DISCUSSION QUESTIONS The Guest Book |
1. Evie teaches her
students that…
[H]istory is sometimes made by heroes, but it is also always made
by us. We, the people, who stumble around, who block or help the hero
out of loyalty, stubbornness, faith, or fear. Those who wall up—and
those who break through walls. The people at the edge of the
photographs. The people watching—the crowd. You.
Do you agree with her? How do the characters in this novel shape
history? And whose history do they shape?
2. Central to Paul’s academic work is the idea that "there is the
crime and there is the silence." How does that statement echo throughout
the novel, specifically in his and Evie’s conversations about the
stumble stones in Germany? How is that silence a kind of willed
forgetting? Do you think Ogden was right to not divest from Nazi Germany
and try to work within the regime? Was this a version of silence that
Paul is criticizing? What kinds of silences do we reproduce in our lives
in this country now?
The jobs had been gotten, the beds made, the dishes washed, the
children sprouted. The wheel had stopped and now what? Where, for
instance, was the story of a middle-aged orphan with the gray streak in
her hair, the historian who had rustled thirteenth-century women’s lives
out of fugitive pages who believed more than most that there was no such
thing as the certainty of a plot in the story of a life, in fact who
taught this to students year in and year out, and yet who found herself
lately longing above all else for just that? Longing, against reason,
for some kind of clear direction, for the promise of a pattern. For the
relief, she pulled against the shoulder strap of her satchel, the
unbearable relief of an omniscient narrator.
What does she mean? What is the significance of the author’s choice
to make Evie middle-aged?
4. During her trip to America, Elsa tells Mrs. Lowell:
Forgive me… but it is a mistake to think news happens somewhere
else. To others. The news is always about you. You must simply fit
yourself in it. You must see how—you must be vigilant.
Do you agree? How does her warning resonate for each generation of
Miltons? Do you think the author is consciously echoing Evie with what
she tells her students (question #1) in referencing "you"? And if
so,what does the author suggest about collective responsibility?
5. On the porch later that evening, after Kitty says no to Elsa,
Kitty is maddened by Elsa’s reading of her refusal. "For god’s sake,"
she says, "it’s not so simple." And Elsa replies, "But it is. It’s very
simple. It always is." Is Kitty’s refusal simple? How might Neddy’s
death have shaped her thoughts? Does it let her off the hook in terms of
Elsa’s request?
Behind every successful man is a good woman… Or so the saying goes.
But I suggest a good woman is the reason men put up walls and gardens,
churches. The reason men build at all. At the center of every successful
man is a good woman.
How do you read this in light of Evie’s thesis about the anchoress?
Discuss the gender dynamics at play in the different marriages in this
novel.
8. Watching Moss on the night of the party, Reg thinks:
Moss sang his heart on his sleeve, as if all the gates of the world
would open with him, believing that they could, with all his heart. But
here on the island, the care with which Reg was being handled, the
pronounced attention was merely the opposite face of the face that gave
the hard stare, or the push between the ribs, or the whip. Both faces
turned to the black man as though to a wall that had to be climbed or
knocked down—and always with the infinitesimal moment of wariness that
slid immediately into anger or polite regard.
How does Reg’s point of view here counter and complicate Moss’s
optimistic belief that he can write a song that unites all Americans?
What is Reg seeing? Do you think the Miltons ever come to see what he
sees?
9. Moss describes to Reg the experience of seeing A
Raisin in the Sun: "It was the first time I’d ever seen my
own story on the stage… To see something, to want it that bad. To want
and want and know that it’s impossible—it’s impossible." What do you
think about Moss, a privileged white man, making a claim like that
regarding a seminal play about the experience of African Americans? |
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