Staying On (The Raj Quartet, Epilogue)
Paul Scott, 1977
University of Chicago Press
216 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780226743493

Summary
Winner, 1977 Booker Prize

In this sequel to "The Raj Quartet," Colonel Tusker and Lucy Smalley stay on in the hills of Pankot after Indian independence deprives them of their colonial status.

Finally fed up with accommodating her husband, Lucy claims a degree of independence herself. Eloquent and hilarious, she and Tusker act out class tensions among the British of the Raj and give voice to the loneliness, rage, and stubborn affection in their marriage.

Staying On won the Booker Prize in 1977 and was made into a 1979 motion picture starring Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—March 25, 1920
• Where—Southgate (north London), England, UK
• Death—March 1, 1978
• Where—London, Englan
• Awards—Booker Prize—1971, 1977

Paul Mark Scott was a British novelist, playwright, and poet, best known for his monumental tetralogy "The Raj Quartet." His novel Staying On won the Booker Prize for 1977.

Paul Scott was born in Southgate, north London, the younger of two sons. His father, Thomas (1870-1958), was a Yorkshireman who moved to London in the 1920s and was a commercial artist specialising in furs and lingerie. His mother, Frances, nee Mark (1886-1969) was the daughter of a labourer from south London, socially inferior to her husband but with artistic and social ambitions. In later life Scott differentiated between his mother’s creative drive and his father’s down-to-earth practicality.

He was educated at Winchmore Hill Collegiate School (a private school) but was forced to leave suddenly, and without any qualifications, when 14, at a time that his father’s business was in severe financial difficulty. He worked as an accounts clerk for CT Payne and took evening classes in bookkeeping. He started writing poetry in his spare time. It was in this environment that he came to understand the rigid social divisions of suburban London, so that when he went to British India he had an instinctive familiarity with the interactions of caste and class in an imperial colony.

He was called up (conscripted) in to the army as a private in early 1940 near the start of World War II and was assigned to Intelligence Corps. He met and married his wife, Penny, née Avery, in Torquay in 1941.

In 1943 he was posted as an Officer Cadet to India, where he was commissioned. He ended the war as a Captain in the Indian Army Service Corps organizing logistics for the Fourteenth Army’s reconquest of Burma, which had fallen to the Japanese in 1942. Despite being initially appalled by the attitudes of the British, the heat and dust, the disease and poverty and the sheer numbers of people, he, like so many others, fell deeply in love with India.

After demobilisation in 1946 he was employed as an accountant for two small publishing houses and remained until 1950. His two daughters (Carol and Sally) were born in 1947 and 1948. In 1950 Scott moved to the literary agent Pearn, Pollinger & Higham (later to be split into Pollinger Limited and David Higham Associates) and subsequently became a director. Whilst there he was responsible for representing Arthur C Clarke, Morris West, M M Kaye, Elizabeth David, Mervyn Peake, and Muriel Spark, amongst others.

Scott published a collection of three religious poems under the title I, Gerontius in 1941, but his writing career began in earnest with his first novel Johnny Sahib in 1952; despite seventeen rejections it met with modest success. He continued to work as a literary agent to support his family, but managed to publish regularly. The Alien Sky (US title, Six Days in Marapore) appeared in 1953, and was followed by A Male Child (1956), The Mark of the Warrior (1958), and The Chinese Love Pavilion (1960). He also wrote two radio-plays for the BBC, Lines of Communication (1952) and Sahibs and Memsahibs (1958). All the novels were respectfully received though selling only moderately, but in 1960 Scott decided to try to earn a living as a full time author, and resigned from his literary agency.

More
His novels persistently draw on his experiences of India and service in the armed forces with strong subtexts of uneasy relationships between male friends or brothers; both the social privilege and the oppressive class and racial stratifications of empire are represented, and novel by novel the canvas broadens. The Alien Sky remains the principal fictional exploration of a very light-skinned Eurasian (mixed race, British-Indian) woman who has married a white man by pretending to be white; A Male Child is set principally in London and deals with the domestic effects of losing a family member to imperial service; and The Chinese Love Pavilion, after an Indian opening, is largely concerned with events in Malaya under Japanese occupation.

In retrospect these novels can be seen as studies towards "The Raj Quartet," and one of its minor characters appears by name in The Birds of Paradise (1962), but the lack of commercial success forced Scott to broaden his range. His next two novels, The Bender (1963), a satirical comedy, and The Corrida at San Feliu (1964), comprising multiple linked texts and drawing extensively on family holidays to the Costa Brava, are a clear attempt to experiment with new forms and locales. However, while still well received neither was especially successful, either financially or artistically, and Scott decided that he must either write the novel of the Raj of which he believed himself capable, or return to salaried work.

Scott flew to India in 1964 to see old friends, both Indian and Anglo-Indian, make new acquaintances in independent India, and recharge his batteries by reconfronting the place that obsessed him. Artistically he felt drained and a failure, feelings that were reinforced by financial straits and physical weakness. Since serving in India, Scott suffered from undiagnosed amoebic dysentery, which can seriously affect mood as well as digestion, and had managed to handle it by what his biographer, Hilary Spurling, describes as “alarming” quantities of alcohol. The condition was exacerbated by the visit and on his return he had to undergo painful treatment, but afterwards felt better than he had for years.

The Raj Quartet
In June 1964, Scott began to write The Jewel in the Crown, the first novel of what was to become "The Raj Quartet". It was published in 1966 to minor and muted enthusiasm. The remaining novels in the sequence were published over the next nine years – The Day of the Scorpion (1968), The Towers of Silence (1971) and A Division of the Spoils (1974). Scott wrote in relative isolation and only visited India twice more during the genesis of "The Raj Quartet", in 1968 and in 1971, latterly for the British Council. He worked in an upstairs room at his home in Hampstead overlooking the garden and Hampstead Garden Suburb woodland—a far cry from the archetypal administrative province, between the Ganges and the foothills of the Himalaya, in which the novels were set. He supplemented his earnings from his books with writing reviews for the Times, the Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman and Country Life.

The Jewel in the Crown engages with and rewrites E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924), and so is necessarily set in a small, Hindu-majority rural town with an army garrison, but the wider province is implicit, and the later novels spread out to the cold-weather capital on the plains, the hot-weather capital in the hills, a neighbouring Muslim-ruled Princely State, and the railways-lines that bind them together—as well as Calcutta, Bombay, and the Burmese theatre of war. The cast also expands to include at least 24 principals, more than 300 named fictional characters, and a number of historical figures including Churchill, Gandhi, Jinnah, Wavell, and Slim. The story is initially that of the gang rape of a young British woman in 1942, but follows the ripples of the event as they spread out through the relatives and friends of the victim, the child of the rape, those arrested for it but never charged and subsequently interned for political reasons, and the man who arrested them. It also charts events from the Quit India riots of August 1942 to the violence accompanying the Partition of India and creation of Pakistan in 1946-7, and so represents the collapse of imperial dominance, a process Scott describes as 'the British coming to the end of themselves as they were'.

Scott's wife Penny had supported him throughout the writing of "The Raj Quartet" despite his heavy drinking and sometimes violent behaviour, but once it was complete she left him and filed for divorce. Forced to reassess his life and options he turned to teaching, and in 1976 and 1977 he was visiting Professor at the University of Tulsa in the U.S. state of Oklahoma. His coda to "The Raj Quartet", Staying On, was published in 1977 just before his second visit. Soon after its publication, and while he was in Tulsa, Scott was diagnosed with colon cancer.

At the time of their publication, the novels of "The Raj Quartet" were, individually and collectively, received with little enthusiasm. Only The Towers of Silence and Staying On achieved success with the award of the Yorkshire Post Fiction Award and the Booker Prize in 1971 and 1977 respectively. Sadly, Scott was too ill to attend the Booker presentation in November 1977. He died at the Middlesex Hospital, London on 1 March 1978.

Scott stated that “For me, the British Raj is an extended metaphor [and] I don’t think a writer chooses his metaphors. They choose him.” From his earliest experiences in north London, he felt himself an outsider in his own country. As his biographer comments,

Probably only an outsider could have commanded the long, lucid perspectives he brought to bear on the end of the British raj, exploring with passionate, concentrated attention a subject still generally treated as taboo, or fit only for historical romance and adventure stories. However Scott saw things other people would sooner not see, and he looked too close for comfort. His was a bleak, stern, prophetic vision and, like Forster's, it has come to seem steadily more accurate with time.

The Jewel in the Crown has at its heart the confrontation between Hari Kumar, the young, English-public-school educated Indian liberal, and the grammar-school scholarship-boy turned police superintendent Ronald Merrick who both hates and is attracted to Kumar and seeks to destroy him after Daphne Manners, the English girl who is in love with Kumar and has been courted by Merrick, is raped.

Critics have seen this conflict as one fundamentally influenced by Scott’s own deeply-divided bisexual nature, with Kumar representing everything young, bright, and forward-looking that had been brutally crushed in Scott’s own youth. At the same time Merrick, probably (but not absolutely certainly) a repressed homosexual, with authoritarian leanings and an arrogant sense of his own racial standing, is partly a self-portrait in which Scott confronted his own and his compatriots' defensive impulse to racial and personal self-aggrandisement, and to moral and political pretence. The result is widely seen as a substantial, and to date definitive, fictional exploration both of the underbelly and of the moral workings of the Raj in India.

In 1980, Granada Television filmed Staying On, with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson as Tusker Smalley and his wife Lucy, famously advertised at the time as "Reunited for the first time since Brief Encounter". The success of its first showing on British television in December 1980 encouraged Granada Television to embark on the much greater project of making "The Raj Quartet" into a major fourteen-part television series known as The Jewel in the Crown, first broadcast in the UK in early 1984 and subsequently in the US and many Commonwealth countries. It was rebroadcast in the UK in 1997 as part of the 50th anniversary celebrations of Indian independence, and in 2001 the British Film Institute voted it as 22nd in the all time best British television programmes. It has also been adapted as a nine-part BBC Radio 4 dramatisation under its original title in 2005. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews
Staying On provides a sort of postscript to [Scott's] deservedly acclaimed "The Raj Quartet".... He has, as it were, summoned up the Raj's ghost in Staying On.... It is the story of the living death, in retirement, and the final end of a walk-on character from the quartet.... Scott has completed the task of covering in the form of a fictional narrative the events leading up to India's partition and the achievement of independence in 1947. It is, on any showing, a creditable achievement.
Malcolm Muggeridge - New York Times Book Review

Scott's vision is both precise and painterly. Like an engraver cross-hatching in the illusion of fullness, he selects nuances that will make his characters take on depth and poignancy.
Jean G. Zorn - New York Times Book Review

Staying On far transcends the events of its central action... [The work] should help win for Scot...the reputation he deserves—as one of the best novelists to emerge from Britain's silver age.
Robert Towers - Newsweek

A graceful comic coda to the earlier song of India.... No one writing knows or can evoke an Anglo-Indian setting better than Scott.
Paul Gray - Time

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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 Staying On:

1. Why do the Smalleys not return to England after Indian independence? Might their decision have been different in the England that is today?

2. As Tusker says, "I still think we were right to stay on, though I don't think of it any longer as staying on, but just as hanging on." What does he mean...and do you think he was "right to stay on"? Does staying on suggest passivity and weakness...or strength and endurance...or what?

3. What effect does Tusker's death at the onset of the book have on the way you read the work? Why would Scott have started the novel with his death? When you revisit his death at the end of the book, has your perspective changed?

4. Talk about the irony of the Smalleys' stature in the newly independent India—their place in the economic-social hierarchy Lucy, for instance, feels she has become "a black sheep in reverse exposure"—what does she mean? For the Smalleys and others who stayed on, are they receiving their "just deserts"? Or not.

5. Discuss how Scott limns the portraits of his characters, particularly Tusker and Lucy. Do his portrayals capture their emotional and psychological complexity? In other words, does he create real people?

6. How would you describe the Smalleys' relationship? What is it (or who is it) that makes the marriage so difficult? In what way did they sacrifice their happiness—was it circumstance... or habit...or what? Is one more to blame than the other—do you sympathize with one more than the other?

6. Talk about how Lucy views her situation? What makes her plight so precarious?

7. Scott uses varying perspectives—Smalleys, Ibrahim, and Mr. Bhoolabhoy—to tell his story. How does each of the characters' reflections reveal the fading days of the Raj and the new society which took its place?

8. Talk about Mr. Bhoolabhoy and his wife. Funny or maddening? In what way was Frank Bhoolabhoy shaped by the Raj—and perhaps left stranded, as much as the Smalleys? What does that say about the effects of colonialism?

9. Talk about Mr. Bhoolabhoy's reaction to the arrival of the new Anglican priest, from south India. How does the priest revitalize the community—and what might this suggest about the possibility of blending cultures?

9. Have you read any novel of the "Raj Quartet," perhaps The Jewel in the Crown (or seen the 1984 BBC series)? If so, in what way might Staying On be considered an epilogue to the Quartet?

10. What is the thematic significance of The newer Shiraz overshadowing Smith's Hotel...and Tusker's dying hand clutching the notice of Mrs. Bhoolabhoy's sale of Smith's?

11. Consider watching Granada TV's 1980 adaptation of Staying On with Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson. Does the film reveal new insights? Is it a faithful adaptation?

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

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The Saturday Wife
Naomi Ragen, 2007
St. Martin's Press
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780312352394

Summary
With more than half a million copies of her novels sold, Naomi Ragen has connected with the hearts of readers as well as reviewers who have met her work with unanimous praise. In The Saturday Wife, Ragen utilizes her fluid writing style—rich with charm and detail—to break new ground as she harnesses satire to expose a world filled with contradiction.

Beautiful, blonde, materialistc Delilah Levy steps into a life she could have never imagined when in a moment of panic she decides to marry a sincere Rabbinical student. But the reality of becoming a paragon of virtue for a demanding and hypocritical congregation leads sexy Delilah into a vortex of shocking choices which spiral out of comtrol into a catastrophe which is as sadly believeable as it is wildly amusing.

Told with immense warmth, fascinating insight, and wicked humor, The Saturday Wife depicts the pitched and often losing battle of all of us as we struggle to hold on to our faith and our values amid the often delicious temptations of the modern world. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—July 10, 1949
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Brooklyn College; M.A., Hebrew University
   of Jerusalem
• Currently—lives in Jerusalme, Israel

Naomi Ragen is the author of seven novels, including several international bestsellers, and her weekly email columns on life in the Middle East are read and distributed by thousands of subscribers worldwide.  An American, she has lived in Jerusalem for the past thirty-nine years and was recently voted one of the three most popular authors in Israel. (From the publisher.)

More
Ragen’s first three novels, which described the lives of ultra-Orthodox Jewish women in Israel and the United States, dealt with themes that had not previously been addressed in that society's literature: wife-abuse (Jephte’s Daughter: 1989), adultery (Sotah: 1992) and rape (The Sacrifice of Tamar: 1995). Reaction to these novels in the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox communities was mixed. Some hailed her as a pioneer who for the first time exposed and opened to public discussion problems which the communities had preferred to pretend did not exist, while others criticized her for “hanging out the dirty laundry” for everyone to see, thus embarrassing the rabbis who were believed by many to be effectively dealing with these problems “behind the scenes” and also putting “ammunition in the hands of the anti-Semites.”

Her next novel (The Ghost of Hannah Mendes: 1998) told the story of a Sephardic family brought back from the abyss of assimilation by the spirit of their ancestor Gracia Mendes (a true historical figure), a 16th century Portuguese crypto-Jew who risked her life and her considerable fortune to practice her religion in secret.

Chains Around the Grass (2002) is a semi-autobiographical novel of the author’s childhood which dealt with the failure of the American dream for her parents.

In The Covenant (2004) Ragen dealt with the contemporary theme of an ordinary family sucked into the horror of Islamic terrorism.

The Saturday Wife (2007), the story of a rabbi's wayward wife, is loosely based on Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and is a satire of modern Jewish Orthodoxy.

Ragen is also known as a playwright. Her 2001 drama, Women’s Minyan, tells the story of an ultra-Orthodox woman who, upon fleeing from her adulterous and abusive husband, finds that he has manipulated the rabbinical courts to deprive her of the right to see or speak to her twelve children. The story is based on a true incident. Women’s Minyan ran for six years in Israel's National Theatre and has been staged in the United States, Canada and Argentina. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Review
Like Emma Bovary, Delilah Goldgrab longs for a better life. A Queens yeshiva girl, Delilah is prayerfully remorseful after fornicating with young, opportunistic Yitzie Polinsky, and quickly marries mediocre rabbinical student Chaim Levi, who is unable to provide her with a house, much less the glossy upper-middle-class life she longs for. When Chaim accepts a position as the rabbi of an affluent Connecticut congregation, Delilah has the opportunity to indulge her ideas about happiness as the congregation's rebbitzin, with deliciously disastrous consequences. It's hard to like selfish, clueless Delilah or anyone else here: the pleasure of this novel is in its mercilessness, with Ragen (The Covenant) raising the stakes until the very end.
Publishers Weekly


The adventures of Delilah and Chaim provide a cautionary tale about the difficulties faced by those attempting to maintain traditional values while struggling with the temptations of the outside world. Ragen tells this story with insight and humor, vividly illustrating the consequences of lashon hara (gossip). This is Jewish chick lit with a message. —Barbara Bibe
Booklist


Conniving rebbitzin topples a wealthy Jewish community. Delilah Goldgrab is as acquisitive as they come. As a young girl, she sets her sights on living in a Woodmere Tudor mansion with a large household staff. When she fails to ensnare a wealthy husband from Bernstein Rabbinical College, Delilah settles for the noble dullard, Chaim Levi. Chaim's grandfather is a prominent Rabbi in the Bronx, and Chaim is heir to a tiny synagogue. When Delilah senses she's getting locked into a lower-class life, she tramples on Chaim's unsuspecting congregants and begins her mad grab at affluence. Doltish Chaim refuses to acknowledge Delilah's sins. Instead, he surrenders to her prodding and applies for a position at the notorious Swallow Lake temple. Swallow Lake's members are fabulously wealthy and famously divided in their faith. Chaim knows he's signing on for an impossible task when he accepts the Rabbi position, but he's helpless. Delilah, now pregnant, calls all the shots in this family. The community quickly sours on Delilah's lackadaisical piety. Delilah tries to distract her critics by luring a fabulously wealthy Russian Jew and his wife into the fold and succeeds in dismantling the congregation. Ragen (The Covenant, 2004, etc.) does an apt job illustrating the numerous demands upon a rabbi and his wife (the rebbitzin). But she fails to make the job appear to be an unbearable burden—these guys are the equivalent to middle management in a large corporation. The book would be far more entertaining if Delilah possessed admirable traits; alas, she is bland in her depravity. Endowed with blonde hair, a voluptuous figure, the first name of a "wicked whore" and a surname that is synonymous with money grubbing, she does not come across as a morally upstanding member of the shul. For the non-Orthodox crowd, the scandals will seem tame, but the culture exotic. For those enmeshed in Ragen's culture, this book may stir up some controversy: Have rabbis become too beholden to their benefactors? Revealing, if long-winded, examination of contemporary Orthodox Judaism.
Kirkus Reviews

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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 Saturday Wife:

1. What's to like about Delilah...anything? How would you describe her? If you can't identify with the heroine, is it possible to enjoy a book? If so, how? Or...do you actually like Delilah?

2. What about the good rabbi? Some find it difficult to sympathize with his passivity in the face of his wife. What do you think?

3. How do Delilah's high school experiences affect her ethical and spiritual development? Think about those experiences in light of the social pressures many teenage girls face.

4. Talk about how Orthodox Judaism views the role of women? Do those attitudes and practices explain, perhaps even excuse, Delilah's actions?

5. Why was the Swallow Lake synagogue blacklisted from the Orthodox community? What does that banishment say about the congregants...or about the tenets of Orthodox Judaism?

6. What is Ragen getting at in this book? What aspects of the Jewish faith is she satirizing? How, for instance, has the author used names in the novel to further her satire?

7. Talk about the Shammanovs and their over-the-top bar mitzvah. At what point did your sham-o-meter kick in...when did you become suspicious? Or did you?

8. Do you agree with this excerpt from the book's end?

Fences just gave certain people the urge to climb over or crawl under. FORBIDDEN, KEEP OUT! was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. If you thought you might get away with it... then fences simply become a welcome challenge.

9. Does Delilah learn anything by the end of the novel?

10. Did you learn anything—or gain insights into Orthodox Judaism? What did you find most interesting, surprising, or disturbing?

11. Talk about parts of the book you found funny.

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

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The Condition 
Jennifer Haigh, 2008
HarperCollins
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780060755799


Summary
The Condition tells the story of the McKotches, a proper New England family that comes apart during one fateful summer. The year is 1976, and the family has embarked on their annual vacation to Cape Cod. One day, Frank is struck by his thirteen-year-old daughter, Gwen, standing a full head shorter than her younger cousin. At that moment he knows something is terribly wrong with his only daughter.

Twenty years after Gwen's diagnosis with Turner's Syndrome—a genetic condition that traps her forever in the body of a child—all five family members are still dealing with the fallout. Frank and Paulette are acrimoniously divorced. Billy is dutiful but distant. His brother, Scott, awakens from a pot-addled adolescence to a soul-killing job and a regrettable marriage. And Gwen is silent and emotionally aloof, until she falls in love for the first time. And suddenly, once again, the family's world is tilted on its axis.

Compassionate yet unflinchingly honest, witty and almost painfully astute, The Condition explores the power of family mythologies. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—October 16, 1968
• Where—Barnesboro, Pennsylvania, USA
• Education—B.A., Dickenson College; M.F.A., Iowa Writers'
   Workshop
• Awards—2002 James A. Michener Fellowship; 2003;
   PEN/Hemingway Award for Outstanding First Fiction, Mrs.
   Kimble; 2006 PEN/L.L. Winship Award for outstanding book
   by a New England author, Baker Towers
• Currently—lives in Boston, Massachusetts


The daughter of a librarian and a high school English teacher, Jennifer Haigh was raised with her older brother in the coal-mining town of Barnesboro, Pennsylvania. Although she began writing as a student at Dickinson College, her undergraduate degree was in French. After college, she moved to France on a Fulbright Scholarship, returning to the U.S. in 1991.

Haigh spent most of the decade working in publishing, first for Rodale Press in Pennsylvania, then for Self magazine in New York City. It was not until her 30th birthday that she was bitten by the writing bug. She moved to Baltimore (where it was cheaper to live), supported herself as a yoga instructor, and began to publish short stories in various literary magazines. She was accepted into the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop and enrolled in their two-year M.F.A. program. While she was at Iowa, she completed the manuscript for her first novel, Mrs. Kimble. She also caught the attention of a literary agent scouting the grad school for new talent and was signed to a two-book contract. Haigh was astonished at how quickly everything came together.

Mrs. Kimble became a surprise bestseller when it was published in 2003. Readers and critics alike were bowled over by this accomplished portrait of a "serial marrier" and the three wives whose lives he ruins. The Washington Post raved, "It's a clever premise, backed up by three remarkably well-limned Mrs. Kimbles, each of whom comes tantalizingly alive thanks to the author's considerable gift for conjuring up a character with the tiniest of details." The novel went on to win the PEN/Hemingway Award for Outstanding First Fiction.

Skeptics who wondered if Haigh's success had been mere beginner's luck were set straight when Baker Towers appeared in 2005. A multigenerational saga set in a Pennsylvania coal-mining community in the years following WWII, the novel netted Haigh the PEN/L.L. Winship Award for outstanding book by a New England author. (Haigh lives in Massachusetts.) The New York Times called it "captivating," and Kirkus Reviews described it as "[a]lmost mythic in its ambition, somewhere between Oates and Updike country, and thoroughly satisfying." High praise indeed for a sophomore effort.

In fact, Haigh continues to produce dazzling literary fiction in both its short and long forms, much of it centered on the interwoven lives of families. When asked why she returns so often to this theme, she answers, " In fact, every story is a family story: we all come from somewhere, and it's impossible to write well-developed characters without giving a great deal of thought to their childhood environments, their early experiences, and whose genetic material they're carrying around."

Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:

• All my life I've fantasized about being invisible. I love the idea of watching people when they don't know they're being observed. Novelists get to do that all the time!

• When I was a child, I told my mother I wanted to grow up to be a genie, a gas station attendant, or a writer. I hope I made the right choice.

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

Light Years by James Salter. Probably the most honest book ever written about men and women—sad, gorgeous, unflinching.

• Favorite authors: James Salter and Vladimir Nabokov. For a writer, reading them is like taking vitamins. (Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

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Book Reviews
Haigh has demonstrated in her previous two novels, Mrs. Kimble and Baker Towers, an unerring ability to chronicle the ways people delude themselves—those lies we tell ourselves daily to survive. And in The Condition her touch with characterization is usually sure. Occasionally, Paulette's monumental repression and Billy's gay domesticity feel a tad cliched, but generally Haigh's characters are layered and authentic. Moreover, one would have to have a heart of stone not to care for them and follow their small sagas…I cared so much for each member of the McKotch clan that I was…happy to have spent time with them, and to have witnessed them growing up and old and, finally, learning to accept who they are.
Chris Bohjalian - Washington Post


Haigh's third novel relates the heartbreaking story of Gwen McKotche, a young woman inflicted with Turner's syndrome, which will forever trap her in the body of a child, and her family's trials and tribulations. With flawed yet honest and caring characters, Jennifer Van Dyck relates the story in a believable voice drenched in sadness without editorializing. Van Dyck delivers a solid reading that displays her knack for emotional storytelling while still allowing her audience the privilege of commanding their own emotions for the majority of the tale. Van Dyck never tries to force sympathy and tears from her audience, but will have no problem bringing them to the surface of each listener.
Publishers Weekly


PEN/Hemingway Award winner Haigh's third novel focuses on the now disconnected members of a once close-knit New England family. The summer of 1976 is the last Paulette and Frank McKotch and their three children will spend together as a family at her parents' Cape Cod cottage before the house is sold and Frank and Paulette are divorced. Cold but needy Paulette, who dropped out of Wellesley to marry, and warm but self-centered Frank, a scientist and professor at MIT, are sexually incompatible-he wants more and she wants less. Their already shaky marriage falls apart when their 13-year-old daughter Gwen is diagnosed with a chromosome deficiency that keeps her from developing physically in puberty; Frank wants to pursue medical solutions while Paulette wants to protect Gwen from pain. Cut ahead 20 years to the mid-'90s. Frank and Paulette have never remarried. Both are painfully lonely. Bill, their oldest son, has become a cardiologist in Manhattan. He is in a genuinely loving relationship with another man, but he keeps his sexuality a secret from his parents, and completely avoids Frank, who always favored him. Youngest son Scott, the family black sheep, has fallen into marriage with a woman whose coarseness is portrayed almost as a moral deficiency. At 30, teaching at a mediocre private school, he barely supports her and their two children. Although he lives in nearby Connecticut, he too rarely sees his parents or siblings. At 34, Gwen still has a child's body. She lives a lonely life working in a museum. On a vacation in the Caribbean, Gwen falls in love with her guide. Paulette, a conventional snob and overly protective mother, sends Scott to find Gwen, settingin motion a chain of reactions that ultimately force each of the McKotches to reexamine their relationships with each other and with themselves. After the lovely opening, filled with genuine insight and touching lyricism, Haigh overly orchestrates her characters' lives.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions 
1. Discuss the significance of the book's title. What else might it refer to other than Gwen's Turner's syndrome?

2. In what ways does Gwen's condition reverberate throughout the McKotch family? What do Frank and Paulette's differing opinions about how to treat Gwen's condition reveal about their personalities and also about their relationship?

3. Paulette and Frank's marriage was rife with misunderstandings on both sides. Was one person more to blame than the other for their break-up? Of the two, who did you find to be more sympathetic? Why does Billy blame his father for the divorce?

4. What was your impression of Paulette? Do you suppose the author meant for her to be a likeable character?

5. Discuss Paulette's relationship with Donald and her infatuation with Gil Pyle. What did Paulette find in her relationship with Donald that she did not with Frank?

6. Frank often compares his working-class background in a Pennsylvania mining town with Paulette's pedigreed family, musing that everything comes down to upbringing. How does his children's upbringing affect the paths they take in life? Was Frank a bad father, as Paulette seemed to believe?

7. On the surface the three McKotch children are extremely different. In what ways, if any, are they alike?

8. Why does Gwen distance herself from her family both physically and emotionally? Why does she ultimately decide to forgive Rico and Scott but not her mother?

9. Do you agree with Paulette's decision to send Scott to St. Raphael to bring Gwen home? Why is it so difficult for Paulette to believe that a man might be attracted to Gwen? Is she merely being a protective mother?

10. Gwen ends up living on St. Raphael, worlds away from her isolated life in Pittsburgh and Concord before that. What does she find on the Caribbean island that she hasn't anywhere else? Why does she reconcile with Rico?

11. What prompts Billy to finally reveal to his family that he's gay? How do Paulette and Frank each react to the news?

12. By the time the family reconvenes at the Captain's House, what realizations has Scott come to about his life—professionally and romantically, as well as his role as a father? In what ways have the others changed by the time of the reunion?

13. Sense of place is an important theme in The Condition. How do the opening scenes at the Captain's House set the tone for the rest of the novel? What do the main characters' living spaces, from Paulette's 200-year-old Concord house to Billy's meticulously decorated New York City apartment, reveal about them?

14. What do you suppose the future holds for the five members of the McKotch family?

15. Jennifer Haigh unfolds the narrative from the alternating perspectives of Frank, Paulette, and their three children. In what ways did this enhance your reading of the story?

16. Overall, what are your thoughts about the way the author presents the McKotches? Did you find their story to be a realistic and believable one?

17. If you have read Jennifer Haigh's previous novels, Baker Towers and Mrs. Kimble, discuss the similarities and differences between those two books and The Condition.
(Questions issued by publishers.)

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Illumination Night
Alice Hoffman, 1987
Penguin Group USA
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780425183267


Summary
Beginning on the night of the Grand Illumination, a festival of lanterns held each summer on Martha’s Vineyard, this novel is a modern chronicle of a marriage and a bittersweet exploration of an extraordinary passion.

Illumination Night follows the lives of a young blond giant who is as beautiful as he is frightening; an old woman at the end of her life whose last mission is to save her granddaughter’s soul; a family torn apart by a wife’s fears and a husband’s unrealized desires—and the high school girl who comes to Martha’s Vineyard against her will, who steals husbands and cars, and who will bring everyone together in a web of yearning, sin, and ultimate redemption.

Both riveting and reflective, this is a story of parenthood and friendship, self-protection and generosity, dream and disillusionment. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—March 16, 1952
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Adelphi Univ.; M.A., Stanford Univ.
• Currently—lives in Boston, Massachusetts


Born in the 1950s to college-educated parents who divorced when she was young, Alice Hoffman was raised by her single, working mother in a blue-collar Long Island neighborhood. Although she felt like an outsider growing up, she discovered that these feelings of not quite belonging positioned her uniquely to observe people from a distance. Later, she would hone this viewpoint in stories that captured the full intensity of the human experience.

After high school, Hoffman went to work for the Doubleday factory in Garden City. But the eight-hour, supervised workday was not for her, and she quit before lunch on her first day! She enrolled in night school at Adelphi University, graduating in 1971 with a degree in English. She went on to attend Stanford University's Creative Writing Center on a Mirrellees Fellowship. Her mentor at Stanford, the great teacher and novelist Albert Guerard, helped to get her first story published in the literary magazine Fiction. The story attracted the attention of legendary editor Ted Solotaroff, who asked if she had written any longer fiction. She hadn't — but immediately set to work. In 1977, when Hoffman was 25, her first novel, Property Of, was published to great fanfare.

Since that remarkable debut, Hoffman has carved herself a unique niche in American fiction. A favorite with teens as well as adults, she renders life's deepest mysteries immediately understandable in stories suffused with magic realism and a dreamy, fairy-tale sensibility. (In a 1994 article for the New York Times, interviewer Ruth Reichl described the magic in Hoffman's books as a casual, regular occurrence — "...so offhand that even the most skeptical reader can accept it.") Her characters' lives are transformed by uncontrollable forces — love and loss, sorrow and bliss, danger and death.

Hoffman's 1997 novel Here on Earth was selected as an Oprah Book Club pick, but even without Winfrey's powerful endorsement, her books have become huge bestsellers — including three that have been adapted for the movies: Practical Magic (1995), The River King (2000), and her YA fable Aquamarine (2001).

Hoffman is a breast cancer survivor; and like many people who consider themselves blessed with luck, she believes strongly in giving back. For this reason, she donated her advance from her 1999 short story collection Local Girls to help create the Hoffman Breast Center at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, MA

Extras
From a 2003 Barnes & Noble interview:

• Hoffman has written a number of children's books, including Fireflies: A Winter's Tale (1999), Horsefly (2000), and Moondog (2004).

• Aquamarine was written for Hoffman's best friend, Jo Ann, who dreamed of the freedom of mermaids as she battled brain cancer.

• Here on Earth is a modern version of Hoffman's favorite novel, Wuthering Heights.

• Hoffman has been honored with the Massachusetts Book Award for her teen novel Incantation.

• When asked what books most influenced her life or career, here's what she said:

Edward Eager's brilliant series of suburban magic: Half Magic, Magic by the Lake, Magic or Not, Knight's Castle, The Time Garden, Seven-Day Magic, The Well Wishers. Anything by Ray Bradbury, Shirley Jackson, J. D. Salinger, Grace Paley. My favorite book: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. 

(Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)

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Book Reviews
Alice Hoffman...has enough power of empathy to make her characters matter to us. Daringly mixing comedy with tragedy, and the quotidian with the fabulous, she has created a narrative that somehow makes myth out of the sticky complexities of contemporary marriage.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - New York Times

Subtle touches here and there make this intelligent novel shine. Ms. Hoffman knows how to tell a story in clear language and how to avoid subordinating the meanderings of temperament to logic or plot.
Gwyneth Craven - New York Times Book Review

Alice Hoffman hits bull's eyes on the incomprehensions between the young and the old, on the magic and pain of ordinary life. She is erotic and romantic...funny...clever and humane.
London Times

Not-so-delicate questions are raised in a wonderfully delicate way in Alice Hoffman’s latest novel.... Explorations of the tangled strands of parenthood and friendship, self-protection and generosity, dream and disillusionment are made achingly vivid by Hoffman’s ability to ground them in the finely etched details of her characters’ daily lives.”
Newsday (Long Island)

One of the best writers we have today-insightful, funny, intelligent, with a distinctive voice.
Cleveland Plain Dealer

With an eye for household details and respect for daily events, Hoffman (Fortune's Daughter) unleashes the mythic forcefulness of ordinary life in this polished story of love and loneliness set on the island of Martha's Vineyard. Simon is in his fourth year and small even for his age when he sees white-robed Elizabeth Renny, a neighbor in her 75th, tumble out her attic window "like a cloud.'' In her convalescence, Elizabeth is cared for by her rebellious teen-aged granddaughter Jody, sent from off-island. Jody sets her sights on Simon's father, Andre, who restores antique motorcycles, raising doubts and fears in Vonny, Simon's mother, Andre's wife. Elizabeth recovers; Jody pines and plots for the taciturn Andre; Simon doesn't grow; and Vonny's anxieties bloom into full-fledged agoraphobia. Seasons advance. Jody learns the limits of her desires and meets a freakishly tall eggman; a child dies, another grows; Elizabeth decides she'd rather live than die; and Vonny faces her fears. Illumination Night, an annual celebration on Martha's Vineyard when Victorian houses surrounding a park and bandstand are lit with hundreds of magical Japanese lanterns, provides apt title and image for this shimmering, radiant tale.
Publishers Weekly

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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 Illumination Night:

1. Try thinking of Illumination Night as a fable, with symbolic elements that reveal much about the state of its characters' lives. How, for instance, does the opening set the stage, symbolically, for the events that follow in the novel. At one point, young Simon's can't see the path he's walking on, but sees a distance filled with light. He and his mother can peer into houses, as if watching a play.

2. What do you think of Vonny? What is happening in her marriage with Andre? At one point she thinks to herself, "you are simply a woman practicing the art of real life." What does she mean? What causes her agoraphobia?

3. How would you describe Jody? What has made her so angry and rebellious? What is her relationship with her grandmother, Elizabeth Renny? Could you accept her falling in love with a giant?

4. What brings Vonny and Jody, ostensibly rivals, together?

5. The story takes place on an island, land isolated by water. In what ways are the characters like islands? And how do they begin to connect with one another?

6. Talk about the other characters: Simon, who yearns to grow and who drives his bike down a set of stairs; Elizabeth who seems to be getting smaller and younger, who is blind but suddenly sees everything; and Eddie the giant who paints miniatures and tends his garden at night; even the dog who seems to have human empathy.

7. Are you satisfied with the ending of this novel? Why...or why not?

8. Alice Hoffman has said she believes in the magic that underlies everyday life. How does that belief get expressed in Illumination Night?

9. If you've read other novels by Hoffman, how does this one compare? If not, does Illumination Night inspire you to read more of her works?

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

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