by Anita Shreve
I would like to thank Michael Pietsch for his continuing encouragement and brilliant editing; Stephen Lamont for his elegant copyediting; Ginger Barber for her wisdom in literary and financial matters; and John Osborn for his guidance and assistance, as well as for his confident eye and ear.
Fortune’s Rocks
by Anita Shreve
A READING GROUP GUIDE
In a summer community on the coast of New Hampshire at the turn of the last century, a girl is drawn into a passionate affair with a man nearly three times her age. . . .
Fortune’s Rocks is the story of Olympia Biddeford — privileged, well educated, and mature beyond her years — and her affair with John Haskell, a married doctor with four children. Drawn together on the night of the summer solstice, the pair set in motion a series of events with surprising and far-reaching consequences.
If Walls Could Talk . . .
Anita Shreve describes how she came to write Fortune’s Rocks
I live in an old house, built more than two centuries ago. Sometimes I walk around the house and think about the people who have gone before me: The baby who was born in the room just off the kitchen; the woman who cried from the inattention of her husband in the upstairs bedroom; the families who huddled around the massive kitchen hearth; the child who perished from diphtheria croup in the room that is now my son’s bedroom. It is a house riddled with history, a house full of stories.
So it was not surprising that when I saw a house I thought was exceptionally beautiful, I would begin to think about its history and would develop this history in the novel The Pilot’s Wife. The house I describe in that novel is one I have actually seen — on the coast of southern Maine, near the New Hampshire border. It is a graceful and beautiful “cottage,” with lovely floor-to-ceiling windows and a mansard roof. I took the house and its location and created a story within it — that of a woman who loses her husband in a horrific accident and then discovers that he may not have been who she thought he was. In many ways, the house is both shelter to Kathryn Lyons and testing ground for her strength and stamina.
But then, as The Pilot’s Wife was nearing the end, I began to think about the history of the house, about the other women who would have lived within its walls, about the people, young and old, who would have known love and passion and fear and great joy. And so I began to think about a fifteen-year-old young woman who has come to the fictional summer resort of Fortune’s Rocks with her family in the summer of 1899. In my imagination, she is a girl just on the cusp of her womanhood, a girl who is educated beyond her years and privileged beyond the dreams of most. That she was not immune to disaster, despite these advantages, seemed appropriate and intriguing. Thus, Fortune’s Rocks was born.
That book is now finished, but I find that I am still reluctant to abandon that lovely house. Occasionally, I think about going still further back in time to when the house was a convent. What marvelous stories must be lurking there!
A brief interview with Anita Shreve
Q: What was your inspiration in writing Fortune’s Rocks?
My inspiration was the house that also appears in The Pilot’s Wife. A house that age has any number of stories to tell. Olympia’s and Kathryn’s are but two of many. I was also still deeply intrigued by nineteenth-century language. I’d experimented with it a bit in The Weight of Water, and was loath to let it go.
Q: Do you become attached to the characters you write about? Can you imagine revisiting any of them in future books — Kathryn, Olympia, Jean?
I am still deeply attached to Olympia and was sorry to say good-bye to her. I have never seriously thought about writing a sequel, however, and think it is probably a bad idea. The pleasure of writing is the pleasure of invention.
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 this detail had been overlooked. She followed signs and arrows along a wide, hushed corridor built during an era when space was not a luxury.
The white paneled door of her room was heavy and opened with a soft click when she inserted the plastic key card. There was a mirrored entryway that seemed to double as a bar, a sitting room with heavily draped windows, and French doors veiled with sheers that led to a bedroom larger tha
n her living room at home. The weight of unwanted obligation was, for the moment, replaced with wary acceptance of being pampered. But then she looked at the ivory linen pillows on the massive bed and thought of the waste that it was only herself who would sleep there — she who might have been satisfied with a narrow bed in a narrow room, who no longer thought of beds as places where love or sex was offered or received.
She sat for a moment in her wet raincoat, waiting for the bellman to bring her suitcase to her. She closed her eyes and tried to relax, an activity for which she had no talent. She had never been to a yoga class, never meditated, unable to escape the notion that such strategies constituted a surrender, an admission that she could no longer bear to touch the skin of reality, her old lover. As if she would turn her back against a baffled husband, when once she had been so greedy.
She answered the door to a young bellman, overtipping the man to compensate for her pathetically small suitcase. She was aware of scrutiny on his part, impartial scrutiny simply because she was a woman and not entirely old. She crossed to the windows and drew back the drapes, and even the dim light of a rainy day was a shock to the gloom of the room. There were blurred buildings, the gleam of wet streets, glimpses of gray lake between skyscrapers. Two nights in one hotel room: Perhaps by Sunday morning she would know the number, would not have to ask at the front desk, as she so often had to do. Her confusion, she was convinced (as the desk clerks clearly were not), was a product simply of physics: She had too much to think about and too little time in which to think it. She had long ago accepted her need for extravagant amounts of time for contemplation (more, she had observed, than others seemed to need or want). And for years she had let herself believe that this was a product of her profession, her art, when it was much the other way around: The spirit sought and found the work, and discontent began when it could not.
And, of course, it was a con, this art. Which was why she couldn’t help but approach a podium, any podium, with a mantle of slight chagrin that she could never quite manage to hide, her shoulders hunched inside her jacket or her blouse, her eyes not meeting those in the audience, as if the men and women in front of her might challenge her, accuse her of fraud. In the end only she appeared to understand what she was guilty of. There was nothing easier nor more agonizing than writing the long, narrative verses that her publisher put in print — easy in that they were simply daydreams written in ink; agonizing the moment she returned to consciousness (the telephone rang, the heat kicked on in the basement), and she looked at the words on the blue-lined page and saw, for the first time, the dishonest images, the manipulation, the conniving wordplay, all of which, when it had been a good day, worked well for her. She wrote poetry, she had been told, that was accessible, a fabulous and slippery word that could be used in the service of both scathing criticism and excessive praise, neither of which she thought she deserved. Her greatest wish was to write anonymously, though she no longer mentioned this to her publishers, for they seemed slightly wounded at these mentions, at the apparent ingratitude for the long — and tedious? — investment they had made in her that was finally, after all these years, beginning to pay off. Some of her collections were selling now (and one of them was selling very well indeed) for reasons no one had predicted and no one seemed to understand, the unexpected sales attributable to that vague and unsettling phenomenon called “word of mouth.”
She covered the chintz bedspread with her belongings: the olive suitcase (slim and soft for the new stingy overheads); the detachable computer briefcase (the detaching a necessity for the security checks); and her microfiber purse with its eight compartments for her cell phone, notebook, pen, driver’s license, credit cards, hand cream, lipstick, and sunglasses. She used the bathroom with her coat still on and then searched for her contact lens case so that she could remove the miraculous plastic irritants from her eyes, the lenses soiled with airplane air and smoke from an airport bar, a four-hour layover in Dallas ending in capitulation to a plate of nachos and a Diet Coke. And seeping around the edges, she began to feel the relief that hotel rooms always provided: a place where no one could get to her.
She sat again on the enormous bed, two pillows propped behind her. Across from her was a gilded mirror that took in the entire bed, and she could not look into such a mirror without thinking of various speakable and unspeakable acts that had almost certainly been performed in front of it. (She thought of men as being particularly susceptible to mirrors in hotel rooms.) Her speculation led inevitably to consideration of substances that had spilled or fallen onto that very bedspread (how many times? thousands of times?), and the room was immediately filled with stories: A married man who loved his wife but could make love to her but once a month because he was addicted to fantasizing about her in front of hotel mirrors on his frequent business trips, her body the sole object of his sexual imaginings; a man cajoling a colleague into performing one of the speakable acts upon him, enjoying the image of her subservient head bobbing in the mirror over the dresser and then, when he had collapsed into a sitting position, confessing, in a moment that would ultimately cost him his job, that he had herpes (why were her thoughts about men today so hostile?); a woman who was not beautiful, but was dancing naked in front of the mirror, as she would never do at home, might never do again (there, that was better). She took her glasses off so that she could not see across the room. She leaned against the headboard and closed her eyes.
She had nothing to say. She had said it all. She had written all the poems she would ever write. Though something large and subterranean had fueled her images, she was a minor poet only. She was, possibly, an overachiever. She would coast tonight, segue early into the Q&A, let the audience dictate the tenor of the event. Mercifully, it would be short. She appreciated literary festivals for precisely that reason: She would be but one of many novelists and poets (more novelists than poets), most of whom were better known than she. She knew she ought to examine the program before she went to the cocktail party on the theory that it sometimes helped to find an acquaintance early on so that one was not left stranded, looking both unpopular and easy prey; but if she glanced at the program, it would pull her too early into the evening, and she resisted this invasion. How protective she had recently grown of herself, as if there were something tender and valuable in need of defense.
From the street, twelve floors below, there was a clanging of a large machine. In the corridor there were voices, those of a man and a woman, clearly upset.
It was pure self-indulgence, the writing. She could still remember (an antidote to the chagrin?) the exquisite pleasure, the texture, so early on, of her first penciled letters on their stout lines, the practiced slant of the blue-inked cursive on her first copybook (the lavish F of Frugality, the elegant E of Envy). She collected them now, old copybooks, small repositories of beautiful handwriting. It was art, found art, of that she was convinced. She had framed some of the individual pages, had lined the walls of her study at home with the prints. She supposed the copybooks (mere schoolwork of anonymous women, long dead) were virtually worthless — she had hardly ever paid more than five or ten dollars for one in a secondhand book store — but they pleased her nevertheless. She was convinced that for her the writing was all about the act of writing itself, even though her own penmanship had deteriorated to an appalling level, nearly code.
She stood up from the bed and put her glasses on. She peered into the mirror. Tonight she would wear long earrings of pink Lucite. She would put her lenses back in and use a lipstick that didn’t clash with the Lucite, and that would be that. Seen from a certain angle, she might simply disappear.
• • •
The party was in a room reserved for such occasions. Presumably, the view outside attracted, though the city now was gray and darkening yet. Lights twinkled at random, and it was impossible not to think: In this room or that, women will be undressing and men, with ties undone, will be pouring drinks. Though one did not know, and there were other, more grotesque, s
cenarios to contemplate.
The window shuddered with a gust similar to the one that had taken her hair. For a moment, the lights dimmed, causing a stoppage in the conversation of equal duration, a pause in which one could not help but think of panic in a blackened hotel, of hands groping. Some dreadful music, cousin to the malevolently bland tunes in the hotel elevator, seeped between the talk. She saw no recognizable face, which was disconcerting. There were perhaps twenty-five people in the suite when she arrived, most already drinking, and most, it would appear, already bonded into clusters. Along one wall, a table had been laid with hors d’oeuvres of a conventional sort. She set her purse under a chair by the door and walked to the bar. She asked for a glass of wine, guessing that the chardonnay would not live up to the rose coronation carpet and the bouquets as big as boys, and in this she was not wrong.
A woman said her name, and Linda turned to an outstretched hand belonging to a slight woman in a woolen suit, its cloth the color of irises. It was pleasant to see a woman not dressed in black, as everyone seemed to be these days, but then this might be taken as insult for being provincial. Linda shook the proferred hand, her own wet and cold from her wineglass.
—I’m Susan Sefton, one of the organizers of the festival. I am such a fan. I wanted to thank you for coming.
—Oh. Thank you, Linda said. — I’m looking forward to it, she lied.
The woman had feral teeth but lovely green eyes. Did she do this for a living?
—In about half an hour, we’ll all be heading down to the front of the hotel, where we’ll be taken by bus to a restaurant called Le Matin. It’s a bistro. Do you like French?
