Tangerine
Christine Mangan, 2018
HarperCollins
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062686664
Summary
The last person Alice Shipley expected to see since arriving in Tangier with her new husband was Lucy Mason. After the accident at Bennington, the two friends—once inseparable roommates—haven’t spoken in over a year.
But there Lucy was, trying to make things right and return to their old rhythms.
Perhaps Alice should be happy. She has not adjusted to life in Morocco, too afraid to venture out into the bustling medinas and oppressive heat. Lucy—always fearless and independent—helps Alice emerge from her flat and explore the country.
But soon a familiar feeling starts to overtake Alice—she feels controlled and stifled by Lucy at every turn.
Then Alice’s husband, John, goes missing, and Alice starts to question everything around her: her relationship with her enigmatic friend, her decision to ever come to Tangier, and her very own state of mind.
Tangerine is a sharp dagger of a book—a debut so tightly wound, so replete with exotic imagery and charm, so full of precise details and extraordinary craftsmanship, it will leave you absolutely breathless. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Detroit, Michigan, USA
• Raised—Long Island, New York, and North Carolina
• Education—B.A., Columbia College Chicago; M.A., University of Southern Maine; Ph.D., University College Dublin
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City
Christine Mangan has her PhD in English from University College Dublin, where her thesis focused on 18th-century Gothic literature, and an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Southern Maine. Tangerine is her first novel. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
It's as if Mangan couldn't decide whether to write a homage to Donna Tartt's The Secret History or a sun-drenched novel of dissolute Westerners abroad in the tradition of Patricia Highsmith and Paul Bowles, so she tried to do both. She mostly succeeds…[Mangan] knows all the notes to hit to create lush, sinister atmosphere and to prolong suspense…Tangerine [is]…a satisfying, juicy thriller.
Jennifer Reese - New York Times Book Review
The reader’s sympathy switches back and forth between Lucy and Alice as their Moroccan reunion moves inexorably toward another fatal crossroads. But caveat lector: Tangerine, like its namesake fruit, can be both bracing and bitter.
Wall Street Journal
The lying, the cunning, and the duplicity is so very mannered that it’s chilling. Rich in dread, the foreboding positively drips from every page.
Washington Post
Unbelievably tense, incredibly smart.… Mangan full-speeds up to her shocking finale, twisting the plot with reveals you never see coming.… [Her] writing is so accomplished, so full of surprises and beauty, that you’d swear she was a seasoned pro.
San Francisco Chronicle
A juicy melodrama cast against the sultry, stylish imagery of North Africa in the fifties.… [Tangerine is] endearing and even impressive in the force of its determination to conjure a life more exciting than most.… Just the ticket.
New Yorker
The amoral, manipulative presence of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley hovers over Tangerine.… An assured and atmospheric debut.
Guardian (UK)
The thriller that everyone will be talking about.… One of those sinuous, Hitchcockian tales that disorients in the best way.… Hypnotic.
Esquire
Promises to be one of the best debuts of the year.… Echoes of Gillian Flynn and Patricia Highsmith in this tightly wound, exotic story.
Entertainment Weekly
Although some of the plot developments are easy to predict, the novel is narrated persuasively in alternating chapters…, and Mangan’s portrayal of Tangier is electric.… [A] sharp novel.
Publishers Weekly
Atmospheric enough to be a movie? You bet; George Clooney's Smokehouse Pictures bought the film rights, with Scarlett Johansson set to star. No wonder this debut is getting a 200,000-copy first printing.
Library Journal
Hypnotic.… [A] deadly, Hitchcockian pas de deux plays out under an unrelenting, Camus-like African sun.… Sucks the reader in almost instantly.
Booklist
In 1956, a pair of college roommates meets again in Tangier, with terrifying results.… A vivid setting and a devious, deadly plot, though the first is a bit overdone and the second contains a few head-scratchers, including the evil-lesbian trope.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for TANGERINE … then take off on your own:
1. How would you describe the two women at the heart of Tangerine? In what ways are they different from one another? Do they share any similarities? At first, were you drawn more to Alice or Lucy? Or neither?
2. What creates the bond between the two women? During the height of their friendship, each feels incomplete without the other. What does Lucy receive from Alice, and Alice from Lucy, that fulfills some part of themselves?
3. The chapters alternate between Alice's voice and Lucy's. How do their memories of Bennington diverge? In what way are both women untrustworthy or unreliable as narrators?
4. Trace the change in Alice and Lucy's relationship over the course of the novel, starting with their time at Bennington and "the incident"? When and why do the cracks first appear?
5. Follow-up to Question 4: What went through Alice's mind the day she found Lucy dressed up in her (Alice's) clothes? And the charm bracelet—care to tackle that one? Lucy appears to be "gaslighting" Alice, but to what purpose?
6. When Lucy turns up in Tangier, Alice recalls Shakespeare's line in The Tempest, "what's past is prologue." What does she mean?
7. Talk about Alice and John's marriage? In what way is Alice portrayed as a woman of the 1950s, educated but without a career, living at the behest of her husband and his job. And once Lucy meets John, she's on to him. What do you think? Is she right to insinuate herself into their marriage, to attempt to pull Alice away from her husband?
8. How do each of the women react to the city of Tangier, and what do their individual reactions say about who they are?
9. How does Christine Mangan depict Tangier. Youssef tells Lucy, “If you are looking for a place that makes sense, I feel I must provide this warning—you will be disappointed." In what way does the backdrop of the city, as well as the country's politics, reflect or enhance the mood and plot?
10. Talk about the dual meaning of the title, both as a juicy fruit and as a "woman of Tangiers," who disappears into the background.
11. Ultimately, what does Lucy want: to take over Alice's life or create a new one for herself?
12. The book is full of literary allusions (subtle and not so subtle) to other well-known novels. Can you pick a few out? Think Daphne du Maurier, Patricia Highsmith, Paul Bowles, even Hitchcock (see cover).
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Lights All Night Long
Lydia Fitzpatrick, 2019
Penguin Publishing
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525558736
Summary
A gripping and deftly plotted narrative of family and belonging, Lights All Night Long is a dazzling debut novel from an acclaimed young writer.
Fifteen-year-old Ilya arrives in Louisiana from his native Russia for what should be the adventure of his life: a year in America as an exchange student.
The abundance of his new world—the Super Walmarts and heated pools and enormous televisions—is as hard to fathom as the relentless cheerfulness of his host parents.
And Sadie, their beautiful and enigmatic daughter, has miraculously taken an interest in him.
But all is not right in Ilya's world: he's consumed by the fate of his older brother Vladimir, the magnetic rebel to Ilya's dutiful wunderkind, back in their tiny Russian hometown.
The two have always been close, spending their days dreaming of escaping to America. But when Ilya was tapped for the exchange, Vladimir disappeared into their town's seedy, drug-plagued underworld. Just before Ilya left, the murders of three young women rocked the town's usual calm, and Vladimir found himself in prison.
With the help of Sadie, who has secrets of her own, Ilya embarks on a mission to prove Vladimir's innocence. Piecing together the timeline of the murders and Vladimir's descent into addiction, Ilya discovers the radical lengths to which Vladimir has gone to protect him—a truth he could only have learned by leaving him behind.
A rich tale of belonging and the pull of homes both native and adopted, Lights All Night Long is a spellbinding story of the fierce bond between brothers determined to find a way back to each other. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1981-82
• Where—N/A
• Education—B.A., Princeton University; M.F.A., University of Michigan
• Awards—Wallace Stegner Fellowship
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Lydia Fitzpatrick's work has appeared in the The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, One Story, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, a fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant.
Fitzpatrick graduated from Princeton University and received an MFA from the University of Michigan. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two daughters. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
A luminous debut.… Fitzpatrick does so many things right in Lights All Night Long, it’s hard to believe it’s a debut novel. As a mystery, it’s paced perfectly, with the novel moving seamlessly back and forth in time between Ilya’s life in Russia and his new one in America. Fitzpatrick proves to be an expert in building suspense; it’s hard not to read the book in a single sitting.… It’s tricky to capture the specific, sometimes difficult language that brothers use to let each other know they care, but Fitzpatrick manages to do so perfectly, and it makes their relationship all the more beautiful and affecting. Lights All Night Long is both an expertly crafted mystery and a dazzling debut from an author who’s truly attuned to how families work at their darkest moments.… An excellent novel from an author who seems to be at the beginning of an impressive career.
Los Angeles Times
Formidably accomplished.… Fitzpatrick sharply examines the cheapness of life while at the same time flagging up and homing in on various redemptive riches, from brotherly bonds to cross-cultural relations to the pursuit of justice.… Few debut novels are so tightly plotted and powerfully written.… A gripping, emotional journey.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
This vivid coming-of-age novel spools out an engrossing mystery amid a tender story about family ties and adopted homes.
Esquire
[G]littering…. The murder mystery is intricate and well-crafted, but the highlight is the relationship between the two brothers…. [A] heartbreaking novel about the lengths to which people go to escape their own pain, and the prices people are willing to pay to alleviate the suffering of their loved ones.
Publishers Weekly
Fitzpatrick’s remarkable debut novel is a coming-of-age narrative interwoven with a gripping mystery.
Shelf Awareness
(Starred review) Beyond the brothers’ crystalline characterizations, Fitzpatrick gifts her intriguing debut with elegant prose, affecting images, and rich settings.
Booklist
A poised, graceful literary debut… An absorbing tale imparted with tenderness and compassion.
Kirkus Reviews
[T]hat rare work of fiction that gathers page-turning momentum from its prose as much as its plot. Fitzpatrick’s writing, accessible yet exquisite, relies on surgically precise metaphors for a lot of heavy emotional lifting.… Darkly beautiful, melancholic but not bleak, Lights All Night Long is storytelling at its finest. Fitzpatrick has written a compelling novel full of intimately portrayed, easy-to-love characters whose spoiled joys and resurgent hopes will linger with readers.
BookPage
Discussion Questions
1. Ilya arrives in Leffie and finds nearly everything about it foreign and strange, from the Masons’ church to the swimming pool that’s lit up at night. Have you had a similar fish-out-of-water experience in an entirely new setting? What specific features about your new surroundings seemed most strange to you?
2. One of the primary themes of the novel is the complexity of Ilya and Vladimir’s relationship. What are the different forms that their brotherly bond takes, and what circumstances cause that bond to shift and change?
3. Berlozhniki and Leffie are different in so many ways. What are some ways that they might be more similar than it seems at first glance?
4. Very soon after Ilya arrives, he and Sadie find themselves to be kindred spirits. What do you think draws them together so strongly?
5. Gabe Thompson is an enigmatic supporting character in the novel. What do you take from his short-lived experience in Berlozhniki, and what do you make of the model he builds of the town upon his return home?
6. Their role in solving the murders aside, what role do you think The Adventures of Michael & Stephanie English-language tapes serve in Ilya’s life, first in Berlozhniki and then once he arrives in Leffie?
7. How would you describe the growth or change that Ilya undergoes during his first year in the United States?
8. Throughout the novel, Ilya experiences powerful feelings of homesickness for Berlozhniki, but by its end, he’s come to think of Leffie as a kind of home as well. What do you think this says about what "home" means to us, and do you think more than one place can be a true home to the same person?
9. Mothers play a very large role in this story. How do you think the personalities of Sadie, Ilya, and Vladimir have been shaped by their mothers?
10. Vladimir’s story ends with devastating finality, but Ilya’s story is left open-ended. What do you think happens to Ilya after the novel ends? How about Sadie and her mother, or Maria Mikhailovna?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Arundhati Roy, 2017
Knopf Doubleday
464 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781524733155
Summary
A dazzling, richly moving new novel by the internationally celebrated author of The God of Small Things
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness takes us on an intimate journey of many years across the Indian subcontinent — from the cramped neighborhoods of Old Delhi and the roads of the new city to the mountains and valleys of Kashmir and beyond, where war is peace and peace is war.
It is an aching love story and a decisive remonstration, a story told in a whisper, in a shout, through unsentimental tears and sometimes with a bitter laugh. Each of its characters is indelibly, tenderly rendered. Its heroes are people who have been broken by the world they live in and then rescued, patched together by acts of love—and by hope.
The tale begins with Anjum—who used to be Aftab—unrolling a threadbare Persian carpet in a city graveyard she calls home. We encounter the odd, unforgettable Tilo and the men who loved her—including Musa, sweetheart and ex-sweetheart, lover and ex-lover; their fates are as entwined as their arms used to be and always will be.
We meet Tilo’s landlord, a former suitor, now an intelligence officer posted to Kabul. And then we meet the two Miss Jebeens: the first a child born in Srinagar and buried in its overcrowded Martyrs’ Graveyard; the second found at midnight, abandoned on a concrete sidewalk in the heart of New Delhi.
As this ravishing, deeply humane novel braids these lives together, it reinvents what a novel can do and can be. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness demonstrates on every page the miracle of Arundhati Roy’s storytelling gifts. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—November 21, 1961
• Where—Shillong, Meghalaya, India
• Education—School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi
• Awards—Booker Prize, 1997
• Currently—lives in New Dheli, India
Arundhati Roy was trained as an architect and is also an award-winning screenwriter. The God of Small Things is her first novel, winning the 1997 Man Booker Prize. Her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was published in 2017. It too received rave reviews. Like her twin protagonists in Small Things, she was raised near her grandmother's pickle factory in Kerala, India. She now resides in New Delhi.
Roy was born in Shillong, Meghalaya to a Keralite Syrian Christian mother, the women's rights activist Mary Roy, and a Bengali Hindu father, a tea planter by profession. She spent her childhood in Ayamenem in Kerala, and went to school in Corpus Christi, Kottayam, followed by The Lawrence School, Lovedale in the Nilgiris, Tamil Nadu. She then studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, where she met her first husband, architect Gerard DaCunha.
Roy met her second husband, filmmaker Pradip Krishen, in 1984, and became involved in film-making under his influence. She played a village girl in the award-winning movie Massey Sahib.
Roy is a niece of the prominent media personality Prannoy Roy and lives in New Delhi.
Roy began writing her first novel, The God of Small Things in 1992, completing it in 1996. The book is semi-autobiographical and a major part captures her childhood experiences in Ayemenem. The book received the 1997 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, was listed as one of the New York Times Notable Books of the Year for 1997. The book reached fourth position in the New York Times Bestsellers list for Independent Fiction. She received half a million pounds as an advance, and rights to the book were sold in 21 countries.
The God of Small Things received good reviews, including one from John Updike in The New Yorker. Carmen Callil, chair of the Booker judges panel in 1996 though, called The God of Small Things "an execrable book" and said it should never have reached the shortlist.
Roy wrote the screenplays for In Which Annie Gives it Those Ones (1989) and Electric Moon (1992) and a television serial The Banyan Tree. She also wrote the documentary DAM/AGE: A Film with Arundhati Roy (2002).
Since publishing her first novel in 1997, Roy has devoted herself to nonfiction and politics, publishing two more collections of essays, as well as working for social causes. She is a figure-head of the anti-globalization/alter-globalization movement and a vehement critic of neo-imperialism and of the global policies of the United States. She also criticizes India's nuclear weapons policies and the approach to industrialization and rapid development as currently being practiced in India, including the Narmada Dam project and the power company Enron's activities in India.
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Roy has campaigned along with activist Medha Patkar against the Narmada dam project, saying that the dam will displace half a million people, with little or no compensation, and will not provide the projected irrigation, drinking water and other benefits. Roy donated her Booker prize money as well as royalties from her books on the project to the Narmada Bachao Andolan.
Arundhati Roy's opposition to the Narmada Dam project has been criticised as "anti-Gujarat" by Congress and BJP leaders in Gujarat.
In 2002, Roy was convicted of contempt of court by the Indian Supreme Court for accusing the court of attempting to silence protests against the Narmada Dam Project. In its judgement, the Supreme Court Of India noted "we feel that the ends of justice would be met if she is sentenced to symbolic one day's imprisonment besides paying a fine of Rs. 2000." Roy served the prison sentence and paid the fine.
Environmental historian Ramachandra Guha has been critical of Roy's Narmada dam activism. While acknowledging her "courage and commitment" to the cause, Guha writes that her advocacy is hyperbolic and self-indulgent, "Ms. Roy's tendency to exaggerate and simplify, her Manichean view of the world, and her shrill hectoring tone, have given a bad name to environmental analysis". He faults Roy's criticism of Supreme Court judges who were hearing a petition brought by the Narmada Bachao Andolan as careless and irresponsible.
Roy counters that her writing is intentional in its passionate, hysterical tone — "I am hysterical. I'm screaming from the bloody rooftops. And he and his smug little club are going 'Shhhh…you'll wake the neighbours!' I want to wake the neighbours, that's my whole point. I want everybody to open their eyes." (From Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Compelling…musical and beautifully orchestrated. Roy’s depiction of furtive romance has a cinematic quality, as well as genuine poignancy and depth of emotion. Her gift is for the personal: for poetic description [and an] ability to map the complicated arithmetic of love and belonging.… Ministry manages to extract hope from tragedies witnessed.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Roy the artist [is] fully and brilliantly intact: prospering with stories and writing in gorgeous, supple prose…Again and again beautiful images refresh our sense of the world…Roy, in her nonfiction, has taken a sharp interest in Kashmir, and it is evident in this novel, which is blazing with details about the Indian government's occupation and the Kashmiri people's ensuing sorrow. She knows everything from the frighteningly euphemistic military terminology of the region…to the natural landscape.… She looks into homes, into bomb sites, into graveyards, into torture centers, into the "glassy, inscrutable" lakes. And she reveals for us the shattered psychology of Kashmiris who have been fighting the Indian Army and also occasionally collaborating with it. These sections of the book filled me with awe—not just as a reader, but as a novelist—for the sheer fidelity and beauty of detail.
Karah Mahajan - New York Times Book Review
A gem—a great tempest of a novel: a remarkable creation, a story both intimate and international.… Here is writing that swirls so hypnotically it doesn’t feel like words on paper so much as ink on water. This vast novel will leave you awed by the heat of its anger and the depth of its compassion.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Fearless…staggeringly beautiful—a fierce, fabulously disobedient novel …so fully realized it feels intimate, yet vibrates with the tragicomedy of myth.… Roy is writing at the height of her powers. Once a decade, if we are lucky, a novel emerges from the cinder pit of living that asks the urgent question of our global era. Roy’s novel is this decade’s ecstatic and necessary answer."
John Freeman - Boston Globe
Powerful and moving…reminds us what fiction can do. Roy’s exquisite prose is [a] rare instrument. She captures the horrors of headlines, and the quiet moments when lovers share poems and dreams. Ministry is infused with so much passion that it vibrates. It may leave you shaking, too. Roy’s is a world in which love and hope sprout against all odds, like flowers pushing through cracked pavement.
Heller McAlpin - San Francisco Chronicle
Glorious…remarkable, colorful and compelling.… Roy has a passionate following, and her admirers will not be disappointed. This ambitious new novel, like its predecessor, addresses weighty themes in an intermittently playful narrative voice. You will [be] granted a powerful sense of the complexity, energy and diversity of contemporary India, in which darkness and exuberant vitality and inextricable intertwined.
Claire Messud - Financial Times (UK)
Magisterial, vibrant.… Roy’s second novel works its empathetic magic upon a breathtakingly broad slate—inviting us to stand with characters who refuse to be stigmatized or cast aside.
Liesel Schillinger - Oprah Magazine
Ministry is the follow-up we’ve been longing for—a poetic, densely populated contemporary novel in the tradition of Dickens and Tolstoy. From its beginning, one is swept up in the story. If The God of Small Things was a lushly imagined, intimate family novel slashed through with politics, Ministry encompasses wildly different economic, religious, and cultural realms across the Indian subcontinent and as far away as Iraq and California. Animating it is a kaleidoscopic variety of bohemians, revolutionaries, and lovers.… With her exquisite and dynamic storytelling, Roy balances scenes of suffering and corruption with flashes of humor, giddiness, and even transcendence.
Daphne Beal - Vogue
(Starred Review) [O]riginal, haunting…fuses tenderness and brutality, mythic resonance and the stuff of front-page headlines.… [S]ometimes densely topical, the novel can be a challenging read. Yet its complexity feels essential to Roy's vision of a bewilderingly beautiful, contradictory, and broken world.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred Review) Roy's first novel since her 1997 Booker Prize-winning debut, The God of Small Things, is well worth the wait.… The uncanny intersecting of these and many other characters' lives, along with fables, songs, and literary quotes, create a brilliant bricolage. —Kate Gray, Boston P.L., MA
Library Journal
(Starred Review) Roy constructs a busy world in which characters cross boundaries of ethnicity, religion, and gender to find, yes, that utmost happiness…. An assured novel borne along by a swiftly moving storyline that addresses the most profound issues with elegant humor.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. The novel opens with a vignette describing the mysterious death of vultures—and how "not many noticed the passing of the friendly old birds" (page 5). How does this occurrence set the stage and tone for the rest of the novel with regard to the state of India’s society and the unrest that the characters experience within themselves and with the outside world? How does that mood transition into the graveyard setting of the first part of the book?
2. Discuss the complications of Aftab’s upbringing and his parents’ reactions to their child’s gender. What does the family dynamic suggest about the role that biology plays in determining one’s true family versus an individual’s ability to create or choose one’s family?
3. Anjum is told that a Hijra is "a living creature that is incapable of happiness.… The riot is inside us. The war is inside us" (page 27). To what extent do you see this manifest in Anjum’s character throughout the book, and in what ways does she defy that definition?
4. What roles do magic and superstition play throughout the novel? Which characters are more inclined to subscribe to unconventional beliefs, and do they seem more comforted or disillusioned by those beliefs in the face of harsh realities
5. Discuss the following idea: "What mattered was that [the moment] existed. To be present in history, even as nothing more than a chuckle, was a universe away from being absent from it, from being written out of it altogether" (page 55). How does the formal inventiveness and variation of the novel’s narrative—which is told through documents, written and oral histories, and other archival materials passed among characters or left in their absence—attest to this sense of one’s relevance in history at any given moment? What are the different characters’ motives for leaving an impression of their existence?
6. How does the variety of perspectives that the documents in the novel afford you as a reader—from Tilo’s notebooks to the letter from Miss Jebeen the Second’s real mother—different, if not conflicting, portraits of the political conflict going on in Kashmir? Overall, did they allow you to more clearly see one side’s argument over another’s? What kind of texture did the shifts in narrative form create in your overall reading experience?
7. What is the intersection between death and life in the novel? Consider the ways in which Anjum’s graveyard/funeral parlor prospers and grows throughout the novel, and the notion that "Dying became just another way of living" (page 320).
8. How does Roy create the atmosphere and emotional tenor of the novel’s primary cities/places in India? What sensory details or descriptions stuck with you the most as the backdrop for the characters’ somewhat nomadic existence?
9. Did you find there to be more similarities or differences between places or scenes where protesting and violence occur in contrast to those where there is relative peace and civility? How does the point of view from which a given scene is narrated affect how you see a place?
10. How is parenthood, and, more specifically, motherhood, explored in the novel? Discuss in particular the mother-child bonds that Anjum, Tilo, and both Miss Jebeens experience.
11. How is religion a defining feature for characters in the novel and a main source of conflict in the society depicted? How do the differing beliefs and political loyalties affect events that transpire in the novel’s different geographical areas of conflict?
12. What role does gender play in the novel, in terms of how characters are expected and allowed to behave as well as how they respond to certain emotions, events, and treatments? Is gender the primary way a person identifies instead of by religion, political party, ethnicity/country of origin, or even profession?
13. The Landlord’s chapters are the only sections written in the first person. How does that point of view color your understanding of the relationship among him, Tilo, Naga, and Musa, including the knowledge that they met on the set of a play? What makes this web of love so intricate, and how does the war intensify their bonds even as it threatens to shatter them?
14. Musa is one character whose identity must be repressed in various ways to ensure his safety, and even his most arduous disguises are not always successful. What does his struggle and that of others in similar situations (people who disappear and/or transform into others) suggest about the mutability of one’s identity—whether it be by necessity or by organic change? How might you interpret the line "Only the dead are free" in that context (page 361)?
15. Discuss the lines of poetry that Tilo writes the end of the book, "How / to / tell / a / shattered / story? / By / slowly / becoming / everybody. /No. / By slowly becoming everything" (page 442). How do the main characters—Tilo, Musa, Naga, and Anjum—embody the idea of telling a story through the assimilation of its many fragments?
16. By the end of the novel, how did you interpret the meaning of its title?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Trust Exercise
Susan Choi, 2019
Henry Holt & Company
272 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250309884
Summary
In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes.
When within this striving “Brotherhood of the Arts,” two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed—or untoyed with—by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley.
The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls—until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down.
What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true—though it’s not false, either. It takes until the book’s stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place—revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence.
As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Susan Choi's Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1969
• Where—South Bend, Indiana, USA
• Education—B.A., Yale University; M.F.A., Cornell University
• Awards—PEN/W.G. Sebald Award; Asian American Literary Award
• Currently—lives in New York City (Brooklyn)
Susan Choi is an American novelist. She was born in South Bend, Indiana to a Korean father and the American daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. When she was nine years old, her parents divorced. She and her mother moved to Houston, Texas. Choi earned a B.A. in Literature from Yale University (1990) and an M.F.A. from Cornell University. She currently resides in Brooklyn, New York.
After receiving her graduate degree, she worked for The New Yorker as a fact checker.
Choi won the Asian American Literary Award for Fiction and was a finalist of the Discover Great New Writers Award at Barnes & Noble for her first novel, The Foreign Student. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her historical fiction novel, American Woman. In 2010, she won the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award.
With David Remnick, she edited an anthology of short fiction entitled Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. Choi's second novel, American Woman, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her third novel, A Person of Interest, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2009. My Education, her fourth, was published in 2013; her fifth novel, Trust Exercise, came out in 2019. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/10/2013.)
Book Reviews
Choi's new novel, her fifth, is titled Trust Exercise, and it burns more brightly than anything she's yet written. This psychologically acute novel enlists your heart as well as your mind. Zing will go certain taut strings in your chest…Choi builds her novel carefully, but it is packed with wild moments of grace and fear and abandon. She catches the way certain nights, when you are in high school, seem to last for a month—long enough to sustain entire arcs of one's life.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
Choi’s voice blends an adolescent’s awe with an adult’s irony. It’s a letter-perfect satire of the special strain of egotism and obsession that can fester in academic settings.… [Choi is] a master of emotional pacing: the sudden revelation, the unexpected attack.… How cunningly this novel considers the way teenage sexuality is experienced, manipulated, and remembered.… The result is a dramatic exploration of the distorting forces of memory, envy, and art.… You won’t be disappointed.
Washington Post
Susan Choi’s thrilling new novel, Trust Exercise, is a rare and splendid literary creature: piercingly intelligent, engrossingly entertaining, and so masterfully intricate that only after you finish it, stunned, can you step back and marvel at the full scope of its unshowy achievements.
Boston Globe
Immerses the reader in the suffocating hothouse atmosphere of a 1980s performing arts high school and all the intense drama, heartbreak, and scandal many remember from their teen years.
Los Angeles Times
In her masterful, twisty [novel], Susan Choi upgrades the familiar coming-of-age story with remarkable command… [displaying her] talent for taking ineffable emotions and giving them an oaken solidity.… So many books and films present teenage years as a passing phase, a hormonal storm that passes in time. Choi, in this witty and resonant novel, thinks of it more like an earthquake―a rupture that damages our internal foundations and can require years to repair.
USA Today
Book groups, meet your next selection.… Trust Exercise is fiction that contains multiple truths and lies. Working with such common material, Choi has produced something uncommonly thought-provoking.
NPR
A twisting feat of storytelling.… [Choi] uses language brilliantly.… She is an astute, forensic cartographer of human nature; her characters are both sympathetic and appalling. In the end, [Trust Exercise] is a tale of missed connection and manipulation―and of willing surrender to the lure and peril of the unknown.
Economist
An intelligent and layered portrait of a school’s legacy.… [Trust Exercise] makes something dramatic and memorable from the simple elements of a teen movie.
The New Yorker
Mind-bending.… A Gen-X bildungsroman that speaks to young generations, a Russian nesting doll of unreliable narrators, and a slippery #MeToo puzzle-box about the fallibility of memory.… [A] perfectly stitched together Frankenstein’s monster of narrative introspection and ambiguity.… It flexes its own meta-existence―as a novel about the manipulation inherent in any kind of narrative―brilliantly.
New York Magazine
Perhaps the best [novel] this year.… [Trust Exercise] begins as an enthralling tale of teenage romance and then turns into a meticulously plotted interrogation of the state of the novel itself.… Read it once for pleasure, and then again to turn up all the brilliant Easter eggs.
Vulture
Electrifying.… [A] story that cuts to the heart of gender politics and the teacher-student dynamic.
People
A gonzo literary performance one could mistake for a magic trick, duping its readers with glee before leaving them impossibly moved.… Facts are debated in Trust Exercise, yes, but Choi always tells the truth.
Entertainment Weekly
(Starred review) Superb, powerful.… Choi’s themes—among them the long reverberations of adolescent experience, the complexities of consent and coercion, and the inherent unreliability of narratives—are timeless and resonant. Fiercely intelligent, impeccably written, and observed with searing insight, this novel is destined to be a classic.
Publishers Weekly
[N]either sentimentalizes nor trivializes the emotional lives of the teens.… [T]he first half of the novel feels "truer" than the more contrived… second half…. The latter retrospective approach serves best in examining the confusion and ambiguity of teenage sexuality and how that can be exploited. —Christine DeZelar-Tiedman, Univ. of Minnesota Libs., Minneapolis
Library Journal
(Starred review) [Choi’s] finest novel.… Trust Exercise should immediately put readers on alert… exposing tenuous connections between fiction, truth, lies, and, of course, people. Literary deception rarely reads this well.
Booklist
(Starred review) [A] story of obsessive first love… twists into something much darker in Choi's singular new novel.… The writing (exquisite) and the observations (cuttingly accurate) make Choi's latest both wrenching and one-of-a-kind. Never sentimental; always thrillingly alive.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for TRUST EXERCISE … then take off on your own:
1. Any one of these talking points could relate to your own life. As you consider each question with regards to Susan Choi's novel, also consider it in terms of your own experiences and what you recall of your adolescent years. Ask yourself how reliable your own memory is, and how others might remember those same events.
2. Start your discussion off with the central couple, Sarah and David. Talk about each as a character and the degree to which Choi enables us to get inside them, to know them. Also, talk about their love for one another. What is it that draws the couple together? Does their attachment feel true; is it deeply felt as, say, a more mature adult's?
3. Talk about Mr. Kingsley. In what ways does he overstep bounds? How does he use his students' own confusion and anxiety to bolster his lessons? Have you ever known teachers/professors like Kingsley?
4. Do the students have any concept of how transgressive, even dangerous, Kingsley's lessons are? How do they view these intimate dynamics?
5. Choi writes of "the excruciating in-betweenness of no longer being children, yet lacking those powers enjoyed by adults." How does her novel depict that line between adolescence and adulthood? In what ways is the line blurred and confusing, thrilling and dangerous?
6. What is the significance of the novel's title, Trust Exercise? Consider that each section of the novel uses the phrase as its title, focusing on a different set of betrayals. Is Choi's novel itself a "trust exercise"? Are all novels? (Now we're in the realm of meta fiction.)
7. At what point in the novel do you first begin to realize that perhaps you've misunderstood what you originally thought was happening?
8. Fast forward 15 years, to the second half of the novel. How have characters and their lives been altered?
9. Follow-up to Question 8: High school years, especially, can be transforming as well deforming, with the scars of betrayals and hurts carried forward, well into adulthood. What are the scars that Choi's characters bear (or perhaps bare)?
10. Related to Question 5: At one point, David talks with Sarah's old friend, recalling students who, they believe, slept with the director. David insists, "We knew what we were doing. Remember what we were like?" "We were children," Sarah's friend points out." But David retorts, "We were never children." What does he mean? How aware are teens to the issues of abuse? Should they know better—are they capable of knowing better?
11. How does the play in the second half reveal what actually happened in the first half?
12. Is Sarah's book betrayal, revenge, or is it art?
13. Discuss the ways in which Trust Exercise takes aim at a number of cultural issues, including the cult of the "Great Man" and the "Elite Brotherhood of the Arts." In what other ways is the book satirical?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Normal People
Salley Rooney, 2019
Crown/Archetype
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781984822178
Summary
Winner, An Post Irish Award
Winner, Costa Novel Award
A universal story of love, friendship, and growing up.
At school Connell and Marianne pretend not to know each other. He’s popular and well-adjusted, star of the school football team, while she is lonely, proud, and intensely private.
But when Connell comes to pick his mother up from her job at Marianne’s house, a strange and indelible connection grows between the two teenagers—one they are determined to conceal.
A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain.
Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.
Sally Rooney brings her brilliant psychological acuity and perfectly spare prose to a story that explores the subtleties of class, the electricity of first love, and the complex entanglements of family and friendship. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1991
• Where—Mayo, Ireland
• Education—M.A., Trinity College
• Awards—Costa Novel Award, An Post Irish Award
• Currently—lives in Dublin, Ireland
(Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Sally Rooney's sentences are droll, nimble and matter-of-fact. There's nothing particularly special about them, except for the way she throws them. She's like one of those elite magicians who can make a playing card pierce the rind of a watermelon. Rooney employs this artery-nicking style while writing about love and lust among damaged and isolated and yearning young people. They're as lonely as Frank Sinatra on some of his album covers, as lonely as Hank Williams's whip-poor-will. The effect can be entrancing.… [Normal People is] fresh and accessible…There is, in the pointed dialogue, a reminder of why we call it a punch line.… [Rooney's] an original writer who, you sense, is just getting started.
Dwight Garner - New York Times
Arguably the buzziest novel of the season, Sally Rooney’s elegant sophomore effort… is a worthy successor to Conversations With Friends. Here, again, she unflinchingly explores class dynamics and young love with wit and nuance (12 Best Books of Spring).
Wall Street Journal
[Rooney’s] two carefully observed and gentle comedies of manners… are tender portraits of Irish college students.… Remarkably precise—she captures meticulously the way a generation raised on social data thinks and talks.
New York Review of Books
I’m transfixed by the way Rooney works, and I’m hardly the only one.… [L]ike any confident couturier, she’s slicing the free flow of words into the perfect shape.… She writes about tricky commonplace things (text messages, sex) with a familiarity no one else has.
Paris Review
[Rooney] has invented a sensibility entirely of her own: sunny and sharp, free of artifice but overflowing with wisdom and intensity.… The novel touches on class, politics, and power dynamics and brims with the sparky, witty conversation that Rooney’s fans will recognize.
Vogue
Normal People tackles millennial concerns with nineteenth-century wit.… [T]he millennial generation would no doubt be happy to accept her as its spokesperson were she so inclined.
Elle
Funny and intellectually agile.… [Combines] deft social observation—especially of shifts of power between individuals and groups—with acute feeling.… [Rooney is] a master of the kind of millennial deadpan that appears to skewer a whole life and personality in a sentence or two.
Harper’s
Keenly observed, deeply perceptive, and psychologically acute, Normal People brims with disarming insights into how men and women wrestle with sex, class, popularity, and young love (Best Books to Read This Spring).
Esquire
(Starred review) Rooney stuns with her depiction of an on-again off-again relationship between two young adults navigating social pressures.… [A] devastating story from a series of everyday sorrows… traversing female and male anxieties over sex, class, and popularity.… [M]agnificent.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) This brilliantly nuanced second novel fulfills the promise evident in the stunning debut.… Rooney is a formidable talent. A major literary achievement.
Library Journal
(Starred review) [S]uperb.… Showcasing Rooney’s focus and ability in building character relationships that are as subtle and infinite as real-life ones, and her perceptive portrayal of class, Normal People gets at the hard work of becoming a person and the near impossibility of knowing if a first love is a true one.
Booklist
(Starred review) In outline it’s a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Rooney’s genius lies in her ability to track her characters’ subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other.… Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. While living at home in Carricklea, Connell’s sense of self is managed by the opinions of his peers in secondary school. To that end, he avoids being publicly seen with Marianne, an outcast in school, fearing how their association might damage his reputation.
Were you critical of Connell for the way he treated Marianne in school, or were you sympathetic toward his adolescent self-consciousness? Do you think he became less concerned by the thoughts of others as he grew older?
2. With Marianne, Connell feels a sense of "total privacy" in which "he could tell her anything about himself, even weird things, and she would never repeat them, he knows that. Being alone with her is like opening a door away from normal life and then closing it behind him" (6–7).
Why do you think Connell is sometimes unnerved by their intense and intimate connection? Further, why do you think he’s unsettled by the sense that Marianne would do anything to please him?
3. The first time Connell tells Marianne he loves her, we are told that…
She has never believed herself fit to be loved by any person. But now she has a new life, of which this is the first moment, and even after many years have passed she will still think: Yes, that was it, the beginning of my life (46).
Do you think Marianne had ever been told that she was loved, in any sense of the word, by anyone before Connell? How can the experience of "first love" transform a person’s self-image and view of the world?
4. In Normal People, Marianne only barely opens up to Connell about her relationship with her family—how her father had been violent when he was alive, how her brother verbally and physically attacks her, and how her mother essentially forbids her to believe that she is "special" in any way.
How does Marianne’s family influence her opinion of herself and affect her relationships with other people? How does she attempt to distance herself from her family? And how does Connell’s upbringing compare and contrast to Marianne’s?
5. When they move from the countryside to attend college in Dublin, there is somewhat of a role reversal between Connell and Marianne. Connell, once popular in secondary school, is scrutinized and mocked at Trinity College for his fashion sense and thick Galway accent, and he is even called a "milk-drinking culchie" (154). Marianne on the other hand, herself from a wealthy family, moves at ease through an elitist social scene.
How do class dynamics affect Connell and Marianne in Dublin? How do their reactions to class prejudice and snobbery shade your view of them as characters?
6. How would you describe the power that Connell and Marianne hold over each other? Did you notice a power relation shift and evolve between them over the years? How might it have had both positive and negative effects in different moments?
7. Despite being so close, Connell and Marianne sometimes miscommunicate and misinterpret each other. This can be seen when Connell, unable to pay rent in Dublin, moves back to Carricklea to save money during the summer of 2012, after he fails to directly ask Marianne if he can move in with her.
How does the structure of Normal People, oscillating between the experiences of both characters during this time, reveal the ways in which they misunderstood each other? How do you think their relationship would have turned out differently if Connell had stayed with Marianne that summer?
8. As the narrative progresses, Marianne becomes increasingly submissive in her sexual encounters with other people. Why do you think she is so repulsed by Lukas during "the game" when he tells her that he loves her (203)? Does she try to separate love from sex? Why do you think she later asks Connell if he will hit her during sex, and why does she shut down when he declines?
9. Both Marianne and Connell undergo certain crises of meaning during their later years in college. For instance, Marianne becomes increasingly dissociated from herself and from other people when she is studying in Sweden, and Connell suffers from depression after his friend Rob commits suicide.
Do you think that people are generally more vulnerable to internal crises and mental health issues in their late teens and early twenties? Why or why not? What are the most important support systems and coping mechanisms for someone going through such a difficult time, and do you think that Connell and Marianne find them in Normal People?
10. Connell is disillusioned by the contrived and stale performances he witnesses during a reading at Trinity College Dublin. Consider the following quote:
It was culture as class performance, literature fetishized for its ability to take educated people on false emotional journeys.… All books were ultimately marketed as status symbols, and all writers participated to some degree in this marketing. Presumably this was how the industry made money. Literature, in the way it appeared at these public readings, had no potential as a form of resistance to anything (228).
Do you agree with this assessment? What kind of "resistance" do you think Connell has in mind? Were you surprised to find such a critique in a recently published book? Do you think that by illuminating prejudices and injustices, as well as commonalities that exist between people, literature might still serve an important social purpose? You might illustrate your answers by pointing to passages from Normal People or by referencing other books that have been released in the past few years.
11. In an interview with The New Yorker, Sally Rooney mentioned that "A lot of critics have noticed that my books are basically nineteenth-century novels dressed up in contemporary clothing." Would you agree with this comment? How might Normal People and Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, be compared, structurally and thematically, to nineteenth-century romantic literature?
12. Despite the magnetic attraction that persists between Connell and Marianne, they are never officially "together" in this book. Considering the highs and lows they each go through over the years, do you think that they could have ever had a normatively structured boyfriend-girlfriend relationship? Did reading this novel lead you to question why we tend to put rigid labels on our relationships?
13. At the end of Normal People, when Connell is offered a place in an MFA program in New York, Marianne thinks,
He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another (273).
In what ways did you see Marianne and Connell change each other’s lives? How did they find parts of themselves in and through each other? Do you worry about what could happen to Marianne without Connell? Or do you think it might be important for them to spend time apart and grow independently after college?
14. At times, we see that Marianne considers herself intrinsically damaged, unlovable, and "bad." In other words, she believes that she will never be a normal person.
Having read about their innermost insecurities, feelings of alienation, sexual drives, desires, and so on, do you think that Connell and Marianne are any more or less "normal" than other people? What qualifies a person as normal, and do you think that such a completely normal person can exist?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
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