Year We Left Home (Thompson)

The Year We Left Home
Jean Thompson, 2011
Simon & Schuster
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781439175880

Summary
Named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a People magazine “Pick of the Week,” and an Indie Next and Midwest Connections selection, The Year We Left Home is the career-defining novel that Jean Thompson’s admirers have been waiting for: a sweeping and emotionally powerful story of a single American family during the tumultuous final decades of the twentieth century.

Stretching from the early 1970s in the Iowa farmlands to suburban Chicago and across the map of contemporary America, The Year We Left Home follows the Erickson siblings as they confront prosperity and heartbreak, setbacks and triumphs, and seek their place in a country whose only constant seems to be breathtaking change.

Ambitious and richly told, this is a vivid and moving meditation on our continual pursuit of happiness and an incisive exploration of the national character. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
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Jean Thompson is the author of The Year We Left Home (2011), the acclaimed short fiction collections Do Not Deny Me (2009) and Throw Like a Girl (2007) as well as the novel City Boy; the short story collection Who Do You Love, a 1999 National Book Award finalist for fiction; and the novel Wide Blue Yonder, a New York Times Notable Book and Chicago Tribune Best Fiction selection for 2002.

Her short fiction has been published in many magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, and been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize. Jean's work has been praised by Elle Magazine as "bracing and wildly intelligent writing that explores the nature of love in all its hidden and manifest dimensions."

Jean's other books include the short story collections The Gasoline Wars and Little Face, and the novels My Wisdom and The Woman Driver.

Jean has been the recipient of Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, among other accolades, and taught creative writing at the University of Illinois—Champaign/ Urbana, Reed College, Northwestern University, and many other colleges and universities. (From the author's website.)

Book Reviews
It's [the] sense of the familiar revivified—of knowing what's coming yet being emotionally outflanked by it anyway—that best characterizes The Year We Left Home, an extraordinarily warmhearted novel whose impressive humanity and lightness of touch refresh some narrative elements so abundantly precedented that most fiction writers would have been afraid to go near them…with its episodic, home-centered structure, its stealthy gallop through time and its distribution of point-of-view duties among the increasingly estranged members of a nuclear family, [the novel] invites, and withstands, comparisons to Evan S. Connell's novels Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, two (or really one) of the great American fictions of the last century.
Jonathan Dee - New York Times Book Review


Startlingly good.... You may forget that the characters don’t really exist, that the Iowa farm family so expertly drawn by the author never drew breath themselves, that most of the events that transpire across the book’s three-decade span aren’t part of the historical record.
Julia Keller - Chicago Tribune


[A] rich, detailed, resonant, emotionally spot-on novel.... Thompson has a light, exquisite touch. The Year We Left Home feels weightless as a result. By the end of the novel, the reader knows more about the Ericksons than even the Ericksons. The effect is enormously satisfying, allowing the reader not only to connect the dots but to fill in the blanks the author shrewdly leaves wide open.
Bill Eichenberger - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette


Lovely.... Told with extraordinary grace.... The clan at the center of Jean Thompson’s spare, startlingly resonant new novel remain inextricably linked to the place that made them, even as they reach for lives richer in both geography and purpose. But even minor characters receive the full attention of the author’s prodigious talents; each one is drawn so vividly that they never feel less than utterly real.
Leah Greenblatt - Entertainment Weekly


Bookended by two wars—Vietnam and Iraq—Thompson's third novel (after the collection Do Not Deny Me) sketches the travails of an Iowa family over three decades. Matriarch Audrey neatly sums up the episodic novel's grand theme: "she'd been born into one world, hopeful and normal, and now she lived in another, full of sadness and failure." The novel opens as oldest daughter Anita, the beauty of the family, celebrates her marriage. Over the years, however, Anita confronts dissatisfaction with herself and disillusionment with her pompous husband. Her younger brother, Ryan, a high school senior as the novel opens, longs to escape his rural roots, dating a hippie poet and majoring in political science before realizing that the farmers who came before him might hold more relevance than he'd imagined. Cousin Chip comes back from Vietnam troubled and aimless, his wanderings from Seattle to Reno, Nev., to Veracruz, Mexico, offering a parallel to the spiritual restlessness all the other characters feel. Told from the point of view of more than a half-dozen characters, the vignettes that make up the narrative are generally powerful in isolation, but as a whole fail to develop into anything more than a series of snapshots of a family touched by time and tragedy.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Dazzling.... Unforgettable.... A masterful wide-angle portrait of an Iowa family over three decades.... Thompson’s ability to put these characters empathically on the page, in their special setting, over an extended period of years, with just the right dose of dark humor, rivals Richard Russo’s.... The novel is a powerful reflection on middle American life—on the changes wrought by the passing years and the values that endure.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Early on in the novel, Ryan muses "what really counted was the life you made for yourself, and the person you decided to be." (p. 11) Does this prove to be true? How does this play out in his life, and in the lives of his family members? How does this concept change for him?

2. "Something in him always stood apart, and he was not who people assumed was." (p. 27) How is this true for Ryan throughout the novel? How do the characters define themselves, and each other?

3. Which narrator did you like best: Anita, Ryan, Chip, Torrie, Audrey, Matthew, or Blake? Why do you think Thompson chose to have Ryan narrate the majority of the sections? Was there someone you wanted to hear more from?

4. Anita feels that she and her mother are always on the verge of a conversation: "Is this what it means to be a wife, a mother, a woman? Is it what you expected? Should I have gone about it differently?" (p. 105) Why don't they ever actually have that conversation? How might things be different for them, and other women in the novel, if they discussed such things with each other?

5. Why do you think Megan ruins Ryan's career with her essay? Is she crazy, or clever? Hurt, or just trying to stand out?

6. Why does Anita go to the Goodells' auction and give her relatives five thousand dollars? Does she feel responsible because her husband is a banker? Talk about Anita's concept of family and loyalty.

7. Martha's words at Anita's wedding startle Ryan: "You never can tell, looking at it from the outside. How miserable people can be in a marriage." (p. 14) How are her words prophetic? Do you think she was referring to her own marriage, which seemed so happy?

8. Discuss the many different ideas of marriage in the novel. Why does Anita marry Jeff (p. 183), and why does she stay with him? Why does Ryan get married (p. 221), and then have affairs that lead to divorce? What about Blake, whose wife everyone seems to look down on?

9. Ryan thinks to himself, "You decided that your life would go in a certain direction, and maybe it did. Or maybe you were kidding yourself, and the world was mostly a matter of being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time." (p. 221) Do you agree? How much of Ryan's life is shaped by his choices, and how much does he simply allow to happen to him?

10. The author states: "Everybody in America is one of two things, either in or out." (p. 288) How does this theme of insider and outsider play throughout the novel?

11. Why does Anita bring in Rhonda to live with her family? How is it true that sometimes a family needs an orphan?

12. For a while, Anita seems to be drifting through the duties of a wife and mother. What spurs her to take classes to become a realtor and get involved with Alcohol Anonymous? Did Jeff's descent into alcoholism empower her to take charge of her life, or do you think she would have done so regardless?

13. Throughout the novel, Chip is consistently an outsider who never seems to have much going for him. However, he often provides poignant insights to Ryan and others, and doesn't seem to experience the lack of fulfillment that plagues many other characters. Why do you think this is?

14. Why do you think Ryan and Chip remain close throughout the years? Is Ryan more like Chip than he might want to admit? How so?

15. Why does Ryan buy the Peerson house?

16. Referring to the Peersons, Blake remarks, "They didn't think in terms of happy." (p. 409) Do you agree that the older generations were more content with what they had, and less concerned with searching for happiness elsewhere? Discuss the characters' conceptions of happiness, and whether or not they are able to find it. What constitutes true happiness?

17. Discuss the title of the novel. Why do you think Thompson chose this title? How does it capture the spirit of the novel?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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