Small Indiscretion (Ellison)

A Small Indiscretion 
Jan Ellison, 2015
Random House
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812995442


Summary
A Small Indiscretion fixes an unflinching eye on the power of desire and the danger of obsession as it unfolds the story of one woman's reckoning with a youthful mistake.

At nineteen, Annie Black trades a bleak future in her washed-out hometown for a London winter of drinking to oblivion and yearning for deliverance. Some two decades later, she is married to a good man and settled in San Francisco, with a son and two daughters and a successful career designing artistic interior lights.

One June morning, a photograph arrives in her mailbox, igniting an old longing and setting off a chain of events that rock the foundations of her marriage and threaten to overturn her family's hard-won happiness.

The novel moves back and forth across time between San Francisco in the present and that distant winter in Europe. The two worlds converge and explode when the adult Annie returns to London seeking answers, her indiscretions come to light, and the phone rings with shocking news about her son. Now Annie must fight to save her family by piecing together the mystery of her past—the fateful collision of liberation and abandon and sexual desire that drew an invisible map of her future.

A Small Indiscretion is a riveting debut novel about a woman's search for understanding and forgiveness, a taut exploration of a modern marriage, and of love -- the kind that destroys, and the kind that redeems. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1965-66
• Raised—Tujunga, California, USA
• Education—B.A., Stanford University; M.F.A., San Francisco State University
• Awards—O. Henry Prize
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, California


Jan Ellison is the author of the debut novel, A Small Indiscretion, which was both a San Francisco Chronicle Book Club Pick and an Oprah Editor’s Pick. Jan’s essays and stories have appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Narrative Magazine and elsewhere, and her first story to appear in print won a 2007 O. Henry Prize.

Jan grew up in Los Angeles, and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband of twenty years and their four children. When her children were small, she spent seven years taking classes at San Francisco State and finally earned her MFA. She had a brief career in her twenties at a Silicon Valley startup, marketing risk management software to derivatives traders. The company went public, Jan became a mother, and instead of leaning in she leaned out, became a stay-at-home mom, and began to write.

Before that, Jan abandoned a job in investment banking before she even started it to spend two years waitressing in Hawaii, temping in Australia, and backpacking through Southeast Asia. Her college days were spent at Stanford, where a degree in History taught her about stories, as did her creative writing classes. She left Stanford for a year at nineteen to live on a shoestring in Paris and work in an office in London. She scribbled notes on yellow legal pads, and years later those notes provided the inspiration for her debut novel. (From the author's website.)

Visit the author's website.
Follow Jan on Facebook.

Book Reviews
Delicious, lazy-day reading.... [Jan] Ellison describes her various love triangles in lavish prose...the real strengths of this novel are the foggy, intimate flashbacks that so perfectly capture the sexual and romantic confusion of a young woman in a foreign land (Editor’s Pick).
Leigh Newman - Oprah.com


Ellison is a tantalizing storyteller, dropping delicious hints of foreshadowing and shifting back and forth in time....moving her story forward with cinematic verve.... [She] masterfully captures the confusing and powerful moment when a young woman realizes her effect on men. Compellingly sympathetic characters bring the London chapter of Annie’s story to dramatic life. If you are clinging to a stash of letters and ticket stubs from old lovers, Indiscretion may have you rethinking the cost of holding on to the past rather than basking in the virtues of the present.
USA Today
 

Astonishing.... This voice is alive. It knows something. It will take us somewhere. The magic is accomplished so fast, so subtly, that most readers hardly notice.... A Small Indiscretion is rich with suspense.... Delectable elements of this terrific first novel abound: Its characters are round and real.... Ellison gives us an achingly physical sense of family life.... Lovely writing guides us through, driven by a quiet generosity.... This voice knows something, and by the end of the novel, so do we.
San Francisco Chronicle

 
Rich and detailed.... The plot explodes delightfully, with suspense and a few twists. Using second-person narration and hypnotic prose, Ellison’s debut novel is both juicy and beautifully written. How do I know it’s juicy? A stranger started reading it over my shoulder on the New York City subway, and told me he was sorry that I was turning the pages too quickly.
Flavorwire


Are those wild college days ever really behind you? Happily married Annie finds out.
Cosmopolitan


An impressive fiction debut....both a psychological mystery and a study of the divide between desire and duty.
San Jose Mercury News


A novel to tear through on a plane ride or on the beach.... I was drawn into a web of secrets, a
world of unrequited love and youthful mistakes that feel heightened and more romantic on the cold winter streets of London, Paris, and Ireland.
Bustle


Annie Black is a flawed heroine whose impulses we may distrust, but whose voice is compelling, drawing us in with her ruminating self-awareness and lively observations of those around her.... Ellison renders the California landscape with stunning clarity.... She writes gracefully, with moments of startling insight.... Her first novel is an emotional thriller, skillfully plotted in taut, visual scenes. The stakes are high from the start.... As Ellison pulls the thread that unravels the past, she weaves a rich tapestry of memory and desire, secrets and omissions, and exposes the knotted wages of love.... A Small Indiscretion resolves in an astonishing plot twist that offers both destruction and self-discovery.
Rumpus


The book is a page-turner but the crazy connections are too orchestrated to be believable, and the epistolary format doesn't fit. Would a mother really tell her son all the sordid details of her sexual past, even if it did reveal something about his patrimony?
Publishers Weekly


The author's prose repeatedly catapults readers from the present to the past by employing a second-person point of view that is often difficult to follow....Part romance novel, part coming-of-age story, and part family drama, this somber book about a perpetually flawed woman is a challenging and thought-provoking read. —Samantha Gust, Niagara Univ. Lib., NY
Library Journal


Hard to put down.... O. Henry Prize winner Jan Ellison’s debut novel is a puzzle with the outside pieces finished. Reading it is like compulsively fitting all those revealing middle pieces together. . . . Skillfully weaving two plots, Ellison unveils the details of each, piece by tantalizing piece
BookPage


[A] cleverly constructed debut....crafted, absorbing novel that peels back the layers of Annie’s character as it reveals the secrets of her past and present.
Booklist


Ellison keeps the mystery going by switching among Annie's life in London at age 20, parts of the recent past, and present-time diary-type chapters....that fiendishly answers only one question at a time. Connoisseurs of domestic suspense will finish this book in a few breathless sittings, then wait eagerly for Ellison's next trick.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In the beginning of the novel, Annie writes: "Between those bookends was a family whose happiness might still be intact if only I’d been able to see the threats to it more clearly." Is Annie responsible for Robbie’s accident, and for her family’s unraveling? Is it in her power to protect them?

2. There is more than one indiscretion in the novel. Which do you think the title refers to, or might it refer to more than one?

3. On page 302, Annie writes that it is "easier to blame the impulsiveness of youth than the wanton self-indulgence of a grown woman." How can this statement be assessed in the context of Annie’s story? Why does Annie confess to Jonathan upon her return from London?

4. After Jonathan moves out, Clara and Polly are passed between their parents "like a restaurant desert." Is Jonathan’s decision to move out defensible? How are the girls’ childhoods altered by the events of the summer? How might they look back on this period in their lives?

5. The novel takes the form of a confessional letter from Annie to Robbie. It also moves back and forth across two decades and spans three continents. How did this structure affect your reading experience? Does the structure remind you of any other novels?

6. Annie’s youthful relationship with Patrick is tortured and unfulfilling, yet she continues to yearn for him for more than twenty years. What causes this obsession? And why does it fade once Annie finally meets Patrick in London as an adult?

7. On page 250, Patrick defines art as "whatever stands in the world with no other purpose than to move us." Annie in turn suggests that art should at least be beautiful. Do you agree with either of these definitions? What other scenes and situations in the novel speak to the themes of art and beauty?

8. Early in the novel, Annie writes: "The heart is large, and there is more than one material in the bucket we call love." How does the novel address the theme of the nature of love? How do notions or definitions of love evolve as the novel progresses, and Annie matures?

9. Alcoholism runs in Annie’s family, yet when she finds herself abroad at nineteen, she begins to drink heavily. How might Annie’s upbringing have influenced this behavior? What leads to Annie’s "bargain" with herself in the clinic in San Francisco, as described on page 209?

10. The letter Annie receives from Emme’s uncle contains a major revelation. Did this revelation come as a surprise? What previous scenes hint at this revelation? Is Emme justified in holding Annie responsible for the shaping of her own history?

11. Annie posits that a memory is "by its nature a revision.... shaped by the waves of time, and by the history that has rushed against it since..." How does the novel interrogate the nature of memory? Is Annie a reliable narrator? How would the story be different if it were told from Jonathan’s point of view? Or Robbie’s? Or Emme’s?

12. On page 273, Annie realizes that if she expects to be forgiven, she must "forgive indiscriminately" from now on. Which characters, besides Annie, seek forgiveness? Which characters are ultimately redeemed, and which, if any, are not?

13. The novel concludes without describing what happens when Annie flies to Paris to reveal to Robbie the truth about his paternity and about Emme’s motivations. How do you imagine events unfolding between Annie and Robbie, and ultimately, between Robbie and Emme?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

top of page (summary)