HG: Were there any places in the novel—or in any of your novels—where the characters took over what you had planned for them and started doing things that surprised you?
JI: No. Never.
Oh, all right, there have been small surprises, but the characters essentially remain as I have imagined them. I’ll tell you what I mean by a small surprise. I knew Marion would come back and buy Ruth’s house, with Eddie. I didn’t know that Eddie would be so smitten with the idea of owning Ruth’s house that he would go so far as to propose buying the house with Hannah. Naturally Hannah’s reaction to that idea wasn’t hard to imagine, but Eddie did surprise me in this one respect: he wanted that house badly enough to embark on this simply terrible proposition. It was a funny moment, and I decided to see where it took me.
I believe you earn those occasionally spontaneous moments only by carefully planning all that you can; if you’ve done your homework on your characters and their stories, a few good accidents will happen and you can take advantage of them. That’s a far cry from trusting in accidents.
A good story must feel to the reader that it happens naturally. But it’s not so natural being natural. In my case, it’s mostly planning.
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
1. A passionate and complex theme throughout the book is the concept of a writer’s imagination. “Eddie O’Hare, who was doomed to be only autobiographical in his novels, knew better than to presume that Ruth Cole was writing about herself. He understood from the first time he read her that she was better than that” (p. 204). What role does imagination, lack of it, even fear of it, play in the lives and careers of the central characters?
2. Ruth, as a novelist, sees books as inventions based on both borrowed and imagined experiences—not necessarily personal ones. However, her best friend, Hannah, a journalist, presumes that all novels are substantially autobiographical; she sees in Ruth’s books a “Hannah” character, who is the adventurer, as well as a “Ruth” character, who holds herself back. Explore the ideas of fiction and imagination and the autobiographical ingredients of writing.
3. What is the meaning and symbolism of the “feet” photo? Why do you think it became kind of a talisman for Ruth? What emotions does the photo evoke in you as a reader?
4. Discuss the humor and the pathos of Ted Cole’s oeuvre. What about the humor and pathos of Ted himself? Where does Ted’s true imagination lie—if not in his writing? Is Ted’s real talent—his passion, his art—the seduction of the prettiest and unhappiest of young mothers? Doesn’t Ted pursue his seductions as passionately as his daughter will pursue her writing?
5. During that fateful summer, Eddie, the aspiring young writer, found his voice. Marion gave him his voice. “It was losing her that had given him something to say. It was the thought of his life without Marion that provided Eddie O’Hare with the authority to write” (p. 112). Discuss the life and writing career of Eddie O’Hare: his brilliance when being truly autobiographical, and his mediocrity when it came to believability in things that were “imagined.”
6. When Ted tells Eddie the “story” of Thomas and Timothy’s accident, he tells it in the third-person removed. “If Marion had ever told the story, she would have stood so close to it that, in the telling of it, she would have descended into a final madness—a madness much greater than whatever madness had caused Marion to abandon her only living child” (p. 154). Examine the madness. Discuss Ted’s ability—and Marion’s inability—to detach.
7. How is Eddie, who appears as the most benign of characters, often the most powerful? For example, beginning with the restaurant “fingerprinting” scene (p. 240), he gives Ruth the gift of her past, of her mother, of other realities. How does he open the door to her future?
8. Examine: “Ruth thought of a novel as a great, untidy house, a disorderly mansion; her job was to make the place fit to live in, to give it at least the semblance of order. Only when she wrote was she unafraid” (p. 267).
Discuss the idea that the books in Ruth’s life and the characters in them were more fixed in Ruth’s life than the flesh-and-blood people closest to her— namely, her father and her best friend.
9. Why do you think Ruth decides to marry Allan? Why was he so safe? How was he different from her “type” of man—a type that disturbed her so?
10. Discuss the theme of humiliation in her novel-in-progress as well as Ruth’s own unconscious quest for humiliation. Examine the themes of women, humiliation, and control. In Amsterdam, Ruth writes in her diary: “The conventional wisdom is that prostitution is a kind of rape for money; in truth, in prostitution—maybe only in prostitution—the woman seems in charge” (p. 338). What do you think of this?
11. Examine the scene after she witnesses the murder. “At last she’d found the humiliation she was looking for, but of course this was one humiliation that she wouldn’t write about” (p. 375).
12. Examine the powerful car scene before Ted’s suicide. As Ted is driving, Ruth reveals the shocking incident with Scott. Her tale is one of degradation. Does it have the desired effect on her father? What does she want? Was this scene about revenge—about giving back the hurt done to her? Can matters of families, of love and hate (her father is the one she most loves and hates in her life), ever really be understood? Of course this scene mirrors the driving scene where Ted tells Ruth the details of her brothers’ death. Discuss.
13. What changes occur in Ruth after she becomes a widow? How do these changes finally free her to fall in love at last?
14. What kind of emotions do you feel at the ending of the book? How have the characters of Ruth, Marion, and Eddie found, in essence, their way back? How has Marion, through her books, come to terms with her grief? When she reveals to Eddie that “grief is contagious,” is she effectively saying that her absence from her daughter’s life was the only way she could love her or the only way she could not destroy her daughter?
AN EXCERPT FROM JOHN IRVING’S NEXT BOOK, IN ONE PERSON,
COMING FROM SIMON & SCHUSTER IN MAY 2012.
Chapter 1
AN UNSUCCESSFUL CASTING CALL
I’m going to begin by telling you about Miss Frost. While I say to everyone that I became a writer because I read a certain novel by Charles Dickens at the formative age of fifteen, the truth is I was younger than that when I first met Miss Frost and imagined having sex with her, and this moment of my sexual awakening also marked the fitful birth of my imagination. We are formed by what we desire. In less than a minute of excited, secretive longing, I desired to become a writer and to have sex with Miss Frost—not necessarily in that order.
I met Miss Frost in a library. I like libraries, though I have difficulty pronouncing the word—both the plural and the singular. It seems there are certain words I have considerable trouble pronouncing: nouns, for the most part—people, places, and things that have caused me preternatural excitement, irresolvable conflict, or utter panic. Well, that is the opinion of various voice teachers and speech therapists and psychiatrists who’ve treated me—alas, without success. In elementary school, I was held back a grade due to “severe speech impairments”—an overstatement. I’m now in my late sixties, almost seventy; I’ve ceased to be interested in the cause of my mispronunciations. (Not to put too fine a point on it, but fuck the etiology.)
I don’t even try to say the etiology word, but I can manage to struggle through a comprehensible mispronunciation of library or libraries—the botched word emerging as an unknown fruit. (“Liberry,” or “liberries,” I say—the way children do.)
It’s all the more ironic that my first library was undistinguished. This was the public library in the small town of First Sister, Vermont—a compact red-brick building on the same street where my grandparents lived. I lived in their house on River Street—until I was fifteen, when my mom remarried. My mother met my stepfather in a play.
The town’s amateur theatrical society was called the First Sister Players; for as far back as I can remem