April & May 2011

Let the Great World Spin: A Novel

Colum McCann

It's August of 1974, a summer "hot and serious and full of death and betrayal," and Watergate and the Vietnam War make the world feel precarious.  A stunned hush pauses the cacophonous universe of New York City as a man on a cable walks (repeatedly) between World Trade Center towers.  This extraordinary, real-life feat by French funambulist Philippe Petit becomes the touchstone for stories that briefly submerge you in ten varied and intense lives--a street priest, heroin-addicted hookers, mothers mourning sons lost in war, young artists, a Park Avenue judge.  All their lives are ordinary and unforgettable, overlapping at the edges, occasionally converging.  And when they coalesce in the final pages, the moment hums with such grace that its memory might tighten your throat weeks later.  You might find yourself paused, considering the universe of lives one city contains in any slice of time, each of us a singular world, sometimes passing close enough to touch or collide, to birth a new generation or kill it, sending out ripples, leaving residue, an imprint, marking each other, our city, the very air--compassionately or callously, unable to see all the damage we do or heal.  And most of us stumbling, just trying not to trip, or step in something awful.

But then someone does something extraordinary, like dancing on a cable strung 110 stories in the air, or imagining a magnificent novel that lifts us up for a sky-scraping, dizzy glimpse of something greater: the sordid grandeur of this whirling world, "bigger than its buildings, bigger than its inhabitants."

Winter 2010

Freedom

Jonathan Franzen

Freedom captures the temptations and burdens of liberty: the thrills of teenage lust, the shaken compromises of middle age, the wages of suburban sprawl, the responsibility of privilege. Charting the characters' mistakes and joys as they struggle to learn how to live in an ever-changing and confusing world, Freedom is an indelible and deeply moving portrait of our time.Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul, Minnesota—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Baby Boomers. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter's dreams. Together with Walter—environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man—she was doing her small part to build a better world.

But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why is Walter working away from home so much? What has happened to their teenage son? Why has Patty, the bright star of Barrier Street, become "a very different kind of neighbor," coming unhinged before the street's attentive eyes? And what exactly is eccentric rocker Richard Katz—Walter's college best friend and rival—still doing in the picture?

As the story explores the nature of love, it also tackles our tenuous relationship with nature. When Walter fights to preserve a habitat for an endangered bird, the troubled history between Patty, Richard and himself threatens to topple the deal, along with everything he believes about truth and illusion.

*This is a longer book therefore with our busy schedules, we have decided to discuss this book club choice in January.  Happy reading!*

January & February 2010

A Reliable Wife

by Robert Goolrick

Rural Wisconsin, 1909. In the bitter cold, Ralph Truitt, a successful businessman, stands alone on a train platform waiting for the woman who answered his newspaper advertisement for "a reliable wife". But when Catherine Land steps off the train from Chicago, she's not the "simple, honest woman" that Ralph is expecting. She is both complex and devious, haunted by a terrible past and motivated by greed. Her plan is simple: she will win this man's devotion, and then, ever so slowly, she will poison him and leave Wisconsin a wealthy widow. What she has not counted on, though, is that Truitt-a passionate man with is own dark secrets-has plans of his own for his new wife. Isolated on a remote estate and imprisoned by relentless snow, the story of Ralph and Catherine unfolds in unimaginable ways.

November 2009

The Weight of Silence

Heather Gudenkauf

It happens quietly one August morning. As dawn's shimmering light drenches the humid Iowa air, two families awaken to find their little girls have gone missing in the night.
Seven year old Calli Clark is sweet, gentle, a dreamer who suffers from selective mutism brought on by tragedy that pulled her deep into silence as a toddler.

Calli's mother, Antonia, tried to be the best mother she could within the confined of marriage to a mostly absent, often angry husband. Now, though she denies that her husband could be involved in the possible abductions, she fears her decision to stay in her marriage has cost her more than her daughter's voice.
Petra Gregory is Calli's best friend, her soul mate and her voice. But neither Petra nor Calli has been heard from since their disappearance was discovered. Desperate to find her child, Martin Gregory is forced to confront a side of himself he did not know existed beneath his intellectual, professorial demeanor.
Now these families are tied by the question of what happened to their children. And the answer is trapped in the silence of unspoken family secrets.

October 2009

The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath

Esther Greenwood, seems to have the perfect life. She has received numerous awards for her poetry and writing and is on scholarship at a prestigious women's college. She wind a month long job assignment in New York City for a women's magazine. To the outside world it would seem that she is living a dream life:

dining on sumptuous meals, hobnobbing with celebrities, and being showered with gifts, all courtesy of the magazine. Inside, however, she is wrenched with confusion. She struggles within herself to reconcile her desires to become a writer in a world where women are expected to be perfect housewives and mothers as well as her desires for sexual equality in a world where women are expected to be pure and virginal, but men are free to experiment with sexuality without fear of pregnancies or ruined reputations.

As she returns home for the remainder of the summer, her thoughts turn increasingly melancholy. Her application for a much-coveted summer school writing course is rejected. To ass insult to injury, she learns that her boyfriend is having feelings for another woman and is not a virgin as he has led her to believe. She begins a rapid decent into a deep depression unable to eat, read, or sleep.

Eventually Esther attempts a near-fatal suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. She ends up in an asylum convinced that her case is without hope. From this point forward, we get a fascinating glimpse into just how far the treatment of depression has come in recent decades. Esther's treatment involves insulin injections, psychotherapy (her mother feels guilty that she may have make mistakes during toilet training), and eventually electroshock therapy.

After several months, she is released to return to school. As she recovers, she uses the apt analogy of the distorted view of the world seen from within a bell jar to describe her former condition. Esther states near the end of the book:

How did I know that someday--at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere--the bell jar, with it's stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?

This quote becomes all the more poignant when one discovers that only a month after "The Bell Jar", her first novel, was published, Sylvia Plath took her own life. One wonders if things would have been different had she lived today.

March 2009

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Jonathan Safran Foer

This is one of the first novels to deal with the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The book is an example of an emerging school of contemporary postmodernism which challenges technical limitations of the novel to create a more immersive work.

Meet Oskar Schell, an inventor, Francophile, tambourine player, Shakespearean actor, jeweler, and pacifist. He is nine years old. And he is on an urgent, secret search through the five boroughs of New york. His mission is to find the lock that fits a mysterious key belonging to his father, who died in the World Trade Center on 9/11.

An inspired innocent, Oskar is alternately endearing, exasperating, and hilarious as he careens fromCentral Park to Coney Island to Harlem on his search. Along the way he is always dreaming up inventions to keep those he loves safe from harm. What about a birdseed shirt to let you fly away? What if you could actually hear everyone's heartbeat? His goal is hopeful, but the past speaks a loud warning in stories of those who've lost loved ones before. As Oskar roams New York, he encounters a motley assortment of humanity who are all survivors in their own way. He befriends a 103-year-old war reporter, a tour guide who never leaves the Empire State Building, and lovers enraptured or scorned. Ultimately, Oskar ends his journey where it began, at his father's grave. But now he is accompanied by the silent stranger who has been renting the spare room of his grandmother's apartment. They are there to dig up his father's coffin.