A Partial History of Lost Causes

by Jennifer Dubois

  JD: I can’t say I particularly identify with any of them, since pretty much everyone, even the more dubious characters, is much more courageous than I am. Viktor and Ivan are particularly brave, of course, and Misha, who’s kind of nuts, is probably the bravest of them all. I did have quite a lot of fun writing Valentin Gogunov, the former soldier Irina meets with at the club. When you’ve spent years in a character’s head, it’s very satisfying to write a scene where someone mocks her a bit. I also have a certain fondness for Petr Pavlovich, in spite of his career choices. He’s just trying to do his job, and he has to manage Aleksandr at his most petulant (a task no one would envy). And Aleksandr’s self-absorption, just as much as his ideals, prevents him from ever seeing Petr Pavlovich as a real person.

  RHRC: What is your writing routine?

  JD: A lot of evasive maneuvering followed by ADHD multitasking interspersed with a few brief stretches of actually sitting still and writing. I would recommend this approach to no one.

  RHRC: What authors have influenced you the most, and whom do you tend to read in your spare time?

  JD: My favorite author is Vladimir Nabokov. I tend to write pretty straight realism myself, which I think is probably a terrible character flaw, but a lot of my favorite authors—George Saunders, Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, Aleksandar Hemon, Gary Shteyngart—set their books in universes that are somewhat askew. I also really love Grace Paley, Michael Chabon, Kazuo Ishiguro, Heinrich Böll, and Zadie Smith.

  Amazon.com Review

  Author One-on-One: Jennifer duBois and Justin Torres

  Justin Torres is the author of the novel, We the Animals. His fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Granta, Tin House, and other publications.

  Justin Torres: I knew very little about chess going in, but found it to be one of the most fascinating elements of the novel. Can you talk a little bit about the role of chess—not just in terms of plot but as an overarching conceit?

  Jennifer duBois: I’d always been interested in chess, and I thought it served as an apt metaphor for both the political and the philosophical concerns of the book—Irina and Aleksandr are both, and with varying degrees of possible success, trying to outmaneuver pretty formidable opponents. On a structural level, the alternating chapters have something of the feel of a chess game—Irina moves, Aleksandr moves. And, without giving too much away, I think the ending has a certain chess logic to it.

  Justin Torres: You use time brilliantly and quite differently for Irina and Aleksandr: Aleksandr’s story takes place over thirty years, whereas Irina’s story covers only two. How did you arrive at this structure?

  Jennifer duBois: Because Irina knows she has this diagnosis in front of her, I wanted her to move through time more slowly; her attention to the world around her actually heightens as the book nears its end. Her journey, at least initially, is a bit subtler than Aleksandr’s—she’s grappling with mortality, with trying to find meaning and beauty in a finite time span. And as Aleksandr begins to confront those same challenges, time starts to move more slowly for him, too, until the two characters are moving through the novel together side by side.

  Justin Torres: I loved the unconventional friendship Irina and Aleksandr forge. Their situations share some deep underlying parallels. How do you see Irina and Aleksandr’s relationship working for each of them?

  Jennifer duBois: There’s the obvious parallel that they both fear for their lives, which unites them. But because their circumstances are different, they have different things to teach and learn from each other. Irina admires Aleksandr’s energy and willingness to work for something outside of himself, because she’s spent so much time sort of waiting out her life. Meeting Aleksandr forces Irina to realize that some people put their own lives at risk on purpose, because there are things worth doing that for. And Aleksandr admires Irina’s fearlessness. He takes so many precautions that he winds up feeling trapped, and he sees that Irina’s situation has been in some ways liberating for her—that it’s driven her toward a more interesting and daring life. And in the end, it’s the strange freedom of Irina’s situation that allows her to be useful.

  READING GROUP QUESTIONS

  1) Are Irina’s actions ultimately courageous or cowardly? Do you see her ending as happy?

  2) In some ways, Irina’s and Aleksandr’s situations are similar—and in many ways, they are very different. What do you think brings Aleksandr and Irina together as friends? What do you think they learn from each other?

  3) The character of Misha challenges Aleksandr’s vision of Russia’s democratic future. Is there any merit to his argument about the pragmatism of slower change? How do recent events in the Arab world speak to this argument?

  4) Irina treasures her intellect, and fears that she will not be herself anymore once she begins to lose it. What do you think makes you “you”? Do you feel there’s some essential quality that makes you who you are—and that if you lost it, you wouldn’t be the same person?

  5) Why are Aleksandr’s sections written in third person while Irina’s sections are written in first? How does this decision inform your reaction to the book? Did you find you connected more with either Irina or Aleksandr?

  6) What do you think would have become of Ivan if he’d lived?

  7) Irina can often be sardonic and fatalistic. Are there any examples of her behaving in ways that subvert this cynical pose?

  8) Beyond Aleksandr’s political career and Irina’s disease, do you see other lost causes in the book? Have you been faced with a lost cause in your own life, and how did you react to it?

  9) How does chess work as a metaphor in the book? Is the structure of the game itself mirrored in the structure of the book?

  10) Do you think that Aleksandr’s chess brilliance ultimately made him a better or worse person?

  11) What role does Irina play in the reunion between Elizabeta and Aleksandr? Do you that they might have reconnected if Irina had never come to Russia?

  12) After Misha’s letter to the editor is published, Boris decides to abandon Aleksandr’s campaign, while Viktor decides to go with Irina to Perm. If you were Boris or Viktor, what decision do you think you would have made?

  About the Author

  JENNIFER DUBOIS is a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently completing a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Originally from western Massachusetts, she lives in Northern California.

  Copyright

  A Partial History of Lost Causes is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Jennifer duBois

  Reading group guide copyright © 2012 by Random House, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by The Dial Press, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  DIAL PRESS is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Random House Reader’s Circle and Design is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  DuBois, Jennifer.

  A partial history of lost causes / by Jennifer duBois.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60474-7

  1. Chess players—Russia (Federation)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3604.U258P37 2011

  813′.6—dc22 2011006057

  www.dialpress.com

  Cover design: Anna Bauer

  Cover image: Marc Schlossman/Millennium Images, UK

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