Oona Out of Order
Margarita Montimore, 2020
Flatiron Books
352 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781250236609
Summary
A remarkably inventive novel that explores what it means to live a life fully in the moment, even if those moments are out of order.
It’s New Year’s Eve 1982, and Oona Lockhart has her whole life before her. At the stroke of midnight she will turn nineteen, and the year ahead promises to be one of consequence.
Should she go to London to study economics, or remain at home in Brooklyn to pursue her passion for music and be with her boyfriend?
As the countdown to the New Year begins, Oona faints and awakens thirty-two years in the future in her fifty-one-year-old body. Greeted by a friendly stranger in a beautiful house she’s told is her own, Oona learns that with each passing year she will leap to another age at random.
And so begins Oona Out of Order...
Hopping through decades, pop culture fads, and much-needed stock tips, Oona is still a young woman on the inside but ever changing on the outside. Who will she be next year? Philanthropist? Club Kid? World traveler? Wife to a man she’s never met?
Surprising, magical, and heart-wrenching, Margarita Montimore has crafted an unforgettable story about the burdens of time, the endurance of love, and the power of family. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
After receiving a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, Margarita Montimore worked for over a decade in publishing and social media before deciding to focus on the writing dream full-time. The author of Asleep from Day (2018) and Oona Out of Order (2020), she lives in New Jersey with her husband and dog. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
[B]eautiful and heartbreaking, a novel about the nature of time and how life marches on that you simply must read.
PopSugar
Looking for a lighthearted read? Maybe something that will remind you all to live your best life?… A charming, quirky story about aging and self-discovery.
Book Riot
Montimore sustains the concept by rooting the story in Oona’s relationships, employing sparkling humor as Oona struggles to make sense of each year’s new circumstances. This witty, fantastical exploration of life’s inevitable changes is surprising and touching.
Publishers Weekly
A compelling page-turner…Montimore delivers a rock-and-roll love letter to 1980s–90s New York City as Oona discovers her true self through a lifetime of music and pop culture. A perfect match for those who enjoy well-developed characters with a twist. —Charli Osborne, Southfield P.L., MI
Library Journal
(Starred review) Witty, humorous, heartwarming. Imbued with musical and cultural influences spanning decades and reminiscent of Liane Moriarty’s What Alice Forgot and Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life, Oona Out of Order is a delightfully freewheeling romp.
Booklist
[D]azzling…. This madcap opera… told in full with scope and breadth in and out of sequence but never out of tune…. Modern, emotional, funny, ferocious, and spun with… light and magic to fire up the Vegas strip, Oona Out of Order lands like a meteor.
Kirkus Reviews
A smart, funny, time-hopping journey around the last four decades…. Montimore’s meditation on what always changes and what never will sparkles with hope and heart, perfect for readers who love a quirky, thought-provoking tale.
Shelf Awareness
Discussion Questions
1. Discuss the novel’s epigraph: “Time heals all. But what if time itself is the disease?” How do you interpret that question? How does the novel seek to answer it?
2. In the prologue, Oona reflects that her condition is the closest thing she could imagine to immortality. What do you think she means? Do you agree?
3. Oona has a “no spoiler” approach to time travel and takes precautions to reveal certain things about her future but keep others secret via her annual letters. Do you agree with her approach? If you were to switch places with Oona, how much of your future would you reveal and what would you add/remove from the letters?
4. Family is a major theme in Oona Out of Order. How does Oona and Madeleine’s relationship change over the course of the novel? What about Oona’s ideas about her own family?
5. To counteract living her life out of sequence, Oona spends much of the novel searching for constancy. Who/what are some of the constants she manages to establish throughout her leaps?
6. Oona experiences a variety of romantic connections throughout the course of the novel. How does her perception of her relationship with Dale change over the years? How does her unique marriage affect her views on romantic relationships? What about other men she’s involved with? Do you think it will be possible for Oona to have a sustained romance despite her leaping? Why or why not?
7. The time travel in Oona Out of Order serves as a way to explore imposter syndrome—her leaps often leave her in situations where she feels unprepared for the role she’s in and what’s expected of her. Which situations do you think she handles effectively and which could she have handled better?
8. There are moments when Oona laments mistakes she's made in her life and considers trying to fix them. What mistakes do you think she has made? Do you think she was better off trying to prevent them or learn from them?
9. As each leap brings new challengers into her life, Oona often struggles with a desire to return to her younger self. How does she try to combat nostalgia to live more fully in the present?
10. Oona and the people closest to her often describe her life as “bittersweet.” Do you agree that her time travel makes her life feel more bittersweet than it would if she were living “in order”? Why or why not?
11. Discuss the evolving role of music in Oona’s life. How does her relationship to it change from the first chapter to the last, and why?
12. Near the end of the novel, Kenzie tells Oona that he is sometimes jealous of her time traveling. Do you understand his feelings? Are there aspects of Oona’s condition that appeal to you?
13. How much of Oona’s destiny do you think is predetermined? Do you think she’s capable of changing her future? What do you think this book ultimately says about fate vs. free will? Do you agree or disagree?
14. Did you have a favorite section in the novel? Why?
15. Assuming her “time sickness” will persist, what do you imagine the next few years might look like for Oona?)
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
Impossible Views of the World
Lucy Ives, 2017
Penguin Publishing
304
ISBN-13: 9780735221536
Summary
A witty, urbane, and sometimes shocking debut novel, set in a hallowed New York museum, in which a co-worker's disappearance and a mysterious map change a life forever
Stella Krakus, a curator at Manhattan's renowned Central Museum of Art, is having the roughest week in approximately ever.
Her soon-to-be ex-husband (the perfectly awful Whit Ghiscolmbe) is stalking her, a workplace romance with "a fascinating, hyper-rational narcissist" is in freefall, and a beloved colleague, Paul, has gone missing.
Strange things are afoot: CeMArt's current exhibit is sponsored by a Belgian multinational that wants to take over the world's water supply, she unwittingly stars in a viral video that's making the rounds, and her mother—the imperious, impossibly glamorous Caro—wants to have lunch. It's almost more than she can overanalyze.
But the appearance of a mysterious map, depicting a 19th-century utopian settlement, sends Stella—a dogged expert in American graphics and fluidomanie (don't ask)—on an all-consuming research mission.
As she teases out the links between a haunting poem, several unusual novels, a counterfeiting scheme, and one of the museum's colorful early benefactors, she discovers the unbearable secret that Paul's been keeping, and charts a course out of the chaos of her own life.
Pulsing with neurotic humor and dagger-sharp prose, Impossible Views of the World is a dazzling debut novel about how to make it through your early thirties with your brain and heart intact. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1980
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Harvard University; M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop; Ph.D., New York University
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Lucy Ives is the author of several books of poetry and short prose, including The Hermit and the novella nineties. Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Lapham’s Quarterly, and at newyorker.com.
For five years she was an editor with the online magazine Triple Canopy. A graduate of Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from New York University. She teaches at the Pratt Institute and is currently editing a collection of writings by the artist Madeline Gins. (From the publisher .)
Book Reviews
[An] intricate, darkly funny debut…There is so much going on in this novel, so many sharp observations packed into sentences as sensual and jarring as a Mardi Gras parade, that it bears a second look.… Ives, an accomplished poet, infuses even mundane actions with startling imagery.… Read this book on whichever level you choose: you woman coming unglued, art world mystery or museum-based episode of The Office, replete with petty workplace drama, aged PCs and the occasional colleague marching "up and down the hall, loudly, in quest of a staple remover." It’s a smart novel brimming with ideas about love, art, personal agency, a lack thereof.
Susan Coll - New York Times Book Review
Cool and bracing…a perfect summer pleasure.… An accomplished poet, Ives also knows how to delight sentence by sentence, with turns of phrase that cry to be underlined or Tweeted.… Part send-up of the Manhattan art world, part elaborate literary mystery, the novel is bound together by a voice that is at turns deadpan and warm, shot through with a crisp irony that makes it tempting to declare it the literary equivalent of an Alex Katz painting.… It’s a singular work, worthy of a place in any world-class collection.
Vogue.com
Ives maximizes her story’s humor with subtlety…. She also isn’t afraid to make her heroine unlikable, which works in the novel’s favor. Ives’s prose and storytelling feel deliberately obtuse at times…but the result is an odd and thoroughly satisfying novel.
Publishers Weekly
An original debut ringing with smart prose, engaging humor and cultivated taste…Ives’ genius is apparent in the intricate way she weaves ironic confession, romantic comedy and artful treatise with explorations into the historic art world…Full of intelligence and imagination, this relatable literary mystery will charm even the most apprentice art devotee.
BookPage
Stella is…smart, with an equal tendency toward snark and introspection…. The novel sends up the museum world, with pretentious art folks courting corporate dollars and the usual office politics, but maintains a sense of something larger, even magical, working in the background.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Ives' writing derives much of its humor from a combination of high and low—arch formulations and mini-disquisitions studded with cussing, sex, and jokes about Reddit.… A diversion and a pleasure, this novel leaves you feeling smarter and hipper than you were before.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Impossible Views of the World … then take off on your own:
1. Describe Stella Krakus. How does she contribute to the mess that her own life is — impending divorce and an affair with a colleague? Does she gain your sympathy or does her frequent deprecation (snark?) of self and others put you off? Do think she a typical millennial?
2. Talk about Stella's mother Caro. What influence does she have on her daughter's life?
3. Lucy Ives is a poet. Do you see evidence of that in Impossible Views? Consider, for instance, the author's turns of phrase: "micro-tizers" or "proofreaders dressed as majorettes" or how Stella "brawls" her way out of the subway.
4. Follow-up to Question 3: Some readers on Goodreads were put off by Ives's writing, finding the novel over-written, pretentious, even confusing. Were you put off, as well?
5. Does Impossible Views of The World live up to its billing as a mystery? Is the ending, the reveal, satisfying?
6. An appendix is…well, appended to the back of the book. Did you find it helpful in following the plot? Is it a necessary inclusion?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Clock Dance
Anne Tyler, 2018
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780525521228
Summary
A delightful novel of one woman's transformative journey, from the best-selling and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.
Willa Drake can count on one hand the defining moments of her life.
In 1967, she is a schoolgirl coping with her mother's sudden disappearance. In 1977, she is a college coed considering a marriage proposal. In 1997, she is a young widow trying to piece her life back together. And in 2017, she yearns to be a grandmother but isn't sure she ever will be.
Then, one day, Willa receives a startling phone call from a stranger. Without fully understanding why, she flies across the country to Baltimore to look after a young woman she's never met, her nine-year-old daughter, and their dog, Airplane.
This impulsive decision will lead Willa into uncharted territory—surrounded by eccentric neighbors who treat each other like family, she finds solace and fulfillment in unexpected places. A bewitching novel of hope, self-discovery, and second chances, Clock Dance gives us Anne Tyler at the height of her powers. (From the publisher.)
• Birth—October 25, 1941
• Where—Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA
• Education—B.A., Duke University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize (see below)
• Currently—lives in Baltimore, Maryland
Anne Tyler is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, short story writer, and literary critic. She has published 20 novels, the best known of which are Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1983), The Accidental Tourist (1985), and Breathing Lessons (1988). All three were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the third won it.
She has also won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, the Ambassador Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2012 she was awarded The Sunday Times Award for Literary Excellence. She is recognized for her fully developed characters, her "brilliantly imagined and absolutely accurate detail" (New York Times), and her "rigorous and artful style" and "astute and open language" (also, New York Times). While many of her characters have been described as quirky or eccentric, she has managed to make them seem real through skillfully fleshing out their inner lives in great depth.
Her subject in all her novels has been the American family and marriage: the boredom and exasperating irritants endured by partners, children, siblings, parents; the desire for freedom pulling against the tethers of attachments and conflicted love; the evolution over time of familial love and sense of duty. Tyler celebrates unremarkable Americans and the ordinary details of their everyday lives. Because of her style and subject matter, she has been compared to John Updike, Jane Austen, and Eudora Welty, among others.
Childhood
The eldest of four children, she was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her father, Lloyd Parry Tyler, was an industrial chemist and her mother, Phyllis Mahon Tyler, a social worker. Both her parents were Quakers who were very active with social causes in the Midwest and the South. Her family lived in a succession of Quaker communities in the South until they settled in 1948 in a Quaker commune in Celo, in the mountains of North Carolina near Burnsville.
The Celo Community settlement was founded by conscientious objectors and members of the liberal Hicksite branch of the Society of Friends, with community labor needs shared by the residents. Tyler lived there from age 7 through 11 and helped her parents and others with caring for livestock and organic farming. While she did not attend formal public school in Celo, lessons were taught in art, carpentry, and cooking in homes and in other subjects in a tiny school house. Her early informal training was supplemented by correspondence school.
Her first memory of her own creative story-telling was of crawling under the bed covers at age 3 and "telling myself stories in order to get to sleep at night." Her first book at age 7 was a collection of drawings and stories about "lucky girls...who got to go west in covered wagons." Her favorite book as a child was The Little House by Virginia Lee Burton. Tyler acknowledges that this book, which she read many times during this period of limited access to books, had a profound influence on her, showing how the years flowed by, people altered, and nothing could ever stay the same."
This early perception of changes over time is a theme that reappears in many of her novels decades later, just as The Little House itself appears in her novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant. Tyler also describes reading Little Women 22 times as a child. When the Tyler family left Celo after four years to move to Raleigh, NC, 11-year-old Anne had never attended public school and never used a telephone. This unorthodox upbringing enabled her to view "the normal world with a certain amount of distance and surprise."
Raleigh, North Carolina
It also meant that Tyler felt herself to be an outsider in the public schools she attended in Raleigh, a feeling that has followed her most of her life. She believes that this sense of being an outsider has contributed to her becoming a writer:
I believe that any kind of setting-apart situation will do [to become a writer]. In my case, it was emerging from the commune…and trying to fit into the outside world.
Despite her lack of public schooling prior to age 11, Anne entered school academically well ahead of most of her classmates in Raleigh. With access now to libraries, she discovered Eudora Welty, Gabriel García Márquez, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many others. Welty remains one of her favorite writers, and she credits Welty with showing her that books could be about the everyday details of life, not just about major events.
During her years at N. B. Broughton High School in Raleigh, she was inspired and encouraged by a remarkable English teacher, Phyllis Peacock. Peacock had previously taught the writer Reynolds Price, under whom Tyler would later study at Duke University. She would also later teach the writer Armistead Maupin. Seven years after high school, Tyler would dedicate her first published novel to "Mrs. Peacock, for everything you’ve done."
Education
Tyler won a full scholarship to Duke University, which her parents urged her to go accept it because they also needed money for the education of her three younger brothers. At Duke, Tyler enrolled in Reynolds Price's first creative writing class, which also included a future poet, Fred Chappell. Price was most impressed with the sixteen-year-old Tyler, describing her as "frighteningly mature for 16," "wide-eyed," and "an outsider." Years later Price would describe Tyler as "one of the best novelists alive in the world,… who was almost as good a writer at 16 as she is now."
While an undergraduate, Tyler published her short story "Laura" in the Duke literary journal Archive, for which she won the newly created Anne Flexner award for creative writing. She wrote many short stories, one of which impressed Reynolds Price so that he later stated that it was the "most finished, most accomplished short story I have ever received from an undergraduate in my thirty years of teaching." "The Saints in Caesar’s Household" was published in Archive also and won her a second Anne Flexner award. This short story led to her meeting Diarmuid Russell, to whom Price had sent it with kudos. Russell, who was an agent for both Reynolds Price and for Tyler’s "crowning influence" Eudora Welty, later became Tyler’s agent.
Tyler majored in Russian Literature at Duke—not English—and graduated in 1961, at age 19, having been inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. With her Russian Literature background she received a fellowship to graduate school in Slavic Studies at Columbia University although she left after a year without her master's degree. She returned to Duke where she got a job in the library as a Russian bibliographer. It was there that she met Taghi Modarressi, a resident in child psychiatry in Duke Medical School and a writer himself, and they were married a year later (1963).
Early writing
While working at the Duke library—before and after marrying Modarressi—Tyler continued to write short stories, which appeared in The New Yoker, Saturday Evening Post, and Harpers. She also started work on her first novel, If Morning Ever Comes, eventually published 1964, followed by The Tin Can Tree in 1965. Years later she disowned both of these novels, as well as many of the short stories she wrote during this period, going so far as to say she "would like to burn them." She feels that most of this early work suffers from the lack of thorough character development and her failure to rework material repeatedly.
After the birth of two children (1965 and 1967), followed by a move from Montreal, Canada, to Baltimore in the U.S., Tyler had little time or energy for writing. She published nothing from 1965 to 1970. By 1970, however, she began writing again and published three more novels by 1974—A Slipping-Down Life, The Clock Winder, and Celestial Navigation. In her own opinion, her writing improved considerably during this period; with her children entering school, she was able to devote more time—and focus more intensely—than at any time since her undergraduate days.
National recognition
With Celestial Navigation, Tyler began to get wider recognition. Morgan's Passing (1980) won her the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize for Fiction and was nominated for both the American Book Awards and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
With her next novel (her ninth), Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Tyler truly arrived as a recognized artist in the literary world. (She considers Homesick her best work.) Her tenth novel, The Accidental Tourist, was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1985. It was also made into a 1988 movie starring William Hurt and Geena Davis. The popularity of this well-received film further increased the growing public awareness of her work. Her 11th novel, Breathing Lessons, received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1989 and was Time magazine’s "Book of the Year." It was adapted into a 1994 TV movie, as eventually were four other of her novels.
Since her Pulitzer Prize with Breathing Lessons, Tyler has written 9 more novels, all of favorably reviewed, many Book of the Month Club Main Selections and New York Times Bestsellers.
Analysis
In Tyler’s own words, the characters are the driving forces behind the stories and the starting point for her writing:
I do make a point of writing down every imaginable facet of my characters before I begin a book, trying to get to know them so I can figure out how they’ll react in any situation…..My reason for writing now is to live lives other than my own, and I do that by burrowing deeper and deeper….till I reach the center of those lives.
The magic of her novels starts with her ability to create those characters in the reader’s mind through the use of remarkably realistic details. The late Canadian author Carol Shields, writing about Tyler's characters, observes:
Tyler has always put her characters to work. Their often humble or eccentric occupations, carefully observed and threaded with humor, are tightly sewn to the other parts of their lives, offering them the mixed benefit of tedium and consolation, as well as a lighted stage for the unfolding of their dramatic selves. She also allows her men and women an opportunity for redemption.
Tyler has clearly spelled out the importance of her characters to her stories: "As far as I’m concerned, character is everything. I never did see why I have to throw in a plot, too."
Stylistically, Tyler's writing is difficult to categorize or label. Novelist Cathleen Schine describes how her "style without a style" manages to pull the reader into the story:
So rigorous and artful is the style without a style, so measured and delicate is each observation, so complex is the structure and so astute and open the language, that the reader can relax, feel secure in the narrative and experience the work as something real and natural.
The San Francisco Chronicle made a similar point: "One does not so much read a Tyler novel as visit it.
While Tyler herself does not like to think of her novels in terms of themes, numerous reviewers and scholars have noted the importance of family and marriage relationships to her characters and stories. Reviewing Noah's Compass, New York Times' Mitchiko Kakutani noted that
The central concern of most of this author’s characters has always been their need to define themselves in terms of family—the degree to which they see themselves as creatures shaped by genetics, childhood memories and parental and spousal expectations, and the degree to which they are driven to embrace independent identities of their own.
Tyler is not without her critics. The most common criticism is that her works are "sentimental," "sweet," and "charming and cosy." Even Kakutani has also occasionally bemoaned a "cloying cuteness," noting that "her novels—with their eccentric heroes, their homespun details, their improbable, often heartwarming plots—have often flirted with cuteness." In her own defense, Tyler has said,
For one thing I think it is sort of true. I would say piss and vinegar for [Philip] Roth and for me milk and cookies. I can’t deny it…. [However] there’s more edge under some of my soft language than people realize.
Also, because almost all of Tyler’s work covers the same territory—family and marriage relationships—and are located in the same setting, she has come under criticism for being repetitive and formulaic.
Tyler’s advice to beginning writers:
They should run out and buy the works of Erving Goffman, the sociologist who studied the meaning of gesture in personal interactions. I have cause to think about Erving Goffman nearly every day of my life, every time I see people do something unconscious that reveals more than they’ll ever know about their interiors. Aren’t human beings intriguing? I could go on writing about them forever."
Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 2/10/2015.)
Book Reviews
Anne Tyler is the most dependably rewarding novelist now at work in our country.
Wall Street Journal
Delightfully zany.… Charming.… Tender.
Washington Post
A psychologically astute study of an intelligent, curious woman.… A triumph.
Boston Globe
What’s so amazing about Tyler’s novels is the way she makes ordinary people and ordinary things so fascinating.… In Tyler’s hands, life’s mundane activities feel vital.… Revelatory.… Unwrapping the story is a delight.
Chicago Tribune
Anne Tyler is one of this country’s great artists.… She has lost none of the inspired grace of her prose, nor her sad, frank humor, nor her limitless sympathy for women who ask for little and get less.… Beautiful, understated, humane.
USA Today
Tyler writes with enormous warmth about all her characters.
Baltimore Sun
Tyler’s stirring story celebrates the joys of self-discovery and the essential truth that family is ours to define.
People
Clock Dance pulls you right in and keeps on ticking.… Tyler’s novels reassure us that the possibilities for meaningful connection—which so often seem lost in our hectic world—are still out there.
Newsday
Full of wisdom about relationships, delivered in gorgeous language and with considerable charm.
San Francisco Chronicle
Clock Dance is Anne Tyler at her best.… An entertaining, heartwarming story about second chances and the real meaning of family.… Full of the sorts of eccentric yet totally believable characters that Anne Tyler is a genius at creating.… Captivating.… A delight.
Greensboro News & Record (NC)
Anne Tyler is one of America’s very best living novelists and one of the world’s most loved.… Her stories about family life—beautifully written, forensically insightful, sometimes laugh out loud funny—are cherished by all ages.… She sheds light on the secret bits of yourself, the parts no one knows about, and her skill is writing compassionately about our so-called ordinary lives with an apparent effortlessness that conceals great art.
Times Magazine (UK)
She is one of our greatest living fiction writers and if I were in charge, she’d have a Nobel by now.
Observer (UK)
If you want to understand the everyday life of Americans, read Anne Tyler.… There is no one better at taking the ordinary person—the one we don’t even notice in the supermarket queue—and showing us what lies beneath.… Clock Dance is a marvelous frog-leap of a book.… Sequel please!
Times (UK).
(Starred review) Stellar.… A bittersweet, hope-filled look at two quirky families that have broken apart and are trying to find their way back to one another.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) Tyler does not disappoint. Her characters are distinctly drawn and their stories layered.… The result is a compelling look at the need for relevance, being offered a second chance, and deciding whether to take it. Highly recommended.
Library Journal
(Starred review) Brilliant, charming, and book-club-ready.… Tyler’s bedazzling yet fathoms-deep feel-good novel is wrought with nimble humor, intricate understanding of emotions and family, place and community—and bounteous pleasure in quirkiness, discovery, and renewal.
Booklist
Tyler’s characteristic warmth and affection for her characters are engaging as eve.… [They are] all vibrantly portrayed with her usual low-key gusto and bracingly dark humor.… Power dynamics are never simple in Tyler’s portraits of marriage.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Questions to help start a discussion for CLOCK DANCE … then take off on your own:
1. What was your initial take of the passenger who threatens Willa on the airplane: "This is a gun, and it's loaded. Move and I shoot"? Why might Anne Tyler have incorporated the plane incident—placing it early on—in the novel? What does it reveal, if anything, about Willa's character? Do you wish Tyler had returned to it… or done more with it?
2. Talk about Willa's relationship with her histrionic mother and her mild-mannered father? How have her parents' personalities shaped Willa's own personality and approach to life?
3. What makes Willa agree to head to Baltimore in order to take care of almost complete strangers?
4. Talk about the bond that develops between Willa and nine-year-old-soon-to-be-double-digit-Cheryl and Cheryl's mother, Denise, who has no difficulty depending on Willa's generosity. And how is Willa's personality perfectly shaped to fall in with this little family of two?
5. Willa confides to Denise that, while she's not asked him, she hoped her son would have offered to pick her up before dinner. Denise responds with "But why just hope? Why do you go at things so slantwise?" What does Denise mean—and where else does Willa "go at things slantwise"?
6. Discuss how Willa's real family treats her, especially, say, her son Sean?
7. A neighbor tells Willa: "Figuring out what to live for. That's the great problem at my age." Care to unpack that statement, say, in terms of this novel or in terms of real life (maybe even your own)?
8. What does Willa find—in life and within herself—in Baltimore?
9. In her review of Clock Dance, Julie Myerson of the UK's Guardian writes that Anne Tyler is an author "who focuses so unapologetically on the quotidian ache of human experience." What do you think that observation means, and how might it apply to Tyler's novels—not only this latest but also her earlier novels (if you've read any)?
10. The book's title, "Clock Dance," comes from the game young Cheryl plays with two friends. What might the thematic significance of the title be?
11. The plot of Clock Dance contains little in the way of conflict. Did you find that refreshing, even a bit of a relief? Were you engaged as you read the book? Or did you find the novel's lack of conflict and suspense uninteresting?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Deacon King Kong
James McBride, 2020
Penguin Publishing
384 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780735216723
Summary
One of the most anticipated novels of the year: a wise and witty tale about what happens to the witnesses of a shooting—from James McBride, author of the National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird.
In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and in front of everybody shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range.
The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride's funny, moving novel.
In Deacon King Kong, McBride brings to vivid life the people affected by the shooting: the victim, the African-American and Latinx residents who witnessed it, the white neighbors, the local cops assigned to investigate, the members of the Five Ends Baptist Church where Sportcoat was deacon, the neighborhood's Italian mobsters, and Sportcoat himself.
As the story deepens, it becomes clear that the lives of the characters—caught in the tumultuous swirl of 1960s New York—overlap in unexpected ways. When the truth does emerge, McBride shows us that not all secrets are meant to be hidden, that the best way to grow is to face change without fear, and that the seeds of love lie in hope and compassion.
Bringing to these pages both his masterly storytelling skills and his abiding faith in humanity, James McBride has written a novel every bit as involving as The Good Lord Bird and as emotionally honest as The Color of Water. Told with insight and wit, Deacon King Kong demonstrates that love and faith live in all of us. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—September 11, 1957
• Where—New York, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Oberlin College; M.A., Columbia University
• Awards—National Book Award
• Currently—lives in New York City and Lambertville, New Jersey.
James McBride, an American writer and musician, was raised in Brooklyn's Red Hook housing projects. His father, the Rev. Andrew D. McBride (1911–1957), was African-American and his mother, Ruchel Dwajra Zylska (1921–2010), was a Jewish immigrant from Poland. McBride was the last child Ruth had from her first marriage, and the eighth of 12 children in all.
I'm proud of my Jewish history,...Technically I guess you could say I'm Jewish since my mother was Jewish...but she converted (to Christianity). So the question is for theologians to answer.... I just get up in the morning happy to be living.
Two of his older brothers, Dennis and Billy, graduated with doctorates in medicine, but medicine had no appeal for James. Instead, he attended Oberlin College and received an undergraduate degree in music composition, followed by a Master's in journalism from Columbia University.
Journalism
As a journalist, he was on the staffs of many well-known publications, including Boston Globe, Washington Post, Wilmington (Delaware) News Journal, and People. He has also written for Rolling Stone, Us, Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Essence, New York Times, and others. Mr. McBride is a charter member of the Clint Harding Network, a group of well-known journalists, writers and musicians who periodically have appeared live on a Missouri radio program for the last two decades.
Author
McBride is best known for his 1996 memoir, the bestselling The Color of Water, which describes his life growing up in a large, poor African American family led by a white, religious, and strict Jewish mother, whose father was an Orthodox rabbi, but converted and became devoutly Christian during her first marriage to Andrew McBride.
The memoir spent over two years on the New York Times bestseller list, and has become an American classic. It is read in high schools and universities across America, has been translated into 16 languages, and sold more than 2.5 million copies.
In 2002, he published a novel, Miracle at St. Anna, drawing on the history of the overwhelmingly African American 92nd Infantry Division in the Italian campaign from mid-1944 to April 1945. The book was adapted into the movie Miracle at St. Anna, directed by Spike Lee, released in 2008.
McBride's 2008 novel, Song Yet Sung, is about an enslaved woman who has dreams about the future, and a wide array of freed black people, enslaved people, and whites whose lives come together in the odyssey that surrounds the last weeks of this woman's life. Harriet Tubman served as an inspiration for the book, and it provides a fictional depiction of a code of communication that enslaved people used to help runaways attain freedom. The book, based on real-life events that occurred on Maryland's Eastern Shore, also featured the notorious criminal Patty Cannon as a villain.
In 2012 McBride co-wrote and co-produced the film Red Hook Summer with Spike Lee, and in 2014 he published The Good Lord Bird, a comic novel recounting the life of notorious abolitionist John Brown. It won the National Book Award.
Musician
McBride is the tenor saxophonist for the Rock Bottom Remainders, a group of best selling authors—Mitch Albom Dave Barry, Amy Tam, Scott Turow, to name a few—who are lousy musicians. "Hopefully," according to McBride, "the group has retired for good." However in 2013, along with the with the rest of the group, he co-authored Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Bank Ever (of Authors) Tells All.
He has also toured as a saxophonist with jazz legend Little Jimmy Scott and has his own band that plays an eclectic blend of music. He has written songs for Anita Baker, Grover Washington Jr., Pura Fé, and Gary Burton.
In 2005, he published the first volume of The Process, a CD-based documentary about life as lived by low-profile jazz musicians.
McBride composed the theme music for the Clint Harding Network, Jonathan Demme's New Orlean's Documentary, Right to Return, and Ed Shockley's Off-Broadway musical Bobos.
McBride was awarded the 1997 American Music Festival’s Stephen Sondheim Award, the 1996 American Arts and Letters Richard Rodgers Award, and the 1996 ASCAP Richard Rodgers Horizons Award.
Personal
McBride is currently a Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University. He has three children and lives between New York City and Lambertville, New Jersey. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 4/7/2014.)
Book Reviews
Cracking…Terrific…Deeply felt, beautifully written, and profoundly humane.
New York Times Book Review (Cover story)
McBride’s hilarious dialogue and an attention to detail reveals a complex local history. Capturing humanity through satire and witticisms, McBride draws everyday heroes.
Time
McBride returns with an improbably hilarious tapestry of late '60s Brooklyn, and an eclectic group of individuals that bore witness to a fatal shooting.
Entertainment Weekly
(Starred review) With a Dickensian wealth of quirky characters, a sardonic but humane sense of humor reminiscent of Mark Twain…, McBride creates a lived-in world where everybody knows everybody’s business. This generous, achingly funny novel will delight and move readers.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) Much is unpacked by the time the book reaches its lovely and heartfelt climax, as McBride shows what can happen when people set aside their differences. Highly recommended, especially for fans of Jacqueline Woodson and Spike Lee. —Stephen Schmidt, Greenwich Lib., CT
Library Journal
(Starred review) While historical fiction fans will appreciate the richly detailed approach to Brooklyn’s grittiness, McBride's neighborhood saga ultimately sets a new standard for multidimensional fiction about people of color.
Booklist
(Starred review) McBride has a flair for fashioning comedy whose buoyant outrageousness barely conceals both a steely command of big and small narrative elements and a river-deep supply of humane intelligence. An exuberant comic opera set to the music of life.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use our LitLovers Book Club Resources. They can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
(Resources by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
New People
Danzy Senna, 2017
Penguin Publishing
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594487095
Summary
A subversive and engrossing novel of race, class and manners in contemporary America.
As the 20th century draws to a close, Maria is at the start of a life she never thought possible.
She and Khalil, her college sweetheart, are planning their wedding. They are the perfect couple, "King and Queen of the Racially Nebulous Prom." Their skin is the same shade of beige. They live together in a black bohemian enclave in Brooklyn, where Khalil is riding the wave of the first dot-com boom and Maria is plugging away at her dissertation, on the Jonestown massacre.
They've even landed a starring role in a documentary about "new people" like them, who are blurring the old boundaries as a brave new era dawns.
Everything Maria knows she should want lies before her—yet she can't stop daydreaming about another man, a poet she barely knows. As fantasy escalates to fixation, it dredges up secrets from the past and threatens to unravel not only Maria's perfect new life but her very persona.
Heartbreaking and darkly comic, New People is a bold and unfettered page-turner that challenges our every assumption about how we define one another, and ourselves. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1970
• Raised—Boston, Massachusetts, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.F.A., University of California-Irvine
• Awards—Whiting Writers' Award; Dos Passos Prize
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California
Danzy Senna is an American novelist, born to two writers: her father, Carl Senna, is an Afro-Mexican poet and author, and her mother, Fanny Howe, an Irish-American writer. The family settled in Boston, Massachusetts, but the couple eventually underwent, as Danzy describes it, a "terrible divorce" that "affected me and my siblings quite profoundly." She wrote about her family history in her 2009 memoir, Where Did You Sleep Last Night?
Senna recevied her B.A. from Stanford University and an M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine. There, she received several creative writing awards.
Her three novels — Caucasia (1998), Symptomatic (2004), and New People (2017) — all feature a view of society from a biracial perspective. The eight stories collected in You Are Free (2011) also deal with the intersection of race, family, and friendship.
Senna's books have been well received, gaining recognition from Book of the Month Club and American Library Association. In 2002, she received the Whiting Writers Award and in 2004 was named a Fellow for the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She has also been nominated for the Orange Prize and was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Danzy Senna lives in Los Angeles with her husband, writer Percival Everett, and their son. (Adapted from Wikipedia and bitchmedia. Retrieved 8/21/2017.)
Book Reviews
The frankness with which New People treats race as a kind of public performance is both uncomfortable and strangely cathartic.… Provocative.
Wall Street Journal
It says a great deal for New People—Danzy Senna’s martini-dry, espresso-dark comedy of contemporary manners — that its compound of caustic observations and shrewd characterizations could only have emerged from a writer as finely tuned to her social milieu as [Jane] Austen was to hers.… [A]rtfully strewn with excruciating and uproarious misperceptions…[New People] doesn’t pour cold water on one’s expectations for a better, more tolerant world. In fact, it implies that world has, to a great extent, already arrived.
Newsday
Slick and highly enjoyable.… Thrillingly, blackness is not hallowed in Senna’s work, nor is it impervious to pathologies of ego. Senna particularly enjoys lampooning the search for racial authenticity.… Identity, far from being a point of solidarity, is a beckoning void, and adroit comedy quickly liquefies into absurd horror.
New Yorker
Compellingly provocative.… [Senna] creat[es] a dense psychological portrait of a black woman nearing the close of the 20th century: inquisitive, obsessive, imaginative, alive.
New Republic
An of-the-moment novel [that] tackles identity and infatuation…slender but powerful, as seductive and urgent as a phone call from an old flame. At first blush, the book seems like a straightforward love story…but it’s more complicated than that.… This is not a book about race disguised as a romance, nor is it a love story saddled with a moral. Senna’s achievement is that she interlaces both threads in one ingenious tale.
Oprah Magazine
Danzy Senna bores into the dynamics of race, identity, heritage, poverty, and privilege in contemporary America.… Agile and ambitious, the novel is also a wild-hearted romance about secrets and obsessions, a dramedy of manners about educated middle-class blacks — the talented tenth — that is Senna’s authorial home ground.
Elle
In many ways, lines of color, alongside the complexities of what it means to pass as one thing or another, may be what best defines Danzy Senna’s epochal — in its most literal sense — new novel.… [It] is a paean to the psychosocial complexities of being racially mixed, and, as a result, color-lines, passing, and double-consciousness are everywhere.… The novel’s ultimate message seems, however, to be one both true and unsettling, if unsurprising: that color-lines have never left America and likely never will.
Los Angeles Review of Books
A darkly comic novel about race, about false utopias, and about the fine line between seemingly innocuous, everyday groupthink—the kind that’s the price of admission for being part of a marriage, or a band of friends, or a tribe of any sort.… Senna writes beautifully about the complexity of identity, the intersection of racial consciousness, and class awareness, and individual perspective.
Vogue
Set in the Rodney King-era ‘90s, New People is as mesmerizingly fast-paced as it is deeply reflective of monumental truths that resonate perhaps even more powerfully two decades in the future.
Harper’s Bazaar
[A] muddled third novel featuring a protagonist in search of her identity.… [D]iscussions about racism and white privilege…and a side plot involving Maria’s attempts to finish her dissertation…. Significant themes and issues…unfortunately get lost before fully landing.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [W]ell-constructed, brooding novel.… [A] great read, both compelling and thoughtful …[with] a page-turning urgency…. Maria tumbles toward a disaster of her own making, while her musings on race shift between provocative and cynical. —Reba Leiding, emeritus, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA
Library Journal
Senna’s meditation on 1996 America and its false sense of progress is an eerie picture of society today, too. With a dark sense of humor, Senna builds her story with a horror-like tension that releases with a tongue-in-cheek sigh. Sure to keep readers riding white-knuckled to the end.
Booklist
(Starred review.) Senna's fearless novel is equal parts beguiling and disturbing.… Every detail and subplot, including Maria's dissertation on the Jonestown massacre and her buried secret about a college prank gone awry, is resonant. A great book about race and a great book all around.!!!
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 New People … than take off on your own:
1. How would you describe Maria Pierce? As her mother observed of her twenty-odd years ago, while Maria was still in her crib, "She's perfectly cheerful, but I sense a coldness." Is that an accurate prediction of her 27 years later? What other characteristics do you find in her? Do you find her a sympathetic character? Does your attitude toward her change over the course of the novel?
2. Khalil, Maria's fiance, is the love of her life. Or is he? "He is the one she needs, the one who can repair her." What does that sentence mean … and what might the words (especially the last two, "repair her") harbinger for their relationship?
3. Maria and Khalil are named the Prom King and Queen Racially Nebulous Prom. Care to comment?
4. Talk about Maria's attraction to the tall, black poet. What is the pull he exudes toward her? Is it, as she herself wonders, the desire for "authenticity" or for something "real" that she's not finding in her own life? And why is he unnamed — why only ever referred to as "the poet"?
5. What do you think of the students at Stanford, their "Recovering Racist" pins and lobbing off their "colonized hair." How would you describe those gestures: genuinely supportive, empty, kind-hearted, over-the-top?
6. Discuss the racist phone prank Maria plays on Khalil and its repercussions.
7. What is the state of race relations in society at the time of this book? Are racial identity and acceptance in the '90s different from how they are today? Consider, for example, the white woman who mistakes Maria for her nanny. Funny? Maddening?
8. Maria's Ph.D. dissertation is on the Jonestown Massacre. What do you know about that event? And what does that event — its rhetoric of racial liberation and left-wing politics — have to do with the overall thematic concerns of Danzy Senna's novel?
9. Talk about the way in which the novel ends — with Maria left in a precarious position. Are you satisfied with that ending, or would you have preferred a different one?
10. Discuss the title of the book. What does it mean to be "new people"?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)