JMG: The struggle between parent and child is paramount in this book—from Maggie and Connie, to Tommy and John, to Connie and Angelo. Which parent-child pairing comes the closest to understanding each other? Is there any element that you view as an “irreconcilable difference” in any of the relationships?
AQ: The most irreconcilable of those relationships is the one between Tommy Scanlan and his dad, mainly because it’s not really a loving relationship on the part of the elder man. It’s one of dominance. That’s always doomed to failure. I think Connie and her father have a genuinely loving bond, although he comes from a culture that likes to keep its children close, and so he is distressed about the obvious ways in which she has pulled away. It’s too soon to know how the relationship between Maggie and Connie will develop, but I will say that of all the characters in the book Connie has the greatest capacity for unconditional love. And that carries you a long way in the long run.
JMG: In which ways is Connie a renegade, and in which ways does she want to fit in? How does her relationship with Joey break boundaries? How does it put her in closer touch with herself?
AQ: I don’t think she means to be a renegade. She’s not born to it the way Celeste is. She’s just wound up in this role because of the ethnic tensions in her marriage. Reading this book in the early ’90s, people thought I had exaggerated that. Someone said to me, “You made it sound almost interracial.” At the time in which these people were growing up, that’s exactly what it was like. (Maybe now that everyone has seen My Big Fat Greek Wedding they’ll understand the intractability of certain groups about having their kids marry outside the clan!) It gets tiring always being the outsider. The relationship with Joey is all about spending time with someone who speaks your language and doesn’t see you as the other.
JMG: It’s interesting that John Scanlan loathes the Kennedys, as he seems such a Joe Kennedy type in many ways. Did you have any inspiration for this larger-than-life personality? Why do you think he and Maggie have such an affinity toward each other?
AQ: A lot of Irish-Catholic patriarchs of a certain age loathed the Kennedys. It was jealousy, pure and simple. They couldn’t break through with the WASPs of their own communities. Somehow, to a limited extent, Kennedy had managed to do so. And these men had as many sons, but none of them fledgling senators or presidents. Some of them felt the same way about the Kellys of Philadelphia. “Who do you think you are?” might as well be tattooed into the forehead of certain old Irish Catholics, they ask it so much. “Too big for your britches,” too. I think at some level Maggie likes the old man because he is strong and sure of himself. And that’s what she wants to be. And he likes her because she’s smart.
JMG: You set up a marked contrast between Monica and Maggie. Why do you think Monica harbors such vitriol toward her younger cousin? Why does John Scanlan see through her, while few others do? Are they cut from the same cloth, so to speak?
AQ: In some ways Monica and Maggie are protoypes of two very different types of women who will do battle over and over in the decades after the action of this novel ends. One is the woman who will play by all the rules in order to win, who will dress correctly, pretend to be tractable, make herself alluring to men and do whatever it takes to succeed, although the standard of her time is that success comes only through a man. She is basically a hard case, and she is about to get harder because all the rules of what makes a successful woman are about to change on her. Maggie is the kind of girl who will be the beneficiary of those changes in the years to come. She is intelligent and thoughtful. She is interested in prospering on her own terms, and the old ways of female manipulation either don’t interest or don’t occur to her. The Monicas and the Maggies will always have a hard time getting along. John Scanlan is amused by the combat. He sees Monica for what she is because he, too, is a hard case.
JMG: How is Maggie’s desire for order tested by the events of the summer? How is she similar to Tommy, who is a self-admitted “slave to routine”? Will his status as a creature of habit change?
AQ: The change of that summer is the catalyst Maggie needs to become herself. It tears her apart, but at the end she can put herself back together. In that way I think she is prototypically female in some sense, and her father prototypically male in that he is quite passive and likely to remain so. The one upheaval he has allowed himself in his life was to marry Connie. But I don’t think he’ll see the like of that moment again.
JMG: Maggie is drawn toward unconventional female figures, like Helen Malone and her aunt Margaret. What about these women appeals to Maggie? Was there a particular female character whom you most enjoyed writing?
AQ: Helen Malone is actually based on an older girl that I saw and knew in my own neighborhood growing up, the kind who had the self-assurance of physical attractiveness and the allure of sexual experience. Those girls suffered. They were golden one day and cast out the next, almost always because of pregnancy. It’s one of the ways in which the world has changed for the better since I was young; you don’t have to pay, all the rest of your life, for a mistake you made when your hormones were in overdrive. I was mesmerized by those girls growing up, because they had so much, and because it was so fleeting. It made me very suspicious of those things that came to you because of your physical allure, and I was very determined to develop my intellect and my will.
JMG: There’s a constant theme of artifice in Object Lessons. Who do you think is the most masked person in the story? Who’s the most true to his or herself? How do you seek to strip away artifice as a writer?
AQ: That’s something I’ve never thought about. I suppose it’s the neighborhood, actually, that’s most artificial, because everyone collectively pretends that life is one way when deep underneath there are all sorts of fissures. It’s like that moment near the end when Maggie can see this couple who has moved into one of the new houses. It seems a tableau of success and contentment, but she intuits that there are endless fault lines. And that’s correct.
JMG: Object Lessons touches on social issues—divorce, infidelity, and teenage pregnancy, among others. Did you consciously set out to write a novel that included social commentary? Or did these issues emerge while you were writing?
AQ: My feeling is that things become social policy issues because they are happening in life, not the other way around. So if you set out to write a realistic novel about America, social issues will inevitably arise in the text. It would be almost impossible to write a novel about, say, marriage, without writing about infidelity. Even Tolstoy had to do it in Anna Karenina, and that was more than a century ago. These are the ways of the world. We just call them social issues when we’re trying to quantify and analyze them somehow. I only do that when I’m wearing my columnist’s hat.
JMG: I was struck by a statement of Connie’s at the end of the book: “Everything in your life is who you marry.” Would Tommy agree with this? Has Connie truly forgiven Tommy and accepted the realities of her marriage?
AQ: Oh, sure. I don’t think you can even argue with that. Who you marry determines what sort of children and family you’ll have, and that shapes your entire life. I don’t think Connie understood that going in. She thought it was all about her and Tommy, when of course a marriage is a much larger circle than that of two people holding hands. I think she’s made her peace, but she’s going to keep kicking at the larger indignities. Frankly, she’ll be a much happier woman the day after John Scanlan’s funeral.
JMG: You open and conclude the book with the concept of “here and hereafter.” How do John Scanlan and Maggie share a similar worldview with respect to those two concepts? Does this jibe with your perception of the world?
AQ: Well, the obvious reference is a religious one. In many ways this is a profoundly Catholic book, and I am a profoundly Catholic writer. But it also refers to the future. John knows that things are changing, in his business and in the lives of his children. He has only to consider his half-Italian granddaughter to know that. And I think he suspects
that the hereafter for her will be in a much different society. So does she. That’s the moment at which both of them are poised. One regrets, one embraces. But both understand.
JMG: In a commencement address at Mount Holyoke, you said, “Listen to that small voice from inside you that chooses to go the other way.” Who in this novel truly takes this advice to heart? How does it represent a struggle for them? How do you try to heed your own advice?
AQ: I never made the connection before, but of course that line in the Holyoke speech describes precisely the moment at the end of Object Lessons when Maggie first hears her own voice in her head. So I would say it would be her, first and foremost. As for me, I have the opposite problem. Because of my life as a novelist and as a columnist, I’m always hearing voices in my head. It’s getting them to shut up and give me a little peace that’s the problem! Usually I have to write it all down first—then I get to watch some TV!
JMG: Object Lessons was your first published novel. Do you have a particular fondness for it because of that designation? As you look back at it after more than a decade has passed, is there anything that you’d approach differently? Has your writing process changed over that span of time?
AQ: I’m more sure-handed as a novelist now. You hope that’s true, after publishing four novels and beginning work on the fifth. You just know your way around a fictional misc-en-scène better than you did the first time out. I had to do three full drafts of this book. On my last novel, Blessings, I did a draft and a fairly light reworking and then it was fine. So I suppose it’s like anything else; the more you do it, the better you become. I can’t tell you whether I’d do anything differently because I’ve never reread Object Lessons. The last time I read it was the day I handed the final draft in. Reading my own work makes me sweat; all I can see are the mistakes and the clunks, never the felicitous phrase or the apt characterization. So I just keep pushing on.
JMG: What are you working on now, either fiction or nonfiction in nature?
AQ: I’m writing a novel about two sisters in New York City at the turn of the century. One’s famous, the other’s not. More than that will have to become clear when the thing’s actually done.
READING GROUP QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Object Lessons unfolds mostly through the eyes of twelve-year-old Maggie. In which ways is Maggie older and more perceptive than her age would suggest? How is she naive? How do you envision Maggie’s evolution as she grows older and away from her family?
2. Does the book have the elements of a traditional coming-of-age novel? If so, what are they? Do you agree with Connie’s assessment at the end of the book that her daughter has become a woman? In what ways is Maggie still a little girl?
3. What does the development being built near Tommy and Connie’s house represent to the various Scanlans? To the neighborhood kids, including Maggie, Debbie, Bruce, and Richard? To the town of Kenwood as a whole? How does it represent a larger theme or symbol in the novel?
4. How do Maggie and Connie have a typical mother-daughter rapport? An atypical one? How is Connie’s attitude toward Maggie influenced by the attitudes of her parents toward her?
5. What factors motivated Tommy and Connie to marry? What initially draws one to the other? How are they well-matched? What causes their marriage to flounder?
6. Why is it significant that Joey Martinelli appears on Connie’s doorstep when he does? How has she become a different person from the girl he once knew? What attributes would she like to bring to the surface once again?
7. When he learns of Connie’s driving lessons, Tommy thinks that he “could take her anywhere she needed to go.” Why does he view her learning to drive as a betrayal? Are Connie’s driving lessons symbolic? If so, how?
8. What role does the Roman Catholic Church play in Object Lessons? How does the Church and its rituals represent a spiritual force for the characters? In which ways is it a business entity?
9. At the beginning of Object Lessons, John Scanlan rules over the family as an indomitable patriarch. What about his personality is so arresting, both to those within the family and outside of it? How does he inspire emotion—whether it’s fear, respect, or loathing? Why do he and Maggie get along so well? How do you see the family evolving as they adjust to his death?
10. Whom does Maggie look up to as a role model, both within her family and outside of it? What attributes do these people have in common? Why does she so dislike her cousin Monica?
11. The friendship between Maggie and Debbie Malone evaporates during the course of the book. Why do you think that Debbie turns on Maggie? How is their friendship different from the relationship Connie has with Celeste?
12. What does the Malone family represent to Maggie? Why does Debbie’s sister, Helen, take a liking to Maggie?
13. After his stroke, John Scanlan says, “It’s not the dying I mind, it’s the changing.” How is this statement typical of his character? Which members of his family would agree with him; who in this novel would disagree?
14. How do Maggie’s two grandfathers compare and contrast with each other? Which attributes from each does Maggie seem to have? To which one does she seem most similar? Why?
15. Debbie decries always being known as “Helen Malone’s sister;” Maggie counters that she’s always “John Scanlan’s granddaughter.” How do the two girls grapple with the idea of identity, especially as it relates to their relationship to other family members? How does each girl try to form her own individuality? How do names and nicknames play a part in identity in Object Lessons?
16. “Until this horrible sweaty summer, lines had been drawn,” Maggie recalls sadly. What connections and boundaries are erased from Maggie’s life during the course of the book? Which fissures are the most apparent? How does Maggie handle the disintegration of these connections?
17. In your opinion, why do the kids begin setting fires in the development? Why does Maggie initially participate? At the last fire, are Maggie’s actions heroic or cowardly, or a combination of the two? Why? Do you think that her behavior hastens the end of her friendship with Debbie?
18. In which ways does John’s death free Mary Frances? Why is she consumed by the memory of her dead daughter, and why does she want to be buried with her? Why does Mary Frances prefer Connie and Tommy living with her to her other children?
19. At the beginning of Object Lessons, Maggie “listens too much;” by the end of the novel, she’s found her voice. Why did it take so long for her true self to emerge? How do you think she’ll merge her newfound consciousness with the competing voices of her past influences?
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANNA QUINDLEN is the author of three bestselling novels, Object Lessons, One True Thing, and Black and Blue. Her New York Times column “Public & Private” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, and a selection of those columns was published as Thinking Out Loud. She is also the author of a collection of her “Life in the 30’s” columns, Living Out Loud; a book for the Library of Contemporary Thought, How Reading Changed My Life; the bestselling A Short Guide to a Happy Life; and two children’s books, The Tree That Came to Stay and Happily Ever After. She is currently a columnist for Newsweek and lives with her husband and children in New York City.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1991 by Anna Quindlen
Reader’s Guide copyright © 2003 by Anna Quindlen and The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Gr
ateful acknowledgment is made to Cherio Corporation for permission to reprint excerpts from “Daddy’s Little Girl,” words and music by Bobby Burke and Horace Gerlach. Copyright 1949 by Cherio Corp. Copyright renewed 1977 by Cherio Corp. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 97-90393
eISBN: 978-0-307-76353-2
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