Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (Ausubel)

Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty 
Ramona Ausubel, 2016
Penguin Publishers
320 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781594634888


Summary
From the award-winning author of No One Is Here Except All of Us, an imaginative novel about a wealthy New England family in the 1960s and '70s that suddenly loses its fortune—and its bearings.

Labor Day, 1976, Martha's Vineyard.
Summering at the family beach house along this moneyed coast of New England, Fern and Edgar—married with three children—are happily preparing for a family birthday celebration when they learn that the unimaginable has occurred: There is no more money.

More specifically, there's no more money in the estate of Fern's recently deceased parents, which, as the sole source of Fern and Edgar's income, had allowed them to live this beautiful, comfortable life despite their professed anti-money ideals.

Quickly, the once-charmed family unravels. In distress and confusion, Fern and Edgar are each tempted away on separate adventures: she on a road trip with a stranger, he on an ill-advised sailing voyage with another woman. The three children are left for days with no guardian whatsoever, in an improvised Neverland helmed by the tender, witty, and resourceful Cricket, age nine.

Brimming with humanity and wisdom, humor and bite, and imbued with both the whimsical and the profound, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty is a story of American wealth, class, family, and mobility, approached by award-winner Ramona Ausubel with a breadth of imagination and understanding that is fresh, surprising, and exciting. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1978-79
• Raised—Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
• Education—M.F.A., University of California, Irvine
• Awards—PEN Center USA for Literary Fiction (more below)
• Currently—lives in the San Francisco Bay area of California


Ramona Ausubel is an American writer, the author of two novels and a short story collection. She grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and now lives with her husband and children in the San Francisco Bay area. She holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine.

Writing
Ausubel's novels include Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty (2016) and No One is Here Except All of Us (2012). Her collection of stories is titled A Guide to Being Born (2013).

Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker, One Story, Electric Literature, FiveChapters, Green Mountains Review, Slice, among others. It has been collected in The Best American Fantasy, Paris Review online.

Her stories have also been included a list of "100 Other Distinguished Stories of 2008″ in the Best American Short Stories and three times as a "Notable" story in the Best American Non-Required Reading.
 
Recognition and honors
Ausubel is a winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Fiction and the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. She has also been a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Story Award and the International Impac Dublin Literary Award. She has also been a finalist for the Puschart Prize and a Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. While in graduate school, she won the Glenn Schaeffer Award in Fiction and served as editor of Faultline Journal of Art & Literature.

Ausubel has taught and lectured at the University of California, Irvine, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Pitzer College and the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has served as a mentor for the PEN Center USA Emerging Voices program. Currently, she is a faculty member of the Low-Residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. (Adapted from the author's website.)

Book Reviews
Ausubel's often whimsical prose is in top form yet again as she imbues the story with her signature touch of magic. This one's just lovely.
Elle.com


"There's no more money." This stark discovery by a golden couple triggers a series of funny, touching adventures.... Set in the anything-goes '70s, this story inspires surprising happiness.
Good Housekeeping


Coming from moneyed backgrounds, married couple Edgar and Fern Keating react in a surprising fashion to their impending insolvency.... Ausubel offers an incisive look at...this couple and...family.... There is true wit in the author’s depiction...and with characters this memorable, the pages almost turn themselves.
Publishers Weekly


Ausubel offers a piercing view of the subtleties of class and privilege and what happens when things go awry.
Booklist


(Starred review.) Fortunes and hearts are lost and found in a modern fairy tale set in the 1960s and '70s. Ausubel's trademark combination of realist narrative with fabulist elements shines.... [Her] magical, engrossing prose style perfectly fits this magical, engrossing story.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add the publisher's questions if they're made available. In the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to kick off a discussion for Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty...then take off on your own:

1. Describe the main characters, Fern and Edgar Keating. Is Edgar a hypocrite, for example, or does he simply live by his own idiosyncratic code of behavior? How do you feel about both of the Keatings, and do those feelings change by the end? Do either of them learn, change, or grow during the course of the novel?

2. Talk about Cricket, James, and Will and how they fend for themselves after their parents' abandonment. Do you find irony in their ability to cope without so-called "adult" supervision...and without dependence on family money? (Who, by the way, are more responsible: parents or children?)

3. Sons and Daughters portrays different reactions to wealth—for instance, taking pleasure in the things money makes possible or viewing wealth as a burden. How do the various characters—Edgar and Fern and the families they came from—approach wealth?

4. Discuss your own attitudes toward money? Given the situation the Keatings find themselves in, how might you react? Is the adage true that money doesn't lead to happiness? Why or why not? Is there a qualifier to that saying?

5. Ramona Ausubel inserts fabulist, folktale-like elements in her otherwise realistic novel. Do these magical additions add to or detract from the story in your opinion?

6. How is the cultural ethos of the 1960s and '70s portrayed in this novel? Talk about how the era's values (or lack of) shape the characters' beliefs and actions. Why might the author have chosen this era as the setting for her story?

7. Will the characters ever achieve happiness? Does the book hint one way or another? What do you think lies in store for the Keating family members?

8. How are animals used to telegraph foreboding in the plot?

9. Given today's political discussions surrounding the 1%, income disparity, a shrinking middle-class, and minimum wage, what were your attitudes toward the privileged when you began reading Sons and Daughters, and has the book altered—or confirmed—your attitudes?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

top of page (summary)