LitPicks - May '08 

Wherefore Happiness: what is happiness, how does one attains it, who deserves it, and how does one hold onto it? Is happiness realistic—or simply a trope of fiction? This month's works consider happiness—using vastly different lenses and reaching very different conclusions.

A Lighter Touch | Wonderfully Written | Great Works      




The Jane Austen Book Club
Karen Joy Fowler
288 pp.

By Molly Lundquist
Change of plans. I'd actually been working on a different theme for this month, one more serious and...um, profound. But then I finally got around to reading Fowler's book (finished it an hour ago) and decided I really wanted to talk about it.

One of the motifs in The Jane Austen Book Club is happiness—and it came to me that happiness is intriguing stuff.

One man and five women, all great readers who are passionate about literature, get together to read Jane Austen's six works. We're invited to join in ... in the club and also in members' lives. Each of them knows and loves a different Jane Austen, one that accommodates his or her own world view and life experiences.

Fowler is interested in how we read: we read through the lens of our own experiences—but what we read can also shape the way we see our lives, sometimes transforming them. Fowler explores this reciprocity with humor and sympathy. It's a clever and fun book, especially for Austen fans, who will pick out themes and parallel events from her works.

The club members observe that all of Austen's works end happily—and club member Allegra (nicely ironic name) wonders whether that makes Austen dangerous. Is it dangerous to believe that life should turn out happily? Another member asks older and wiser Bernadette if she believes in happy endings? "Oh my Lord, yes," she answers. "I've had a hundred of them." Elsewhere, members debate whether Austen's characters—and real people—deserve the happiness they get...or get the happiness they deserve. In other words, must we earn happiness or does it come to us gratuitously...or what?

A smart, funny, thought-provoking book—don't miss this one. (There is a film. But really...I don't know. It's enjoyable, but don't go out of your way.)

Finally, see our Reading Guide for The Jane Austen Book Club.

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Saying Grace
Beth Gutcheon, 1995
320 pp.

By Molly Lundquist
I recently got an email asking me to put up a Reading Guide on a work by Beth Gutcheon. Who's this, I wondered?...only to be surprised to find that she was born and raised in the small town I live in now.

I was more surprised to see the extent of Gutcheon's work (7 novels)...and even more surprised...that she isn't more widely talked about in book club circles. She's an extremely intelligent, gifted writer: perhaps, a writer's writer. Anyway, where's Oprah when you need her?

Saying Grace is one of Gutcheon's earlier works, a story about locating and holding on to happiness no matter how precarious its nature. Rue (another ironic name...see Allegra above) runs a private school in California. She's smart, well-grounded, and driven by a set vision—for her school and her family and life. That secure, even rigid, vision of how life ought to be will be severely tested during the novel.

The novel opens with a wonderfully written passage.

It was two days before the opening of school when the Spanish teacher dropped dead. Dropped is the right word; she was on her knees in the garden, cleaning out the crocosmia bed, when she felt a sudden lightball of pain in her chest, and then she was herself extinguished. She toppled face-foward into the fragrant California earth...wearing her green-and-yellow gardening gloves.

Touching yet funny, this passage sets the stage for the novel's events. What makes Saying Grace so compelling is Rue's capacity to see life as transcendent—to reach past temporal pain and see human connection with eternity, with what is divine. It is a beautiful evocation.

During Thanksgiving dinner, a discussion ensues regarding what it means to say grace—is it mere decoration; an "incantation, like magic"; a ritual—with or without meaning? Gutcheon doesn't hand us the answer, but by the end of the book we come to see that saying grace is an acknowledge-ment of blessedness, a realization that life, no matter its sorrows, is a gift.

I recommend this gorgeous, heartfelt book.

Also, be sure to download our Readers' Guide for Saying Grace.

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A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen, 1879
85 pp.

By Molly Lundquist
Talk about theatrics—or drama queens—Nora Helmer is the real thing, bless her heart.

Nora's door slam at the end of Ibsen's play became the "slam heard around the world"—affronting Victorian values and igniting suffragette hopes everywhere. It signaled a revolution in the Western World, which led eventually to the female vote and later to workplace equality. (Okay, we could debate that last point.)

All is happiness in Nora's coddled existence—doting husband, comfortable living, beautiful children. But we soon learn the only thing standing between Nora's "encoddlement" and disaster is a blackmail letter—which eventually makes its way into Torvald's hands. When it's revealed that Nora had once secretly borrowed money and forged her father's signature, poor Torvald is outraged: Nora has ruined his life, his reputation, his happiness. His furor is unforgiving, despite two extenuating facts

1) Nora borrowed the money to pay for Torvald's medical treatments;
2) she has quietly, over the years, repaid the entire loan.

The veil has slipped from Nora's eyes—her husband is revealed as a first-class chump and her life an imprisonment that has stultified her growth and freedom. Happiness lies elsewhere, so out the door she goes. SLAM. BANG. Curtain down. It's one of drama's most stunning endings, even today it still shocks...even when you know it's coming.

Don't be put off by the fact that is a play rather than novel. Come on...switching genres is goooood for us.

Also, you might check out the 4 film versions, though I'm not familiar (yet) with any of them— 1992 (TV) with Juliet Stevenson; 1973 with Claire Bloom and Anthony Hopkins; another in 1973 with Jane Fonda; 1959 (TV) with Julie Harris and Christopher Plummer.

I don't have a reader's guide up for you yet, but use our Generic Discussion Questions. I can imagine some great discussions surrounding the implications of that slammed door—and Nora's bid for freedom and happiness.

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