Fortune's rocks_ a novel - Anita Shreve [189]
Q: What writers influence you?
I am influenced by many writers: Alice McDermott, Roddy Doyle, Ian McEwan, John Banville, Edith Wharton, Brian Moore, Shirley Hazzard . . . the list goes on and on.
Q: What books would you suggest to readers who particularly appreciated the time period of Fortune’s Rocks?
I don’t believe it’s the time period of a certain book that so deeply affects us, but rather the feel of it, its urgency. Given that criterion, I could suggest a thousand readings and yet none. It’s inevitably a disappointment to look for the qualities we so enjoyed in one book in another. That said, Edith Wharton.
Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion
Is Olympia’s innocence in the opening scene believable?
Do you think the absence of strong female role models affects Olympia’s emotional development?
Olympia evolves into a passionate woman in a rigid society. Does her isolated upbringing as an only child who is home-schooled contribute to this? How?
How does Shreve foreshadow future events? Do such scenes help to explain Olympia’s decisions later in the book?
Was Zachariah Coates’s action justifiable? Was it purely malicious? Did he have ulterior motives?
“It seems, as it always does, a most elemental gesture, to take a child from a man.” Discuss the various instances in which Olympia takes a child from John’s hands.
If John were not married and a father of four children, would you feel differently about his relationship with Olympia? At the beginning, do you think he loves Olympia or just feels tremendous desire for her?
If you were in Olympia’s shoes, could you have made the decision she made regarding her son? Was it the right decision for the child? For her?
Discuss the theme of possession. Olympia understands that she never possessed either John or her son. Is it possible for one person to possess another?
What issues regarding class are raised at the trial? Could such issues be raised in a court of law today?
Following is a preview of
Anita Shreve’s new novel,
The Last Time They Met,
which Little, Brown and Company
will publish in April 2001.
She had come from the plane and was even now forgetting the ride from the airport. As she stepped from the car, the rain darkened her stocking and a gust of wind blew her hair upward from her neck. She strained to emerge with dignity to an audience of a doorman in uniform and another man in a dark coat moving through a revolving door, but the gravity of inanimate objects made her graceless. The man in the dark coat hesitated, taking a moment to open an umbrella that immediately, in one fluid motion, blew itself inside out. He looked abashed and then purposefully amused — for now she was his audience — as he tossed the useless appendage into a bin and moved on.
She wished the doorman wouldn’t take her suitcase, and if it hadn’t been for the ornate gold leaf of the canopy and the perfectly polished brass of the entryway, she might have told him it wasn’t necessary. She hadn’t expected the tall columns that rose to a ceiling she couldn’t see clearly without squinting, or the rose carpet through those columns that was long enough for a coronation. The doorman wordlessly gave the suitcase, inadequate in this grandeur, to a bellman, as if handing off a secret. She moved past empty groupings of costly furniture to the Reception desk.
Linda, who had once minded the commonness of her name, gave her credit card when asked, wrote her signature on a piece of paper, and accepted a pair of keys, one plastic, the other reassuringly real, the metal key for the minibar, for a drink if it came to that. She followed directions to a bank of elevators, noting on a mahogany table a bouquet of hydrangeas and daylilies as tall as a ten-year-old boy. Despite the elegance of the hotel, the music in the elevator was cloying and banal, and she wondered how it was