The Cookbook Collector 
Allegra Goodman, 2010
Random House
394 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780385340854


Summary 
Heralded as “a modern day Jane Austen” by USA Today, National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author Allegra Goodman has compelled and delighted hundreds of thousands of readers. Now, in her most ambitious work yet, Goodman weaves together the worlds of Silicon Valley and rare book collecting in a delicious novel about appetite, temptation, and fulfillment.

Emily and Jessamine Bach are opposites in every way: Twenty-eight-year-old Emily is the CEO of Veritech, twenty-three-year-old Jess is an environmental activist and graduate student in philosophy. Pragmatic Emily is making a fortune in Silicon Valley, romantic Jess works in an antiquarian bookstore. Emily is rational and driven, while Jess is dreamy and whimsical. Emily’s boyfriend, Jonathan, is fantastically successful. Jess’s boyfriends, not so much—as her employer George points out in what he hopes is a completely disinterested way.

Bicoastal, surprising, rich in ideas and characters, The Cookbook Collector is a novel about getting and spending, and about the substitutions we make when we can’t find what we’re looking for: reading cookbooks instead of cooking, speculating instead of creating, collecting instead of living. But above all it is about holding on to what is real in a virtual world: love that stays. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio 
• Birth—1967
• Where—New York City, New York, USA
• Raised—in Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
• Education—A.B., Harvard University; Ph.D., Stanford
   University
• Currently—lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Goodman was raised a Conservative Jew in Honolulu, Hawaii. She graduated from Punahou School in 1985. Her mother, the late Madeline Goodman, was a genetics and women's studies professor then assistant vice president at the University of Hawaii at Manoa for many years before moving on to Vanderbilt University in the 1990s. Her father, Lenn E. Goodman, is a professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt.

Goodman attended Harvard University, where she earned an A.B. degree and met her husband, David Karger. Both were regulars at Harvard Hillel, and prayed in Harvard Hillel Orthodox Minyan. They then went on to do graduate work at Stanford University, where Goodman earned a Ph.D. degree in English literature.

Goodman's younger sister, Paula Fraenkel, is an oncologist. Fraenkel's experience in research labs is one of the inspiratons for Goodman's 2006 novel Intuition.

Goodman and Karger live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Karger is a researcher in computer science at MIT. They have four children, three boys and a girl.

Writings
Goodman wrote and illustrated her first novel at the age of seven, which was an instant hit in the Goodman family. She is, however, more widely known for her adult writings, which include The Family Markowitz (1996); Kaaterskill Falls (1998); Paradise Park (2001); Intuition (2006); The Other Side of the Island (2008); The Cookbook Collector (2010). She as also written a short story collection, Total Immersion (1989) and other assorted short stories. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews 
Allegra Goodman's new novel has so many appealing ingredients. Where, then, to start the list? Perhaps, as with food labels, it would be best to begin with the biggest: an irresistible story. Then add four strong characters: two sisters, and the two men who orbit them. Then there's the narrative voice: sweet but not cloyingly so, nourishing but not heavy, serving up zesty nuggets of truth. And the spicing is piquant but not too assertive…If you're hankering for a feast of love, let yourself fall under the spell of Allegra Goodman's abundantly delicious tale. You won't leave hungry.
Dominique Browning - New York Times

Fans of Goodman's lovely, nuanced novels have a treat in store with this tale of two sisters.
Entertainment Weekley

(Starred review.) If any contemporary author deserves to wear the mantel of Jane Austen, it's Goodman, whose subtle, astute social comedies perfectly capture the quirks of human nature. This dazzling novel is Austen updated for the dot-com era, played out between 1999 and 2001 among a group of brilliant risk takers and truth seekers. Still in her 20s, Emily Bach is the CEO of Veritech, a Web-based data-storage startup in trendy Berkeley. Her boyfriend, charismatic Jonathan Tilghman, is in a race to catch up at his data-security company, ISIS, in Cambridge, Mass. Emily is low-key, pragmatic, kind, serene—the polar opposite of her beloved younger sister, Jess, a crazed postgrad who works at an antiquarian bookstore owned by a retired Microsoft millionaire. When Emily confides her company's new secret project to Jonathan as a proof of her love, the stage is set for issues of loyalty and trust, greed, and the allure of power. What is actually valuable, Goodman's characters ponder: a company's stock, a person's promise, a forest of redwoods, a collection of rare cookbooks? Goodman creates a bubble of suspense as both Veritech and ISIS issue IPOs, career paths collide, social values clash, ironies multiply, and misjudgments threaten to destroy romantic desire. Enjoyable and satisfying, this is Goodman's (Intuition) most robust, fully realized and trenchantly meaningful work yet.
Publishers Weekly

(Starred review.) Crisp, accomplished Emily Markowitz is CEO of a data-storage startup in late 1990s California. Her sister, Jessica, is a messy, passionate graduate student in philosophy who's involved with the charismatic leader of Tree Savers and works in a rare-books store owned by the older, slightly grumpy George. George got rich off of Microsoft and now follows his first love, and he's impressed when Jess manages something brilliant with a woman who wants but doesn't want to part with an astonishing cookbook collection. Frantically different, the sisters are still bound by memories of the mother they lost as children; Emily strains to persuade Jess to invest in her startup even as Jess strains to see what Emily sees in her fiancé, go-getter Jonathan, who has his own startup back East. Meanwhile, their father, who appreciates techie overachiever Emily more than wise Jess, is strangely resistant to the Bialystokers moving in next door. Alas, 9/11 brings not just family tragedy but the revelation of some uncomfortable truths and a realignment of relationships. Verdict: Do these folks sound like types? They absolutely are not. Goodman (Kaaterskill Falls) is remarkably successful in creating rich, engaging characters and a complex story of love and identity that reads like life itself. Highly recommended. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal

Goodman asks the big questions about what money can—and cannot—buy, and how we should live our lives. To those questions, of course, she provides no easy answers.
Bookmarks Magazine

(Starred review.) From mysticism to algorithms, IPOs, and endangered trees and souls, Goodman spins a glimmering tale, spiked with hilarious banter, of ardent individualists, imperiled love, and incandescent interpretations of the mutability and timelessness of the human condition. —Donna Seaman
Booklist

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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 Cookbook Collector:

1. Start with the obvious: the two sisters, Emily and Jess Bach. How are they different? Do they share any traits in common? How would you describe their relationship to one another? Do you identify or sympathsize with one over the other?

2. What do you think about George Friedman, a man who tells "his life history with objects"? What does this regard for beautiful objects—and his need to collect them—suggest about his priorities in life?

3. What about the other love interests—especially Jonathan and Leon? Describe them, their obvious differences, and their respective relationships with Emily and Jess?

4. Much has been made, by reviewers and the author herself, of this novel's likeness to Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. Have you read S & S? If so, what similarities do you see? Have you also read The Three Weissmanns of Westport (2010), another sendup of Sense and Sensibility? If so how does Cookbook compare with Weissmanns?

5. On her website, author Allegra Goodman makes this comment about her inspiration for the novel:

I don't cook, but I love to read cookbooks. I know I'm not alone in this, and I began to think about this phenomenon of reading instead of cooking, and dreaming instead of living. I thought—what would it be like to write a novel about hunger? Hunger to taste, to build, to collect, to profit, to love.

How do the ideas expressed here—dreaming rather than living and fulfilling the hunger for life—get played out in the novel?

6. Dismissing the benefit of hindsight, what do you think of Emily's offer to Jess to purchase Veritech's IPO stock at a reduced rate?

7. Emily, again: why does she confide Veritech's secret project to Jonathan? What consequences does sharing that secret have on their relationship? What does it suggest about trust and doubt between two people?

8. How does Jess go about attaining the remarkable cookbook collection? What makes the books so desirable? What is their symbolic significance to the theme (and title)?

9. The novel uses shifting narrators. Why might the author have used such a structure? Do you enjoy the different perspectives...or would you have prefered a single narrative voice?

10. Some readers felt Goodman tries to weave too many subjects into the plotline—IPO's and dot-coms, 9/11, Jewish mysticism, environmentalism, cookbooks, parent-child relationships, materialism, doubt, secrets.... Do you feel the author was successful in pulling all the plot strands together? Or do you agree that too much is, well...too much?

11. How does Goodman's use of co-incidence sit with you? Are the coincidences too blatant, too impossible (i.e., wouldn't the sisters know their mother's maiden name)...or do they work?

12. Do Emily and Jess become more similar by the end of the book—do their differences begin to fade? What does each character learn through the course of the novel? How do they change or grow?

13. Are you satisfied with how the book ends?

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

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State of Wonder
Ann Patchett, 2011
HarperCollins
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062049810


Summary
Ann Patchett raises the bar with State of Wonder, a provocative and ambitious novel set deep in the Amazon jungle.

Research scientist Dr. Marina Singh is sent to Brazil to track down her former mentor, Dr. Annick Swenson, who seems to have disappeared in the Amazon while working on an extremely valuable new drug. The last person who was sent to find her died before he could complete his mission. Plagued by trepidation, Marina embarks on an odyssey into the insect-infested jungle in hopes of finding answers to the questions about her friend's death, her company's future, and her own past.

Once found, Dr. Swenson is as imperious and uncompromising as ever. But while she is as threatening as anything the jungle has to offer, the greatest sacrifices to be made are the ones Dr. Swenson asks of herself, and will ultimately ask of Marina.

State of Wonder is a world unto itself, where unlikely beauty stands beside unimaginable loss. It is a tale that leads the reader into the very heart of darkness, and then shows us what lies on the other side. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—December 2, 1963
• Where—Los Angeles, California, USA
• Raised—Nashville, Tennessee
• Education—B.A., Sarah Lawrence College; M.F.A., University of Iowa
• Awards—Guggenheim Fellowship; PEN/Faulkner Award; Orange Prize
• Currently—lives in Nashville, Tennessee


Ann Patchett is an American author of both fiction and nonfiction. She is perhaps best known for her 2001 novel, Bel Canto, which won her the Orange Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award and brought her nationwide fame.

Patchett was born in Los Angeles, California, and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. Her mother is the novelist Jeanne Ray. Her father, Frank Patchett, who died in 2012 and had been long divorced from her mother, served as a Los Angeles police officer for 33 years, and participated in the arrests of both Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan. The story of Patchett's own family is the basis for her 2016 novel, Commonwealth, about the individual lives of a blended family spanning five decades.

Education and career
Patchett attended St. Bernard Academy, a private Catholic school for girls run by the Sisters of Mercy. Following graduation, she attended Sarah Lawrence College and took fiction writing classes with Allan Gurganus, Russell Banks, and Grace Paley. She managed to publish her first story in The Paris Review before she graduated. After college, she went on to the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa

For nine years, Patchett worked at Seventeen magazine, writing primarily non-fiction; the magazine published one of every five articles she wrote. She said that the magazine's editors could be cruel, but she eventually stopped taking criticism personally. She ended her relationship with the magazine following a dispute with one editor, exclaiming, "I’ll never darken your door again!"

In 1990-91, Patchett attended the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. It was there she wrote The Patron Saint of Liars, which was published in 1992 (becoming a 1998 TV movie). It was where she also met longtime friend Elizabeth McCracken—whom Patchett refers to as her editor and the only person to read her manuscripts as she is writing.

Although Patchett's second novel Taft won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize in fiction in 1994, her fourth book, Bel Canto, was her breakthrough novel. Published in 2001, it was a National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist and won the PEN/Faulkner Award and Britain's Orange Prize.

In addition to her other novels and memoirs, Patchett has written for publications such as The New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, Oprah Magazine, ELLE, GQ, Gourmet, and Vogue. She is the editor of the 2006 volume of the anthology series The Best American Short Stories.

Personal
Patchett was only six when she moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and she lives there still. She is particularly enamored of her beautiful pink brick home on Whitland Avenue where she has lived since 2004 with her husband and dog. When asked by the New York Times where would she go if she could travel anywhere, Patchett responded...

I've done a lot of travel writing, and people like to ask me where I would go if I could go anyplace. My answer is always the same: I would go home. I am away more than I would like, giving talks, selling books, and I never walk through my own front door without thinking: thank-you-thank-you-thank-you.... [Home is] the stable window that opens out into the imagination.

In 2010, when she found that her hometown of Nashville no longer had a good book store, she co-founded Parnassus Books with Karen Hayes; the store opened in November 2011. In 2012, Patchett was on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world. She is a vegan for "both moral and health reasons."

In an interview, she once told Barnes and Noble that the book that influenced her writing more than any other was Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellow.

I think I read it in the tenth grade. My mother was reading it. It was the first truly adult literary novel I had read outside of school, and I read it probably half a dozen times. I found Bellow's directness very moving. The book seemed so intelligent and unpretentious. I wanted to write like that book.

Books
1992 - The Patron Saint of Liars
1994 - Taft
1997 - The Magician's Assistant
2004 - Truth and Beauty: A Friendship
2001 - Bel Canto
2007 - Run
2008 - What Now?
2011 - State of Wonder; The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life
2013 - This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
2016 - Commonwealth
2019 - The Dutch House
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/5/2016.)

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Book Reviews
The large canvas of sweeping moral issues, both personal and global, comes to life through careful attention to details, however seemingly mundane—from ill-fitting shoes and mosquito bites to a woman tenderly braiding another woman’s hair.
O Magazine


Patchett (Bel Canto) is a master storyteller who has an entertaining habit of dropping ordinary people into extraordinary and exotic circumstances to see what they're made of. In this expansive page-turner, Marina Singh, a big pharma researcher, is sent by her married boss/lover to the deepest, darkest corner of the Amazon to investigate the death of her colleague, Anders Eckman, who had been dispatched to check on the progress of the incommunicado Dr. Annick Swenson, a rogue scientist on the cusp of developing a fertility drug that could rock the medical profession (and reap enormous profits). After arriving in Manaus, Marina travels into her own heart of darkness, finding Dr. Swenson's camp among the Lakashi, a gentle but enigmatic tribe whose women go on bearing children until the end of their lives. As Marina settles in, she goes native, losing everything she had held on to so dearly in her prescribed Midwestern life, shedding clothing, technology, old loves, and modern medicine in order to find herself. Patchett's fluid prose dissolves in the suspense of this out-there adventure, a juggernaut of a trip to the crossroads of science, ethics, and commerce that readers will hate to see end.
Publishers Weekly


In this superbly rendered novel, Patchett (Run) takes the reader into the primitive world of the Amazon in Brazil. Pharmacologist Marina Singh from Minnesota works for the pharmaceutical company Vogel. Her colleague Anders Eckman dies in the jungle while trying to locate Dr. Annick Swenson, who has been working on a fertility drug for Vogel by studying the Lakashi people, whose women bear children into old age. Marina's journey to the Amazon to find the uncommunicative and intimidating Dr. Swenson and to discover the details of Anders's death is fraught with poisonous snakes and poisonous memories, malarial mosquitoes and sickening losses, but her time among the Lakashi tribe is transformative. Verdict: Not a sentimental view of a primitive people, Patchett's portrayal is as wonderful as it is frightening and foreign. Patchett exhibits an extraordinary ability to bring the horrors and the wonders of the Amazon jungle to life, and her singular characters are wonderfully drawn. Readers who enjoy exotic locales will especially be interested, but all will find this story powerful and captivating. —Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA
Library Journal


In fluid and remarkably atmospheric prose, Patchett captures not only the sights and sounds of the chaotic jungle environment but also the struggles and sacrifice of dedicated scientists.
Booklist

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Discussion Questions
1. How would you describe Marina Singh? How has the past shaped her character? Discuss the anxieties that are manifested in her dreams.

2. “Marina was from Minnesota. No one ever believed that. At the point when she could have taken a job anywhere she came back because she loved it here. This landscape was the one she understood, all prairie and sky.” What does this description say about the character?

3. Talk about Marina’s relationship with her boss, Mr. Fox. Would you call what they share love? Do they have a future? Why does he want Marina to go to the Amazon? What propels her to agree?

4. What drew Marina to her old mentor, Annik Swenson? Compare and contrast the two women. How does Annick see Marina? Barbara Bovender, one of Annik’s caretakers/gatekeepers tells Marina, “She’s such a force of nature. . . . a woman completely fearless, someone who sees the world without limitations.” Is this a fair assessment of Annik? How would you describe her? How has the elderly doctor’s past shaped the person she is and the choices she has made?

5. Describe the arc of Marina and Annik’s relationship from the novel’s beginning to its end. Do you like these women? Did your opinion of them change as the story unfolded? Why didn’t Marina ever tell anyone the full story of her early experience with Annick?

6. Consider Annik’s research in the Amazon. Should women of any age be able to have children? What are the benefits and the downsides? Why does this ability seem to work in the Lakashi culture? What impact does this research ultimately have on Marina? Whether you are a man or woman, would you want to have a child in your fifties or sixties? How far should modern science go to “improve” on nature?

7. In talking about her experiences with the indigenous people, Annik explains, “the question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you; or if you choose to go on as if you had never arrived. “ How does Marina respond to this? Did Annik practice what she preached? How do these women’s early choices impact later events and decisions? How does Annik’s statement extend beyond the Amazon to the wider world? Would you rather make a “disturbance” in life, or go along quietly?

8. Talk about the Lakashi people and the researchers. How do they get along? Though the scientists try not to interfere with the natives’ way of life, how does their being there impact the Lakashi? What influence do the Lakashi have on the scientists?

9. Would you be able to live in the jungle as the researchers and natives do? Is there an appeal to going back to nature; from being removed from the western constraints of time and our modern technological society?

10. What role does nature and the natural world—the jungle, the Amazon River—play in Marina’s story? How does the environment influence the characters—Marina, Annik, Milton, Anders, Easter, and the others? Annik warns Marina, “It’s difficult to trust yourself in the jungle. Some people gain their bearings over time but for others that adjustment never comes.” Did Marina ultimately “gain her bearings”?

11. Marina travels into hell, into her own Conradian “heart of darkness.” What keeps her in the jungle longer than she’d ever thought she’d stay? How does this journey transform her and her view of herself and the world? Will she ever return—and does she need to?

12. What is your opinion of the choices Marina made regarding Easter? What role did the boy play in the story? Do you think Marina will ever have the child—one like Easter—that she wants?

13. What do you think happens to Marina after she returns home?

14. State of Wonder is rich in symbolism. Identify a few—for example, Eden Prairie (Marina’s Minnesota home), Easter (the young deaf native boy), Milton (the Brazilian guide)—and talk about how Ann Patchett uses them to deepen the story.

15. State of Wonder raises questions of morality and principle, civilization, culture, love, and science. Choose a few events from the book to explore some of these themes.

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The Keep
Jennifer Egan, 2006
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781400079742

Summary
Two cousins, devastated by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a castle in Eastern Europe. The fortress has a bloody history that stretches back hundreds of years. Amid extreme paranoia and eerie silence, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results.

And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a third party — a prisoner, jailed for an unnamed crime—recounts an unforgettable story that brings the crimes of the past and present into stunning alignment. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—September 7, 1962
• Where—Chicago, Illinois, USA
• Raised—San Francisco, California
• Education—University of Pennsylvania; Cambridge
   University (UK)
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize; National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, New York


Jennifer Egan is an American novelist and short story writer who lives in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn, New York City. She is perhaps best known for her 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won both the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

Background/early career
Egan was born in Chicago, Illinois, but grew up in San Francisco, California. She majored in English literature at the University of Pennsylvania and, as an undergrad, dated Steve Jobs, who installed a Macintosh computer in her bedroom. After graduating from Penn, Egan spent two years at St John's College at Cambridge University, supported by a Thouron Award.

In addition to her several novels (see below), Egan has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, among other periodicals. Her journalism appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. She also published a short-story collection in 1993.

A Visit from the Goon Squad
Egan has been hesitant to classify her most noted work, A Visit from the Goon Squad, as either a novel or a short story collection, saying,

I wanted to avoid centrality. I wanted polyphony. I wanted a lateral feeling, not a forward feeling. My ground rules were: every piece has to be very different, from a different point of view. I actually tried to break that rule later; if you make a rule then you also should break it!

The book features genre-bending content such as a chapter entirely formatted as a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. Of her inspiration and approach to the work, she said,

I don’t experience time as linear. I experience it in layers that seem to coexist.… One thing that facilitates that kind of time travel is music, which is why I think music ended up being such an important part of the book. Also, I was reading Proust. He tries, very successfully in some ways, to capture the sense of time passing, the quality of consciousness, and the ways to get around linearity, which is the weird scourge of writing prose.

Bibliography (partial)
Novels
1995 - The Invisible Circus
2001 - Look at Me
2006 - The Keep
2010 - A Visit from the Goon Squad
2017 - Manhattan Beach

Short fiction
1993 - Emerald City (short story collection; released in US in 1996)
2012 - "Black Box" (short story, released on The New Yorker's Twitter account)
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/3/2017.)

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Book Reviews
Egan shares [John] Fowles’s unusual gift for transporting the reader into a world where magical thinking actually works. In Egan’s case it also counts for something real, durable and concrete. The result is a work both prodigiously entertaining and profoundly moving. Ray’s motives for inventing this tale are mostly left to the reader’s inference; what he and Egan show in the end is that art and the imagination are the most powerful means of healing.
Madison Smartt Bell - New York Times

Claustrophobic paranoia, intentionally mediocre writing and a transparent gimmick dominate Egan's follow-up to Look at Me, centered on estranged cousins who reunite in Eastern Europe. Danny, a 36-year-old New York hipster who wears brown lipstick (and whose body can detect Wi-Fi availability), accepts his wealthy cousin Howard's invitation to come to Eastern Europe and help fix up the castle Howard plans on turning into a luxury Luddite hotel (check your cell at the door). In doing so, Danny can't help recalling the childhood prank he played on a young Howie that left the awkward adolescent nearly dead—or so writes Ray, the druggie inmate who's penning this novel-within-a-novel for his prison writing workshop. Subsequent chapters alternate between Danny's fantastical castle travails (it's home to a caustic baroness bent on preserving her family seat) and Ray's prison drama. There are funny asides and trappings (particularly digital technology) along the way, and the sendup of castle narratives generates some chuckles. But the connection between the two narratives, which Egan reveals in intentionally tawdry fashion, feels telegraphed from the first chapter, making for a frustrating read.
Publishers Weekly

Egan's first work after National Book Award finalist Look at Me relates the story of aimless Danny, whose only talent is being in the right place at the right time and knowing the right people. He's so intent on maintaining this sense of supreme cool-which he calls alto-that he drags a satellite dish all the way to central Europe, where rich cousin Howie has bought a castle he plans to turn into a hotel. Howie is looking for a little alto of his own and wants Danny's help, never mind the ancient baroness hanging on heartlessly in the castle's keep. Soon, echoes of the past set Danny's head spinning, and he thinks Howie is out to revenge a nasty childhood prank. The histories of other people get layered in as well: there's Ray, who's writing Danny's story from a jail cell and whose connection to the events emerges slowly, and Holly, the prison writing instructor with a past. Their stories enhance Danny's, but they're not as developed and don't fit in so smoothly, somewhat roughing up the narrative arc toward the end. Yet the novel can be recommended for most collections as an engrossing narrative told in prose that's remarkably fresh and inventive. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal

Two cousins linked by a shameful secret, a convicted murderer and a reformed meth freak are unlikely co-conspirators in this adventurous new novel by Egan (Look at Me, 2001, etc.). Aging party boy Danny is uneasy at the castle recently purchased by his cousin Howie in a remote area of central Europe. True, a "misunderstanding" with some very tough customers made it imperative to get out of New York City, and his cousin sent him a ticket. But has Howie really forgiven Danny for abandoning him in an underground cave when they were teenagers, a trauma that led him to drugs and crime? Well, maybe, since Howie eventually became a bond trader rich enough to retire at 34 and dream of turning the castle into a unique kind of hotel. "Let people be tourists of their own imaginations," he says, explaining that the castle will be free of all electronic distractions. Danny, who panics without his cell phone and Internet connection, is incredulous; when Howie says, "Imagination! It saved my life," his guilty cousin is sure he's making reference to that fateful day in the cave. No sooner are we immersed in this intriguing setup than the author pulls back to reveal that it's the creation of Ray, who's taking a writing course to kill time in jail. This storytelling strategy is hard to pull off, since one tale is almost always more interesting than the other, but Egan's characterizations and plotting are so strong that we're eager to find out where both sets of protagonists are heading even before it becomes clear that Ray is describing something that actually happened to him. As the focus shifts once again, this time to Ray's teacher Holly, all the narrative strands come together to underscore the theme Egan movingly delineates throughout: the power of art to transform even the most twisted and hopeless lives. There are a few slow spots, and the beautiful prose doesn't entirely disguise how wildly improbable the novel's events are, but the characters' emotions are so real, the author's insights so moving, that readers will be happy to be swept away. Intelligent, challenging and exciting.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions
1. What happens when you discover that Danny, in whose story we are immersed from the opening pages, is actually a character in the story being written by Ray, who is in prison [pp. 18–19]? As you proceed, does your involvement in both Danny’s story and Ray’s story remain equal, or does one plot become primary and the other secondary? How does Egan navigate the transitions between these two plots?

2. Jennifer Egan said in an interview that The Keep arose from a visit to a medieval castle. “The revelation was: This is something new to me, something different. I just want to be here for a while. I want this feeling. And for me, that sense of time and place—of atmosphere—predates a character, a story, everything else except a few abstract notions that I want to explore [The Believer, August 2000].” Consider how the setting and situation affect you in the opening chapters. What is the feeling they evoke? How does Danny’s very modern voice affect your response?

3. Guilt plays a large role in the lives of several self-destructive characters in The Keep. How does guilt for past actions shape the present lives of Danny and Holly?

4. The Gothic novel is a genre that emerged in the eighteenth century with Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto. Gothic novels often included crumbling ruins, dark secrets, imprisoned heroines, hidden passages, and so on. Why does Ray choose to write a modern Gothic novel, and how do elements like the castle, the baroness, and the drowned twins resonate against the hyper-modernity of the information age that Danny has so reluctantly left behind?

5. What does the catalog of Danny’s scars and injuries tell us about him? Is he particularly accident prone? Does Danny’s character change over the course of the story?

6. Danny is officially disconnected from his known world when his satellite dish, laboriously carried from Manhattan, falls into the castle’s “Imagination Pool.” Why is this funny? What are some of the other comic scenes in the novel?

7. The series of questions that arises on page 158 is one of the frequent reminders that Danny’s story is being written by a novice. Ray becomes inspired to take writing seriously when Holly tells the class to notice all the locked doors and gates surrounding them. She says, “My job is to show you a door you can open. And she taps the top of her head.” Though Ray is skeptical about Holly’s “cheesy motivational speech,” he feels “something pop in [his] chest” [p. 20]. Why does Ray respond so powerfully to Holly’s suggestion, despite the fact that “it was just figurative language” [p. 20], as he says?

8. The Keep allows us to watch the process of someone becoming a writer. Ray listens to “ghost words” from his fellow convicts’ former lives, writing them down “because every one has the DNA of a whole life in it, a life where those words fit in and made sense.... I save up those words and later on I open up the notebook where I’m keeping the journal Holly told us all to keep and I write them down one by one. And for some reason that puts me in a good mood, like money in the bank” [p. 61]. What does this suggest about close observation, words, and meaning in daily life?

9. The Keep is filled with imagery of doors, windows, towers, tunnels, and stairways. Characters climb in, climb out, explore, are locked in, emerge into the light. Why is this imagery used so consistently, and whose imagination is creating or projecting it? Another major image is the pool: “There was the pool: round, quiet, black. The Imagination Pool” [p. 155]. How are these symbolic elements related to one another?

10. Drug use plays a significant role in the story, with Mick, Danny, Holly, Ray, and many of the prisoners all having been serious addicts or occasional users. How is drug use related to the main ideas in the novel? Can drug use be seen as a corollary to writing in the ways it alters perception and reality?

11. Howard is drawn to the castle because of “the feel of it. All this...history pushing up from underneath” [p. 46]. He goes on to say that in the distant past, “people were constantly seeing ghosts, having visions—they thought Christ was sitting with them at the dinner table, they thought angels and devils were flying around.... Was everyone nuts in medieval times? Doubtful. But their imaginations were more active. Their inner lives were rich and weird” [p. 47]. Later he asks, “What’s real, Danny? Is reality TV real?...Who are you talking to on your cell phone? In the end you have no fucking idea. We’re living in a supernatural world, Danny. We’re surrounded by ghosts” [p. 137]. The baroness tells Danny, “Before my time there were eighty generations of von Ausblinkers whose blood now runs in my veins, and they built this castle and lived and fought and died in it. Now their bodies are dust—they’re part of the soil and the trees and even the air we’re breathing this very minute, and I am all of those people. They’re inside me. They are me. There is no separation between us” [p. 88]. This idea of feeling or seeing or hearing ghosts is central to The Keep. How do you interpret the meaning or meanings of “ghosts” in these and other conversations?

12. Can writing—and the imagination—be redemptive? Ray is serving time for murder; yet as he presents himself to us, it’s difficult to detect any evil in him. Is he a reliable narrator, or not? Is he a likable and even lovable character? Is Holly a reliable judge of character, and does her love for Ray influence your feelings about him?

13. Davis’s shoebox full of dust is a radio that can hear the voices of the dead; he sees this radio as having the same function as Ray’s manuscript: “All this time we’ve been doing the same thing: picking up ghosts. We’re in lockstep, brother. We’re like twins” [p. 106]. How is writing like Davis’s radio? Davis’s comment about himself and Ray as twins is also significant. What is important about this idea of twins, and how might it also include other characters in the novel? Which characters seem to be doubles or shadows of each other?

14. In their shared obsession with castles, dungeons, and the seductive powers of the imagination, are Danny and Howard both interested in reliving their pasts? Does the past return? Does Danny redeem himself for what Danny did to Howard when they were boys?

15. Can you imagine visiting a hotel such as Howard’s? Might the principles underlying the hotel actually be attractive to busy people in the world we now live in? Does Howard’s real power lie not in his money, but in his belief in the imagination, and possibly in his ability to provoke people to change their lives? Is The Keep in part a serious critique of American culture’s obsession with superficiality and the distractions of the moment?

16. Reread pages 148–149, the paragraphs leading up to and immediately following the stabbing of Ray. What elements make this writing so powerful?

17. The Keep tells the stories of three main protagonists: Danny, Ray, and Holly. Whose story is most compelling, and why? Does the final chapter resolve or leave unsettled your understanding of the relationship between these characters? What happens to the two distinct plots—the story of Ray and the story of Danny—at the end of the novel? What happens when Holly dives into the pool in the final scene?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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Paradise 
Toni Morrison, 1997
Penguin Group USA
318 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780452280397


Summary
They shoot the white girl first. With the others they can take their time.

Toni Morrison's first novel since she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature opens with a horrifying scene of mob violence then chronicles its genesis in a small all-black town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by descendants of free slaves as intent on isolating themselves from the outside world as it once was on rejecting them, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear.

But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage.

Paradise is a tour de force of storytelling power, richly imagined and elegantly composed. Morrison challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth, into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and the way a society can turn on itself until it is forced to explode. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio 
• Aka—Chloe Anthony Wofford
• Birth—February 18, 1931
• Where—Lorain, Ohio, USA
• Education—B.A., Howard University; M.A.,  Cornell,
• Awards—Nobel Prize, 1993, National Book Critics' Circle
   Award, 1977; Pulitzer Prize, 1988.
• Currently—lives in Princeton, NJ and New York, NY


With her incredible string of lyrical, imaginative, and adventurous modern classics Toni Morrison lays claim to being one of America's best novelists. Race issues are at the heart of many of Morrison's most enduring novels, from the ways that white concepts of beauty affect a girl's self image in The Bluest Eye to themes of segregation in Sulu and slavery in her signature work Beloved. Through it all, Morrison relates her tales with lyrical eloquence and spellbinding mystery.

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, Morrison's unique approach to writing stems from a childhood spent steeped in folklore and mythology. Her family reveled in sharing these often tales, and their commingling of the fantastic and the natural would become a key element in her work when she began penning original tales of her own.

The other majorly influential factor in her writing was the racism she experienced firsthand in, as Jet magazine described it, the "mixed and sometimes hostile neighborhood" of Lorain, Ohio. When Morrison was only a toddler, her home was set afire by racists while her family was still inside of it. During times such as these, she found strength in her father, who instilled in her a great sense of dignity. This pride in her cultural background would heavily influence her debut novel.

In The Bluest Eye, an eleven-year old black girl named Pecola prays every night for blue eyes, seeing them as the epitome of feminine beauty. She believes these eyes, symbolizing commonly held white concepts of attractiveness, would put an end to her familial woes, an end to her father's excessive drinking and her brother's meandering. They would give her self-esteem and purpose. The Bluest Eye is the first of Toni Morrison's cries for racial pride and it is an auspicious debut told with an eerie poeticism.

Morrison next tackled segregation in Sulu, which chronicles the friendship between two women who, much like the author, grew up in a small, segregated village in Ohio. Song of Solomon followed. Arguably her first bona fide classic and certainly her most lyrical work, Song of Solomon breathed with the mythology of Morrison's youth, a veritable modern folktale pivoting on an eccentric whimsically named Milkman Dead who spends his life trying to fly. This is one of Morrison's most breathtaking, most accomplished and fully dimensional novels, a story of powerful convictions told in an unmistakably original manner.

In Song of Solomon, Morrison created a distinct world where the supernatural commingles comfortably with the mundane, a setting that would reappear in her masterpiece, Beloved. Beloved is a ghost story quite unlike any other, a tale of guilt and love and the horrendous legacy of slavery. Taking place not long after the end of the Civil War, Beloved finds Sethe, a former slave, being haunted by the daughter she murdered to save the child from being sold into slavery. It is a gut wrenching story that is buoyed by its fantastical plot device and the sheer beauty of Morrison's prose.

Beloved so moved Morrison's literary peers that forty-eight of them signed an open letter published in the New York Times demanding she be recognizing for this major effort. Subsequently, the book won her a Pulitzer Prize. A year after publishing her next novel Jazz in 1992, she would become the very first African American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Towards the end of the century, Morrison's work became increasingly eclectic. She not only published another finely crafted, incendiary novel in Paradise, which systematically tracks the genesis of an act of mob violence, but she also published her first children's book The Big Box. In 2003, she published Love, her first novel in five years, a complex meditation on family and the way one man fuels the obsessions of several women. The following year she assembled a collection of photographs of school children taken during the era of segregation. What makes Remember: The Journey to School Integration so particularly haunting is that Morrison chose to compose dialogue imagining what the subjects of each photo may have been thinking. In 2008, Morrison published A Mercy.

That imagination, that willingness to take chances, to examine history through a fresh perspective, is such an integral part of Morrison's craft. She is as vital as any contemporary artist, and her stories may focus on the black American experience, but the eloquence, imaginativeness, and meaningfulness of her writing leaps high over any racial boundaries.

Extras
• Chloe Anthony Wofford chose to publish her first novel under the name Toni Morrison because she believed that Toni was easier to pronounce than Chloe. Morrison later regretted assuming the nom de plume.

• In 1986, the first production of Morrison's sole play Dreaming Emmett was staged. The play was based on the story of Emmett Till, a black teen murdered by racists in 1955.

• Morrison's prestigious status is not limited to her revered novels or her multitude of awards. She also holds a chair at Princeton University. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)

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Book Reviews 
[The novel] addresses the same great themes [as Morrison's] 1987 masterpiece, Beloved: the loss of innocence, the paralyzing power of ancient memories and the difficulty of accepting loss and change and pain.... [Paradise is] a heavy-handed, schematic piece of writing, thoroughly lacking in the novelistic magic Ms. Morrison has wielded so effortlessly in the past... [A] clunky, leaden novel.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

The strangest and most original book Morrison has written.
The New Yorker

In Paradise [Toni Morrison] has produced, unfortunately, her weakest book.... A theme can be pursued as relentlessly as an idea, and repeating a pattern twelve times doesn't make it twelve times more convincing.... Paradise has about it a belligerent singlemindedness—one that gives the author's plea for tolerance the uninflected purity of a religious tract.
Geoffrey Bent - Southern Review

For me there are two Toni Morrisons. The first Morrison is intimate and republican. Her theme, most brightly handled in The Bluest Eye, is family. The second Morrison is impersonal and imperial. Her theme, majestically handled, is history. The ironically titled Paradise, like Beloved, belongs to the work of the second Toni Morrison. Sentences roll on like breakers. The generations are born, till the earth and lie beneath. Sing, oh muse!

Paradise begins in 1976 in Ruby, an affluent all-black Oklahoma town with a population of 360, and flashes back to the men and women who founded the town's precursor, Haven, after the Civil War. Haven was decimated not by whites (there are hardly any whites in Paradise) but by the Depression, leading the children of its founders to pick up and move 240 miles to the west and try again.

Nearly every townsperson gets a cameo in the course of this narrative of flawed nation-building. What I wouldn't give for a relationship chart. There are the town's macho leaders, the twins Deacon and Steward Morgan. There are their wives, Soane and Dovey. Both know tragedy. One has had two sons die. The other has had multiple miscarriages, each punished according to the sins of the husband. There is an insurgent outside preacher named Reverend Misner, who is keeping court with an independent woman and store owner named Anna Flood. They are the closest thing to common sense in the town. And there is a no-good lothario named K.D., son of Deacon and Steward's deceased sister Ruby, eponym of the town. Imagine a family reunion when you're not quite catching the names.

The action, though, is simple. As the novel opens, a woman lies dead in the front hall of the Convent, a former Catholic retreat just outside Ruby. The town's alpha menfolk have driven over and shot her, and now they are hunting down the house's remaining inhabitants. Connie, Seneca, Grace, Pallas and Mavis are the prey, female refugees who gathered in this safe place. They have done nothing wrong. Their crime is otherness. Their practices are vaguely occult, vaguely Sapphic and vaguely threatening to law and order. The men mistrust them. In short, they are killed because they can be slain without consequence.

And afterward Ruby is a little bit sorry. Morrison writes: "Bewildered, angry, sad, frightened people pile into cars, making their way back.... How hard they had worked for this place; how far away they once were from the terribleness they have just witnessed. How could so clean and blessed a mission devour itself and become the world they had escaped?" It would not, I think, be a leap to say there is a metaphor here.

There's also a helluva trick, a real coup de theatre, in these last pages. Beloved is no longer Morrison's only ghost story. But you'll have to read from the opening scene, when the guns go off, to the final one, when the chickens come home to roost, to figure this out. This is an extraordinary novel from a Nobel Prize winner confident enough to try anything.
D.T. Max - Salon

So intense and evocative in its particulars, so wide-ranging in its arch, this is another, if imperfect, triumph for the Nobel Prize-winning author (Song of Solomon, Beloved, etc.). In 1950, a core group of nine old families leaves the increasingly corrupted African American community of Haven, Okla., to found in that same state a new, purer community they call Ruby. But in the early 1970s, the outside world begins to intrude on Ruby's isolation, forcing a tragic confrontation. It's about this time, too, that the first of five damaged women finds solace in a decrepit former convent near Ruby. Once the pleasure palace of an embezzler, the convent had been covered with lascivious fixtures that were packed away or painted over by the nuns. Time has left only "traces of the sisters' failed industry," however, making the building a crumbling, fertile amalgam of feminine piety and female sexuality. It's a woman's world that attracts the women of Ruby and that repels the men who see its occupants as the locus of all the town's ills. They are "not women locked safely away from men; but worse, women who chose themselves for company, which is to say not a convent but a coven." Only when Morrison treats the convent women as an entity (rather than as individual characters) do they lose nuance, and that's when the book falters. Still, the individual stories of both the women and the townspeople reveal Morrison at her best. Tragic, ugly, beautiful, these lives are the result of personal dreams and misfortune; of a history that encompasses Reconstruction and Vietnam; and of mystical grandeur.
Publishers Weekly

Nobel laureate Morrison creates another richly told tale that grapples with her ongoing, central concerns: women's lives and the African-American experience. Morrison has created a long list of characters for this story that takes place in the all-black town of Ruby, Oklahoma, population 360, which was founded by freed slaves. In what could be seen as an attempt to create some of the same mysticism that was present in many of her previous works, Morrison alludes to Ruby's founding citizens, now ghosts, and only minimally focuses on the present generations that have let the founding principles of Ruby's forebears deteriorate. Paradise is an examination of the title itself and deliberately builds into a plot that is unexpected and explosive. This is Morrison's first novel since her 1993 Jazz, and it is well worth the wait.— Emily J. Jones
Library Journal

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Discussion Questions 
1. Why has Toni Morrison chosen to use the poem "for many are the pleasant forms..." as an epigraph for this novel?

2. Why is the Oven such an important symbol for the people of Ruby? What is implied in the various phrases which different groups in Ruby want to inscribe upon it? Soane believes that the Oven has become too important a symbol: "A utility became a shrine (cautioned against not only in scary Deuteronomy but in lovely Corinthians II as well) and, like anything that offended Him, destroyed its own self" (103). Is she right? Does this indeed come to pass?

3. How has the history of Ruby (and Haven before it) shaped the nature of the town in the 1970s? What did "freedom" mean to the original settlers? What varying views of freedom do the modern inhabitants of Ruby hold?

4. Each of the young women living at the Convent is in some way lost. Why does each feel so entirely friendless? What caused Gigi's feeling of hopelessness? What about Pallas? Do you believe that Mavis's children were really trying to harm her, or did she imagine this?

5. "Almost always, these nights, when Dovey Morgan thought about her husband it was in terms of what he had lost" (82). She adds up some of Steward's losses: his taste buds, the election for church Secretary, the trees on his land, and his discovery that he and Dovey could not have children. What has Steward lost in a larger, more symbolic sense: which of the convictions of the earlier generation he so admires has he himself lost sight of? What do his feelings about his brother Elder's defense of a Liverpool whore (94-95) tell us about his character? Can you see, early in the novel, intimations of what we discover at the end: that Steward and Deacon are essentially different?

6. Who is Dovey's "Friend" and why is he so important to her?

7. The conservative elements in Ruby ultimately find it impossible to keep the impact of the Sixties from affecting their town. What "Sixties" ideas turn out to be the most powerful, the most resonant, for the people of Ruby? Do these ideas destroy the town's social cohesion or give it new strength?

8. What new ways of thinking does Richard Misner represent, and how is he received by the people of Ruby? When Patricia tells him that "Slavery is our past" (212), he insists that "We live in the world.... The whole world." Which of them is right? What does Misner mean when he says he thinks the people of Ruby love their children "to death" (212)?

9. "Who could have imagined, " think the men who attack the Convent, "that twenty-five years later in a brand-new town a Convent would beat out the snakes, the Depression, the tax man and the railroad for sheer destructive power?" (17). It is clear that the Convent, and the harmless women who have taken refuge there, are not destructive. What is the destructive element in Ruby, and what is it destroying?

10. "Minus the baptisms the Oven had no real value, " Soane reflects. (103). What did these baptisms at the Oven symbolize, and how does their removal to the church change Ruby? At the Convent, the women dance in rain and reconcile themselves, finally, to the tragedies in their lives (283). Why does Morrison use, here, the imagery of baptism? Does she imply that this dance is a true baptism; that the Convent has achieved a more genuine spirit of community than the town?

11. What are the circumstances of the death of Ruby, K. D.'s mother, and what effect does the manner of this death have upon on the character of the town that is named after her? What is the "bargain" or "prayer in the form of a deal" (114) that is struck after her death, and who strikes it?

12. Why does Sweetie make for the Convent when she finds herself at the breaking point? Why does she then try to get away from the Convent, and then tell the people of Ruby that the women there are evil?

13. In what ways does the wedding of Arnette and K. D. symbolize the current state of affairs in Ruby?

14. What does the school nativity play tell us about the way Ruby sees itself and mythologizes itself?

15. Is it fair to say that the people of Ruby have perpetuated racism in the town that was supposed to be a haven from it? If so, in what does the town's racism consist?

16. Why does Patricia burn all her research on the history of the Ruby and Haven families?

17. What does Consolata mean when she says "Dear Lord, I didn't want to eat him. I just wanted to go home" (240)? What sort of home does she long for, and why does she associate it with Deacon? Who is the Piedade to whose company Consolata returns after her death (321)? What is the meaning of Consolata's vision on p. 254?

18. How does the death of Sweetie and Jeff's daughter Save-Marie subtly change Ruby? What sort of a future do you envision for the town? Is it possible to see the murders at the Convent as ultimately helping Ruby to evolve and to survive?

19. What do you think lies behind the door or window that Anna and Misner notice as they leave the Convent? Why do they choose not to open it?

20. What is the meaning of the novel's title? What does "Paradise" mean within the context of the book? "How exquisitely human was the wish for permanent happiness, and how thin human imagination became trying to achieve it, " thinks Misner. Does Morrison imply that it is impossible to create a paradise on earth?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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