features of this magnificent topography were simply tokens of some other world, some deeper life with a whole other existence toward which we ought aim all our yearning" [p. 144]. What very different conclusions does Ada come to? How do Inman and Ruby view the natural world?

7. Remembering his friend Swimmer, Inman reflects that Swimmer's spells "portrayed the spirit as a frail thing, constantly under attack and in need of strength, always threatening to die inside you. Inman found this notion dismal indeed, since he had been taught by sermon and hymn to hold as truth that the soul of man never dies" [p. 20]. Which version of the soul seems to be borne out during the course of the book? Does Inman come to change his ideas during his journey?

8. Throughout Cold Mountain, the author works with the idea of the search for the soul. Inman, Ada, Ruby, Stobrod, Veasey, and the slaveholder's runaway son Odell are all in some way engaged upon this search. Which of them is, in the end, successful, and why?

9. Both Ada and Inman reflect, at different times, that they are living in a "new world" [p. 33].... What changes is nineteenth-century America undergoing, and how do Ada and Inman's experiences, and the people they meet, reflect those changes? How, and why, is the ideal of womanhood changing?

10. Both Ada and Ruby were motherless children from the time they were born. How has that state affected their characters and formed their ideas? How has it molded their relationships with their fathers? Do both women reconcile themselves to their fathers in the end, and if so, why?

11. Was Monroe, overall, a good father to Ada? In what ways did he fail her, and in what ways did he contribute to her strength of character? In what ways did he deceive himself?

12. Several of Cold Mountain's characters meet their death during the course of the novel. How do these characters' deaths reflect, or redeem, their lives? What points are made by the particular deaths of Veasey, Ada's suitor Blount, Pangle, Monroe, and others?

13. Stobrod claims not to be Ruby's true father; his wife, he says, was impregnated by a heron. What other mythical or animistic images does the book offer, and what is their purpose? How does Frazier view, and treat, the supernatural?

14. What is the significance of the Cherokee woman's story about the Shining Rocks? What does it mean to Inman, and why is Ada skeptical? What does her reaction tell us about her character?

15. Charles Frazier has based his novel loosely on Homer's Odyssey. If you are familiar with The Odyssey, which incidents from it do you find reproduced in Cold Mountain, and how has Frazier reimagined them? Why do you think he might have chosen this structure for a Civil War novel? What similarities do the two works have in the way they deal with war? With love and marriage? With fidelity? With home? With spiritual growth? How is Inman like Odysseus?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page (summary)

 

---

Summary  |  Author  |  Book Reviews  |  Discussion Questions

---

The Hunt Club
John Lescroart, 2006
Penguin Group USA
544 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780451220103

In Brief  
A federal judge is murdered, found shot to death in his home—together with the body of his mistress. The crime grips San Francisco. To homicide inspector Devin Juhle, it first looks like a simple case of a wife’s jealousy and rage. But Juhle’s investigation reveals that the judge had powerful enemies...some of whom may have been willing to kill to prevent him from meddling in their affairs.

Meanwhile, private investigator Wyatt Hunt, Juhle’s best friend, finds himself smitten with the beautiful and enigmatic Andrea Parisi. A lawyer who recently has become a celebrity as a commentator on Trial TV, Andrea has star power in spades, and seems bound for a national anchor job in New York City. Until Juhle discovers that Andrea, too, had a connection to the judge, along with a client that had everything to gain from the judge’s death.

And then she suddenly disappears....

Andrea becomes Juhle’s prime suspect. Wyatt Hunt thinks she may be a kidnap victim, or worse...another murder victim. And far more than that, she’s someone with whom he believes he may have a future.

As the search for Andrea intensifies, Hunt gathers a loose band of friends and associates willing to bend and even break the rules, leading to a chilling confrontation from which none of them might escape. (From the publisher.)

top of page  

---

About the Author 

• Birth—January 14, 1948
• Where—Houston, Texas, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California, Berkeley
• Currently—lives in El Macero, California

John Lescroart has made a name (albeit an unpronounceable one!) for himself as the author of crime thrillers, most notably an acclaimed series starring the San Francisco lawyer-and-cop team of Dismas Hardy and Abe Glitsky. But the road to bestsellerdom has been paved with more than a few unexpected detours for this hardworking novelist, who has been writing all his adult life but who only started to chart big around the mid-1990s.

Lescroart (pronounced les-KWA) grew up with an equal interest in music and writing. After college, he concentrated his energies on the former, performing alone and in bands around the San Francisco Bay area and scribbling in whatever spare time he could find. But he set a deadline for himself, and when he had not "made it" by age 30, he quit music to focus on writing. Within weeks he finished up a novel-in-progress based on his experiences living in Spain. He submitted it to a former high school teacher who was less than dazzled; but the man's wife loved it and entered the manuscript in a local competition. Although it would not formally see print for another four years, Sunburn won the prestigious Joseph Henry Jackson Award, beating out Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire for the best novel by a California author.

To support his art, Lescroart held down a dizzying succession of jobs — from house painting and bartending to working as a legal secretary. At one point, just as he was ready to enroll in the creative writing program at Amherst, he was offered a lucrative gig he could not afford to pass up, and graduate school fell by the wayside. As the years passed, some of his books were published, but he never felt financially secure enough to write full-time. Then, in 1989, he contracted spinal meningitis after body-surfing in contaminated seawater. He emerged from his life-threatening ordeal with a new resolve, quit the last of his day jobs, and became a real working novelist.

It took a few tries for Dismas Hardy to become the fully realized character Lescroart's fans have come to know and love. Debuting in 1989's Dead Irish, Hardy began life as an ex-cop/ex-attorney turned bartender and did not return to the practice of law until his third appearance in Hard Evidence (1993). From then on, interest grew in the series, which has snowballed into a lucrative franchise for the author. In 2006, Lescroart introduced another San Francisco-based dynamic duo, private investigator Wyatt Hunt and homicide detective Devin Juhle, in The Hunt Club. Slightly younger than Hardy and Glitsky but drawn with the same humanizing brush, the protagonists of this series have proved immensely popular with readers.

Incidentally, Lescroart's writing success has allowed him to return to his other love: He has founded his own independent label, CrowArt Records, which showcases some of his own music and produces CDs by a number of artist/friends. At long last, John Lescroart is able to enjoy the best of both worlds.

Extras
From a 2004 Barnes & Noble interview:

• First, it's Less-KWAH. Here's a tip—don't have that name. Get a pen name that people can pronounce and remember. Just this Saturday, I gave a talk at a well-attended writers' conference. There were probably a hundred people in the room, and the talk went very well. Five minutes later, I was in the bathroom washing my hands and around the corner, I heard a guy tell another that he'd just heard the greatest talk by John le Carré. "You know, The Tailor of Panama and the Smiley books? Good stuff. I'm going to go buy all his books."

• Second, I didn't have to quit the day job to keep writing. One of the most productive times in my early writing life was while I had a full-time job as a word processor in a law firm and also worked part-time at night, often working until 11:00 p.m. How did I do any writing, you might ask? Well, I did it between 6:00 and 8:00 in the morning, four pages a day, and published five books in six years. But because a) I was making some money doing 'regular' work and didn't have to be scrounging for coin and b) I was panic-stricken at the little time that was left in the day to write, I wound up becoming more efficient.

• Third, I don't wait on inspiration, and I refuse to acknowledge 'writer's block.' I simply sit down and put words on the paper. It's like being a carpenter — writers build things. Carpenters don't wake up and say, 'Hmm, I'm not in the mood to drive nails today.' No, they go to work and do the job. It's not very romantic, but that's how I approach writing.

• If you have a good relationship, nurture it. The great god of Writing with a capital "W" isn't the only thing in life. It can be a great part and a big part, but it shouldn't consume you on a daily basis and shouldn't make your life miserable all the time. Try not to get nuts about the greater success of other writers — we're really not in competition with other writers. We're only trying to outdo ourselves, to get better at our jobs. Go on dates. Spend some time outside (fishing is good, so is skiing, hiking, swimming, jogging). Stay in shape — writing is a marathon. Don't drink too much. Have as much fun as you can.

• Lescroart used to perform as "Johnny Capo" in a group called Johnny Capo and His Real Good Band. Although he no longer performs with that outfit, he still pursues music as the founder of his very own independent label called CrowArt Records. The first project on the label was Date Night, a CD of his own compositions performed by master pianist Antonio Castillo de la Gala. Followers of Lescroart's writing may recognize the in-joke in the album's title. As he explains on his web site, "Fans of Dismas Hardy will know that Diz and Frannie (Dismas's wife) set aside every Wednesday night for some time alone together— it's their date night."

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

The single most important book for my life and my career as a writer is actually a connected group of four books: The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea) by Lawrence Durrell. These works are not "mysteries." They are profoundly "literary," and yet there is plenty of intrigue and suspense. Character development — with dozens of main and hundreds of ancillary characters — is the glue that holds the stories together. But even important is the conceit that binds these books—the idea, based to some extent on chaos theory and quantum mechanics — is that the act of viewing an event changes the event itself. Point of view becomes, then, in some respects, as much of a "character" in these books as any of the people who inhabit them. This shifting point of view, even sometimes within individual chapters, has become a hallmark of my own writing, and has enabled me to enlarge my palette to include many elements in my work that are "novelistic" rather than genre-specific. And perhaps to give the books, although set in San Francisco, something of a universal flavor.

(Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

top of page   

---

Critics Say . . . 
Lescroart...inaugurat[es] a new San Francisco series, starring private investigator Wyatt Hunt and homicide detective Devin Juhle. Longtime Lescroart fans can relax: these pals are at least as interesting and enterprising as Hardy/Glitsky. Hunt's eccentric pack of friends and associates (aka the loose organization known as the Hunt Club) are investigating the murder of a federal judge and his young girlfriend. What would normally be a job for the police becomes personal after Hunt's love interest, who has connections to the judge, goes missing. Both Hunt and Juhle have appropriately troubled pasts: Hunt was forced out of a career as a child protective services officer, and Juhle is trying to live down a shoot-out that killed his last partner. As a PI, Hunt is free to detect in unorthodox and entertaining ways, while Juhle brings to bear the technical and logistic resources of official law enforcement. Most readers will agree that it's a great combination, both on the job and on the page.
Publishers Weekly

In recent volumes of his popular Dismas Hardy/Abe Glitsky courtroom series (Second Chair and The Motive), Lescroart has flirted with the addition of new characters and subplots, but here he takes a fully fledged leap into the previously uncharted territory of private investigator Wyatt Hunt. Lescroart introduces Hunt as a caseworker for Child Protective Services (CPS) in San Francisco, follows him through an incident that ends his CPS career, and sets him up as a new protege of Dismas Hardy's ever-expanding law firm. Four years later, the staff and associates of Hunt's team, aptly named the Hunt Club, are drawn into a baffling investigation of the murder of a federal judge and his mistress that has surprising connections within the Bay City's power strata. Lescroart is to be applauded for recognizing the need for a fresh viewpoint in his narrative and for the creation of the energetic, streetwise Hunt, who certainly fills that bill. Hardy/Glitsky fans and new Lescroart readers alike will most assuredly want to join the Hunt Club. —Nancy McNicol, Ora Mason Branch Lib., West Haven, CT
Library Journal

Lescroart takes a break from the long-running adventures of San Francisco attorney Dismas Hardy and Lt. Abe Glitsky (The Second Chair, 2004, etc.) to audition a new detective hero. Wyatt Hunt worked for Child Protective Services until a politically connected boss forced him out even though he loved the work and was good at it. When he saw his chance for revenge, Hunt took it, shifted gears to get his p.i. license, opened an agency called the Hunt Club, with an unofficial annex of justice-minded friends—and never looked back. But his interest in the murders of aging federal judge George Palmer and Staci Rosalier, the much younger waitress His Honor had just given a diamond necklace, is more personal than professional. While Inspector Devin Juhle, a Hunt Club veteran from SFPD Homicide, is running around trying to pin the shootings on either the judge's widow or the hardnosed prison guards' union he was investigating, Hunt rescues TV lawyer Andrea Parisi from an embarrassing night on the town and takes her to bed hours before she vanishes from the face of the earth. What connection could her disappearance have with the double murder and the spreading stain of corruption Juhle finds beneath it? Lescroart's eye for Bay Area graft is as far-reaching and unerring as ever; conspiracies seem to lurk under every parked car in the city. Though well-connected complications keep slipping in, however, the solution is disconcertingly simple, disappointingly limited in scope and impact and readily spotted from as far away as the Golden Gate Bridge. Inside a story as big and loose-limbed as any of Dis and Abe's cases, Lescroart has hidden an uncommonly detailed story of his hero's origins and a much smaller case of double murder.
Kirkus Reviews

top of page  

---

Book Club 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 The Hunt Club: 

1. Discuss Wyatt Hunt's character...what kind of man is he? Why was he removed from his former job in Child Protective Services?

2. Same with Wyatt's friend Devlin Juhle. What kind of character is he...and on what is the two men's friendship based?

3. Talk about the meaning of the "Hunt Club" that Wyatt establishes. What is the club based on?

4. How does Wyatt's relationship with Andrea Parisi strain the friendship with Devlin? After she disappears, both men want to find her, but they proceed in divergent ways. How do they differ in their detection/police work—and why? What are each man's goals? Do you side with one man's method over the other's?

5. What makes Staci Roaslier's murder so baffling to the police? Where are her friends or family?

6. What complications arise with the prison guard union (CCPOA) and what is/was Andrea's connection with that investigation?

7. Overall, there are three distinct plotlines within the story? Does Lescroart do a good job of interweaving them...or does he keep the strands separate, pursuing each independently? Is there too much going on in the book, making it confusing? Or do the divergent plots add to the excitement?

8. Do you find the legal issues of this novel interesting? Have they enlightened you on how our court and legal process operate? Or do you find them tiresome, weighing down the pace of the plot? Are you disappointed that the book contains no courtroom scenes?

9. Point out some of the passages that move away from the legal/thriller aspect of the plot and concentrate on the ideals of love? Which ones do you find insightful...or moving? How do these passages contribute to the novel? In what way do they deepen character?

10. All in all, does this book deliver? Did you find yourself on the edge of your seat, rapidly turning pages, unable to put the book down? Or did you find it disappointing, dragged down by too many plots, uninteresting characters...too much legalese? Does Lescroart tie up all the loose ends to your satisfaction?

11. Have you read the other Lescroart series, based on Hardy and Glitsky? If so, how does this new effort compare with that first series? If you haven't read other Lescroart books, are you inspired to do so after reading The Hunt Club?

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

top of page