Stern Men (Gilbert)

Stern Men
Elizabeth Gilbert, 2000
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000; Penguin Groups USA 2009
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780143114697

Summary
In this big, wise, funny first novel from a PEN/Hemingway Award finalist, a resilient young woman brings an end to an age-old fishing feud...

On two remote islands off the coast of Maine, the local lobstermen have fought savagely for generations over the fishing rights to the ocean waters between them. Young Ruth Thomas is born into this feud, a daughter of Fort Niles destined to be at war with the men of Courne Haven.

Eighteen years old, smart as a whip, irredeemably unromantic, Ruth returns home from boarding school determined to throw her education overboard and join the "stern men" who work the lobster boats. She is certain of one thing: she will not surrender control of her life to the wealthy Ellis family, which has always had a sinister hold over the island. On her side are Fort Niles's eccentric residents: the lovable Mrs. Pommeroy and her various deadbeat sons; sweet old Senator Simon, on a mission to dig up shipwreck treasure; and Simon's twin brother, Angus Addams, the most ruthless lobsterman alive.

The feud between the islands escalates daily—until Ruth gets a glimpse of Owney Wishnell, a silent young Courne Haven Adonis with a prenatural gift for catching lobsters. Their passion is fast, furious, and forbidden. Their only hope is an unlikely truce.

For readers who love the work of John Irving, Stern Men is a comedy that is as smart and finely crafted as it is entertaining. Stern Men captures a particular American spirit with on-the-mark dialogue and a fine funny touch that pierces our notions of commerce and class. This is a large-canvas novel with a heroine destined for greatness in spite of herself. (From the publisher.)

---

Author Bio
• Birth—July 18, 1969
• Raised—Litchfield, Connecticut, USA
• Education—B.A., New York University
• Awards—Pushcart Prize
• Currently—Frenchtown, New Jersey


Elizabeth M. Gilbert is an American author, essayist, short story writer, biographer, novelist and memoirist. She is best known for her 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love, which spent 200 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list, and was also made into a film by the same name in 2010.

Gilbert was born in Waterbury, Connecticut. Her father was a chemical engineer, her mother a nurse. Along with her only sister, novelist Catherine Gilbert Murdock, Gilbert grew up on a small family Christmas tree farm in Litchfield, Connecticut. The family lived in the country with no neighbors, and they didn’t own a TV or even a record player. Consequently, they all read a great deal, and Gilbert and her sister entertained themselves by writing little books and plays.

Gilbert earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science from New York University in 1991, after which she worked as a cook, a waitress, and a magazine employee. She wrote of her experience as a cook on a dude ranch in short stories, and also briefly in her book The Last American Man (2002).

Journalism
Esquire published Gilbert's short story "Pilgrims" in 1993, under the headline, "The Debut of an American Writer." She was the first unpublished short story writer to debut in Esquire since Norman Mailer. This led to steady—and well paying—work as a journalist for a variety of national magazines, including SPIN, GQ, New York Times Magazine, Allure, Real Simple, and Travel + Leisure.

Her 1997 GQ article, "The Muse of the Coyote Ugly Saloon", a memoir of Gilbert's time as a bartender at the very first Coyote Ugly table dancing bar located in the East Village section of New York City, was the basis for the feature film Coyote Ugly (2000). She adapted her 1998 GQ article, "The Last American Man: Eustace Conway is Not Like Any Man You've Ever Met," into a biography of the modern naturalist, The Last American Man, which received a nomination for the National Book Award in non-fiction. "The Ghost," a profile of Hank Williams III published by GQ in 2000, was included in Best American Magazine Writing 2001.

Early books
Gilbert's first book Pilgrims (1997), a collection of short stories, received the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. This was followed by her novel Stern Men (2000), selected as a New York Times "Notable Book." In 2002 she published The Last American Man (2002), a biography of Eustace Conway, a modern woodsman and naturalist, which was nominated for National Book Award.

Eat, Pray, Love
In 2006, Gilbert published Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (Viking), a chronicle of her year of "spiritual and personal exploration" spent traveling abroad. She financed her world travel for the book with a $200,000 publisher's advance.

The memoir was on the New York Times Best Seller List of non-fiction in the spring of 2006, and in October 2008, after 88 weeks, the book was still on the list at number 2. Gilbert appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007, and has reappeared on the show to further discuss the book and her philosophy, and to discuss the film. She was named by Time as among the 100 most influential people in the world. The film version was released in 2010 with Julia Roberts starring as Gilbert.

After EPL
Gilbert's fifth book, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage, was released in 2010. The book is somewhat of a sequel to Eat, Pray, Love in that it takes up Gilbert's life story where her bestseller left off. Committed also reveals Gilbert's decision to marry Felipe, the Brazilian man she met in Indonesia as recounted in the final section of EPL. The book is an examination of the institution of marriage from several historical and modern perspectives—including those of people, particularly women, reluctant to marry. In the book, Gilbert also includes perspectives on same-sex marriage and compares this to interracial marriage prior to the 1970s. Gilbert and Felipe are still married and operate a story called Two Buttons.

In 2012, she republished At Home on the Range, a 1947 cookbook written by her great-grandmother, the food columnist Margaret Yardley Potter.

Gilbert returned to fiction in 2013 with The Signature of All Things, a sprawling 19th-century style novel following the life of a young female botonist. The book brings together that century's fascination with botany, botanical drawing, spiritual inquiry, exploration, and evolution. Kirkus Reviews called it "a brilliant exercise of intellect and imagination," and Booklist a "must read."

Literary influences
In an interview, Gilbert mentioned The Wizard of Oz with nostalgia, adding, "I am a writer today because I learned to love reading as a child—and mostly on account of the Oz books..." She is especially vocal about the importance of Charles Dickens to her, mentioning his stylistic influence on her writing in many interviews. She lists Marcus Aurelius' Meditations as her favorite book on philosophy. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 9/16/2013.)

---

Book Reviews
Her metaphoric writing flashes with welcome brillance...[Stern Men] makes its mark through vividness and toughness.
New York Times

A wonderful first novel about life, love and lobster fishing...Stern Men is high entertainment.
USA Today

Set on two fictitious islands in northern Maine during the 1970s, this first novel by the author of a sparkling story collection, Pilgrims, begins slowly but warms up with smart, sassy humor. Isolated from the mainland by 20 miles of sea, but separated from each other only by a small channel, the islands of Fort Niles and Courne Haven should be natural allies, sharing the local lobster industry. Instead, the two communities are old enemies, torn apart by centuries of hostile, occasionally violent competition among their territorial lobstermen. Ruth Thomas, daughter of one of Fort Niles's most cutthroat lobstermen, has returned home after four years at a private girls' school, determined both to resist her rich grandfather's plans to send her to college and to find her place among the island's rough-spoken personalities. Both propositions prove more difficult than the headstrong romantic expects. As Gilbert charts Ruth's attempts to decide her future, she introduces a strong dose of lobster lore and a large cast of sly villains and oddball characters. Her prose is as light-hearted and amusing as ever, though some narrative twists lack the emotional resonance of her previous work and several characters seem hemmed in as caricatures. Ruth's meeting with her estranged mother is smoothed over in an anticlimactic fashion, blunting the power of the scene, and her offbeat coming-of-age story gets going only a third of the way through the book. Nonetheless, Gilbert's comic timing grows sharper in the second half, and her gift for lively, authentic dialogue and atmospheric settings continually lights up this entertaining, and surprisingly thought-provoking, romp.
Publishers Weekly

This is the first novel by Gilbert, whose collection of short stories, Pilgrims, was published to critical acclaim. The novel takes place on the remote Maine island of Fort Niles and its neighboring twin, Courne Haven. For years, the residents of these islands have been lobster fishermen constantly at war with one another for control of the waters. Ruth Thomas is born into this community, but she is not quite of it. Her father's family has fished here for generations. Her mother was raised as a servant, the illegitimate child of an adopted daughter of the influential Ellis family, who summer on the island where they once ran a quarry. Ruth's task is to find her own way in the world, despite the Ellis family's attempts to control her and the opinion of many that a smart girl like her would be better off moving to the mainland. This is a beautiful novel, funny and moving at the same time and populated by some quite memorable characters. Highly recommended for public and academic fiction collections. —Debbie Bogenschutz, Cincinnati State Technical & Community Coll. Lib.
Library Journal

A sly picaresque about a young woman who single-handedly ends a generations-long feud between two remote islands off the coast of Maine. Ruth Thomass parentsher lobsterman father and New England sort-of aristocrat motherseparated when she was a child. Largely ignored but adored by her gruff father, Ruth is sent off to boarding school, but she still spends her summers and vacations happily adrift among the oddball characters of Fort Niles Island. She virtually lives with her neighborsa widow with five inbred sonsand cusses as heatedly and colorfully as the most ruthless lobstermen (whom she alone seems able to befriend). But Ruth is not just your run-of-the-mill tomboy: she also has strong ties to her mother, who lives as a glorified maid/half-sister in the wealthy and powerful Ellis family, and Ruth thus has the typical (if slightly more hard-boiled) romantic yearnings of every teenage girl. Part offbeat social history of lobstermen and their environment and partyeslove story, Gilbert's debut (after a particularly arresting set of stories called Pilgrims, 1997) is a surprisingly satisfying combination of ideas: that a young woman can be tough and still be a girl, that even in a masculine culture, a smart and crafty woman can take charge and end decades of feuding, that sleeping with the enemy can be a good idea. Theres romance here, but little sentimentality and, mercifully (considering that this is a first novel by a young urban woman), no trendy psychologizing. In fact, while the story is more or less contemporary, it has the time-out-of-time quality typical of the best fiction and it has a heroine who owes more to Voltaire than to Helen Fielding. Sophisticated yet ribald, comic yet serious: an exceptional debut from a writer to watch.
Kirkus Reviews

---

Discussion Questions
1. “As humans, after all, we become that which we seek. Dairy farming makes men steady and reliable and temperate; deer hunting makes men quiet and fast and sensitive; lobster fishing makes men suspicious and wily and ruthless” (p. 5). Can you think of other occupations to which this statement could apply?

2. The men of Fort Niles and Courne Haven have historically hated one another. How do you think the women felt?

3. Do you think Ruth would have grown up to be more or less the same person without Mrs. Pommeroy’s influence? What are the benefits for a woman to have a same-sex role model and/or confidante?

4. Ruth stubbornly declares a love of lobster fishing and island life when, in fact, she finds them both rather boring. Can you think of a situation in your own life when you loved the idea of something more than the truth of it?

5. In assembling the collection for his projected museum, Senator Simon tells Ruth, “It’s the common objects...that become rare” (p. 77). What are some everyday objects that you think should become tomorrow’s artifacts and why?

6. How are the mudflats where Senator Simon and Webster search for the elephant’s tusk a metaphor for Ruth’s predicament? What does the tusk represent to Webster? Ruth?

7. Do you think Jane Smith-Ellis’s death was a suicide? Are there clues in the text that lead the reader to that conclusion? What are they?

8. Where do you think Ruth’s mother ought to live? To whom does she owe her greatest allegiance? What about Ruth?

9. Lanford Ellis sent Ruth away to school in order for her to eventually save the islands. Why did he think it was necessary for her to be educated so far away from Fort Niles?

10. How would the outcome of the novel change if Ruth had been born a boy?

11. What literary heroines does Ruth remind you of? Why is a headstrong young girl such an appealing protagonist in a novel?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page