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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780307472823 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/02/2008 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 802 KB |
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Chapter One
From the canoe, stilled on the still cove of the lake, the land was reflected in detail in the water: branches and leaves and pinecones, berry bushes, and the stone-and-timber house on the steep bank among trees. The house was abandoned. For all the ten years Gerard had been spending his summers on the other side of the lake in the house his wife, Peggy, had inherited from a rich uncle, the cove with the abandoned house overlooking it had been the end of every canoe ride. The cove, as calm and warm and peaceful as it was, instilled in them the calm and warmth and peace that they went out on the water for: Peggy at the front of the canoe, Gerard at the back, their dripping paddles resting lengthwise across the sides, and sitting on a cushion on the bottom halfway between them was their six-year-old son, Harry, who seemed to be in the same drifting state as the canoe, or so Gerard imagined.
For the first time, Gerard was struck by how Harry’s bones, which he had up until now seen as delicate, were beginning to enlarge, his vertebrae pronounced, his shoulder blades almost disproportionately large in the way they stuck out, and yet his shoulders were small and smooth. Harry was motionless, which meant he must have been thinking, drifting, Gerard again imagined, on his thinking. Gerard liked to drift on his thoughts, and his son, he was sure, took enough after him to like to too—that is, until Peggy, as Gerard always counted on her doing, stopped the drifting. She did so now by dipping her paddle into the water, a sign for Gerard to get to it and paddle. He did, and they continued in slow ripples deeper into the cove, towards the abandoned house, some of whose wide, many-paned windows on the second story were broken.
Raising his thin arm with a large elbow, Harry pointed to the house and asked, “Who lives there?”
Not turning, Peggy answered, “No one does.”
“Why doesn’t anyone live there?”
His high voice sounded in the silence like one of the natural sounds of the lake, a heat bug trilling or a bird flying overhead.
Gerard said, “Harry, here we go with your question why again. I’d like to answer, but I have to tell you I don’t know why.”
“Did the people who lived there die?”
Turning her head a little, so the thick bunch of her frizzy, tied-back hair swung against her bare shoulders, Peggy said, “No, they didn’t die.”
“How do you know?”
Amused, Gerard also wanted to ask how she knew.
“I just know.”
As a matter of simple fact, Harry said, “You just know a lot of things.”
“I do.”
“I wish I knew a lot of things.”
“You will, darling. You’ll know a whole lot of things.”
“I want to know everything.”
“That’s not possible,” his mother said. “You can know this and that, you can know a whole lot, but you can’t know everything. Everything is too much to know.”
“But that’s what I want.”
“Well, I hope you get what you want, darling. I do.”
Peggy again rested the paddle across the canoe, and Gerard did, and again the canoe drifted, now among water-lily pads that made a slurring sound along its thin bottom; and Harry, silent, seemed to Gerard to be once more drifting in his mind.
Below the abandoned house was a rotted dock, the remaining weathered boards tilting into the water.
Harry suddenly asked, “Can’t we go see the house?”
“No,” Peggy said abruptly.
“Why not?”
“I’m not going to answer one more question of yours that begins with ‘why’!”
Harry was bemused, seriously so. “Why won’t you?”
Now Peggy did turn enough to look at Gerard and say to him, “You’ve got to help me answer Harry’s why this, why that, why everything.”
Smiling, Gerard said, “But that’s his way of learning.”
“If I had answers, he’d learn something, but I don’t. Maybe you do.”
A little petulantly now, Harry asked, “Why can’t we go see the house?”
“You tell him why not,” Peggy said to Gerard.
“I’m not sure why not,” he said. “To be straightforward, why not?”
“Because I don’t want to.”
“Why?”
“For God’s sake, don’t be like Harry.”
The boy was deeply attentive to this bantering between his parents.
“Maybe I’m more like Harry than you think, and have a whole lot to learn—more than a whole lot, a whole everything,” Gerard bantered. “I want to know why not.”
The canoe was arrested among the thickness of the lily pads, with white lilies, swarming with small black flies, rising among them.
Peggy clearly didn’t want to banter. “In all the years we’ve been coming here, you never once said you’d like to see into that old, broken-down house. Let me ask you, why now?”
“I want to now because Harry wants to.”
Harry had his father on his side. He bounced on his butt. “I want to, I want to.”
His father said, “The boy’s at the age when he’s drawn to a little adventure.”
“I’m sure there’s nothing in that house, or if there is, it’ll be nothing but broken-down furniture and rubbish.”
“Then he’ll see that.”
Peggy turned away to look, Gerard saw, up at the house, in the shadows of trees, with small flashes of sunlight. He heard her say, “I really don’t want to.”
Harry chanted, “I want to, I want to, I want to.”
Without saying any more, Peggy stuck her paddle into the lily pads, and Gerard followed suit. At this, Harry knelt on the cushion and turned to his father and gave him a wide, bright smile, one that made Gerard place his paddle across his knees and lean forward and reach out and with both hands take his son’s head into his hands and hold it. With a sudden rush of love for his son—love for him because, for some reason he only glancingly wondered about, he realized his son was right now more his son than he had ever been before—he would have kissed Harry if the canoe hadn’t swerved because of Peggy’s continuing paddling. Gerard sat back and righted the canoe, so it slithered over the lily pads to the shore, where, with a soft bump, it was stopped by weeds and mud. Kneeling before him, Harry was still smiling at his father, with a look in his eyes as of his too seeing something in his father he hadn’t seen before, something that pleased him a lot.
In nothing but shorts, Gerard stepped out of the canoe into the muck that oozed in gray-green clouds about his feet and held the side steady for Peggy, in a bathing suit, to step out. Now Gerard could hold his son, his naked, narrow, flat chest against his own naked, rounded, and hairy chest, to heft him out of the canoe and place him on the shore, where the roots of pine trees were exposed among stones. That contact between his and his son’s body was, to Gerard, a contact he had never before noticed with his son, and once again he wondered, however glancingly, Why now? While Harry watched, Peggy helped Gerard beach the canoe up the slope beyond the shoreline.
There was a path up the slope, so covered with dry pine needles it was hardly distinguishable. Harry ran up it.
“Harry,” Peggy called. “I don’t want you out of our sight. You hear?”
The boy laughed and ran on more, but, in sight of his parents, stopped by the trunk of a massive pine tree on which was attached a verdigris-gray bell with a rope dangling from its clapper. Harry studied it.
Peggy said to Gerard, “Why I don’t want to go into that house is—well, because I’m sure all kinds of acts have been performed there that I wouldn’t want Harry to know about, not at his age.”
“How would he know?”
“There’ll be graffiti all over the walls, and, Harry being Harry, he’ll ask what they mean. I don’t want him to know. As long as he’s my baby, I don’t want him to know.”
“Is he still your baby? I think he’s beginning to know more than you think he does.”
“Not as long as I can stop him from knowing.”
Gerard laughed a little.
“Don’t laugh,” Peggy said.
Gerard pressed his lips together and shook his head, then said, “I’m not laughing.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Yes, I am.”
“Why?”
“I guess, thinking of everything Harry will learn.”
Peggy slapped Gerard lightly on his bare shoulder and she too laughed. “And what’s that?”
With a lilt to his voice, Gerard said, “Those strange acts performed in the house you’re apprehensive of Harry finding out about—he’ll find out sooner or later, and God bless him for what he finds out.”
“Did I say strange? You did. You are such an innocent, Gerard. Not being so innocent, I can think of some pretty sordid acts performed there.”
“I block those out, and so will Harry.” As they approached Harry, who was holding the rope and looking up at the bell, Gerard took Peggy’s arm and pulled her towards him for a moment and whispered, “The fact is, the house makes me think of an act I’d like to perform with you.” She smelled of fresh lake water, and all her clear, taut skin, exposed on her shoulders, the slopes of her breasts, her abdomen and her back and her thighs and legs, looked as if it had the sheen of water.
Laughing more, Peggy shoved him aside, saying, “Remember, this is Harry’s adventure, not yours.”
“That’s right, Harry’s adventure.”
And that moment, the boy jerked on the rope and rang the bell, and to the resonant clang throughout the woods birds flew out from everywhere. Laughing, Harry continued to ring the bell.
Reading Group Guide
1. There is a sense of otherworldliness in the novel—the passages where the dead are present in the air around the living, the incidences of coincidence (the multiple appearances of the Historie de L’Ecriture, the graves in Boston bearing the same names as Catherine’s family, the reappearance/disappearance of the bombed car). What do you feel is the atmosphere of the novel? How do these elements of the mysterious affect your reading of the novel?
2. The novel as a whole strongly illuminates the idea of grief as a journey—in the sense of obsession and exploration, but also in a physical sense, as we follow the characters from a small New England village into Boston, then to England, Greece, and Syria. What does it mean that Gerard travels so far from home, through so many countries, encountering other cultures and languages? Do you think his physical journey is a necessary outgrowth of his grief?
3. The idea of historical events tearing apart individual lives builds throughout the novel, as new characters enter with escalating grief. There is the question of how we measure grief and if it is possible to weigh one’s own personal suffering against horror on a global scale. Catherine’s husband kills himself soon after his daughter dies; Aminat, after living through the atrocious attacks on her town and family, in the end kills herself as well. What do you think the novel suggests about what is survivable?
4. Peggy, Gerard’s wife, believes that meaning resides in the inner world; Gerard believes meaning is all in the outside world. Where do you think we generally search for meaning and what is the distinction (if there isone) between inner and outer meaning? Do you think that Gerard’s beliefs have changed by the end of the novel?
5. It is notable that Gerard is French-Canadian, Catherine is a Chinese woman raised in South America who now resides in London, and David is a Sephardic Jew whose first language was Greek and who was married to an Armenian. What does the confluence of these characters say about the global village? Is there a healing element suggested in the connection between the different characters, with their diverse backgrounds, or a suggestion that pain and grief cannot be shared across borders?
6. The intricacies of philology and the history of the alphabet are explored in such beautiful detail and with such intelligence in the person of Charles Craig, the don at Cambridge. What do you feel is his role in the novel? Is it important that he himself reveals no losses, yet does speak about his uncle’s deep grief when his beloved librarian died? Is there a link between the knowledge offered by academia and the experience of deep mourning? What does it mean that Craig can offer no final answers, no reason for the arrangement of the alphabet?
7. What languages do you speak? How does your fluency in one or more languages affect your reading of the novel? What is the history of your language, and how does it relate to the languages explored in the novel and to your relationship to the alphabet? Do you come from a language close to English, with its own ABCs, or, like Catherine, from a mother tongue (Chinese) that does not have an alphabet in the sense of one letter following another?
8. Place is very important in ABC. What do you think the different meanings are of the places the characters call home, and of the houses in the novel, from the one that Harry dies in, “the Wreck,” to Gerard’s home in Manchester, Catherine’s in England, David’s in Greece, and the vision of Aminat’s in Chechnya?
9. Aminat, like the others, is obsessed with the alphabet and is certain that “nothing is incomprehensible to humankind.” Yet Aminat has an endpoint: she wishes to reach Ugarit, and then to die. “She would do, of course she would do, what none of them–Gerard, Catherine, David–had been able to do.” What does the author mean by this statement–does it refer to Aminat killing herself, to fully understanding the alphabet, or to something else entirely?
10. In addition to mourning, the novel touches on the ways in which we love our children and the complications of that love. Both Gerard and Catherine confess that they dream about killing their children–and that in the dreams, their children will not die. What do you make of these dreams and their relationship to Gerard and Catherine’s grief?
11. Catherine states that she was raised without religion; Aminat describes reading the Koran in Russian; David portrays being a Jew in the Orthodox Christian world of Greece; Anjuli, the Indian girl from the trailer park, goes to the Wreck to talk about religion and translates for Gerard the slip of paper he finds at the abandoned house: “Krishna says, ‘Of sounds, I am the first sound, A.’” What role does religion play in the novel? How is it linked to language? How does your own religious background connect you to the different characters?
12. The dead follow the living throughout the novel, clustering in certain spaces (the abandoned house, Susan’s dorm room at Cambridge). What role do the dead play in the novel? The author states that the dead cannot force action, but can only “be attentive.” Do you think the characters are driven along on their journey by the dead? What do you think is the “vast longing” of the dead, the thing that they want the living to fulfill? What about the statement that the characters need the dead as much as the dead need them?
13. Gerard believes that the more incomprehensible something is, the more it must have a meaning. Catherine, David, and Aminat all express this same obsession with meaning; they believe the question of the alphabet’s arrangement must have an answer. Why do you think their grief takes the form of obsession? How is this question linked to religion? How do characters like Peggy, Catherine’s husband, and Charles Craig perceive the quest for meaning?
14. Gerard believes that the more incomprehensible something is, the more it must have a meaning. Catherine, David, and Aminat all express this same obsession with meaning; they believe the question of the alphabet’s arrangement must have an answer. Why do you think their grief takes the form of obsession? How is this question linked to religion? How do characters like Peggy, Catherine’s husband, and Charles Craig perceive the quest for meaning?
15. Much of ABC is mystical and stretches the boundaries of reality–in the desert of Syria, the author writers that things became “literally unreal.” Was the novel believable for you? Why or why not?
16. What do you make of the reappearance of Harry at the end of the novel, and of his stating that the alphabet’s meaning will always be a secret, that the joy of the exploration lies in “the wonder of it,” rather than in Gerard’s obsession with a single answer? Why do you think Harry at the end reads the alphabet from a child’s notebook, but reads it in Greek rather than English, and that the scene takes place in a derelict house? What does it mean, finally, that Gerard’s grief “expands into helpless love”?