China Rich Girlfriend (Crazy Rich Asians Trilogy 2)
Kevin Kwan, 2015
Knopf Doubleday
496 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780804172066
Summary
t’s the eve of Rachel Chu’s wedding, and she should be over the moon.
She has a flawless Asscher-cut diamond, a wedding dress she loves, and a fiancé willing to thwart his meddling relatives and give up one of the biggest fortunes in Asia in order to marry her.
Still, Rachel mourns the fact that her birthfather, a man she never knew, won’t be there to walk her down the aisle.
Then a chance accident reveals his identity.
Suddenly, Rachel is drawn into a dizzying world of Shanghai splendor, a world where people attend church in a penthouse, where exotic cars race down the boulevard, and where people aren’t just crazy rich … they’re China rich. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1973-74
• Where—Singapore
• Raised—Clear Lake, Texas, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Houston-Clear Lake; B.F.A., Parsons School of Design
• Currently—lives in New York, New York
Kevin Kwan is a Singaporean-American novelist best known for his satirical Crazy Rich Asians Trilogy (2013-17). He was born in Singapore, the youngest of three boys, into an established, old-wealth Chinese family.
Background and early years
His great-grandfather, Oh Sian Guan, was a founding director of Singapore's oldest bank, the Overseas-Chinese Banking Corporation. His paternal grandfather, Dr. Arthur Kwan Pah Chien, was an ophthalmologist who became Singapore's first Western-trained specialist and was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his philanthropic efforts. His maternal grandfather, Rev. Paul Hang Sing Hon, founded the Hinghwa Methodist Church. Kwan is also related to Hong Kong-born American actress Nancy Kwan.
As a young boy, Kwan lived in Singapore with his paternal grandparents and attended the Anglo-Chinese School. When he was 11, his father, an engineer, and mother, a pianist, moved the family to the U.S., eventually landing in Clear Lake, Texas, where Kwan graduated from high school at the age of 16. Kwan earned a B.A. in Media Studies from the University of Houston-Clear Lake, after which he moved to Manhattan to attend Parsons School of Design to pursue a B.F.A. in Photography.
Career
Staying in New York, Kwan worked for Andy Warhol's Interview Magazine, Martha Stewart Living, and Tibor Kalman's design firm M & Co. In 2000, Kwan established his own creative studio; his clients have included Ted.com, Museum of Modern Art, and the New York Times.
In 2007, Kwan edited I Was Cuba, a photographic "memoir" of Cuba; in 2008 he co-authored with Deborah Aaronson an advice book, Luck: The Essential Guide.
Then, in 2009, while caring for his dying father, Kwan began to conceive of Crazy Rich Asians. He and his father reminisced about their life in Singapore while driving to and from medical appointments. Hoping to capture those memories, Kwan began writing them down in story form.
Living in the U.S. since 1985, Kwan's view of Asia had become westernized—he has said he feels like "an outsider looking in." His goal was to change the stereotypical perception of wealthy Asians' conspicuous consumption, refocusing instead on old-wealth families more like his own, families that exude "style and taste [and] have been quietly going about their lives for generations."
Four years later, in 2013, Kwan published Crazy Rich Asians, the first volume of what would become his trilogy. Two years later, in 2015, he released China Rich Girlfriend and, in 2017, Rich People's Problems. In 2018 the first book of the trilogy was released as a film and became an immediate box office hit.
In August 2018, Amazon Studios ordered a new drama series from Kwan and STX Entertainment. The as yet unnamed series is to be set in Hong Kong and will follow the "most influential and powerful family" along with their business empire.
Recognition
In 2014, Kwan was named as one of the "Five Writers to Watch" on the list of Hollywood's Most Powerful Authors published by The Hollywood Reporter. In 2018, he made Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people; that same year he was also inducted into The Asian Hall of Fame. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/18/2018.)
Book Reviews
Kevin Kwan’s brand of giddy wealth porn arrived in 2013 with Crazy Rich Asians, not a moment too soon.… China Rich Girlfriend [is] the second volume in what has been projected as a gossipy, good-humored trilogy that will follow the richest old families of Singapore, Hong Kong and a few from mainland China. They join in a single shared pursuit: watching in horror as their youngest generations squander money in ways so staggering that Western show-offs look like pikers by comparison.… Mr. Kwan has good aim with his fashion world- and ego-skewering shivs. And regardless of how reality-based these characters may be, he has his style references down cold.… [Keeps] readers surprised and inquisitive.… Snarky.… Wicked.… Funny.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
In this year's best beach reading, Jane Austen meets Singapore.… There's no timely cocktail I'd rather recommend than China Rich Girlfriend.… As frothy as the egg whites on the sort of cocktail you should drink while reading Kwan's books. But if you need to assuage your guilt about summer reading with a little intellectual patina, Kwan has you covered too; his peek into this rarified world is spiked with tart observations about old and new money, the nuances of racism and the way they all interact.… Fizzy, highly entertaining.
Washington Post
As the real China rich dig their nails into the world of the wealthy and wasteful, Kwan sharpens his with another acerbic yet affectionate examination of Asian uber-elite social mores, still largely invisible in Western popular culture.… The novel is filled with jaw-dropping accounts of opulence… and showdowns worthy of an episode of "Gossip Girl."… China Rich Girlfriend is a crazy parade through the lives of the aspirational elite. It's also a rich portrait of Asia's real obsession with consumerism and its economic rise, one whose trajectory, like Kwan's, is not yet complete.
Nicole Lee - Los Angeles Times
What happens when the young woman destined to marry Asia’s most eligible bachelor gets derailed by a shocking family secret? That’s what Kwan examines in this amusing, whirlwind novel about Rachel Chu, who discovers her long-lost father and falls headlong into a Shanghai—the fashion! the social climbing! the secrets!—wilder than her wildest dreams.
Miami Herald
Take a Jane Austen novel, combine it with Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous and set it in the glittering capitals of Shanghai, Hong Kong and Singapore. What have you got? This deliciously fun follow-up to Kwan's bestselling Crazy Rich Asians… a field guide to Asia's uberwealthy echelon and comic satire at its best.
People Magazine
The summer's funniest beach read. When Crazy Rich Asians hit shelves in peak beach-read season two summers ago, readers ate up its urestrained and uproarious fictional depictions of the opulent lives of Asia's super elite.… China Rich Girlfriend follow[s] the same multitentacled clan and their world-traveling, high-spending, and backstabbing antics.
Lauren Christensen - Vanity Fair
Welcome to the world of China Rich Girlfriend, which picks up a few years after the events of Kevin Kwan's frothy 2013 best-seller, Crazy Rich Asians. In accordance with the Law of Sequels, it's more over-the-top than its predecessor—which is saying something.… [E]ntertaining.… [B]uoyant.
Entertainment Weekly
The novel offers a second helping of the social-climbing, jet-setting, wildly scandalous world that propelled Kwan's first book to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. With one exception—somehow it manages to outstrip the earlier work's excesses.
Women's Wear Daily
The much-anticipated sequel to Crazy Rich Asians (a great summer read in its own right), China Rich Girlfriend continues the tale of Rachel Chu and her upcoming nuptials to Nicholas Young, heir to one of the greatest fortunes in Asia.… With the same hilarity and scandalous narrative as the first novel, China Rich Girlfriend will not disappoint both fans and newcomers to the series.
Town & Country
(Starred review) Kwan’s latest follows in the footsteps of his wildly imaginative Crazy Rich Asians.… Those who enjoy splendid writing and getting a glimpse at how the other half… lives will delight in this book.
Library Journal
Lovers of clothes, cuisine, and cars will find themselves at home in Kwan’s second smart and snarky send-up of the Chinese jet set. —Kristine Huntley
Booklist
Kwan returns with an equally good-natured, catty-as-hell sequel to his bestselling roman a clef about China's new and old money dynasties. For those not cued in, Kwan's tone is breakneck and utterly disarming—part Oscar Wilde…. Hilarious…. Over-the-top and hard to stop.
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 CHINA RICH GIRLFRIEND … then take off on your own:
1. Consider the book's title: what does "China rich" mean? How is it different (or is it...?) from "Singapore rich" where Crazy Rich Asians (CRA) takes place?
2. Like the previous book, China Rich Girlfriend is filled with jaw-dropping opulence. Which incident, or which character, dropped your jaw more than others?
3. In what way do Rachel and Nick serve as (somewhat) objective observers into this world of crazy conspicuous consumption? To what degree are their values different from the characters who live in Asia? Do they exude a sense of superiority over the others?
4. Poor Rachel has her trouble with secondary mothers: Eleanor, her future mother-in-law, and Shaoyen, her step-mother. Both make life difficult for Rachel. How do their attitudes change and are those changes genuine?
5. Talk about the ins & outs of Rachel's relationship with her half-brother Carlton.
6. What do you make of Kitty Pong, her social climbing and attempts to fit in with the Straits Chinese? Is she a sympathetic character?
7. How have events transformed Astrid's husband, Michael? Is he due a "comeuppance?"
8. Overall, what do you think of these characters? Is Kevin Kwan presenting them critically, satirically, lovingly, humorously? All or none of those?
9. Is there a take-away from this novel and, if you've read CRA, from that novel as well? If so, what? Or are these books simply one of those guilty pleasures that one loves to indulge in?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online and off, with attribution. Thanks.)
Ducks, Newburyport
Lucy Ellman, 2019
Biblioasis
1040 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781771963077
Summary
Baking a multitude of tartes tatins for local restaurants, an Ohio housewife contemplates her four kids, husband, cats and chickens.
Also, America's ignoble past, and her own regrets.
She is surrounded by dead lakes, fake facts, Open Carry maniacs, and oodles of online advice about survivalism, veil toss duties, and how to be more like Jane Fonda.
But what do you do when you keep stepping on your son's toy tractors, your life depends on stolen land and broken treaties, and nobody helps you when you get a flat tire on the interstate, not even the Abominable Snowman?
When are you allowed to start swearing?
With a torrent of consciousness and an intoxicating coziness, Ducks, Newburyport lays out a whole world for you to tramp around in, by turns frightening and funny. A heart-rending indictment of America's barbarity, and a lament for the way we are blundering into environmental disaster, this book is both heresy—and a revolution in the novel. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—October, 18 1956
• Where—Evanston, Illinois, USA
• Education—B.A.University of Essex; M.A., Courtald Institute of Art
• Awards—Booker Prize, shortlisted
• Currently—lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Lucy Ellmann was born in the U.S., to biographer Richard Ellman and writer Mary (Donahue) Ellman. The family moved to Britain when she was 13, and although she has said she always meant to return to American soil, she never did. She received her B.A. from the University of Essex and her M.A. at the Courtald Institute of Art. She now lives in Scotland.
Ellman's first novel, Sweet Desserts (1989), won the Guardian Fiction Prize. It was followed by Varying Degrees of Hopelessness (1991), Man or Mango? (1998), Dot in the Universe (2002), Doctors & Nurses (2006), Mimi (2013). Her most recent work, Duck, Newburyport (2019) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Her short stories have appeared in magazines, newspapers and anthologies, and she has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Independent, Independent on Sunday, Times Literary Supplement, Telegraph, New Statesman and Society, Spectator, Herald, Scottish Review of Books, Time Out (London), Art Monthly, Thirsty Books, Bookforum, Aeon, Evergreen, and Baffler.
A screenplay, The Spy Who Caught a Cold, was filmed and broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK. She edits fiction for the Fiction Atelier (fictionatelier.wordpress.com), and abhors standard ways of teaching Creative Writing, which she considers mostly criminal. (Adapted from the publisher.)
Book Reviews
This book… mimics the way our minds move now, toggling between tabs, between the needs of small children and aging parents, between news of ecological collapse and school shootings while somehow remembering to pay taxes and fold the laundry.… [It] demands the very attentiveness, the care, that it enshrines.
Parul Sehgal - New York Times
Brilliantly ambitious…. At times there’s such fury to these ruminations that the book seems to shift into direct cultural critique… but it is also, fundamentally, a very long and meaningful list… as accumulative, as pointed, as death-addled, as joyous, as storied, as multitudinous and as large as life.
Martin Riker - New York Times Book Review
A book about a mother’s love, but also about loss and grief, and anxiety dreams about Donald Trump, and despair about mass shootings..… It is also a catalogue of life’s many injuries and mishaps… and of the simple joys and consolations of memory and imagination. [A] triumph.
Guardian (UK)
Resplendent in ambition, humour and humanity.… [A] lifetime of memories hoarded and pored over, like the family heirlooms the narrator and her husband have inherited along with all the joy and desolation contained within them.… In Ducks, Newburyport Ellmann has created a wisecracking, melancholy Mrs Dalloway for the internet age.
Financial Times (UK)
Perhaps the most intensely real depiction of the life of the quotidian mind I’ve ever witnessed... what Ducks amounts to is one great trauma diagnosis for the entire country.… It’s a colossal feat.
Spectator (UK)
Ellmann captures the pathos of the everyday, how one might use pie crusts and film synopses to dam in pain.… [The book] also flickers with tenderness… that every individual is owed an unending devotion, and that such devotion, applied universally, might change the fate of the world.
New Yorker
Brilliant—and addictive.… There have been comparisons to James Joyce’s Ulysses, but Ellmann is in a class by herself.
Associated Press
The free-associative stream accumulates into a work of great formal beauty, whose distinctive linguistic rhythms and patterns envelop the reader like music or poetry.… If art is measured by how skillfully it holds a mirror up to society, then Ellmann has surely written the most important novel of this era.
Paris Review
Lucy Ellmann has written a genre-defying novel, a torrent on modern life, as well as a hymn to loss and grief. Her creativity and sheer obduracy make demands on the reader. But Ellmann’s daring is exhilarating—as are the wit, humanity and survival of her unforgettable narrator.
Joanna MacGregor - 2019 Booker Prize Jury Citation
(Starred review) [A] stream-of-consciousness monologue… [in which] plot is secondary…. This jumble of cascading thoughts provides a remarkable portrait of a woman in contemporary America contemplating her own life and society’s storm clouds… challenging but… brilliant.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review) [A] long, free-association, run-on sentence from the overactive brain of a mother of four…. Is it worth the considerable time and effort required… to journey into the mind of this funny and insanely loveable worrywart? Yes! It's a jaw-dropping miracle. —Barbara Love, formerly with Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.
Library Journal
(Starred review) Mesmerizing, witty, maximalist…. [A] bravura and caring inquiry into Earth’s glory, human creativity and catastrophic recklessness, and the transcendence of love.
Booklist
[A] Ulysses-sized saga…. Literary experimentation that, while surely innovative, could have made its point in a quarter the space.
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.)
The Hamilton Affair
Elizabeth Cobbs, 2016
Arcade Publishing
433 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781628728552
Summary
Set against the dramatic backdrop of the American Revolution, and featuring a cast of legendary characters, The Hamilton Affair tells the sweeping, tumultuous, true story of Alexander Hamilton and Elizabeth Schuyler, from passionate and tender beginnings of their romance to his fateful duel on the banks of the Hudson River.
Hamilton was a bastard and orphan, raised in the Caribbean and desperate for legitimacy, who became one of the American Revolution's most dashing — and improbable — heroes. Admired by George Washington, scorned by Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton was a lightning rod: the most controversial leader of the new nation.
Elizabeth was the wealthy, beautiful, adventurous daughter of the respectable Schuyler clan — and a pioneering advocate for women. Together, the unlikely couple braved the dangers of war, the perils of seduction, the anguish of infidelity, and the scourge of partisanship that menaced their family and the country itself.
With flawless writing, brilliantly drawn characters, and epic scope, The Hamilton Affair tells a story of love forged in revolution and tested by the bitter strife of young America, and will take its place among the greatest novels of American history ever written. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—July 28, 1956
• Where—Gardena, California, USA
• Education—B.A., University of California-San Diego; Ph.D., Stanford University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—teaches history at Texas A&M University
Elizabeth Cobbs holds the Melbern Glasscock Chair in American History at Texas A&M University and is a research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. She is a historian, commentator, and author of seven books, including two novels, a textbook, and three non-fiction works. She is also credited as screenwriter on the film adaptation of her book American Umpire.
Background
Cobbs was born in Gardena, California, and began her writing career at the age of 15, serving as a community organizer and publications coordinator for the Center for Women's Studies and Services in Southern California. During this period, she founded and headed several innovative projects for adults and young people. In recognition for her efforts, she earned the international John D. Rockefeller Youth Award in 1979 — at the age of 23 — for exceptional service to humanity.
Cobbs studied literature at the University of California, San Diego and graduated Summa Cum Laude in 1983. She earned her M.A. and PhD in American History from Stanford University in 1988. While at Stanford, she won the David Potter Award for Outstanding History Graduate Student. Following graduation, she won the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians for best dissertation on U.S. history.
She taught nine years at the University of San Diego, becoming chair of the History Department, and then accepted the Dwight E. Stanford Chair in of American Foreign Relations at San Diego State University.She has been a Fulbright scholar in Ireland and a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C.
In 2008, Dr. Cobbs served on the jury for the Pulitzer Prize in History, and from 1999 to 2006, she served two terms on the Historical Advisory Committee of the US State Department from, advising the government on the declassification of top secret documents and transparency in government.
Books and publications
Dr. Cobbs has published over 40 articles in newspapers and magazines in the United States such as The Jerusalem Post, Chicago Tribune, New York Times, Reuters, China Daily News, National Public Radio, Washington Independent, San Diego Union Tribune and several other distinguished publications, including several pieces for The New York Times. Her first nonfiction book, The Rich Neighbor Policy (1988, 1992), won the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians (as a dissertation) and later the Bernath Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (as a published book).
She has since published six more books about American history and politics, winning four literary prizes: two for nonfiction and two for fiction. She also wrote and co-produced the PBS documentary American Umpire which is based on her book of the same name. It explores America's foreign policy "grand strategy" for the next 50 years.
Books
1992 - The Rich Neighbor Policy: Rockefeller and Kaiser in Brazil
1998 - All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s
2002 - Major Problems in History, Vol. II (co-editor)
2011 - Broken Promises: A Novel of the Civil War
2013 - American Umpire
2016 - The Hamilton Affair
2017 - Hello Girls: America's First Women Soldiers
Awards
2009 - San Diego Book Award
2009 - Director's Mention, Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction
1993 - Stuart Bernath Book Prize, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations
1989 - Allan Nevins Prize, Society of American Historians (for Ph.D. dissertation)
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 10/27/2017.)
Book Reviews
Historic scholarship and creative music have suddenly turned Alexander Hamilton into one of the hottest of the nation's Founding Fathers. The Hamilton Affair promises to turn up the heat even further. Elizabeth Cobbs' superb novel about the many lives and perils of Hamilton and his wife Eliza adds delights and insights that are as fascinating as they are fun. Think of it as a terrific companion to all things Hamilton.
Jim Lehrer - Formerly of PBS News Hour
Cobbs' novel presents a thoroughly researched portrait of the Hamiltons that makes you feel like you are in the room where it happened. It's a bouquet to obsessed [fans], but this well-written novel is enough to keep the lay reader satisfied, too.
Miami Herald
Author and historian Elizabeth Cobbs' fictionalized spin on the life of the founding pops and his better half, Eliza Schulyer, is a juicy answer to Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton.
Cosmopolitan
[A] captivating historical novel from cover to cover, vividly recreating Hamilton's dramatic and inspirational life story. Highly recommended for both public library collections and personal or book club reading lists, The Hamilton Affair is all but impossible to put down.
Midwest Book Review
Cobbs's depiction of Hamilton will endear him in the hearts of readers and shed light on one of the most misunderstood figures in American history and the woman who shared his life.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [L]ove so deep it was able to survive betrayal and a devastatingly public scandal.… Hamilton's true story is so fantastical, it is amazing that it has taken this long to transform his life and times into a national sensation.
Booklist
Cobbs's depiction of Hamilton will endear him in the hearts of readers and shed light on one of the most misunderstood figures in American history and the woman who shared his life without catchy tunes.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
I. Discuss the ways in which Alexander Hamilton was a successful man. In what ways was he also a failure? Which were more important to America or to his family?
2. Alexander says only "honor" had an older claim to his heart than Eliza. Why was that? What else drove him, besides love and honor?
3. Elizabeth Schuyler did not believe the rumors of her husband’s infidelity. Why? Was she naive? Were there other factors?
4. Whom did Alexander deceive more: his wife or himself?
5. If honor is key to Alexander’s motivations, what are the keys to Eliza’s character? How did they shape her actions?
6. How and why did Eliza come to accept her husband’s failings? Was she a feminist, or is that too modern a label?
7. Why did Alexander Hamilton cheat on his wife? Is there any evidence that Eliza’s behavior played some part in the distance that came between them?
8. Alexander Hamilton resigned as Secretary of the Treasury at the height of his powers? Why? Was it consistent with his character?
9. Is Alexander Hamilton tragic or triumphant in the novel? What about Eliza?
10. The Hamilton family was devastated by political partisanship. Are there parallels in our own time? What are the differences, and why?
11. What role does Ajax Manly play in the story? What does the reader learn about Alexander and Eliza through him?
12. Was Ajax Manly foolish for loving a slave? Is it believable that the first slave he loved was unwilling to run to freedom?
13. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, John Laurens, the Marquis de Lafayette, and Aaron Burr all endorsed abolition to some degree. George Washington freed his slaves upon his death. Why did so many other Americans not challenge the institution, including Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Eliza’s own family? Is it possible they did not think slavery was wrong?
14. What roles do Native Americans play in the book? Are they essential or peripheral to the story?
15. Parts of this story are well known, others less familiar. What surprised you? What techniques did the author use to create suspense about events like the infamous duel?
16. The book alternates between two points of view: Alexander’s and Eliza’s. What did Eliza perceive about Alexander that he might not have understood about himself — and vice versa?
17. How does fatherhood shape Hamilton’s life? What were the effects of not having a father? Was he a good one or a bad one?
18. Alexander Hamilton was a critic of dueling, yet accepted Burr’s challenge. Why? Did he betray his family by doing so?
19. The book is from the Hamiltons’ perspective. Who are the anti-heroes? Are they fairly portrayed?
20. Does the book change or confirm your view of America’s founders?
(Questions issued by publishers.)
The Topeka School
Ben Lerner, 2019
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780374277789
Summary
A tale of adolescence, transgression, and the conditions that have given rise to the trolls and tyrants of the New Right.
Adam Gordon is a senior at Topeka High School, class of ’97. His mother, Jane, is a famous feminist author; his father, Jonathan, is an expert at getting "lost boys" to open up. They both work at a psychiatric clinic that has attracted staff and patients from around the world.
Adam is a renowned debater, expected to win a national championship before he heads to college. He is one of the cool kids, ready to fight or, better, freestyle about fighting if it keeps his peers from thinking of him as weak.
Adam is also one of the seniors who bring the loner Darren Eberheart—who is, unbeknownst to Adam, his father’s patient—into the social scene, to disastrous effect.
Deftly shifting perspectives and time periods, The Topeka School is the story of a family, its struggles and its strengths: Jane’s reckoning with the legacy of an abusive father, Jonathan’s marital transgressions, the challenge of raising a good son in a culture of toxic masculinity.
It is also a riveting prehistory of the present: the collapse of public speech, the trolls and tyrants of the New Right, and the ongoing crisis of identity among white men. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—February 4, 1979
• Where—Topeka, Kansas, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University
• Awards—Believer Book Award; Terry Southern Prize
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City, New York
Ben Lerner has been a Fulbright Fellow, a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, a Howard Foundation Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. His first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, won the 2012 Believer Book Award, and excerpts from 10:04 have been awarded The Paris Review’s Terry Southern Prize.
He has published three poetry collections: The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
Lerner’s own arsenal has always included a composer’s feel for orchestration [and] a ventriloquist’s vocal range .… I could say more—about trauma, sex, paradox, magic—but only at the cost of further reducing this irreducible novel, which seeks instead to spread its readers beyond their borders with its fertile intelligence and its even more abundant heart.
Garth Risk Hallberg - New York Times Book Review
[Lerner is] one of the most acclaimed writers in the English-speaking world…. [The Topeka School] is not just a bildungsroman… but a polyphonic portrait of an entire community…. Lerner can get away with writing so many books that are autofictional because a spirit speaks through him—because his language takes on a life of its own.
Becca Rothfeld - Wall Street Journal
An extraordinarily brilliant novel that’s also accessible to anyone yearning for illumination in our disputatious era…. Through the wizardry of Lerner’s prose, this battle of adolescent elocution becomes an emblem for the fiery state of American culture…. Among the myriad miracles of The Topeka School is that it accomplishes so much, captures so much and questions so much about America in fewer than 300 pages.
Ron Charles - Washington Post
Lerner is a dazzlingly intelligent writer, and for anyone looking to understand contemporary America this tale of toxic masculinity, resentful outcasts, rigged high-school debates and political disaster is a good place to start.
Times (UK)
A triumph of ventriloquism…. [Lerner] has written a perfectly weighted, hugely intelligent, entirely entertaining novel that does more than simply mine his childhood or explore what it is to be an author; he has taken on American masculinity, group identity and marginalization, political messaging and generational exchange, and has done so not didactically but generously and with admirable sensitivity."
Times Literary Supplement (UK)
[The Topeka School] is thoroughly, intimidatingly brilliant and absolutely contemporary…. It's funny, and at times, painfully acute…. [Lerner] is a supremely gifted prose stylist, at once theoretical and conversational; he never bores or blathers, and is always limpid. Rather than inviting the reader to look at him or his life, he invites the reader to look through him.
Christine Smallwood - Harper's
Autofiction master Lerner returns with his most expansive novel to date.… Narration from the present-day and interludes hinting at a terrible tragedy add intrigue to this study of polarization and toxic masculinity.
Entertainment Weekly
Loosely plotted but riveting, this novel expertly locates the thread of the anxious present in the memory-stippled past.
Publishers Weekly
[T]his book reintroduces Adam Gordon, narrator of Lerner's… Leaving the Atocha Station. Adam's youth in Topeka, KS, is unveiled,… Readers seeking the wry humor… will find it in short supply here. This exploration of the angst-filled road to manhood is recommended for fans of Jonathan Franzen. —Sally Bissell, formerly with Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Fort Myers, FL
Library Journal
(Starred review) Engrossing…. Few writers are so deeply engaged as Lerner in how our interior selves are shaped by memory and consequence…. Autofiction at its smartest and most effective: self-interested, self-interrogating, but never self-involved.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. In the novel’s first scene, Adam gives a speech to his high school girlfriend, Amber, without realizing that she’s disappeared (7). Later, Amber recounts abandoning her stepfather’s dinnertime polemic without his noticing (13). What kinds of speaking, and listening, do the two stories introduce? How do they reflect conditions of gender and power?
2. Who are the primary voices in the book? Why does the perspective shift between first, second, and third person? How does the italicized, untitled format of Darren’s sections distinguish him from the other characters, and what is the effect of his voice being set apart in this way?
3. The novel serves as "a genealogy of [Adam’s] speech, its theaters and extremes" (142). How are different kinds of speech—including talk therapy, competitive debate, and political discourse—rehearsed and performed in the book?
4. Recalling his affair with Sima, Jonathan says: "Maybe I was a man who sought substitute mothers, then left them like my father" (172). What does the book reveal about parents and children? What do Adam and Jane’s recitations of "The Purple Cow" suggest about the ability to disrupt intergenerational patterns?
5. As Jane describes her fraught public conversation with Sima, she states: "I was both on that stage and back in Brooklyn in the fifties; I was very briefly on the train" (105). Why do several timelines converge in this instance? What genres of time exist in the book?
6. How does Jane recover the memory of her father’s abuse? Why might the book refrain from explicitly portraying the scene on the train?
7. The young Adam "wanted to be a poet because poems were spells" (126). Elsewhere, he experiences the "abstract capacity" of language through freestyle rap, a cultural appropriation of hip hop that also contains "pure possibility" (256). What qualities distinguish poetry from freestyle? What other verbal expressions contain the potential for magic? For oppression?
8. Like Adam, Ben Lerner is a poet from Topeka whose mother is a renowned psychologist and author. In the novel, the adult Adam explicitly wonders: "Why does it feel dangerous to fictionalize my daughters’ names?" (265). How does the book disturb distinctions between fact and fiction?
9. Different technologies mediate the voice: strangers harass Jane via landline; Jonathan records speech-shadowed passages of Sportsmanlike Driving (45); Jane directs the distraught Adam to the safety of a payphone (182); and the trio encounters Adam’s grandfather’s voice through Jonathan’s cassette player (239). How does technology shape the listener’s ability to intercept and alter speech? How do these moments underline the novel’s historical concerns?
10. The title introduces school as a primary setting. What are some of the schools featured, both literal and figurative? How do instruction and indoctrination take place?
11. Lerner’s first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, opens in a museum as Adam Gordon witnesses another visitor’s emotional breakdown, potentially caused by "a profound experience of art." In what ways do visual art and artifice, including Rose’s pilfered painting, Jonathan’s visits to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Duccio’s Madonna and Child, operate in The Topeka School?
12. How does race inflect the novel, from Adam’s freestyle—"a crisis in white masculinity"(127)—to Jason’s recognition of his "ethnic difference" following the September 11 attacks (120), to Jonathan’s memories of his Taipei upbringing? What is the relationship between whiteness and violence?
13. The novel bridges various settings: Jonathan and Jane’s New York, Klaus’ Europe, Adam’s forecasted return to the "vaguely imagined East Coast city from which [his] experiences in Topeka would be recounted with great irony" (15). How does tension exist between and within places? Does Topeka become a city of "milieu therapy" (54)?
14. The text makes a number of overt and implicit political references: the former senator Bob Dole’s face appears on a stranger’s television screen (12) and Donald Trump’s remarks about his daughter surface during the playground altercation between Adam and another father (270). How do personal stories—of the Gordon family, of Darren’s act of violence—acknowledge or reflect the political landscape of the past and present? How do these strains collide, such as when the adult Adam encounters Darren "wearing a red baseball cap, holding his sign in silence" (275)?
15. Does the motif of "the spread" complicate the transcendent possibilities of language? What questions does the novel pose about language’s ability to convey meaning in our contemporary moment? Does the book "spread" its readers with a surplus of allusions, materials, perspectives, and timelines?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)
top of page (summary)
Idaho
Emily Ruskovich, 2017
Random House
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812994049
Summary
A stunning debut novel about love and forgiveness, about the violence of memory and the equal violence of its loss—from O. Henry Prize–winning author Emily Ruskovich.
Ann and Wade have carved out a life for themselves from a rugged landscape in northern Idaho, where they are bound together by more than love.
With her husband’s memory fading, Ann attempts to piece together the truth of what happened to Wade’s first wife, Jenny, and to their daughters.
In a story written in exquisite prose and told from multiple perspectives—including Ann, Wade, and Jenny, now in prison—we gradually learn of the mysterious and shocking act that fractured Wade and Jenny's lives, of the love and compassion that brought Ann and Wade together, and of the memories that reverberate through the lives of every character in Idaho.
In a wild emotional and physical landscape, Wade’s past becomes the center of Ann’s imagination, as Ann becomes determined to understand the family she never knew—and to take responsibility for them, reassembling their lives, and her own. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Raised—Hoodoo Mountain in Idaho
• Education—B.A., University of Montana; M.A., University of New Brunswick, Canada;
M.F.A., Iowa Writers' Workshop
• Awards—O. Henry Award
• Currently—lives in Denver, Colorado.
Emily Ruskovich is an American author, whose debut novel, Idaho, was published in 2016 to wide acclaim. She grew up in the Hoodoo Mountains in the Panhandle of northern Idaho.
Ruskovich received her B.A. from the University of Montana, her M.A. in English from the University of New Brunswick and an M.F.A from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was the 2011–2012 James C. McCreight Fiction Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In 2015, she won an O. Henry Award for her story “Owl.” Her fiction has appeared in Zoetrope, One Story, and Virginia Quarterly Review. Ruskovich currently teaches at the University of Colorado in Denver. (From the publisher.)
Book Reviews
With an act of unspeakable violence at its heart, Idaho…is about not only loss, grief and redemption, but also, most interestingly, the brutal disruptions of memory…Ruskovich's language is itself a consolation, as she subtly posits the troubling thought that only decency can save us. When that decency expresses itself—in dozens of portraits of a missing girl, in the epiphanies of a prison poetry class—an ennobling dignity begins to suggest that a deep goodness might be a match for our madness. In any case, that's the best we're going to get. Idaho is also a very Northwestern book. Thoughts eddy here as they do in Jim Harrison's work, and Ruskovich's novel will remind many readers of the great Idaho novel, Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping.
Smith Henderson - New York Times Book Review
Sensuous, exquisitely crafted.
Wall Street Journal
The first thing you should know about Idaho, the shatteringly original debut by O. Henry Prize winner Emily Ruskovich, is that it upturns everything you think you know about story.... You could read Idaho just for the sheer beauty of the prose, the expert way Ruskovich makes everything strange and yet absolutely familiar.... She startles with images so fresh, they make you see the world anew. . . . Idaho’s brilliance is in its ability to not tie up the threads of narrative, and still be consummately rewarding. The novel reminds us that some things we just cannot know in life—but we can imagine them, we can feel them and, perhaps, that can be enough to heal us.
San Francisco Chronicle
Mesmerizing...[an] eerie story about what the heart is capable of fathoming and what the hand is capable of executing.
Marie Claire
Idaho is a wonderful debut. Ruskovich knows how to build a page-turner from the opening paragraph.
Ft. Worth Star-Telegram
Ruskovich’s debut is haunting, a portrait of an unusual family and a state that becomes a foreboding figure in her vivid depiction.
Huffington Post
Poetic and razor sharp, Idaho is a mystery in more ways than one.... Ruskovich’s prose is lyrical but keen, a poem that never gets lost in its own rhythm...with a Marilynne Robinson-like emphasis on the private, painfully human contemplation going on inside the characters’ brains. The result is writing as bruisingly beautiful as the Idaho landscape in which the story takes place.
A.V. Club
(Starred review.) [B]eautifully constructed.... With her amazing sentences, Ruskovich draws readers into the novel’s world...[with] well-developed voices to describe various perspectives.... Shocking and heartbreaking...a remarkable love story.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) [S]trains of a literary thriller...transform[ed] into a lyrical meditation on memory, loss, and grief in the American West.... Ruskovich builds poetry out of observing the smallest details—moments of narrative precision and clarity.... [F]illed to the brim with dazzling language, mystery, and a profound belief in the human capacity to love and seek forgiveness.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Though at the novel’s center is an act of shocking violence, this is also a story about many different kinds of love. What are these various forms of love? What role does love play in this novel, and how does love contribute to the feelings you are left with in the end?
2. When Wade’s memory begins to fail, Ann endures humiliation and physical pain because of his actions, which, to someone outside of the relationship, would look like domestic abuse. Discuss the ways in which she copes with these episodes. How does Ann interpret these acts of violence, and what does that say about her as a character? Did you feel nervous and uncomfortable about the fine line she is walking between her love and her safety?
3. What are other examples of sacrifice in this novel?
4. Consider the structure of the book: the shifting narrative voices and the shifting timeline, spanning nearly fifty years. How does the book’s structure influence your understanding of each character and his or her story? Discuss also the inclusion of minor perspectives, such as the bloodhound and Eliot.
5. What role does art play in this story? Consider music, painting, and poetry. How do you understand Tom Clark’s motivations?
6. Near the end of the novel, Ann remembers learning about the history of Idaho’s name. How does this history inform her own life? Why is Idaho the title of this novel? Discuss also the role the landscape plays in the interior lives of all the characters. How would you characterize this landscape?
7. Female friendship and sisterhood are major themes. Discuss the various relationships between the female characters, including the children. Is female friendship the saving grace of this story?
8. How do you interpret the act of violence that is at the heart of this story? Do you feel that Ann’s interpretation is correct? Do you feel the novel provides an absolute answer? Why do you think the author chose to tell only as much as she did?
9. Do you sympathize with Jenny, in spite of what she’s done? Why or why not? If you had to choose only one moment in the story that characterized Jenny, would it be her act of violence, or something else? How do you think she understands herself?
10. Are you surprised by the end of Ann’s story? Jenny’s? Why or why not?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)