Reading Group Guide
Our Book Club Recommendation
Diane Johnson's Le Divorce is a modern novel that so effectively seduces its readers through the author's charming, effortless storytelling that its complex side is almost easy to miss. Through her surprisingly wise young narrator, she offers a complex take on modern love, cultural differences, and the battle of the sexes. Book clubs will find the sheer pleasure of Johnson's elegant comedy perfectly matched by the thoughtfulness with which Le Divorce handles the issues that lie below its sparkling surface.
The plot of the book revolves around an almost ordinary set of events: Young Isabel leaves California to stay with her stepsister Roxy in Paris, helping Roxy with her little daughter while she prepares to give birth to a second child. When Roxy's French husband suddenly leaves her for another woman, divorce looms, and questions of propriety and property become as crucial as Roxy's broken heart. When a family heirloom becomes part of the struggle, Isabel finds herself involved in something much more tangled than a romantic breakup -- and when she gets involved with an unlikely suitor, questions of trust and betrayal present themselves ominously.
Johnson turns this Franco-American family squabble into a vehicle for musings about cultural prejudice (from both sides) and for a hard look at our assumptions about sex, money, class, and marriage. Isabel's frequent reflections about French mores, and her own very American responses to them, are perfectly geared to produce controversy among readers who may or may not agree with her.
In the end, Isabel's story incorporates both tragedy and comedy, and her trials and triumphs in France have not merely been an amusing experience but truly an education for us and for her. Book clubs will find that Le Divorce may lead to other reading, perhaps of other writers who have explored the divide between these two nations -- from Henry James to Janet Flanner. Johnson's tale takes its place in a grand tradition of stories in which Americans find, in Paris, something beguiling and challenging that cultivates a new way of thinking about ourselves. (Bill Tipper)
From the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
1997 was truly a banner year for Diane Johnson. Le Divorce, her first novel since 1990's Health and Happiness, quickly gained acclaim and climbed national bestseller lists, culminating in a nomination for the National Book Award for fiction. Throughout her varied writing career, Johnson's reputation has grown; this guide covers six of her fascinating novels penned over the course of twenty-seven years.
Though Johnson's novels run the gamut in geographical setting, protagonist, and even time period, they are unmistakably of a piece. Her critically acclaimed narrative style makes each scene unshakably real for us, and more than just presenting a scene, she transmits the feelings and atmosphere of each situation to her readers. A skilled travel writer and essayist, Johnson excels at conveying the look and feel of exotic locations, be they Paris or Persia (Iran) or, perhaps most foreign of all to many Americans, California.
ABOUT THE TITLES
Burning, Johnson's earliest of this collection, is also perhaps the most unique. Unlike most of Johnson's effortlessly beautiful characters, Bingo Edwards is acknowledged by everyone, herself and her husband included, to be homely and middle-aged. Her faithful husband admires her for her intelligence, though, and, of all the characters, Barney and Bingo feel the most compunction about committing adultery; yet even the Edwards find themselves succumbing to the potent mixture of curiosity, boredom, and lust that seems to overcome all Johnson's characters. In Health and Happiness, a senior professor of medicine with a beautiful, supportive wife is smitten by a comatose woman. In Persian Nights and The Shadow Knows, young wives, chafing under the burdens of homemaking responsibilities, turn to a colleague of their husbands for support and escape. In Lying Low, however, we do see a character who has successfully resisted the bonds of love, a former dancer who is considerably older than she appears, whose perseverance has brought even fewer benefits than those earned by the rash actions of others.
From first to last, Diane Johnson illustrates that it is the woman who suffers love more deeply. From Magda, who loses her life, to N, who loses her home and almost her sanity, to Max, who loses her children, it is the woman who is cast out or beaten or ridiculed for the sake of love. Even when their actions verge on insanity, the male characters are protected and excused by society at large, and a little irresponsibility or callousness is not questioned. What continues to be Johnson's triumph is that she writes strong, resilient, resolute female characters who find hidden reservoirs of strength and determination just when they need it most, who persevere in the face of menace, mockery, and dismissal, and that she manages to tell their tales in an engaging, witty, and totally believable style.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Diane Johnson's life has been at least as exciting as any of her heroines', filled with international travel and critical acclaim in whatever medium she deems worthy of her efforts. Born in 1934 in Moline, Illinois, Johnson's childhood was happy without being uneventful. Johnson's father, a high school principal, lost his job but not his honor when he exposed plagiarism committed by the daughter of the Superintendent of Schools. After high school, Diane attended Stephens, an academy for future airline stewardesses where teachers encouraged her to write, but left school in 1953 for a 'Los Angeles' marriage to a professor of medicine.
Twelve years later, Johnson terminated the union, having gained a Ph.D. in English from UCLA and "four wonderful children." Simultaneously, her first book, Fair Game, was published. Johnson's reputation continued to grow with the 1968 publication of Loving Hands at Home-"my discontented wife novel, about a Mormon family." In 1970, Johnson penned the timely Burning, an incisive novel chronicling the experiences of a staid, conformist married couple thrown in amongst the hippies, drug-addicts, psychiatrists, and firemen of the Bel Air hills. Next, Johnson took a short sabbatical from novels to write the National Book Award-nominated Lesser Lives, a fascinating biography of Mary Ellen Meredith, wife of writer George Meredith, and a poet in her own right, though she often used her husband's name to get her works published. In 1973, Johnson's first short story, "An Apple, An Orange," was included in the annual O. Henry collection of Best Short Stories.
In 1974, The Shadow Knows was released, garnering major praise from all sides. Director Stanley Kubrick was so impressed by the novel's taut psychological suspense and depiction of a person dealing with irrational occurrences that he chose her to write the screenplay for his next horror blockbuster, "The Shining." In 1978, Lying Low was hailed as surpassing The Shadow Knows, with its skillfully rendered atmosphere of foreboding and malice, and its violent and tragic denouement which managed to be surprising even though the events of the book led inexorably towards it. Also in 1978, Johnson spent three months in Iran with her second husband, Dr. John Murray, under a medical school exchange program. Taking another break from fiction, in 1982, Johnson gathered several literary portraits, reviews, and review essays in to Terrorists and Novelists, and in 1983 composed another biography, Dashiell Hammett: A Life, with the authorization and help of Lillian Hellman.
Johnson used her experiences in Iran as the basis for Persian Nights. Drawing comparisons to E.M. Forster's Passage to India, Johnson depicted, through the eyes of a typical American housewife, the collapse of Shah Mohammed Riza Pahlevi's regime. In 1988, based on the excellence of Persian Nights, as well as the rest of her body of work, Johnson was awarded "The Mildred and Harold Strauss Livings," which consists of a $50,000 yearly stipend to allow its recipients to devote their time exclusively to writing. In 1990, Johnson again used experiences relating to her husband's work in Health and Happiness. Set in San Francisco, Health and Happiness shows the inner workings of a large hospital complex from the differing viewpoints of MDs, RNs, employees, volunteers, and patients. 1993 brought the publication of Natural Opium: Some Travelers' Tales, a collection of short stories narrated by D., who is accompanied by her doctor husband, J., giving a sense that these tales are more than a little autobiographical.
In 1997, Le Divorce was published by Dutton and became a national best-seller and a National Book Award Finalist. She now splits her time between Paris and San Francisco, continuing to soak up culture and offer wry observations as a travel writer, essayist, and book reviewer for numerous publications, including The New York Times Book Review. Interviewed by The New York Times as a consummate example of an expatriate writer, Johnson stands by her purpose, "I'm still writing about Americans for Americans." Johnson's latest work, Le Mariage (now a Dutton hardcover), will be published by Plume in paperback in 2001.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
A conversation with Diane Johnson
Q: Did any particular person, scene, or idea serve as the inspiration for Le Divorce?
A: I heard a lot of stories from American women in Paris, about their divorces, or divorces they'd known about. My story is a sort of compendium, though none ended quite the way mine does.
Q: Le Divorce possesses a comical voice, but also addresses serious issues. Many authors feel it is harder to write comedy than tragedy. Do you agree? What were the challenges of blending humor and drama?
A: Whether or not one is a comic writer is probably a matter of temperament and vision, and you probably don't have much choice which one you are. I do agree that the comic is a harder mode, because it can so easily descend into the jokey or slapstick or facetious, when really it must be serious. It is also harder to have the comic taken seriously-many critics mistake melodrama for high seriousness, and the comic as "light."
Q: You make wonderul use of Paris as a backdrop in Le Divorce. Which of the city's features stirred your novelist's instincts? Also, to what degree did you draw upon your own experience living in Paris?
A: The whole beauty of Paris, and its contrast with American cities, thrilled me very much. I drew completely on my experience of living here-for example my love for the bus and the metro, my realization that the car is a huge waste of time, the wonderful feeling of personal security that means women can come home alone late at night without concern, the rich texture of street life when people are out and about instead of locked in cars or suburban houses. The organ grinder is playing tunes under my window as I write thisŠ
Q: Reviewers of Le Divorce have compared you to expatriate writers like Henry James, Edith Wharton, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, among others. Have these authors been important in your own development as a writer? Were you inspired or influenced by any others?
A: I was certainly influenced by James, Wharton, and Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald has especially been a writer I admire; and of course James, though I always find myself on the opposite moral side to James, and Wharton. In some ways, Le Divorce was meant to be a reverse Jamesian novel, in which the heroine is a little bit wild-the Americans are not innocent and naive. I was also influenced by Hemingway, though this may not be apparent-a writer I revere, and a major writer of expatriate novels.
Q: Your novels Persian Nights, The Shadow Knows, Lying Low-and now Le Divorce-all feature witty female heroines and narrators. Are women better observers than men in your opinion? What factors influence your choice narrator/protagonist?
A: No, I imagine not, but they are easier for me to imagine observing, since I am one. Also, I think the female point of view is instrinsically subversive, thus suited to the comic vision. Literary observers must by definition be marginalized in some way, in sensibility if not in position. In position they have to be well-placed. So I try to choose someone-usually but not always a woman (in Health and Happiness, for example, there was a male protagonist) who is well situated to observe the action and with personal qualities to allow her to comment on it, and sometimes to experience it.
Q: Do you think men read your books in a different way than do women?
A: I expect so, but I don't know. As a reader, I identify with the protagonists of either sex, but I don't know if male readers have this training, since they often aren't given, as children, books with female protagonists.
Q: You have an impressively varied résumé as a writer: biographer, literary critic, travel writer, and novelist. How do these different disciplines blend in your work? Does the travel writer inspire the novelist and vice versa?
A: I think the different disciplines in which I write are all the same to me-i.e. all aspects of my own sensibility or perceptions; thus I don't experience the different tasks as wildly different. Certainly my travels have inspired the settings for my books. And I often give characters in fiction the same ideas I might put into a book review or a critical article, the things that are on my mind.
Q: Many of the chapters in Le Divorce open with aphorisms from great French writers. As an American novelist, do you look to European literature for certain qualities you find lacking in American literature? Was Le Divorce a conscious attempt to resurrect the "international" novel?
A:Not categorically, though of course, many of the books that have been most influential in my life have been Europeans or English-the 19th century English novels of Austen and Trollope and Meredith, then Russian novels, especially Tolstoy-who doesn't start out loving novels with Anna Karenina? Kafka, Dumas, Constant. Le Divorce was a conscious attempt to resurrect the international novel, and I'm not finished with it yet!
PRAISE
"Delightful...what makes this book so much fun is the acerbic humor, fresh comical voice, and the acute observations...Masterful."- Chicago Tribune
"Sexy, graceful, and funny " -New York Review of Books
"A sparkly novel about the screwy collision of two cultures in the City of Light...Alluring." -Boston Globe
"Delightful...This charming tale knows exactly what to say." -Glamour
"Social commentary at its best."-Los Angeles Times Book Review
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
- The relationship between Roxeanne and Isabel has hidden depths but is defined by contradictions. Both the Persands and the Walkers never cease to comment on how different they are-Roxeanne is the Francaise, Isabel the American; Roxeanne is emotional, Isabel has common sense; Roxeanne is a poet, Isabel has no ambitions; Roxeanne is the smart one, Isabel is the pretty one. Do some roles reverse over the course of the novel? How does the stereotyping effect the girls' own self images?
- On the day her parents arrive, Isabel is suddenly able to understand the French conversations around her. "It was like the moment in some magic tale, when you find the ring, or swallow the potion, and you can suddenly understand what the birds are saying"(200). Is that an accurate representation of what happens when one travels abroad? Have you ever 'picked up the language' after being in a country a few months? What is the larger significance of this event and the point at which it occurs?
- L'oncle Edgar is fifty years older than Isabel. He is attracted by her good looks, youth, and mutable character; she is attracted by his stately bearing, knowledge, and experience. Edgar Cosset takes Isabel to France's finest restaurants and cultural events and teaches her more about the art of love than she thought there was to know. In exchange, Isabel gives him her adoration and tries to improve herself in his name. Who suffers as a result of this affair? (Suzanne de Persand worries Isabel will be heart-broken, while the Walkers are sure Edgar has been taken advantage of-is either opinion correct?) To what extent is Isabel's self-image damaged and/or formed by this relationship?
- Roxy felt a kind of kinship to St. Ursula, converted to Catholicism after marriage, and, in her time of greatest need and bewilderment, prayed a novena with no specific wish in mind which she later credited with causing Charles-Henri's death. In California, Isabel explains, "someone who talks about God automatically comes across as a hypocrite"(191), and it seems to be the adulterers who are firmest in their beliefs (references are made to both Magda and Edgar's strong faiths). What role do church and religious beliefs play in Le Divorce?
- Martial conflict is an important theme. L'oncle Edgar's time is consumed by "useless preaching" about the Bosnian conflict, while Mrs. Pace marvels at how strong feelings about draft-dodgers and peace demonstrations are years after the war is over. Roxy equates her own situation to the poor women and children under siege, and ends up a literal hostage at the book's climax. Does the background concern for war-torn lands simply contribute to the setting, or does it lend an ominous undertone of violence to the events in Paris? What other "wars" are being waged?
- Consider the American community in Paris. Some come for love, others for business, some are escaping political persecution, or even the AIDS epidemic. Besides being strangers in a strange land, what binds them together? Are any truly accepted by the French? Do most, like Roxy, have bewildered friends and family wondering in what aspect America failed to measure up, and wishing they would come home?
- Doug Tellman seems like a minor character, yet it is his actions that affect the other characters most. Americans are supposed to be rational, yet as an enraged husband he kills the adulterer. He seems always drunk or menacing and wants to pimp Isabel to foreign businessman, yet after he is arrested the American community rallies to support him. Is Tellman what they claim-a fragile, disturbed person driven to distraction and misunderstood by the French? Is he being treated harshly or differently than a native would be?
- Johnson's protagonists seem consistently more concerned with what feels good to them than with what society or law tells them to do. If they feel love, they act on that impulse, and normally have to face dire consequences. Much of what happens to them is inevitable, and events seem to occur despite their best efforts at prevention-are they ever able to gain control or to learn to relinquish it? Are they wise to eschew compromise and search for their true selves? In the end, do they find happiness and closure?
Related Titles (About the Books)
Le Divorce
Le Divorce, a finalist for the National Book Award in fiction and a national bestseller, is Diane Johnson's delightfully witty account of the adventures of two sisters from California who make a modern pilgrimage to the City of Light. Isabel Walker, film school dropout, arrives in Paris to help her older step-sister Roxeanne during the final weeks of her second pregnancy. Isabel intends to use the trip to delay getting her life in gear and to pick up a little French culture, though she can't be bothered to learn the language. Arriving just as Roxy's perfect husband, Charles-Henri, walks out on her, Isabel quickly undergoes a crash course in the secret codes and intricacies of French social behavior.
Many critics were quick to find similarities and differences between Isabel Archer, heroine of Portrait of a Lady, and Isabel Walker, Johnson's heroine. While both women are ignorant of European social mores, Johnson makes it clear her Isabel is neither innocent nor easily taken advantage of. In contrast, Roxy, a part-time poet and full-time romantic, is the woman in need of guidance. Her French husband has fallen in love with another woman, a Czech sociologist named Magda who is also married to an American, and wants a divorce. Roxy's in-laws, the powerful and prestigious de Persand family, exert subtle but firm control over her decision whether or not to grant it. In favor of maintaining cordial relations for the sake of the grandchildren, the de Persands urge Roxy to reconsider. Impeccably courteous Madame de Persand, while exasperated at her son's foolishness, warns Roxy against making a mistake. "Why ruin your life and lose your social position?" Meanwhile, Isabel steps out of her role as mere observer of the de Persands and into a torrid affair with l'oncle Edgar, a prominent politician, who is married and over forty years her senior.
Complicating matters is the disposition of a family heirloom, a painting appreciated only by Roxy until it is discovered to be worth millions. In the midst of a variety of schemes, the stakes are suddenly raised by a crime of passion which disrupts everyone's motives and plans. Not since Edith Wharton penned her brilliant portraits of Americans abroad has an American novelist so perfectly captured the possibilities and perils of succumbing to the allure of Paris.
Burning
Bel Air is a wealthy community nestled in the hills outside of Los Angeles. Here, among the pastel stucco houses and palm trees, Bingo Edwards, the wife of an orthopedic surgeon, lives a sheltered and eccentric life raising chickens, box turtles, and two children. The Edwards' harmonious existence is disrupted when the local fire department forces them to remove the hazardous backyard privacy hedge which has protected her from the outside world. Uprooting the hedge exposes Bingo all too well to her neighbors, an unconventional Beverly Hills psychiatrist and his eccentric patients. Venturing into the company of these strangers, particularly a primitively ugly but strangely alluring patient and a distractingly handsome fireman neither of whom pause at the thought of nudity or casual sex, Bingo and Barney feel their last vestiges of normalcy slipping away. As the situation heats up for everyone, an enormous fire threatens to consume Bel Air, putting its own twist on the radical alteration of Bingo's way of life.
Health and Happiness
Ivy Tarro, a young, single mother, awakens one day with an oddly swollen arm‹a minor problem that should have her home from the hospital by dinnertime. Instead, she finds herself detained and hospitalized, her life suddenly at risk. A near fatal misdiagnosis, over-medication, and neglect leave Ivy a victim of modern medicine. A swirl of galvanized doctors surrounds her‹interns, specialists, virtuosos, incompetents, prima donnas, saints, the head nurse who knows her patients' vital signs and her colleague's love affairs, and the brilliant senior professor of medicine who falls dangerously in love with her. As these lives intermingle, Ivy's potentially fatal condition sends shock waves through the hospital community, stirring up currents of fear, courage, ambition, rivalry, doctor hate, and doctor love. Health and Happinesscaptures the endless moral dilemmas and life-and-death decisions that are the foundation of hospital life, portraying the continuous clashes of motive and sensibility that create the ongoing comedy of medical manners.
Lying Low
A National Book Award finalist, this novel relates the events of four crucial days in the lives of four people sharing a rambling Victorian house, "lying low," and harboring secrets not meant to be shared. Theo Wait, a middle-aged former ballet dancer, and her brother, Anton, have taken in two boarders: beautiful Marybeth, who goes by the name of Lynn, who never receives mail or visitors, and in whom many readers saw Patty Hearst; and energetic and effusive Ouida, a Brazilian student and illegal alien who won't let complicated bureaucratic wrangles and constant fear of deportation taint her vision of America as the land of opportunity. A faked identity, a search for one of the FBI's most wanted escaped prison convicts, and a Brazilian feast that spins out of control kick the plot into high gear. While each of these characters has been plagued by a sense of impending disaster, the terrible thing they've all been fearing comes from an entirely unexpected direction, shattering all of their lives.
Persian Nights
With Persian Nights, Diane Johnson delivered an entertaining novel of an appealing woman caught up in a mysterious world of challenge and intrigue. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, this novel portrays a charming heroine who is pronouncedly unliberated. Disamingly delicate and pretty, and not averse to putting either attribute to its best use, Chloe Johnson is young, married, and satisfied with her normal American role as a doctor's wife and mother of two. On the eve of her first trip to Iran, Chloe's husband is summoned back to his clinic and urges her to travel on without him. Yet in a place where her ordinary notions of reason and reality run headlong into a wall of intrigue, Chloe is liberated from everything she has ever known and every idea she has about herself is put to the test. Much to her surprise, she finds herself drawn to the life she encounters in Iran; intoxicated by each exotic sight which reminds her how far from home she really is; both comforted and unsettled by the group of foreign and Iranian physicians and their wives who take her in. However, her exhilaration crashes when her rooms are searched, and odd, often frightening events begin to occur, exposing the darker side of this "colonial life." Persian Nights follows Chloe on a voyage through the seductively inexplicable, and has all the qualities one expects from Johnson‹the quirky, vivid atmosphere; the intelligent, humane voice; and the compelling narrative.
The Shadow Knows
The anonymous heroine, N, is considerably more liberated than Chloe or Isabel, but this does not give her more freedom. N is a young woman who has broken free of a constricting marriage, but is caught in an almost obsessive affair with a married man, and is struggling to raise four children in a housing project aided only by Ev, an endearing housekeeper who unfortunately seems to need as much care and protection as the children. Coming home on New Year's Eve, N finds her door hacked with an ax and smeared with what appears to be a mixture of blood and crankcase oil. A few days later a strangled cat is left outside her apartment door. She is plagued daily by mysterious, disturbing phone calls. Examining her life in an attempt to figure out who her enemy may be, N's real fears merge with paranoid fantasy in this fascinating story which rivals Charlotte Perkins Gilman's classic portrayal of a sane woman driven to madness, The Yellow Wallpaper.
