Beautiful Bureaucrat (Phillips) - Discussion Questions

Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)

Also, consider these talking points to help start a discussion for The Beautiful Bureaucrat:

1. Talk about the way Helen Phillips portrays Josephine's job and the atmosphere of the institution in which she works. What is the author sugesting about the contemporary workplace? Does her description resonate with your own experiences?

2. Reviewers have compared Phillips writing to surrealistis or existentialsts like Kafka, Camus, Orwell, and more recently Pynchon, Murakami and Atwood. Why might Phillips have chosen to write in this surrealist genre? How does it affect your experience reading the book? Do you find her style illuminating, overly symbolic and obscure, humorous, dead-on accurate?

3. What does the boss mean when he tells Josephine that "you need the Database as much as the Database needs you”?

4. How much in this book brings to mind the revelations by Edward Snowden about U.S. government surveillance...or perhaps the Thought Police in George Orwell's 1984? Are other there parallels, either to literature or real-life events?

5. Phillips seems to be posing some large philosophical issues:

• Are humans merely pawns in an institutional or cosmic game of power?
• Are we predestined for heaven or hell? Or are we endowed with free will?
• Do we have a purpose in life? Or is life meaningless?
• What compensatory power does love offer?

Talk about some of those questions—and how they are reflected in The Beautiful Bureaucrat. What other issues are raised? Does the book offer any concrete answers?

6. In what way might Trishiffany and the Person With Bad Breath (PWBB) stand in for a kind of deity?

7. What is the religious and mythical significance of Joseph's handing a pomegranate to Josephine and then telling her he's found them a "garden apartment"? (Note the book's cover.) In hindsight, how does that act portend what happens next? What other Judeo-Christian symbology do you see in the novel?

8. How would you describe the characters—Josephine and Joseph, Hillary, and Trishiffany. Do they come alive for you—are they convincing? Do you care about them, particularly Josephine? Or do you find them overly determined or drawn with a heavy-hand?

9. Do you find the book's conclusion satisfying? Do you find the book satisfying?

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

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