Sweet Breath of Memory
Ariella Cohen, 2016
Kensington Books
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781496703705
Summary
Life is in the telling.
With its tree-lined streets, vibrant downtown and curbside planters of spring bulbs, Amberley, Massachusetts, seems a good place for Cate Saunders to start over.
It's been two years since her husband, John, was killed in Iraq and life has been a struggle. Her new job as a caregiver doesn't pay much, but the locals are welcoming. In fact, Cate has barely unpacked before she's drawn—reluctantly at first—into a circle of friends.
There's diner-owner Gaby, who nourishes her customers' spirits as well as their bodies; feisty Beatrice, who kept the town going when its men marched off to WWII; wise-cracking MaryLou, as formidable as Fort Knox but with the same heart of gold; and, Sheila, whose Italian grocery is the soul of the place.
As Amberley reveals itself to be a town shaped by war, Cate encounters another kindred spirit—a Holocaust survivor with whom she feels a deep connection. When revelations about John's death threaten Cate's newfound peace of mind, these sisters-in-arms' stories show her an unexpected way forward.
And Cate comes to understand that although we suffer loss alone, we heal by sharing our most treasured memories. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1961-62
• Raised—Teaneck, New Jersey, USA
• Education—B.A., Columbia University (Barnard College); J.D., University of Michigan
• Currently—lives in New England
Ariella Cohen is a graduate of Barnard College, the Hebrew University, and the University of Michigan Law School. Her short fiction appears in A Cup of Comfort for Couples, Heartscapes, and Flashshot. Sweet Breath of Memories (2016) is her first novel.
Although she makes her home in New England, her dream self resides in County Mayo, Ireland. (From the publisher.)
Visit the author's website.
Discussion Questions
1. Cate’s memories of John are fluid, shifting in and out of focus and becoming abraded by time. She questions if this means her love was somehow flawed. Why do you think some memories remain crisp, while others blur and seem to dim with each dawn?
2. Cate speaks of memories as a shield against loneliness and despair. Like armor, they’re "initially so shiny they dazzle and in time acquire the patina of use." Do you agree? Are there particular memories that have been your armor in life?
3. How does the life path of Cate mirror that of Miriam Rosen? Can the guilt Cate feels over John’s death be compared with a Holocaust survivor’s guilt?
4. Gaby does not initially tell her closest friends that she is dying. Knowing how her parents’ deaths shadow her life, do you think denying herself the comfort of friendship is a form of self-punishment?
5. Working as a home care aide, Cate wears the uniform of one valued more for what her hands can do than what her mind can imagine. Compare her initial attitude toward caregiving with Gaby’s toward waitressing. Both women come to view such manual labor as a form of atonement. Is this healthy?
6. When Helen describes growing up with her mother, the anger and resentment she felt toward Charlotte is obvious even though it was tempered by great love. How can we help friends and colleagues face the unique challenges of caregiving?
7. Rosa Vitelli, whom we meet only through the memories of other characters, often said that, "Life’s challenges are best confronted on a full stomach." Compare this with Vincent’s outburst in the grocery when the sight of so much food disgusts and angers him. Could you relate to that scene? Have you had similar feelings after traveling or living overseas?
8. Cate’s book celebrates those who mother, marry, and mourn America’s warriors. For Cate, such women are the silent casualties of war. Do you agree that these sisters-in-arms need to tell their stories?
9. Sheila and Leah differ in their views of how war changes people. Sheila believes that the experience will bring to the surface what was always there, while Leah feels that what is life-altering can also change a person’s character. What is your view? Is war merely a crucible or fundamentally transformative?
10. After she understands Zelda’s medical needs, Cate asks why the woman isn’t in a place where she can be cared for. Helen points out that Amberley is such a place because Zelda’s friends keep an eye on her. Do you think a community coming together like that is a good thing, or should people like Zelda be in care facilities?
11. In comforting Cate after her first patient dies, Helen points out that the choices Lourdes Garcia made can’t be understood by those living in comfort. One implication of Helen’s words is that Lourdes was justified in compromising her ethics in order to survive. Can Lourdes be compared with Jan Schultz, the German-Polish collaborator Miriam wrote about?
12. Who do you think gave Cate Miriam’s journal entries? Why were they given to her?
13. The novel examines the Jewish concept of tikkun ha-olam—repair of the broken world—from many perspectives. How do the main characters affect repair of their community and themselves? Discuss, for example, Cate, Sheila, Gaby, Helen, and Father Sullivan.
14. The ring Judah Berkson made for Miriam was the gift of a dying father to the daughter he would never see become a woman. Consider the ring’s meaning to those who controlled its destiny: Miriam, the German officer who stole it, Jack Mitchell, Leah and Sheila’s mother, Sheila, Cate, Samuel, and, finally, Rachel.
15. Cate realizes that she may never learn the truth about John’s death. Ambiguity settles uneasily in her mind but she comes to accept it as the "new normal." Could you live with such uncertainty?
16. After meeting Samir Falah, Cate cannot bring herself to expose his possible complicity in John’s death. In mirroring Miriam’s actions, did Cate do the right thing?
17. The town of Amberley is a central character in the novel. How does living in such an iconic small town contribute to Cate’s emotional journey?
18. At the end of the novel, Cate comes home to Amberley. Compare that scene with her arrival by bus in chapter one. Think about how the women of Amberley changed in the interim. Is Cate a catalyst for change much as Miriam was decades before?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Excellent Lombards
Jane Hamilton, 2016
Grand Central Publishing
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781455564224
Summary
A heartfelt coming-of-age story that Karen Joy Fowler calls "a timeless classic...a book you will read and reread."
Mary Frances "Frankie" Lombard is fiercely in love with her family's sprawling apple orchard and the tangled web of family members who inhabit it.
Content to spend her days planning capers with her brother William, competing with her brainy cousin Amanda, and expertly tending the orchard with her father, Frankie desires nothing more than for the rhythm of life to continue undisturbed. But she cannot help being haunted by the historical fact that some family members end up staying on the farm and others must leave.
Change is inevitable, and threats of urbanization, disinheritance, and college applications shake the foundation of Frankie's roots. As Frankie is forced to shed her childhood fantasies and face the possibility of losing the idyllic future she had envisioned for her family, she must decide whether loving something means clinging tightly or letting go. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 13, 1957
• Where—Oak Park, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A., Carleton College
• Awards—Hemingway/PEN Award, 1988
• Currently—lives in Rochester, Wisconsin
Her first published works were short stories, "My Own Earth" and "Aunt Marj's Happy Ending", both published in Harper's Magazine in 1983. "Aunt Marj's Happy Ending" later appeared in The Best American Short Stories 1984.
Her first novel, The Book of Ruth, was published in 1988 and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, and the Wisconsin Library Association Banta Book Award in 1989. The Book of Ruth was an Oprah's Book Club selection in 1996, and it was the basis for a 2004 television film of the same title.
In 1994, she published A Map of the World, which was adapted for a film in 1999 and, the same year, was also an Oprah's Book Club selection. Her third novel, The Short History of a Prince, published in 1998, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998. This book was also shortlisted for the 1999 Orange Prize. In 2000, Hamilton was named a Notable Wisconsin Author by the Wisconsin Library Association.
All of her books are set, at least in part, in Wisconsin.
In an interview with the Journal Times in Racine, Wisconsin, in November 2006, Hamilton talked about her early inspiration for writing novels. As a student at Carleton College, she overheard a professor say she would write a novel one day. Hamilton had written only two short stories for the professor's class. Overhearing the conversation gave her confidence. "It had a lot more potency, the fact that I overheard it, rather than his telling me directly," she said. (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
[A] tender, astute look behind the scenes at a small-scale family farm in the years when the locavore movement was just taking hold…Mary Frances goes by many names—Francie to her mother, Marlene to her father, Frankie or Imp to her brother—but as expertly rendered by Hamilton…she's a storybook character, an inquisitive, imperious but lovable girl akin to Harper Lee's Jean Louise Finch, Rumer Godden's Cecil Grey or Ian McEwan's Briony Tallis. Like them, she absorbs and channels emotion and drama, processing it for the reader as a vested outsider: an outsider because she's a child, but vested because she wants to have this land, and the life she lives on it, remain unchanged forever.
New York Times Book Review - Mary Pols
Ms. Hamilton has written what's known as a "quiet" novel, yet this beautiful coming-of-age story offers a more trenchant narrative on the sustainability of family farming.
New York Times - Carmela Ciuraru
A powerful coming-of-age story.... [Hamilton's] penetration into the hearts of her characters is as profound, perhaps more so, than ever before.... This is a very fine novel: Its people, their individual predicaments and their relationships with one another and with the land stay with the reader long after that last page has been turned.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Funny and heartbreaking, colored with a palpable wistfulness...deeply affecting, a moving elegy for an idyllic way of life that's slipping away as development and technology encroach and children grow up and away from rural pleasures.
Miami Herald
Despite the growing threat of urbanization and her sharp-tongued librarian mother’s attempts to steer her toward university, Francie clings obsessively to the orchard.... [Eventually, she] learns that sometimes loving a person and a place means letting go. The novel ends a little abruptly, but Hamilton’s coming-of-age story is written with humour and compassion
Toronto Star
A poignant coming-of-age tale that resonates with readers...beautiful.
Romantic Times
This coming-of-age story is captivating and passionate, taking us back to being a child and believing in one thing wholeheartedly. Simply put, this is a book you won't be able to put down.
BookPage
(Starred review.) Hamilton's lushly pleasurable novel of radiant comedy, deep emotions, and resonant realizations considers the wonders of nature, the boon and burden of inheritance, and the blossoming of the self.
Booklist
A Wisconsin girl reluctantly comes of age in Hamilton's tender and rueful latest. A suspenseful opening chapter, with the Lombards racing to get their freshly baled hay into the barn...deftly sets the scene for the fraught family drama..... Richly characterized, beautifully written, and heartbreakingly poignant—another winner from this talented and popular author.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
Sweet Lamb of Heaven
Lydia Millet, 2016
W.W. Norton & Co.
256 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393285543
Summary
Nominated, 2016 National Book Awards
Blending domestic thriller and psychological horror, this compelling page-turner follows a mother fleeing her estranged husband.
Lydia Millet’s chilling new novel is the first-person account of a young mother, Anna, escaping her cold and unfaithful husband, a businessman who’s just launched his first campaign for political office.
When Ned chases Anna and their six-year-old daughter from Alaska to Maine, the two go into hiding in a run-down motel on the coast. But the longer they stay, the less the guests in the dingy motel look like typical tourists―and the less Ned resembles a typical candidate. As his pursuit of Anna and their child moves from threatening to criminal, Ned begins to alter his wife’s world in ways she never could have imagined.
A double-edged and satisfying story with a strong female protagonist, a thrilling plot, and a creeping sense of the apocalyptic, Sweet Lamb of Heaven builds to a shattering ending with profound implications for its characters―and for all of us. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 5, 1968
• Where—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Raised—Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• Education—B.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; M.S., Duke University
• Awards—PEN Center USA Award for Fiction; Pulitizer finalist
• Currently—lives near Tuscon, Arizona
Lydia Millet is an American novelist. Her third novel, My Happy Life, won the 2003 PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, and she has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Salon wrote of Millet's work, "The writing is always flawlessly beautiful, reaching for an experience that precedes language itself."
Millet was born in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Toronto, Canada. She holds a BA in interdisciplinary studies, with highest honors in creative writing, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Master's in environmental policy from Duke University. Millet lives in Tucson, Arizona with her two children. She worked for Natural Resources Defense Council for two years before joining the Center for Biological Diversity in 1999 as a staff writer.
Works
Millet is best known for her dark sense of humor, stylistic versatility, and political bent. Her first book, Omnivores (1996), is a subversion of the coming-of-age novel, in which a young girl in Southern California is tormented by her megalomaniac father and invalid mother and finally sold in marriage to a real estate agent. Her second, George Bush, Dark Prince of Love (2000), is a political comedy about a trailer-park woman obsessed with the 41st American President.
Brief but weighty, her third book, My Happy Life (2002), is a poetic, language-oriented work about a lonely misfit trapped in an abandoned hospital, who writes the poignant story of her life on the walls. It is narrated by, as the Village Voice glowing deems her, "an orphan cruelly mistreated by life who nevertheless regards her meager subsistence as a radiant gift." Despite the horrors that amount to her life, she still calls herself happy.
Jennifer Reese of the New York Times Book Review commented on Millet's new approach to the treatment of the literary victim, saying "Millet has created a truly wretched victim, but where is the outrage? She has coolly avoided injecting so much as a hint of it into this thin, sharp and frequently funny novel; one of the narrator's salient characteristics is an inability to feel even the mildest indignation. The world she inhabits is a savage place, but everything about it interests her, and paying no attention to herself, she is able to see beauty and wonder everywhere."
Millet's fourth novel, Everyone's Pretty (2005), is a picaresque tragicomedy about an alcoholic pornographer with messianic delusions, based partly on Millet's stint as a copy editor at Larry Flynt Publications. Sarah Weinman of the Washington Post Book World called it "both prism and truth" "With a sharp eye for small details, a keen sense of the absurd and strong empathy for its creations," Millet creates a kaleidoscope of quirky characters. The New York Times Book Review called her fifth novel, Oh Pure and Radiant Heart (2005), an "extremely smart…resonant fantasy." It brings three of the physicists responsible for creating the atomic bomb to life in modern-day New Mexico, where they acquire a cult following and embark on a crusade for redemption.
How the Dead Dream (2008) is "a frightening and gorgeous view of human decline," according to Utne Reader. It features a young Los Angeles real estate developer consumed by power and political ambitions who, after his mother's suicide attempt and two other deaths, begins to nurture a curious obsession with vanishing species. Then a series of calamities forces him from a tropical island, the site on one of his developments, onto the mainland where he takes a Conrad-esque journey up a river into the remote jungle. Eye Weekly summarized this black comedy, noting "American culture loves its stories of hubris, downfall and ruin as of late, but it takes a writer of Millet's sensitivity to enjoy the way down this much."
Love in Infant Monkeys (2010) is a short story collection featuring vignettes about famous historical and pop culture icons and their encounters with other species.
Her 2011 novel Ghost Lights made best-of-the-year lists in the New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle and received strong critical attention. The novel stars an IRS bureaucrat named Hal—a man baffled by his wife’s obsession with her missing employer. In a moment of drunken heroism, Hal embarks on a quest to find the man, embroiling himself in a surreal tropical adventure (and an unexpected affair with a beguiling German woman). Ghost Lights is beautifully written, engaging, and full of insight into the heartbreaking devotion of parenthood and the charismatic oddity of human behavior. The Boston Globe called it "[An] odd and wonderful novel," while the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote, "Millet is that rare writer of ideas who can turn a ruminative passage into something deeply personal. She can also be wickedly funny, most often at the expense of the unexamined life."
Ghost Lights was the second in an acclaimed cycle of novels that began with How the Dead Dream in 2008. The third, Magnificence (2012) completes the cycle.
Magnificence introduced Susan Lindley, a woman adrift after her husband’s death and the dissolution of her family. Embarking on a new phase in her life after inheriting her uncle’s sprawling mansion and its vast collection of taxidermy, Susan decides to restore the extensive collection of moth-eaten animal mounts, tending to "the fur and feathers, the beaks, the bones and shimmering tails." Meanwhile an equally derelict human menagerie—including an unfaithful husband and a chorus of eccentric old women—joins her in residence. In a setting both wondrous and absurd, Susan defends her legacy from freeloading relatives and explores the mansion’s unknown spaces. Jonathan Lethem, writing for the Guardian, called it "elegant, darkly comic…with overtones variously of Muriel Spark, Edward Gorey and J. G. Ballard, full of contemporary wit and devilish fateful turns for her characters, and then also to knit together into a tapestry of vast implication and ethical urgency, something as large as any writer could attempt: a kind of allegorical elegy for life on a dying planet. Ours, that is." The book was nominated for an L.A. Times Book Prize.
The September 2012 release of Shimmers in the Night was the second in The Dissenters, an eco-fantasy series for young adults. Beginning with The Fires Beneath the Sea, the plot follows two young siblings as they search for their mother, a shapeshifting character who is fighting against forces who wants to make the planet over in their own image.
Pills and Starships (2014) is a young adult novel set in "a dystopic future brought by global warming."
Mermaids in Paradise (2015) tempers the sharp satire of Millet's early career with the empathy and subtlety of her more recent novels and short stories. In a sendup of the American honeymoon, Mermaids in Paradise takes readers to the grounds of a Caribbean island resort, where newlyweds Deb and Chip—the opinionated, skeptical narrator and her cheerful jock husband—meet a marine biologist who says she's sighted mermaids in a coral reef.
"Karen Russell" wrote "leave it to Lydia Millet to capsize her human characters in aquamarine waters and upstage their honeymoon with mermaids. I am awed to know there's a mind like Millet's out there—she's a writer without limits, always surprising, always hilarious. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 1/13/2015.)
Book Reviews
Few novels surprise me…But Lydia Millet's Sweet Lamb of Heaven confounded me, delightfully so…I have little patience with literary novels that claim to have the propulsive momentum of a thriller, yet Millet pulls it off…The source of the mysterious voice is not the true mystery at the heart of Sweet Lamb of Heaven. Instead, it is the eternal human dilemma of what to do with knowledge once we have it. Will it lead to enlightenment or insanity? Will we be better people for it, or worse? It is Anna's voice—cool, intelligent, passionate, contradictory—that makes this novel so affecting. I resisted it initially because I was overwhelmed by my sense of dislocation, my uncertainty about where we were headed. But how I missed it when it was gone, how I yearned for it to speak to me again.
Laura Lippman - New York Times Book Review
Lydia Millet is not as popular as she should be. This novel will change that…. Her ambitious new novel, “Sweet Lamb of Heaven,” is part fast-paced thriller, part quiet meditation on the nature of God.
Lisa Zeidner - Washington Post
“[W]e have a real thriller on our hands. ... part of a higher-stakes game being played by Millet, one that will ultimately, unabashedly touch on time, beauty, horror, God, demons and the very nature of being. By novel's end... the stakes have been raised through the roof.
Laird Hunt - Los Angeles Times
[A] hypnotic novel of psychological and philosophical suspense.
Oprah Magazine
Millet’s prose is stunning,... you’ll have a hard time putting this down.
Isabella Biedenharn - Entertainment Weekly
Millet weaves a satisfying cat and mouse game.... Her novel reads like top-notch psychological suspense...: Anna’s paranoia is smartly given an additional, possibly supernatural dimension with the unknown voice, which becomes an inextricable part of her flight. This is a page-turner from a very talented writer, and the result is a crowd-pleaser.
Publishers Weekly
Operating, as always, on multiple levels with artistic panache, emotional precision, and profound intent, Millet transforms a violent family conflict into a war of cosmic proportions over nothing less than life itself. —Donna Seaman
Booklist
Folded into this plot is the mystical tale of Anna hearing voices upon Lena's birth, which leads her to others like her and the understanding that deep language belongs to all sentient creatures yet generally gets lost to humans.... Compelling in parts, but with Anna's very real battles with Ned deflected by fuzzy meditation, not successful as a whole. —Barbara Hoffert
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Millet is content to leave the woollier questions unanswered, but the thriller writer in her brings the book to a satisfying climax. A top-notch tale of domestic paranoia that owes a debt to spooky psychological page-turners like Rosemary's Baby yet is driven by Millet's particular offbeat thinking.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(We'll add specific questions if and when they're made available by the publisher.)
Imagine Me Gone
Adam Haslett, 2016
Little, Brown & Co.
368 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316261357
Summary
From a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, a ferociously intimate story of a family facing the ultimate question: how far will we go to save the people we love the most?
When Margaret's fiance, John, is hospitalized for depression in 1960s London, she faces a choice: carry on with their plans despite what she now knows of his condition, or back away from the suffering it may bring her.
She decides to marry him.
Imagine Me Gone is the unforgettable story of what unfolds from this act of love and faith. At the heart of it is their eldest son, Michael, a brilliant, anxious music fanatic who makes sense of the world through parody. Over the span of decades, his younger siblings—the savvy and responsible Celia and the ambitious and tightly controlled Alec—struggle along with their mother to care for Michael's increasingly troubled and precarious existence.
Told in alternating points of view by all five members of the family, this searing, gut-wrenching, and yet frequently hilarious novel brings alive with remarkable depth and poignancy the love of a mother for her children, the often inescapable devotion siblings feel toward one another, and the legacy of a father's pain in the life of a family.
With his striking emotional precision and lively, inventive language, Adam Haslett has given us something rare: a novel with the power to change how we see the most important people in our lives. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 24, 1970
• Where—Port Chester, New York, USA
• Raised—Oxfordshire, England, UK; Wellesley, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Swarthmore College; M.F.A., University of Iowa; J.D., Yale University
• Awards—(See below)
• Currently—lives in New York City, New York
Adam Haslett is an American fiction writer. He was born in Port Chester, New York and grew up in Oxfordshire, England, and Wellesley, Massachusetts. He is a graduate of Swarthmore College (B.A., 1992), the University of Iowa (M.F.A., 1999), and Yale Law School (J.D., 2003). He has been a visiting professor at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and Columbia University. Fall 2011 he enjoyed half a year of free study work at the American Academy in Berlin. He currently lives in New York City, New York.
Books
His first book, a collection of short stories entitled You Are Not a Stranger Here, was released in 2002 and was a finalist for the 2002 National Book Award and the 2003 Pulitzer Prize and spent some time on the New York Times Best Seller list. It was also named one of the five best books of the year by Time.
Haslett has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Nation, Atlantic, and Best American Short Stories, as well as National Public Radio's "Selected Shorts." His first novel, Union Atlantic, was released in 2010 and his second, Imagine Me Gone, in 2016.
Awards
2002 - New York Magazine Writer of the Year
2002 - National Book Award, finalist
2003 - Pulitzer Prize, finalist
2003 - L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award (You Are Not a Stranger Here)
2006 - PEN/Malamud Award
2011 - Mary Ellen von der Heyden Prize, Fiction
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/8/2016.)
Book Reviews
Ambitious and stirring.... With Imagine Me Gone, Haslett has reached another level, affording readers a full and luminous depiction of a mind under siege.... By putting the readers in the same position as [oldest son] Michael's family members, Haslett has pulled off something of a brilliant trick: We feel precisely what they feel-the frustration, the protectiveness, the hope and fear and, yes, the obligation. If Michael is on the page, if his thoughts or actions are laid bare, there's a grueling sense of dread. If he's out of sight, if his thinking and whereabouts are unknown, the dread becomes all but unbearable.... This is a book refreshingly replete with surprise. It sneaks up on you with dark and winning humor, poignant tenderness, and sentences so astute that they lift the spirit even when they're awfully, awfully sad.... But make no mistake, the novel's most rewarding surprise is its heart. Again and again, the characters subtly assert that despite the expense of empathy and the predictable disappointment of love, our tendency to care for one another is warranted.... Even when it's difficult or terrifying or impossible, especially when it's impossible, the impulse to calm those we hold dear is an absolute privilege
Bret Anthony Johnston - New York Times Book Review
Haslett is one of the country's most talented writers, equipped with a sixth sense for characterization and a limber, unpretentious style. Perhaps his rarest gift is the apprehension of the invisible connections that tie people together...The chapters seamlessly negotiate the passage of time.... [Oldest son] Michael comes to dominate the narrative, and Haslett perfectly captures the qualities that make him both seductive and infuriating. He is a motormouth with a fitful imagination and a wicked sense of humor; his nervous energy and 'ceaseless brain' are the battery power on which the whole family runs...Haslett is alert to the reality of others, and the insinuating power of this novel comes from its framing of mental illness as a family affair. Michael's siblings are both wholly convincing characters, shaped by the abiding question of how much, or how little, they are meant to act as their brother's keepers.... Most affecting of all is Margaret, who is treated with impatience by her children but possesses a capacious understanding...'What do you fear when you fear everything?' Michael wonders. 'Time passing and not passing. Death and life.... This being the condition itself: the relentless need to escape a moment that never ends.' That condition, Haslett's superb novel shows, is an irreducible part of the fabric of Michael's family, as true and defining as the love that binds them.
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
We come to know the family at the center of Adam Haslett's powerful new novel as intimately as if they were our own.... Imagine Me Gone is the story of this family across the decades-a family that is bonded and riven and bonded again by mental illness.... [Oldest son] Michael is the center of the novel and certainly Haslett's most original character.... For the reader, as for his family, Michael is strangely dear, utterly maddening, and ultimately heartbreaking.
Tom Beer - Newsday
Powerful...a study of destructive family dynamics.... Family here is a trap as filled with love and concern as it is with exasperation and dread. Moving with penetrating wit between the points of view of a father, mother, daughter, and two sons, the novel traces how the vein of mental illness running through this family affects every membe.... Haslett, as he turns the narrative over to first one and then the other, is uncanny in nailing how their differences in personality and temperament guide their respective actions.... His sharp take on how minor family foibles become conflated with major family dysfunction introduces some unexpected comedy into the proceedings.... Haslett expertly evokes family behavioral patterns that simply repeat themselves, taxing everyone's patience, before precipitating into panic-inducing crises.... With its fugue of voices, each contributing a vital slant to the action, Imagine Me Gone offers rigorous formal pleasures. Yet while flirting with narrative artifice, Haslett stays keenly aware that in this family there is no explanation 'sufficient to account for the events.... Lives weren't works of art.' In acknowledging that, Imagine Me Gone respects the mystery of how things happen the way they happen, while brilliantly conjuring the tide-like pull with which dreaded possibilities become harsh inevitability.
Michael Upchurch - Boston Globe
A devastating family drama.... Haslett's considerable skills as a writer turn domestic conflicts into something more profound.... In one beautifully rendered scene after another, Haslett shows the family dealing with John's illness and Michael's descent while also managing their own conflicts.... Imagine Me Gone is a handsome work...the sort of writing that is guaranteed to turn heads
Michael Magras - Miami Herald
Searing... Devastating and gorgeously written.... Pure genius.... Haslett hits the nail on the head when it comes to describing just how anguishing and time-consuming psychiatric disorders can be, not only for the afflicted but also for the flailing loved ones trying their damnedest-and failing-to find a suitable fix.... Haslett writes with his eyes wide open about the pitfalls of piled-on medication, the panicked late-night phone calls, the cycles of fear, frustration, and guarded hope. And herein lies the kicker: Because these chapters are told from the alternating perspective of each of the five family members, we believe every word in them and bear witness to just how complex and multi-angled the issue of mental illness can be.... By signing on with Haslett and his characters we are given the chance to look beyond our minutiae and daily distractions in order to notice the passage of time as experienced by others. We are reminded of what it is like to be truly, if fleetingly, alive.
Alexis Burling - San Francisco Chronicle
Imagine Me Gone brilliantly captures the excruciating burden of love and the role it plays in both our survival and our destruction. Haslett suspends a sense of dread over you like an anvil from page one, cutting the rope that holds it in the brutal last act. You'd be a fool to look away.
Julia Black - Esquire
An extraordinary blend of precision, beauty, and tenderness.... Haslett's prose rises to the challenge, lushly capturing the dense fog of depression that blankets John [the father] and occasionally lbifts just enough to reveal the 'beast' moving in on him. But Haslett really shows his chops channeling [oldest son] Michael's amped-up voice.... I got caught up in the beauty of Haslett's sentences and the lives of these oh-so-human people bound by shared duress and cycles of hope. Haslett's signature achievement in Imagine Me Gone is to temper the harrowing with the humorous while keeping a steady bead on the pathos. You want sympathetic characters? You want a narrative that showcases love as a many-splendored thing capacious enough to encompass stalwart, long-suffering spouses, loyal siblings, suffocatingly obsessive crushes, and casual, noncommittal relationships (both gay and straight) that morph as if by magic into soul-sustenance? You want writing that thrums with anguish and compassion? It's all here.
Heller McAlpin - NPR
There are some bobbrred review.) [A] sprawling, ambitious epic about a family bound not only by familial love, but by that sense of impending emergency that hovers around Michael, who has inherited his father John’s abiding depression and anxiety.... This is a hypnotic and haunting novel.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [S]oaring, heartrending.... The [novel] is a polyphonic page-turner that slowly reveals its orbit around Michael, the eldest son. Michael's troubled psyche, an inheritance from his father, proves to be the troubling linchpin at the center of this intensely personal work.
Booklist
(Starred review.) [A] touching chronicle of love and pain.... As vivid and moving as the novel is, it's not because Haslett strives to surprise but because he's so mindful and expressive of how much precious life there is in both normalcy and anguish.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime use our LitLovers talking points to get a discussion started for Imagine Me Gone...then take off on your own:
1. Had you been Margaret—or even yourself—would you have made the same choice to marry John?
2. In attempting to explain the nature of depression to Margaret, the doctor tells her: "You could say the mind closes down. It goes into a sort of hibernation." Before reading Imagine Me Gone, what was your understanding of depression? Having read Haslett's book, have your views been altered...or confirmed?
3. Was it irresponsible of John to marry Margaret and father three children? What about his suicide?
4. Talk about the children of this union and their relationship with both their parents and with one another, especially with Michael.
5. If his father's mind is given to "hibernation," how would you describe Michael's mind? How does it differ from his father's?
6. A good deal of Michael's inner workings are revealed in his letters and his responses on medical forms. What do we learn of his reality?
7. Consider Alex's desire to spirit Michael away to Maine. Was the outcome inevitable? Was Michael naive?
8. Follow-up to Question #7 Were you taken by surprise at that outcome?
9. What does this book suggest about our responsibility to care for one another, despite constant and expected disappointment? Is there a point in which utter hopelessness gives us permission to no longer attempt active care?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Everybody's Fool
Richard Russo, 2016
Knopf Doubleday
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307270641
Summary
Richard Russo, at the very top of his game, now returns to North Bath, in upstate New York, and the characters who made Nobody’s Fool (1993) a "confident, assured novel [that] sweeps the reader up," according to the San Francisco Chronicle back then.
The irresistible Sully, who in the intervening years has come by some unexpected good fortune, is staring down a VA cardiologist’s estimate that he has only a year or two left.
It’s hard work trying to keep this news from the most important people in his life: Ruth, the married woman he carried on with for years—the ultra-hapless Rub Squeers, who worries that he and Sully aren’t still best friends, and Sully’s son and grandson, for whom he was mostly an absentee figure (and now a regretful one).
We also enjoy the company of Doug Raymer, the chief of police who’s obsessing primarily over the identity of the man his wife might’ve been about to run off with, before dying in a freak accident; Bath’s mayor, the former academic Gus Moynihan, whose wife problems are, if anything, even more pressing
And then there’s Carl Roebuck, whose lifelong run of failing upward might now come to ruin. And finally, there’s Charice Bond—a light at the end of the tunnel that is Chief Raymer’s office—as well as her brother, Jerome, who might well be the train barreling into the station.
Everybody’s Fool is filled with humor, heart, hard times and people you can’t help but love, possibly because their various faults make them so stridently human. This is classic Russo—and a crowning achievement from one of the greatest storytellers of our time. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 15, 1949
• Where—Johnstown, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., M.F. A. and Ph.D., University of Arizona
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize
• Currently—lives in Camden, Maine
Prizewinning author Richard Russo is regarded by many critics as the best writer about small-town America since Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis. "He doesn't over-sentimentalize [small towns]," said Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for NPR's "Fresh Air." Nor does he belittle the dreams and hardships of his working-class characters. "I come from a blue-collar family myself and I think he gets the class interactions; he just really nails class in his novels," said Corrigan.
When Russo left his own native small town in upstate New York, it was with hopes of becoming a college professor. But during his graduate studies, he began to have second thoughts about the academic life. While finishing up his doctorate, he took a creative writing class; and a new career path opened in front of him.
Russo's first novel set the tone for much of his later work. The story of an ailing industrial town and the interwoven lives of its inhabitants, Mohawk won critical praise for its witty, engaging style. In subsequent books, he has brought us a dazzling cast of characters, mostly working-class men and women who are struggling with the problems of everyday life (poor health, unemployment, mounting bills, failed marriages) in dilapidated, claustrophobic burghs that have—like their denizens—seen better days. In 2001, Russo received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, a brilliant, tragicomic set-piece that explores past and present relationships in a once-thriving Maine town whose textile mill and shirt factory have gone bust.
Russo's vision of America would be bleak, except for the wit and optimism he infuses into his stories. Even when his characters are less than lovable, they are funny, rueful, and unfailingly human. "There's a version of myself that I still see in a kind of alternative universe and it's some small town in upstate New York or someplace like that," Russo said in an interview. That ability to envision himself in the bars and diners of small-town America has served him well. "After the last sentence is read, the reader continues to see Russo's tender, messed-up people coming out of doorways, lurching through life," said the fiction writer Annie Proulx. "And keeps on seeing them because they are as real as we are."
Extras
From a 2005 Barnes & Noble interview:
• In 1994, Russo's book Nobody's Fool was made into a movie starring Paul Newman and Bruce Willis. Newman also starred in the 1998 movie Twilight, for which Russo wrote the screenplay. Russo now divides his time between writing fiction and writing for the movies.
• When he wrote his first books, Russo was employed full-time as a college teacher and would stop at the local diner between classes to work on his novels. After the success of Nobody's Food (the book and movie), he was able to quit teaching—but he still likes to write in tight spots, such as the Camden Deli. It's "a less lonely way to write," he told USA Today. "I'm less self-conscious when it's not so quiet."
• When asked what his favorite books are, he offered this list:
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens—All of Dickens, really. The breadth of his canvas, the importance he places on vivid minor characters, his understanding that comedy is serious business. And in the character of Pip, I learned, even before I understood I'd learned it, that we recognize ourselves in a character's weakness as much than his strength. When Pip is ashamed of Joe, the best man he knows, we see ourselves, and it's terrible, hard-won knowledge.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain—Twain's great novel demonstrates that you can go to the very darkest places if you're armed with a sense of humor. His study of American bigotry, ignorance, arrogance, and violence remains so fresh today, alas, because human nature remains pretty constant. I understand the contemporary controversy, of course. Huck's discovery that Jim is a man is hardly a blinding revelation to black readers, but the idea that much of what we've been taught by people in authority is a crock should resonate with everybody. Especially these days.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald—Mostly, I suppose, because his concerns -- class, money, the invention of self -- are so central to the American experience. Fitzgerald understood that our most vivid dreams are often rooted in self-doubt and weakness. Many people imagine that we identify with strength and virtue. Fitzgerald knew better.
Cannery Row by John Steinbeck—For the beauty of the book's omniscience. It's fine for writers to be humble. Most of us have a lot to be humble about. But it does you no good to be timid. Pretend to be God? Why not? (Bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
[D]elightful…. North Bath, N.Y., a fictitious upstate town [is]…a town where dishonesty abounds, everyone misapprehends everyone else and half the citizens are half-crazy. It's a great place for a reader to visit, and it seems to be Mr. Russo's spiritual home…. Both Bath and Everybody's Fool are funny—very funny…Mr. Russo's people…sideswipe, wisecrack, sneak, scheme and talk to figments of their imaginations. It's a joy to spend time with any of them, two-legged or four.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
[I]n both [Nobody's Fool and Everybody's Fool>, the humor is…genial, and it works in service of the characters. Sully in particular emerges as one of the most credible and engaging heroes in recent American fiction…. Taken together, at over 1,000 pages, the two Fool books represent an enormous achievement, creating a world as richly detailed as the one we step into each day of our lives. Bath is real, Sully is real, and so is Hattie's and the White Horse Tavern and Miss Peoples's house on Main, and I can only hope we haven't seen the last of them. I'd love to see what Sully's going to be up to at 80.
T. C. Boyle - New York Times Book Review
How could twenty-three years have slipped by since Nobody’s Fool? . . . Russo is probably the best writer of physical comedy that we have [but] even the zaniest elements of the story are interspersed with episodes of wincing cruelty. . . . The abiding wonder [is that] Russo’s novel bears down on two calamitous days and exploits the action in every single minute . . . mudslides, grave robbery, collapsing buildings, poisonous snakes, drug deals, arson, lightning strikes and toxic goo. North Bath is a sleepy little town that never sleeps [and] no tangent ever feels tangential.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
A madcap romp, weaving mystery, suspense and comedy in a race to the final pages.
Jennifer Maloney - Wall Street Journal
Buoyantly unsentimental.... You hold his books to your heart.
Jan Stuart - Boston Globe
A writer of great comedy and warmth, Russo’s living proof that a book can be profound and wise without aiming straight into darkness. [His] voice can play in any register, any key, any style [in this] portrait of an entire community, in all its romance and all its grit.
Eliot Schrefer, USA Today
Elegiac but never sentimental. . . . Russo’s compassionate heart is open to the sorrows, and yes, the foolishness of this lonely world, but also the humor, friendship and love that abide.
Paul Wilner - San Francisco Chronicle
Everybody should read Everybody’s Fool. Almost nobody in Richard Russo’s novel is sure of anything, but I’m sure of that. . . . [He] has given readers all they should want.
Brian O’Neill - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette>
[A] shaggy dog story of revenge and redemption.The give-and-take of rude but funny dialogue is Russo's trademark, as is his empathy for down-and-outers on the verge of financial calamity. He takes a few false steps...but clever plot twists end the novel on lighthearted note.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) Loneliness and missed connections loom large in Russo's work, but he tempers tear-inducing sentiment with laugh-out-loud moments.... Russo avoids caricature with writing that reflects his deep affection for the quotidian and for the best and worst that's found in every human heart. —Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
Library Journal
(Starred review.) Triumphant.... Russo's reunion with these beloved characters is genius: silly slapstick and sardonic humor play out in a rambling, rambunctious story that poignantly emphasizes that particular brand of loyalty and acceptance that is synonymous with small-town living. —Carol Haggas
Booklist
(Starred review.) A sequel to the great Nobody's Fool (1993) checks in on the residents of poor old North Bath, New York, 10 years later.... For maximum pleasure, read Nobody's Fool first. Russo hits his trademark trifecta: satisfying, hilarious, and painlessly profound.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Evaluate the title of the book. Who do you believe the title is referencing? Is the foolishness of the title character—or characters—something determined by public opinion or something revealed via a process of self-reflection? Explain. What causes the character(s) to act foolishly or otherwise be perceived as foolish?
2. Analyze the setting of the book. How does the author characterize North Bath? How does North Bath compare with its neighboring town Schuyler Springs? What factors have contributed to the condition of North Bath? How does the economic and aesthetic state of the town affect its residents?
3. Everybody’s Fool opens with a description of the local cemetery. How might the cemetery and its present condition function as symbolism? What might the uprooted tree and coffins represent? Why do you think that Russo chose to begin the story with this imagery of the divided and overflowing cemetery?
4. Evaluate the themes of fortune and luck. How much are the characters’ lives shaped by luck? Do they have any control over their fate? If so, where is this evident? Why does Gus think that the townspeople of North Bath are determined to believe in the idea of luck and fortune? Do you agree with him? Why or why not?
5. At the start of the book, Raymer notes that he has always been "vulnerable to the judgments of others" (16), so much so that he actually becomes whatever people call him. Is he ever able to overcome this problem? What other characters in the novel are influenced by the judgments of others? Are the judgments a primarily positive or negative influence?
6. In the chapter entitled "Slinky," Raymer indicates that he prefers order, but says that generally "humans preferred to meander" (67). What does he mean by this? Does the novel ultimately seem to support or refute his claim? Explain.
7. Is there an identifiable protagonist or antagonist in the book or a sense of "good" and "bad" characters, or do the characters offer a more complicated and nuanced view of humanity and human nature? Does any single point of view overshadow the rest? Which of the characters do you feel most sympathetic toward and why? Who do you find the most disagreeable and how does the author elicit this response? Does your perception of any one of the characters change substantially over the course of the novel? If so, which character and how?
8. Consider the various relationships depicted in the book. Do the characters in North Bath share a strong bond with one another? If so, what unites them? Alternatively, why do you think that so many of the characters are entangled in or just out of broken relationships, and how have they been affected by these relationships? What seems to prevent the characters from having healthier and stronger relationships?
9. Why do you believe that the author incorporates elements of comedy and the absurd in the novel? How did these elements influence and shape your interpretation of the novel and your response to its characters? For instance, does the use of comedy make you feel more or less sympathetic to the characters and their plight? Explain.
10. Many of the characters in the book are aging and are faced with their morality. How does this affect their actions and the way they choose to live? What questions arise as a result of their awareness of their limited time? What answers to these questions do they arrive at? Do these aging characters seem to become wiser with age?
11. How does Russo portray the aging process? Do the older characters age gracefully and with dignity? Do they seem to have control over this process and how they handle it? Discuss.
12. How do the characters use fantasy to escape their present condition? What examples of this are found in the novel? Does this kind of escapism prove to be an effective or destructive means of coping?
13. Why did Gus wish to be mayor of North Bath? What did he hope to accomplish in this position? What obstacles does he face as he attempts to accomplish this? Is he ultimately successful? Why or why not?
14. Evaluate the theme of complicity. Which of the characters believe they have been complicit and why do they believe this? Do you agree? Explain. Where else in the novel do we see complicity at work? What do you think causes the characters to be complicit and what are the consequences?
15. In the chapter entitled "Grave Doings," Carl asks what men are even good for. Sully admits that this is a question he has avoided asking himself his entire life. Does the novel ever answer this question? Why might the characters be so determined to avoid it?
16. Explore the theme of legacy. How do characters who are deceased or who are referenced indirectly in the story influence the main characters of the book? Consider, for example, Miss Beryl, Rub’s parents, Becka, or Judge Flatt. How do they continue to have an impact on the lives of others and affect the community even in their absence? What might this indicate about the power of an individual, the weight of one’s actions, and the value of a single human life?
17. Evaluate the treatment of prejudice and race in the book. Why is Miller hesitant to ask out Charice? Why does Raymer feel like a fool when Charice tells him what she plans to make him for dinner? How do the people of Bath treat Jerome? Are the residents of North Bath primarily an accepting people?
18. Consider the treatment of women. What do the female characters seem to share in common? How are they treated by the men in the novel? How do the women view themselves? What do their stories, when considered collectively, reveal about sexuality and womanhood?
19. Russo named one of the chapters "Secrets". What secrets do the characters in the novel keep? Do any of the characters ultimately choose to reveal their secrets? If so, what motivates them and what happens when they do? What might this indicate about truth telling or about shared experience?
20. Is there any evidence of a system of justice in the world the characters inhabit? Explain. If you believe that there is, does the book seem to suggest that justice is something dealt by an outside force such as karma, God, or fate, or is it something that must be dealt by humankind? What injustices are presented in the novel? Do you believe that they could have been prevented or otherwise addressed? If so, how?
21. Why didn’t Miss Beryl want Sully to enlist in the army? What does she think young people are always being asked to risk? Do you agree with her? Can readers tell how the veterans in the story have been affected or changed by their service?
22. Evaluate the theme of forgiveness. What examples of forgiveness, if any, are evident in the book? What causes the characters to reach a place of forgiveness—or to be unable to forgive? What does Miss Beryl think is the real reason that people forgive others? What does the book suggest about self-forgiveness?
23. Compare Everybody’s Fool with Russo’s 1993 novel Nobody’s Fool. What themes does Russo revisit in Everybody’s Fool? Who are some of the recurring characters and how have they changed or remained the same between books? What do you think the books offer collectively that they do not or cannot offer when considered singularly?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)