Tuesday Nights in 1980
Molly Prentiss, 2016
Gallery/Scout Press
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501121043
Summary
An intoxicating and transcendent debut novel that follows a critic, an artist, and a desirous, determined young woman as they find their way—and ultimately collide—amid the ever-evolving New York City art scene of the 1980s.
Welcome to SoHo at the onset of the eighties: a gritty, not-yet-gentrified playground for artists and writers looking to make it in the big city.
Among them: James Bennett, a synesthetic art critic for the New York Times whose unlikely condition enables him to describe art in profound, magical ways, and Raul Engales, an exiled Argentinian painter running from his past and the Dirty War that has enveloped his country.
As the two men ascend in the downtown arts scene, dual tragedies strike, and each is faced with a loss that acutely affects his relationship to life and to art. It is not until they are inadvertently brought together by Lucy Olliason—a small town beauty and Raul’s muse—and a young orphan boy sent mysteriously from Buenos Aires, that James and Raul are able to rediscover some semblance of what they’ve lost.
As inventive as Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad and as sweeping as Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings, Tuesday Nights in 1980 boldly renders a complex moment when the meaning and nature of art is being all but upended, and New York City as a whole is reinventing itself.
In risk-taking prose that is as powerful as it is playful, Molly Prentiss deftly explores the need for beauty, community, creation, and love in an ever-changing urban landscape. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1984
• Where—Santa Cruz, California, USA
• Education—M.F.A., California College of the Arts
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Molly Prentiss was born and raised in Santa Cruz, California. She was a Writer in Residence at Workspace at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Vermont Studio Center and was chosen as an Emerging Writer Fellow by the Aspen Writers Foundation.
She holds an MFA in creative writing from the California College of the Arts. She lives in Brooklyn. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Molly Prentiss sets an almost impertinently high bar for herself. She's determined to write a love letter in polychrome to a bygone Manhattan; to recreate the squalid exuberance of Jean-Michel Basquiat's and Keith Haring's art scene; to explore all the important, hairy themes—love, creativity, losing your innocence in one cruel swoop. That she mostly pulls it off is impressive, thrilling.
Jennifer Senior - New York Times Book Review
The gritty New York art scene of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s pulsed with creative energy, and so does this engaging novel… It portrays an intoxicating world and its raw, ungentrified backdrop—both about to be transformed by greed.
People
[Prentiss’s] sensual linguistic flourishes exquisitely evoke the passions we can feel for people and places we’ve known or are discovering…again and again, the temptation is to underline passages…there are riveting plots and subplots… still the book’s magnificence remains in its shadings, descriptive and emotional… toward the end you’ll find yourself turning the pages slowly, sorry to realize you’re almost finished.
Oprah Magazine
It's 1980 in SoHo, and in this thrilling, vibrant debut, a synesthetic art critic could make or break [an artist named] Raul. And so could a girl named Lucy. Oh, and his own recklessness, too.
Marie Claire
Innovative to the max, this debut novel from Molly Prentiss is a book that I've been raving about to everyone I know…. Prentiss will leave you breathless as she plays with form and description in astounding new ways.
Bustle
[Prentiss'] writing is as vivid and sensitive as the pensées of her synesthetic art-critic protagonist...[her] descriptions of the eighties art world ring true on both the texture of the work and its go-go capitalist corruption.
Vulture
Prentiss vividly conjures a colorful love triangle set in the gritty, art-soaked world of downtown New York in 1980.... One yearns for more time spent on the women artists who are minor characters.... Nevertheless, this is a bold and auspicious debut.
Publishers Weekly
We are luckily introduced to three individuals who bravely take the stage, ready to conquer SoHo by storm. Their trek amongst the bright lights is captivating, and readers will be hanging on the edge of their seats.
Romance Times Book Reviews
(Starred review.) A...seductive writer, Prentiss combines exquisite sensitivity with unabashed melodrama to create an operatic tale of ambition and delusion, success and loss, mystery and crassness.... [A] vital, sensuous, edgy, and suspenseful tale of longing, rage, fear, compulsion, and love.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Prentiss' characters...[are] rich, nuanced, satisfyingly complicated.... [T]he novel is elegantly infused with an ambient sense of impending loss...[but] miraculously manages to dodge the trap of easy nostalgia, thanks in large part to Prentiss' wry humor. As affecting as it is absorbing. A thrilling debut.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the 1980 "portrait of Manhattan" offered here. How does New York City act as its own of character throughout the novel? How does it change and grow? How would you describe a portrait of your own home, in 2015?
2. James’s first journalism teacher claims that there is "influence in oddity." How do we find ways to absorb difference into our identity? Discuss James’s complex relationship to his synesthesia.
3. Like James, we all have a "Running List of Worries." What do think would be on Lucy’s or Raul’s list? Marge’s or Arlene’s? Why do you think it is so much easier to internalize our regrets over our accomplishments?
4. There is a perverse comfort afforded to those who share tragedy, like Franca’s resistance group or John Lennon’s mourners, that is inaccessible to those who suffer in solitude, like Raul. Where and how do you think Raul finally finds a similar kind of recognition?
5. Discuss James’s relationship to art commercialization as it swarms up around him. Why does his black-and-white stance on separating art from currency fade to gray?
6. For these characters, there is often a wide gap between perception and reality. Do you think Manhattan culture perpetuates this gap? Why or why not?
7. When Raul paints Franca, she asks him not to paint the "bad parts," but Raul becomes fixated on the flaws that surround him. Discuss how these fragments can make up a beautiful whole, or even act as a whole themselves. How does this resonate throughout the novel?
8. Discuss the role of fate and timing in the story, especially as it relates to Winona’s New Year’s Eve party. How much agency do these characters really have?
9. Raul’s father plays him a scratched recording of "Little Child" by the Beatles before professing that "the scratches are what make a life." Do you agree? Why do you think the author chose "Little Child" for this moment?
10. When she moves to New York, Lucy wants a life of momentum, change, and propulsion. Do you think she feels the same at the end? Do you agree with Raul that she doesn’t yet know how to "need herself"? What does that mean?
11. After breaking up with Lucy, Raul realizes that "memories of sweet times now felt sour." In the novel, how does memory shift to reflect shame and regret, and how does that extend to Raul and Franca’s siblinghood? James and Marge’s marriage?
12. James insists that every work of art must be a journey, filled with associative power, while Raul wonders if it is possible to begin with a complete idea already in hand. What do you think, and why?
13. Discuss the symbolism of James’s white suit. What does the black stain mean?
14. Lucy often compartmentalizes herself, neatly splitting her identity between her girlhood in Idaho and her womanhood in the city. Discuss the inherent disconnect here. In the end, how do these character learn to reconcile each part of themselves?
(Questions issued by Gallery/Scout Press at Simon & Schuster.)
Everyone Brave is Forgiven
Chris Cleave, 2016
Simon & Schuster
532 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781501124372
Summary
London, 1939.
The day war is declared, Mary North leaves finishing school unfinished, goes straight to the War Office, and signs up.
Tom Shaw decides to ignore the war—until he learns his roommate Alistair Heath has unexpectedly enlisted. Then the conflict can no longer be avoided.
Young, bright, and brave, Mary is certain she’d be a marvelous spy. When she is—bewilderingly—made a teacher, she finds herself defying prejudice to protect the children her country would rather forget.
Tom, meanwhile, finds that he will do anything for Mary.
And when Mary and Alistair meet, it is love, as well as war, that will test them in ways they could not have imagined, entangling three lives in violence and passion, friendship and deception, inexorably shaping their hopes and dreams.
Set in London during the years of 1939–1942, when citizens had slim hope of survival, much less victory; and on the strategic island of Malta, which was daily devastated by the Axis barrage, Everyone Brave is Forgiven features little-known history and a perfect wartime love story inspired by the real-life love letters between Chris Cleave’s grandparents.
This dazzling novel dares us to understand that, against the great theater of world events, it is the intimate losses, the small battles, the daily human triumphs that change us most. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1973
• Where—London, England, UK
• Where—raised in both Buckinghamsire (UK) and Cameroon
• Education—Oxford University
• Awards—Somerset Maughm Award; Prix des Lecteurs
• Currently—lives in London
Chris Cleave is a British author of four novels and has been a journalist for London's Guardian newspaper, where from 2008 until 2010 he wrote the column "Down With the Kids."
Novels
His first novel, Incendiary, was published in 2005 and released in 20 countries. It won the 2006 Somerset Maugham Award and the Prix Special du Jury at the 2007 French Prix des Lecteurs. In 2008, the novel was adapted to film starring Ewan McGregor and Michelle Williams.
His second novel, Little Bee, was inspired by his childhood in West Africa. It was shortlisted for the prestigious Costa Award for Best Novel. Gold, his third novel, came out in 2012, and his fourth, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, was published in 2016. That novel is based on his grandparents' experience during the London Blitz of World War II.
Cleave lives in London with his French wife and three mischievous Anglo-French children. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/24/2016.)
Visit the author's website.
Book Reviews
(Starred review.) Real, engaging characters, based loosely on Cleave’s own grandparents, come alive on the page. Insightful, stark, and heartbreaking, Cleave’s latest novel portrays the irrepressible hopefulness that can arise in the face of catastrophe.
Publishers Weekly
[S]weeping saga...well crafted and compelling but a tad shy of perfect, if only because the romance between the main characters isn't developed convincingly.... Cleave shines when delivering droll banter, and [some of the] exchanges...are particularly clever and touching. —Christine Perkins, Whatcom Cty. Lib. Syst., Bellingham, WA
Library Journal
Intensely felt…Full of insight and memorably original phrasings, the story is leavened by sardonic humor… Cleave paints an emotion-filled portrait of a damaged city with its inequities amplified by war and of courageous individuals whose connections to one another make them stronger.
Booklist
Privileged young Londoners lose their sense of entitlement and their moral innocence in Cleave's romantic but very adult World War II love story.... Among all the recent fictions about the war, Cleave's miniseries of a novel is a surprising standout, with irresistibly engaging characters who sharply illuminate issues of class, race, and wartime morality.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Both Mary and Alistair sign up to be part of the war effort almost immediately after war is declared. What are their motivations for doing so? How does each of them serve? Why is Mary surprised by her assignment?
2. When Mary first begins spending time with Tom, she describes him as "Thoughtful. Interesting. Compassionate." (p. 41) What did you think of him? Discuss Mary’s relationship with Tom. Are the two well suited for each other? Why, or why not?
3. In a letter, Mary writes, "I was brought up to believe that everyone brave is forgiven, but in wartime courage is cheap and clemency out of season." (p. 245) Why do you think Chris Cleave chose to take the title of his novel from this line? Does your interpretation of the title change when you read it in the full context of the quote? In what ways?
4. Mary’s student Zachary makes a big impression on her. Why? Discuss their relationship. Why does Mary write to Zachary after he has been evacuated to the countryside? How do her letters help both of them?
5. While Alistair is on leave, he returns to London and finds "there was a new way of moving that he could not seem to weave himself into." (p. 100) Why does Alistair have difficulty adjusting to life in London? Why does Alistair put off seeing Tom? Do you think he is right in doing so? Explain your answer.
6. Early in the novel, while Mary is with Tom, she is "thinking how much she was enjoying the war." (p. 86) Why might Mary enjoy the war? What new freedoms are afforded to her in wartime?
7. During one of her conversations with her mother, Mary notices that "There was a sadness in her mother’s eyes. Mary wondered whether it had always been there, becoming visible only now that she was attuned to sorrow’s frequency." (p. 236) Describe Mary’s relationship with her mother. Is Mary’s mother supportive? Explain your answer. Why might Mary’s experiences during the war make her more "attuned to sorrow’s frequency"? Do these experiences help Mary better relate to her mother? Why, or why not?
8. Alistair tells Mary "Nobody is brave, the first time in an air raid." (p. 164) How do each of the main characters react the first time that they experience an air raid? Were any of them brave? In what ways? Were you surprised by the way any of them reacted to the bombs?
9. When Mary meets with Cooper to discuss going back to work, she tells him "We needn’t put this city back the way we found it." (p. 228) What prompts Mary to make her comment and what does she mean by it? How has life in London changed as a result of the war? Have any of those changes been positive? Why might Mary be reluctant to return to the status quo?
10. Explain the significance of Tom’s jar of blackberry jam. When Alistair is injured, he worries that "if he opened it, the dust would get into everything he minded about." (p. 302) What does the jam represent and why doesn’t Alistair open the jar? Is Simonson right to think that "to eat the jam would be a betrayal." (p. 393) Why? Think about your own belongings. Do you own anything like the jam jar that has special significance? Tell your book club about it.
11. Mary tells Alistair "My mother thinks [happiness] isn’t even a word, in wartime." (p. 416) Do you think Mary’s mother is right? Why, or why not? Are there any moments of happiness in Everyone Brave is Forgiven? What are they? Discuss them with your book club.
12. What were your initial impressions of Hilda? Did they change as you learned more about her? If so, why? Discuss Hilda’s friendship with Mary. Do you think the women are good friends to each other? Explain your answer.
13. While Alistair is on leave, he, Tom, Mary and Hilda go to see Zachary’s father’s show at the Lyceum. How does each of them react to the show? Does this give you any insight into their characters? Why is Mary ashamed to go over and say hello to Zachary’s father during the interval?
14. After seeing the effects of one of the air raids, Mary "knew, now, why her father had not spoken of the last war, nor Alistair of this. It was hardly fair on the living." (p. 268) What does Mary see that leads to her have this insight? What effect does not speaking of his experiences in war have on Alistair?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Regional Office Is Under Attack!
Manuel Gonzales, 2016
Penguin Publishing
416 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594632419
Summary
In a world beset by amassing forces of darkness, one organization—the Regional Office—and its coterie of super-powered female assassins protects the globe from annihilation.
At its helm, the mysterious Oyemi and her oracles seek out new recruits and root out evil plots. Then a prophecy suggests that someone from inside might bring about its downfall. And now, the Regional Office is under attack.
Recruited by a defector from within, Rose is a young assassin leading the attack, eager to stretch into her powers and prove herself on her first mission. Defending the Regional Office is Sarah—who may or may not have a mechanical arm—fiercely devoted to the organization that took her in as a young woman in the wake of her mother’s sudden disappearance.
On the day that the Regional Office is attacked, Rose’s and Sarah’s stories will overlap, their lives will collide, and the world as they know it just might end.
Weaving in a brilliantly conceived mythology, fantastical magical powers, teenage crushes, and kinetic fight scenes, The Regional Office Is Under Attack! is a seismically entertaining debut novel about revenge and allegiance and love. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1974
• Raised—Fort Worth and Plano, Texas, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Texas; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Awards—Sue Kaufman Price for First Fiction; John Gardner Prize for Fiction
• Currently—lives in Lexington, Kentucky
Manuel Gonzales is the author of The Miniature Wife and Other Stories (2013) and his debut novel, The Regional Office is Under Attack! (2016). He is an assistant professor of writing at the University of Kentucky. He and his wife have two children.
Gonzales graduated with a BA in English from the University of Texas in 1996 and then with an MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from Columbia University's School of the Arts in 2003.
His fiction and nonfiction have been published in McSweeney's, Fence, Tin House, Open City, One Story, The Believer, i09.com, and various other publications. He is the recipient of the Academy of Arts and Letters Sue Kaufman Price for First Fiction and the Binghamton University John Gardner Prize for Fiction.
For four years he ran the nonprofit writing and tutoring center for kids, Austin Bat Cave, and in times past he co-owned The Clarksville Pie Company in Austin, TX, where he baked pies for a living. (Adapted from University of Kentucky profile.)
Book Reviews
Zounds! Something has gone horribly wrong. After 20 years of fighting against the forces of evil, The Regional Office has come under attack, but no one can figure out why…or who. Manuel Gonzales has written a terrific, quirky novel, a real genre-bender that’s tough to pin down (and put down). It’s hard to know what to call it—sci-fi, fantasy, action-thriller, parody, or romance. Answer: All of the above, which is precisely what makes the book such fun. READ MORE.
P.J. Adler - LitLovers
Supernaturally powerful though they may be, these characters, like us, are constantly searching for their role in the world: the place where they fit in…Like Gonzales's 2013 story collection, The Miniature Wife, The Regional Office Is Under Attack! is primarily concerned not with the action-packed events at the surface but with the greater question of human alienation, through talent, technology or a combination of the two…. Gonzales's prose is crisp, but fittingly looping and parenthetical, often doubling back on itself to offer a slightly different interpretation…. The Regional Office Is Under Attack! is an entertaining and satisfying novel. Like the best of the stories it satirizes so gently, it's rollicking good fun on the surface, action-packed and shiny in all the right places; underneath that surface, though, it's thoughtful and well considered. Gonzales has created a superheroic fighting force of the kind we've grown so used to through constant exposure to the Avengers and various iterations of the X-Men, and then he has turned out their pockets and flipped open their diaries.
Kelly Braffet - New York Times Book Review
The novel is divided into four books, and we read about Rose and Sarah in short bursts of action that alternate between the past and present. It’s an odd narrative structure,...which may be why this book feels more like a pitch for TV than a fully fleshed out novel; it is tailor-made for the small screen. And yet, it’s just so much fun to read.
Dallas Morning News
[H]ighly entertaining… Wonderfully strange and fun, Gonzales’ novel follows both the women attacking and defending the Regional Office and how their lives intersect.
Buzzfeed
Like the writers he is compared to, Gonzales’s stories’ fantastic premises are always anchored in real-world conflicts that hold universal familiarity. The Regional Office is Under Attack!, …carries some of his stories’ thematic arsenal into a book length narrative…. The story nods to tons of tropes—from Kill Bill and Charlie’s Angels to Blade Runner and The Karate Kid—but it frequently subverts those tropes and uses them to flesh out characters that dazzle.
Rumpus
The Regional Office is Under Attack!—set in the underground headquarters of an organization deploying a team of "superpowered warrior women" to battle "the forces of darkness that threaten, at nearly every turn, the fate of the planet"—is fundamentally an office novel, a tale of the prosaic struggles of young adulthood, set, with deliciously rich irony, against a distant background of absurdly operatic adventure.
Slate
[A]n intricate, if frustrating, debut novel about a subterranean superhero organization under attack by its own rogue operatives.... Gonzales writes with an abundance of imagination, riffing on comic book and pop culture plot lines and characters while adding his own unique perspective. The novel...occasionally feels overextended, but there are moments of brilliance.
Publishers Weekly
[A] nonstop action fest peppered with pop-culture references, explosions, and karate-esque fight scenes.... The plotline can be confusing owing to the narrative changing among the characters, and their differing perceptions of reality, but the action is captivating. —Jennifer Funk, McKendree Univ. Lib., Lebanon, IL
Library Journal
(Starred review.) You might want to get a firm grip on your socks before cracking open this one; otherwise, Gonzales is likely to knock them off. It's very difficult to categorize this mind-bending novel... it's pure excitement.... A brilliant genre-blender.
Booklist
A clash of swords, spells, and wills erupts in an upper Manhattan office building under assault by well-armed mercenaries. A dense mythology threatens to undermine this frenetic action novel..., but the author just manages to wobble to the end.... A surprisingly erudite bit of sci-fi that throws in everything but the kitchen sink.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add the publisher's questions if and when they're available. In the meantime use our LitLovers talking points to kick off a discussion for The Regional Office Is Under Attack!...then take off on your own...
1. Describe Rose, her personality, upbringing and her longings. Why is she disgruntled enough to lead the attack against her former employer?
2. Same goes for Sarah. In fact, what does the novel suggest about the need fit in, to belong, not just for Rose and Sarah but for all the characters?
3. Talk about Oyemi and Mr. Niles and how they came to found The Regional Office. Is Oyemi insane? And why does Mr. Niles begins to have second thoughts about the enterprise?
4. What about the mysterious Henry? Playing both sides? Motivations? Is Henry the good guy...or bad guy?
5. In attempting to fill out his fictional world, Manuel Gonzales weaves in excerpts from an essay subtitled, "Tracking the Rise and Fall of an American Institution." What do you learn about the world in which the book's characters live? Is there enough information for you to get full sense of what that wider fictional world is like?
6. Did you find the sudden switch in point-of-view to the hostages jarring...or a clever and revealing narrative move on the part of the author? What do we learn through the above-ground workers' complaints and resentments?
7. What is Gonzales satirizing in The Regional Office Is Under Attack!? Consider, for instance, whether an office setting—with its humdrum, prosaic tasks—offers a sufficiently heroic setting for an epic battle between good and evil. In other words, think how Gonzales makes use of familiar sci-fi / thriller tropes to break the genre open and reveal the deeper truths of the people who populate—and read—fantasy novels. Consider the all-too-human need for escape, adventure, acceptance, and belonging—as those needs apply both to the superheroes within the genre and to the readers of the genre.
8. What is the meaning of the message from the Oracles?—The one who once loved will one day destroy that which was loved. How did Oyemi misinterpret the message? And who turns out to be "the one" predicted to destroy the Regional Office?
9. The Regional Office commits crimes to safeguard society. Are those crimes justified?
10. What actually happens at the end? Who lives? Who dies? What about Emma?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Hystopia
David Means, 21016
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780865479135
Summary
At the bitter end of the 1960s, after surviving multiple assassination attempts, President John F. Kennedy is entering his third term in office.
The Vietnam War rages on, and the president has created a vast federal agency, the Psych Corps, dedicated to maintaining the nation’s mental hygiene by any means necessary.
Soldiers returning from the war have their battlefield traumas “enfolded”—wiped from their memories through drugs and therapy—while veterans too damaged to be enfolded roam at will in Michigan, evading the government and reenacting atrocities on civilians.
This destabilized version of American history is the vision of twenty-two-year old Eugene Allen, who has returned from Vietnam to write the book-within-a-book at the center of Hystopia. In conversation with some of the greatest war narratives, from Homer’s Iliad to the Rolling Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” David Means channels the voice of Allen, the young veteran out to write a novel that can bring honor to those he fought with in Vietnam while also capturing the tragic history of his own family.
The critic James Wood has written that Means’s language “offers an exquisitely precise and sensuous register of an often crazy American reality.” In Hystopia, his highly anticipated first novel, David Means brings his full talent to bear on the crazy reality of trauma, both national and personal.
Outlandish and tender, funny and violent, timely and historical, Hystopia invites us to consider whether our traumas can ever be truly overcome. The answers it offers are wildly inventive, deeply rooted in its characters, and wrung from the author’s own heart. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October 17, 1961
• Where—Kalamazoo, Michigan., USA
• Education—B.A., College of Wooster; M.F.A., Columbia University
• Currently—lives in Nyack, New York
David Means is an American author of several short story collections and the 2016 novel Hystopia. He has been a part-time member of the English department at Vassar College since 2001 and lives in Nyack, New York, along the Hudson River. He and his wife have two children.
Education
Born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Means graduated from Loy Norrix High School in and received his bachelor's degree in 1984 from the College of Wooster. He went to graduate school at Columbia University where he received an MFA in poetry.
Work
Hystopia, Means's 2016 novel, presents an alternate version of history in which John F. Kennedy survived the assassination attempt and is in his third presidential term. The story focuses on the horrors of the Vietnam War, which Kennedy prosecutes with determination. Various comparisons have been made to David Foster Wallace, Charlie Kaufman, Kazuo Ishiguro, and even Hemingway.
In addition to his collections, Means's stories have appeared in many publications, including Esquire, The New Yorker, and Harper's. They are frequently set in the Midwest or the Rust Belt, or along the Hudson River in New York. Means has been compared to such writers as Raymond Carver and Alice Munro while Eileen Battersby in the Irish Times compared him to Eudora Welty and John Cheever. Praised for his sharp prose, James Wood in the London Review of Books wrote...
Means' language offers an exquisitely precise and sensuous register of an often crazy American reality. Sentences gleaming with lustre are sewn through the stories. One will go a long way with a writer possessed of such skill.
(Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/23/2016.)
Book Reviews
Hystopia, David Means's dark acid trip of a novel, reads like a phantasmagorical…mash-up of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Charlie Kaufman's screenplay Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Michael Herr's Vietnam classic, Dispatches. It's a meditation on war…and the toll it takes on soldiers and families and loved ones. It's also a portrait of a troubled America in the late 1960s and early '70s—an America reeling from unemployment and lost dreams, and seething with anger, and uncannily familiar, in many ways, to America today. Perhaps most insistently, it's an exploration of how storytelling—the causal narratives we manufacture in our heads—shapes our identities and provides a hedge against the chaos of real life.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
The horrors of war, especially the traumas of America’s experience in Vietnam, birthed the recursive, thickly ironized literary sensibility we call postmodernism. David Means’s violent, mind-warped novel-within-a-novel Hystopia is a throwback to this style’s heyday, a drug-addled nightmare version of American history nodding in the direction of Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut and Hunter S. Thompson.... Hystopia’s tale-swallowing metafiction ingeniously embodies the self-replicating mental prisons of war trauma (in Allen’s telling, even enfolded veterans feel caged inside their forgetfulness).
Sam Sacks - Wall Street Journal
Supremely gonzo and supremely good.... If Flannery O'Connor had written about Vietnam, Rake is the kind of character she would have created.... What is the relation between the chaos of lived experience and the coherence of narrative? How is trauma tied to the fracturing of narrative, to our inability to see the past as past, distinct from, yet leading to the present? Henry James once described the real as "the things we cannot possibly not know." Hystopia often reads, strange as it sounds, like a Jamesian investigation of knowledge, albeit one fueled by amphetamines.
Anthony Domestico - Boston Globe
Subtle yet evocative..... [T]here is a lot to unpack in this novel whose central themes include, but are hardly limited to, trauma, memory and violence..... [Means is] a writer of imagination and vision, someone for whom history is not ossified but still very much alive, and rich with possibilities for reinvention.
Shoshana Olidort - Chicago Tribune
Brilliant..... [T]he writing is beautiful and exuberant, moving and funny, and always one step ahead. The descriptions of getting stoned are as vivid as the landscapes. Means s characters live in a state of constant sensory attention that keeps them always attuned to the texture...the smell of lakes and trees, the taste of carbon.
Christine Smallwood - Harper's
(Starred review.) After four story collections, Means delivers his first novel, and it’s a dazzling and singular trip.... Means writes stunning prose and draws his characters with verve.... [Hystopia] reads like an acid flashback, complete with the paranoia, manic monologues, and violent visions, proving that some traumas never go away.
Publishers Weekly
John F. Kennedy has survived several assassination attempts and founded a federal agency called the Psych Corps, meant to keep the nation positive. (Vietnam vets have the horrors they've seen scrubbed from their memories.) Into this fake brightness lands a vet named Eugene Allen, who writes the novel within this novel. Eyebrow-raising.
Library Journal
(Starred review.) A compelling, imaginative alternative-history tale about memory and distress . . . By turns disturbing, hilarious, and absurd, Means’ novel is also sharply penetrating in its depiction of an America all too willing to bury its past.
Booklist
(Starred review.) [P]recise, relentless, unsentimental...[tracing] the inevitability of loss. [O]ne of the pleasures of this dark and complex work is to see Means stretch out. Even more, however, it's the novel's manic energy, its mix of realism and satire, set in an alternative universe.... Means' first novel is a compelling portrait of an imagined counterhistory that feels entirely real.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add the publisher's questions if and when they're available. In the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to kick off a discussion for Hystopia...and then take off from there:
1. The war veterans take a drug called Tripizoid to enable them to forget the trauma of war. Even providing that it works, are the veterans better off with "therapeutic amnesia"? Is there a benefit to the erasure of traumatic memories...to not remembering? If you cut out memory, what is left?
2. What is the purpose of the novel within a novel—a novel "enfolded" within a novel? How is the inner novel linked to the real one (David Means's Hystopia)? Why might Means have chosen to structure his story this way? Consider that the "editor" tells us Eugene Allen suffered from “Stiller’s disease”—the "propensity...to witness the world from a distance and within secure confines." Is that what David Means is choosing to do,as well?
3. Can you draw parallels between Hystopia's veterans of 40 some years ago and today's veterans from the Middle East? What other ways does the novel comment on contemporary life?
4. Talk about the title, "Hystopia"? What is its significance...its play on words?
5. Why does Rake, whose failed enfolding sends him on a killing spree, deliberately leave clues behind for the Psych Corps?
6. How has Hank, unlike Jake, been able to reverse the mal-effects of his failed treatment? What are the ways in which he is able to find peace?
7. Talk about the references to Hemingway's traumatized veterans. As Agent Singleton notes:
Hemingway's war had produced a certain kind of character, a new way of thinking and speaking that came from what was left out, from the things war had demolished and pushed away forever.
What does Singleton mean? What was "left out" in the "new way of thinking a speaking"? How is this observation relevant to Singleton, Rake and Hank?
8. The author juxtaposes the natural world and the man made world. Describe the state of the State of Michigan, the setting for the novel. In what way does Michigan border on dystopia? What are the parallels to the "rust belt" of today.
9. How does the rather uplifting conclusion of Allen's novel conflict with the editor's note at the very beginning about Eugene Allen's suicide and his sister's unhappy end?
10. One of the major concerns in the book is the role of memory in preserving personal history—and thus self-identity. What, for instance, is the relationship among Rake, Singleton, and Wendy if their memories are erased?
11. How might this book be using personal amnesia as a metaphor for national amnesia?
12. Talk about the following passage: "Don’t accuse the kid of bending history. Accuse history of bending the kid. And the war, the war bent him, too. Like so many, he came back changed."
13. Reviewers have compared this book to an acid trip. Care to comment?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
The Little Red Chairs
Edna O'Brien, 2015
Little, Brown & Co.
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316378239
Summary
A woman discovers that the foreigner she thinks will redeem her life is a notorious war criminal.
Vlad, a stranger from Eastern Europe masquerading as a healer, settles in a small Irish village where the locals fall under his spell. One woman, Fidelma McBride, becomes so enamored that she begs him for a child.
All that world is shattered when Vlad is arrested, and his identity as a war criminal is revealed.
Fidelma, disgraced, flees to England and seeks work among the other migrants displaced by wars and persecution. But it is not until she confronts him—her nemesis—at the tribunal in The Hague, that her physical and emotional journey reaches its breathtaking climax.
The Little Red Chairs is a book about love, and the endless search for it. It is also a book about mankind's fascination with evil, and how long, how crooked, is the road towards Home. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—December 15, 1930
• Where—Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland
• Education—University College, Dublin
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently— lives in London, England
Edna O'Brien is an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short story writer. Philip Roth has described her "the most gifted woman now writing in English," while former President of Ireland Mary Robinson has cited her as "one of the great creative writers of her generation."
O'Brien's works often revolve around the inner feelings of women, and their problems in relating to men, and to society as a whole. Her first novel, The Country Girls (1960), is often credited with breaking silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland following World War II. The book was banned, burned and denounced from the pulpit, and O'Brien left Ireland behind.
O'Brien now lives in London. She received the Irish PEN Award in 2001. Her 2011 story collection, Saints and Sinners, won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the world's richest prize for a short story collection. Her memoir, Country Girl, was published in 2012.
Earlier years
O'Brien was born in 1930 at Tuamgraney, County Clare, Ireland, a place she would later describe as "fervid" and "enclosed." Her family once had money and position, but by the time of her birth in 1930 all of that was gone and life was difficult, all the more so because her father was distant and often drunk. According to O'Brien, her mother was a strong, controlling woman who had emigrated temporarily to America, and worked for a time as a maid in Brooklyn, New York, for a well-off Irish-American family before returning to Ireland to raise her own family.
O'Brien was the youngest in what she called "a strict, religious family." In the years 1941-46 she was educated by the Sisters of Mercy—a circumstance that contributed to a "suffocating" childhood.
I rebelled against the coercive and stifling religion into which I was born and bred. It was very frightening and all pervasive. I'm glad it has gone.
Her 1970 novel, A Pagan Place, centered on her growing-up years. Her mother strongly disapproved of her daughter's career as a writer; in fact, both parents were vehemently opposed to all things related to literature. Her mother even tried to burn a Sean O'Casey book in her daughter's possession.
She studied pharmacy at University College in Dublin, was awarded her license in 1950, and worked as a pharmacist in Dublin for several years. In 1954, she married Irish writer Ernest Gebler against her parents' wishes. The couple moved to London in 1959 where they raised two sons, Carlo and Sasha. The marriage lasted for 10 years and was dissolved in 1964. Gebler died in 1998.
It was during her marriage that O'Brien bought Introducing James Joyce, with an introduction written by T. S. Eliot. Learning that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was autobiographical, it made her realize that she might turn to writing: "Unhappy houses are a very good incubation for stories," she said.
She worked for an English publishing house and was eventually advanced £50 to write her own novel. The Country Girls, her first book, was result. Published in 1960, the book became the first in a trilogy which included The Lonely Girl (1962) and Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964). Because of their frank portrayal of sex, the books were banned—even burned—in Ireland shortly after publication. Later, in 1987, the three volumes were collected and issued as "The Country Girls Trilogy."
Celebrity life
During the 1960s, O''Brien became a well-known beauty at the center of swinging London, and her glamour and fame became a part of her identity as a writer. She befriended famous celebrities—Paul McCartney, Lord Snowdon, Richard Burton, Sean Connery, Maggie Smith, and Samuel Beckett. She had a house in Carlyle Square which was often filled with the great names, from Harold Wilson to Ingrid Bergman.
In New York her experiences also glittered with celebrities—historian and Kennedy aide Arthur Schlesinger, Al Pacino, Norman Mailer—and with a rewarding, and vivid, friendship with Jacqueline Onassis, who once told Edna that she was one of the three people in the world she loved most
Legacy
According to Scottish novelist Andrew O'Hagan, her place in Irish letters is assured. "She changed the nature of Irish fiction; she brought the woman's experience and sex and internal lives of those people on to the page, and she did it with style, and she made those concerns international." Irish novelist Colum McCann avers that O'Brien has been "the advance scout for the Irish imagination" for over fifty years.
Novels
The Country Girls (1960) ♦ The Lonely Girl (later Girl with Green Eyes, 1962) ♦ Girls in Their Married Bliss (1964) ♦ August Is a Wicked Month (1965) ♦ Casualties of Peace (1966) ♦ A Pagan Place (1970) ♦ Zee & Co. (1971) ♦ Night (1972) ♦ Johnny I Hardly Knew You (1977) ♦ The High Road (1988) ♦ Time and Tide (1992) ♦ House of Splendid Isolation (1994) ♦ Down by the River (1996) ♦ Wild Decembers (1999) ♦ In the Forest (2002) ♦ The Light of Evening (2006) ♦ The Little Red Chairs (2015).
Short story collections
The Love Object and Other Stories (1968) ♦ A Scandalous Woman and Other Stories (1974) ♦ Mrs Reinhardt and Other Stories (1978) ♦ Some Irish Loving (1979) ♦ Returning (1982) ♦ A Fanatic Heart (1985) ♦ Lantern Slides (1990) ♦ Saints and Sinners (2011) ♦ The Love Object: Selected Stories (2013, a fifty-year retrospective)
Nonfiction
Mother Ireland (1976) ♦ James Joyce (1999-biography) ♦ Byron in Love (2009-biography) ♦ Country Girl (2012, memoir)
Poetry
On the Bone (1989) ♦ "Watching Obama" (2009-poem, The Daily Beast)
Awards and honors
Kingsley Amis Award (1962-The Country Girls) ♦ Premio Grinzane Cavour (1991-Girl with Green Eyes) ♦ European Prize for Literature (1995-House of Splendid Isolation) ♦ Irish PEN Award (2001) ♦ Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award (2009) ♦ Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award (2011-Saints and Sinners) ♦ Irish Book Awards-Irish NonFiction (2012-Country Girl)
(Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/21/2016.)
Book Reviews
Edna O'Brien's boldly imagined and harrowing new novel…is both an exploration of those themes of Irish provincial life from the perspective of girls and women for which she has become acclaimed and a radical departure, a work of alternate history in which the devastation of a war-torn Central European country intrudes upon the "primal innocence, lost to most places in the world," of rural Ireland. Here, in addition to O'Brien's celebrated gifts of lyricism and mimetic precision, is a new, unsettling fabulist vision that suggests Kafka more than Joyce, as her portrait of the psychopath "warrior poet" Vladimir Dragan suggests Nabokov in his darker, less playful mode…. O'Brien is not interested in sensationalizing her material, and The Little Red Chairs is not a novel of suspense, still less a mystery or a thriller; it is something more challenging, a work of meditation and penance.
Joyce Carol Oates - New York Times Book Review
[An] extraordinary articulation of the lingering effects of trauma.... In the end, what leaves one in humbled awe of The Little Red Chairs is O'Brien's dexterity, her ability to shift without warning—like life—from romance to horror, from hamlet to hell, from war crimes tribunal to midsummer night's dream. And through it all, she embeds the most perplexing moral challenge ever conceived.... At a time when our best writers are such delightfully showy stylists, O'Brien...practices a darker, more subtle magic. Surprise and transformation lurk in even the smallest details, the most ordinary moments.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
O'Brien achieves a tone at once mythical and contemporary, archetypal and particularized, and does wonderful things with voice and tense.... The Little Red Chairs has much to recommend it: beautiful writing, immense ambition, a vivid cast of supporting characters, and a rigorous humanitarian ethos.
Priscilla Gilman - Boston Globe
A memorable work of art for our unsettled times.... [O'Brien's] prose is as lyrically arresting as ever, her vision as astute, and as delicate. The Little Red Chairs is notable for its interweaving of the near-mythical and the urgent present, and for its unflinching exploration of the complex and lasting effects of human brutality.... At once arduous and beautiful, The Little Red Chairs marries myth and fact in a new form that journeys, as we do now, from Cloonoila to The Hague, from fairytale to contemporary agon.
Claire Messud - Financial Times (UK)
A spectacular piece of work, massive and ferocious and far-reaching.... Holding you in its clutches from first page to last, it dares to address some of the darkest moral questions of our times while never once losing sight of the sliver of humanity at their core.... It's impossible not to be knocked out by the sly perfection of O'Brien's prose (A Best Book of 2015).
Julie Myerson - Guardian (UK)
Magnificent.... A joyful reminder of why O'Brien's literary career has spanned so many years: she repeatedly finds the sweet spot between tight craft and unhinged brilliance.... A timely and defiant book.
Lucy Atkins - Sunday Times (UK)
The title refers to the 11,541 empty chairs set out in Sarajevo in 2012 as a national monument to represent people killed during the siege by Bosnian Serb forces.) Against this dark subterranean thread O’Brien interjects lines from classic poets...who attest to the enduring power of love. Fidelma’s eventual redemption seems forced, but O’Brien’s eerily potent gaze into the nature of evil is haunting.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review. ) O'Brien retains every element of her gorgeous writing [in] her new novel.... Dark fairy-tale threads give the story a magic-realism effect, but ultimately...the author's twenty fourth book is starkly realistic. O'Brien speaks to contemporary political violence in a suitably audible voice.
Booklist
(Starred review. ) [O'Brien] delivers noble truths as well as atrocities. Her fictional depiction of Serbian war criminal Radovan Karadic will chill readers not only because it convincingly exposes the egoism of a rational madman but also because these horrors happened. O'Brien's mastery of symbolism and natural description remain unmatched in modern fiction. —John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman
Library Journal
(Starred review. ) An Irish town is touched by the war crimes in Sarajevo when an outsider sleeps with a local woman and she's driven by shame and brutality into exile.... O'Brien's writing in this rich, wrenching book can be both lyrical and hard-edged, which suits a world where pain shared or a tincture of kindness can help ease the passage from losses.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add the publisher's questions if they're made available. In the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to kick off a discussion for The Little Red Chairs...then take off on your own:
1. How would you describe Dr. Vlad when we first meet him? To one person, he seems to resemble a "holy man," to another a figure of hope, to children he's simply looks "a bit funny." The schoolteacher alone is suspicious...why?
2. What do you make of Father Damien, who at first is wary of Dr. Vlad, especially on learning that he's a sex therapist: "Chastity," he say, "is our No. 1 commandment." He later tells Dr. Vlad that many of the local residents "feel a vacuum in their lives." How so? Is he being insightful or full of cliches? The priest goes on to say that "repentance and sorrow for sin is woven into our DNA." What do you think?
3. How would you describe the lives of the women of Cloonoila? Why are they so susceptible to Dr. Vlad's charms—why do they fall under his spell? Does he, in fact, fill that "vacuum" that Father Damien referred to (see Question 2)?
4. Talk about Fidelma, both her marriage and her affair with Dr. Vlad. Is her attraction to Dr. Vlad a consequence of naivete or lust? In what way is her story treated in the manner of a fairy tale, written with a near mythical quality?
5. Talk about Dr. Vlad's dream. It is written in a narrative style very different from the rest of the book, as it it were inserted as a separate piece of text. What was your experience reading it?
6. Talk about the punishment Fidelma later receives, a punishment way out of proportion to the offense. It is painful, almost impossible, to read...did you? Explore a thematic connection between Fidelma's brutal treatment at the hands of her townspeople and the brutality of the Bosnian war?
7. Can Fidelma atone for her interaction with evil? Trace her spiritual development: how does she work her way toward redemption? Why for instance, why does she choose to live among the homeless—"the hunted, the haunted, the raped, the defeated, the mutilated, the banished, the flotsam of the world, unable to go home"? What do they represent to her?
8. Fidelma chooses "not to look at the prison wall of life, but to look up at the sky." Will this be enough for her? Is it enough for any of us?
9. Given the nature of the world and its capacity for evil, Edna O'Brien seems to be asking whether innocence and naivete are self-destructive—and whether skepticism, distrust or cynicism are justified. What do you think? What should our response be to the world?
10. O'Brien has said about her book, "I wanted to take a dreadful situation and the havoc and harm that it yields, and show how it spirals out into the world at large." How does she go about accomplishing that in The Little Red Chairs?
11. Why is memory so important in this story? During one of their last encounters, Dr. Vlad tells Fidelma, "Start forgetting...everything." Yet one of the displaced persons insists, "It is essential to remember, nothing must be forgotten." What is our responsibility as human beings: should we try to forget and forge ahead with life...or to remember and bear witness?
12. How much did you know about the Bosnian war before reading The Little Red Chairs? For instance, the character of Vladimir Dragan is based on "the Butcher of Bosnia” Radovan Karadzic—whose 2016 conviction of war crimes at the Hague coincided with the U.S. publication of the book. Consider doing some research on the conflict to enrich your book discussion.
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)