Nights in Rodanthe (Sparks)

Nights in Rodanthe
Nicholas Sparks, 2003
Grand Central Publishing
240 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780446612708


Summary
Adrienne Willis is forty-five and has been divorced for three years, abandoned by her husband for a younger woman. The trials of raising her teenage children and caring for her sick father have worn her down, but at the request of a friend and in hopes of a respite, she’s gone to the coastal village of Rodanthe in North Carolina’s outer banks to tend the local inn for the weekend. With a major storm brewing, the time away doesn’t look promising…until a guest named Paul Flanner arrives.

At fifty-four, Paul is a successful surgeon but in the previous six months his life has unraveled into something he doesn’t recognize. Estranged from his son and recently divorced, he’s sold his practice and his home and has journeyed to this isolated coastal town in hopes of closing a painful chapter in his past, completely unaware that his life is about to change forever.

Adrienne and Paul come together as the storm gathers strength over Rodanthe, but what begins between them over the weekend will resonate throughout the rest of their lives, intertwining past and future, love and loss. (From the publisher.)

Nights in Rodanthe was adapted to film in 2008, starring Diane Lane and Richard Gere.

Author Bio
• Birth—December 31. 1965
• Where—Omaha, Nebraska, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Notre Dame
• Currently—lives in New Bern, North Carolina


Nicholas Charles Sparks is an American novelist, screenwriter and producer. He has published some 20 novels, plus one non-fiction. Ten have been adapted to films, including Message in a Bottle, A Walk to Remember, The Notebook, Nights in Rodanthe, Dear John, The Last Song, The Lucky One, and most recently The Longest Ride.

Background
Sparks was born to Patrick Michael Sparks, a professor of business, and Jill Emma Marie Sparks (nee Thoene), a homemaker and an optometrist's assistant. He was the middle of three children, with an older brother and a younger sister, "Dana", who died at the age of 33 from a brain tumor. Sparks said that she is the inspiration for the main character in his novel A Walk to Remember.

His father was pursuing graduate studies at University of Minnesota and University of Southern California, and the family moved a great deal, so by the time Sparks was eight, he had lived in Watertown, Minnesota, Inglewood, California, Playa del Rey, California, and Grand Island, Nebraska, which was his mother's hometown during his parents' one year separation.

In 1974 his father became a professor of business at California State University, Sacramento teaching behavioral theory and management. His family settled in Fair Oaks, California, and remained there through Nicholas's high school days. He graduated in 1984 as valedictorian from Bella Vista High School, then enrolled at the University of Notre Dame under a full track and field scholarship. In his freshman year, his team set a record for the 4 x 800 relay.

Sparks majored in business finance and graduated from Notre Dame with honors in 1988. He also met his future wife that year, Cathy Cote from New Hampshire, while they were both on spring break. They married in 1989 and moved to New Bern, North Carolina.

Writing career
While still in school in 1985, Sparks penned his first (never published) novel, The Passing, while home for the summer between freshman and sophomore years at Notre Dame. He wrote another novel in 1989, also unpublished, The Royal Murders.

After college, Sparks sought work with publishers or to attend law school, but was rejected in both attempts. He then spent the next three years trying other careers, including real estate appraisal, waiting tables, selling dental products by phone and starting his own manufacturing business.

In 1990, Sparks co-wrote with Billy Mills Wokini: A Lakota Journey to Happiness and Self-Understanding. The book was published by Random House sold 50,000 copies in its first year.

In 1992, Sparks began selling pharmaceuticals and in 1993 was transferred to Washington, DC. It was there that he wrote another novel in his spare time, The Notebook. Two years later, he was discovered by literary agent Theresa Park, who picked The Notebook out of her agency's slush pile, liked it, and offered to represent him. In October 1995, Park secured a $1 million advance for The Notebook from Time Warner Book Group. The novel was published in 1996 and made the New York Times best-seller list in its first week of release.

With the success of his first novel, he and Cathy moved to New Bern, NC. After his first publishing success, he began writing his string of international bestsellers.

Personal life and philanthropy
Sparks continues to reside in North Carolina with his wife Cathy, their three sons, and twin daughters. A Roman Catholic since birth, he and his wife are raising their children in the Catholic faith.

In 2008, Entertainment Weekly reported that Sparks and his wife had donated "close to $10 million" to start a private Christian college-prep school, The Epiphany School of Global Studies, which emphasizes travel and lifelong learning.

Sparks also donated $900,000 for a new all-weather tartan track to New Bern High School. He also donates his time to help coach the New Bern High School track team and a local club track team as a volunteer head coach.

In addition to track, he funds scholarships, internships and annual fellowship to the Creative Writing Program (MFA) at the University of Notre Dame. (Adapted from Wikipedia.)

Book Reviews
Sparks (A Bend in the Road, etc.) logs more miles on the winding high road of romance with the story of two middle-aged people who meet by chance in the small North Carolina coastal town of Rodanthe. The impassioned but doomed romance seems to owe much to Robert James Waller's The Bridges of Madison County. Once again, a housewife who has focused on everyone but herself indulges in a brief, intense, secret affair with a stranger who changes her life forever. As the story begins, Adrienne Willis is 60, the divorced mother of three grown children. To help her troubled daughter cope with the untimely recent death of her husband, Adrienne tells her the tale of her love affair, which took place 15 years before. At the time, Adrienne was an uptight matron whose ex-husband had just left her for a younger woman. This rejection colors her entire life, and Sparks realistically portrays a vulnerable and isolated woman who throws herself into raising her children to escape her despair. Paul Flanner, her paramour, is a surgeon and an obsessive workaholic with no genuine connection to his wife or son, whose world completely falls apart when one of his patients inexplicably dies. Sparks builds a taut, plausible relationship between his protagonists, but even fans may be irked by the obviousness of their story and the inevitability of their fate.
Publishers Weekly

Sparks...is back at it with his latest mix of love story and pathos. He doesn't disappoint, whipping up plenty of melodrama in the story of two shattered people, both badly scarred by past experiences, who find each other late in life and realize they are soul mates. —Kathleen Hughes
Booklist

A mother unburdens a story of past romance to her troubled daughter for no good reason. Adrienne Willis is a middle-aged mother with three kids who, not surprisingly, finds herself in an emotional lurch after her husband dumps her for a younger, prettier thing. Needing to recharge her batteries, Adrienne takes a holiday, watching over her friend's small bed-and-breakfast in the North Carolina beach town of Rodanthe. Then Dr. Paul Flanner appears, himself a cold fish in need of a little warming up. This is the scene laid out by Adrienne to her daughter, Amanda, in a framing device of unusual crudity from Sparks (A Bend in the Road, 2001, etc.). Amanda's husband has recently died and she hasn't quite gotten around to figuring out how to keep on living. Imagining that nothing is better for a broken heart than somebody else's sad story, Adrienne tells her daughter about the great lost love of her life. Paul came to Rodanthe in order to speak with the bereaved family of a woman who had just died after he had operated on her. Paul, of course, was not to blame, but still he suffers inside. Add to that a recent divorce and an estranged child and the result is a tortured soul whom Adrienne finds absolutely irresistible. Of course, the beach, an impending storm, the fact that there are no other visitors around, a roaring fireplace, and any number of moments that could have been culled from a J. Crew catalogue and a Folgers's commercial make romance just about inevitable. Sparks couldn't be less subtle in this harshly mechanical story that adheres to formula in a way that would make an assembly-line romance writer blush. Short, to the point, and absolutely unremarkable: sure to be another medium-hotromance-lite hit for Sparks, who at the very least can never be accused of overstaying his welcome.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. In the opening scene, Adrienne decides to tell her daughter about a story from her past about Paul Flanner, a relationship that had obviously ended. Did you realize that he had died, or did you think that the relationship had ended differently? How would the novel have been different had the author decided not to let the reader know the ending in advance? Could the story have been told in another way, as simply a remembrance for instance, and still had the same impact?

2. Amanda lost her husband to cancer, and Adrienne lost Paul to an accident. Adrienne also lost her husband to a younger woman. Yet Adrienne found a way to heal, despite her losses, while Amanda has not. Is this difference a function of age and maturity, or simply the passage of time? If its both, do you believe that Amanda will eventually fall in love again? Is that important to her? What other lessons did she draw from her mother's story?

3. Rodanthe is described in detail. How does the setting play a role in the story? Could this story have occurred in a larger city? Why or why not?

4. The novel deals with the theme love and sacrifice. How did the major characters -- Adrienne, Paul, Amanda and Robert Torrelson -- sacrifice? How did love play a role? What else played a role? Is sacrifice an act, or is sacrifice an on-going process? Explain.

5. In this novel, as in Message in a Bottle, there are scenes that take place in the beach. What is the significance of the beach in this story? How does it play into the theme of the novel? Also in this novel is a storm, just as there was in The Notebook. What is the significance of the storm? How does it play into the theme of the novel?

6. Adrienne never told her children about Paul in the year that followed their relationship in Rodanthe. Think about Adrienne at that point in her life. Why wouldn't she tell the children about him? Is that believable? How do her children remember her from that time? How does Amanda see her mother now, in knowing that she'd kept him a secret?

7. Paul is a wounded character when the novel opens because he feels that all the sacrifices in his life haven't been worth it. His wife has left him, he's estranged from his son, he's sold his medical practice, and has come to Rodanthe to meet Robert Torrelson. Was he a necessary character in this novel? Why or why not? How does Robert Torrelson influence the relationship between Paul and Adrienne? Would you like to read a novel based on the love story between Robert and his wife?

8. Mark plays a central role in letting us get to know Paul Planner. He also writes a letter that lets Adrienne know what had happened. Why did the author choose to use the epistolary method for describing these things? Is the letter more effective than a conversation? Why or why not? What is the relationship between Mark and Paul like in the final moments of Paul's death? How do you think Mark views Paul now? Is this typical of father/son relationships?

9. The inn is described in the opening paragraph of the novel. Why did the author start the novel with a description of an inn? How does the inn play a role in all that happens?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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