Reunion of Ghosts (Mitchell)

A Reunion of Ghosts 
Judith Claire Mitchell, 2015
HarperCollins
400 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780062355881


Summary
Three wickedly funny sisters . . .  One family's extraordinary legacy . . .  A single suicide note that spans a century . . .

Meet the Alter sisters: Lady, Vee, and Delph. These three mordantly witty, complex women share their family's apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

They love each other fiercely, but being an Alter isn't easy. Bad luck is in their genes, passed down through the generations. Yet no matter what curves life throws at these siblings—and it's hurled plenty—they always have a wisecrack, and one another.

In the waning days of 1999, the trio decides it's time to close the circle of the Alter curse. But first, as the world counts down to the dawn of a new millennium, Lady, Vee, and Delph must write the final chapter of a saga lifetimes in the making—one that is inexorably intertwined with that of the twentieth century itself.

Unspooling threads of history, personal memory, and family lore, they weave a mesmerizing account of their lives that stretches back decades to their great-grandfather, a brilliant scientist whose professional triumph became the sinister legacy that defines them.

Funny, heartbreaking, and utterly original, A Reunion of Ghosts is a magnificent novel about three unforgettable women bound to each other, and to their remarkable family, through the blessings and the burdens bestowed by blood. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Brooklyn, New York City, New York, USA
• Rasied—on Long Island, New York
• Education—B.A., Barnard College
• Currently—lives in Madison, Wisconsin


Judith Claire Mitchell is the author of the novels The Last Day of the War (2004) and A Reunion of Ghosts (2015). She teaches undergraduate and graduate fiction workshops at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she is a professor of English and the director of the MFA program in creative writing.

She has received grants and fellowships from the Michener-Copernicus Society of America, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and Bread Loaf, among others. She lives in Madison with her husband, the artist Don Friedlich.). (From the publisher.)

Visit the author's website for a delightful, more personal version of her bio.

Book Reviews
What’s so funny about three sisters bent on committing suicide? Plenty, in the imagination of Judith Claire Mitchell…. Darkly witty.
Dallas Morning News


Mitchell’s plot, which twists in unexpected but believable ways and opens up just when it seems as it the same time—that makes it remarkable.
Columbus Dispatch


Mitchell explores the mixed-blessing bonds of family with wry wit. This original tale is black comedy at its best (Book of the Week).
People


My favourite novel of the year so far…. A literary mash-up of The Virgin Suicides and Grey Gardens. I wouldn’t be surprised if Wes Anderson and Sofia Coppola are slugging it out for the film rights already.
Sam Baker - Harper's Bazaar.com (UK)


(Starred review.) [T]riumphant...darkly comic prose..... Lady, Delph, and Vee Alter decide to kill themselves..... Moving nimbly through time and balancing her weightier themes with the sharply funny, fiercely unsentimental perspectives...Mitchell’s fictional suicide note is poignant and pulsing with life force.
Publishers Weekly


Lady, Vee, and Delph Alter...have given themselves the "deadline" of late December 1999 to commit suicide. Their reasons are based mostly on that the Alters have miserable luck, stretching back to their great-grandfather.... [T]his serious study of a very odd family has its darkly humorous side. —Andrea Tarr, Corona P.L., CA
Library Journal


For the Alter sisters, living with the guilt of the generations, there is only one way out…. This novel is a carefully crafted, thought-provoking examination of history past and present as seen through the eyes of a complex yet humble family.
Booklist


(Starred review.) [A] memoir that's meant to double as their collective suicide note may not sound like a hilarious premise for a novel, but Mitchell's masterful family saga is as funny as it is aching.... Mitchell's dark comedy captures the agony and ecstasy...with deep empathy and profound wit.... [S]tunning.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. How does The Alter Family Tree affect your entry into the novel?

2. Consider each of the sisters—Lady, Vee and Delph—who narrate most of the novel. How are they similar and different? How is their living together healthy? How not?

3. In Chapter 1, the sisters present a "chart" of family suicides and claim that the "tidiness of the rows and columns" help balance the emotional feeling of "life as forever chaotic." Does it? Can organizing and listing difficult experiences make them less powerful?

4. What is potentially valuable or challenging about a family legacy?

5. Heinrich Alter states that "being Jewish is his culture, but being German is his faith." How do the other characters of the novel struggle with being Jews with German ancestry after World War II?

6. As a child, Lenz Alter was "mournful," and bad at most things he tried, yet he eventually wins the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. How does such a transformation take place?

7. How does the sisters’ humor and love of wordplay and puns balance the sadness and suffering explored in the novel?

8. Consider the structure of the novel, which moves backwards and forwards in time. What are the effects of this?

9. Albert Einstein’s theories about time serve as a way for the sisters to consider their largely unpleasant lives. What did Einstein say about the nature of time? How is that helpful to the sisters?

10. Delph, the youngest sister, at 19 years old, says she’s not interested in "soup," the sisters’ euphemism for romantic and sexual involvement with men. Why isn’t she? Consider Lady’s relationship with Joe Hopper and Vee’s with Eddie Glod.

11. In their wonderings about what might have happened to the father who left them, the sisters find the fantasy of his being killed by their mother the most satisfying and interesting. How might such a drastic fantasy make emotional sense? In what ways might fantasy be helpful in the face of great trauma?

12. What does the sisters' Great Grandmother Iris Emanuel bring to the novel? What’s the value of the letters she writes to chemistry professor Richard Lehrer, even after he has died?

13. The sisters believe they are the last Alters subject to the family curse --- "The sins of the fathers are visited on the sons to the third and fourth generations." What might this Biblical idea mean?

14. Albert Einstein’s first wife Mileva talks to Iris about the challenge of being married to genius. How might great intelligence affect intimate relationships like marriage?

15. After the painful loss of Richard Lehrer, Iris passionately instructs her son Richard about surviving: "The worst happens, and people go on." And yet she takes her own life. How might you explain such conflict, such apparent hypocrisy?

16. Both Lenz Alter and Albert Einstein do profound scientific work that eventually provide a force for genocide. To what extent is each responsible? What ethical responsibilities should scientists have?

17. Thinking of both an ad for Lord & Taylor and the horrific image of clothes worn by Jews in concentration camps, Richard thinks "Thank God for the human capacity to hold both kinds of pajamas in our heads at once." What might he mean?

18. At one point Vee mimics and criticizes one of the many academics writing about Lenz and Iris. What is she upset about? To what extent should academic research involve empathy or emotional understanding? What are the limits of studying historic figures and their behavior?

19. After her bilateral mastectomy and chemotherapy, Vee thinks about the "body as narrative," and the "face as biography." In what ways is this true?

20. In the face of Vee’s cancer the sisters claim that repression is a "gift," and of great value. To what extent can such profound pain and fear be "tamp[ed] down"?

21. What is the nature of coincidence? Fate? Carl Jung’s idea of synchronicity?

(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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