The Writing Class: A Novel

by Jincy Willett

Overview

Amy Gallup was a promising writer once—published and highly praised at twenty-two. It was all downhill from there, and now, year in and year out, she teaches a writing workshop at the local university extension. And this semester begins just the same as the others. But then there's a threatening phone call, followed by obscene threats worked into the student's peer evaluations. Then a murder—and every one of the students is a suspect. The clues are hidden in their writing, and she (and we) can solve the murder only by looking more closely at each writer's attempts at fiction. Hilarious, vicious, and elegantly written, The Writing Class examines the desperation, perversion, and mania of the writing life through an unforgettable mystery story.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312428419
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	05/26/2009
Series:	Amy Gallup , #1
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	5.48(w) x 8.28(h) x 0.91(d)

About the Author

JINCY WILLETT is the author of Jenny and the Jaws of Life and Winner of the National Book Award. She lives in San Diego, California.

Reading Group Guide

Warning: This guide contains key plot points and spoilers. Enter at your own risk.

1. This novel incorporates many voices—student writing, the Sniper's notes, emails, traditional narration—to tell its story. Why do you think the author chose to reproduce the actual documents, rather than just describing them? What is the effect on the story?
2. What motivated Edna to torment and murder her classmates? Were there any clues in her fiction that she had the capacity to be a killer?
3. Is Amy a good teacher? How does her private life contribute to the way she teaches her class?
4. What compels the students to keep attending class, even when they know the Sniper is among them? Does their interest in writing and storytelling have anything to do with it?
5. How do you interpret the novel's last lines? What is Amy thanking them for, and why do you think the author ends the story on this note?
6. How would you describe Amy and Carla's relationship? Are they friends? What does each get from the other?
7. How does Amy cope with the presence of the Sniper? As the Sniper became more menacing, did she react differently to the threat than you would have?
8. Were you surprised to learn who the Sniper was? Who did you suspect early on?
9. Look at the passage on pages 129-31 about the disembodied hands. Why do you think the author includes this, as well as the passages about Amy's fear of tarantulas? What can these fears tell us about Amy's mind as an adult? What larger fears do you think they might be connected to?
10. "In the years after [Amy] stopped pretending to write, she had begun, she now realized, to deal with actual people as though they were puny fictional replicas" (page 69). What does the author mean by this? How does this behavior change over the course of the novel? Do you know anyone who has a similar tendency?
11. Though some of the students want to be writers, many of them take the class for other reasons as well. What do we learn over the course of the novel about the connection between various students' private lives and their roles in the class?
12. What does this novel have to say about what it takes to write fiction, and about fiction writers as people? Are there lessons in Amy's class that you think could be applied to writing in the real world?

Editorial Reviews

Willett's delicious satire savages every literary pretension imaginable.” —The Miami Herald

“The Writing Class is alternately funny, sweet, and suspenseful. It's a mystery written for book lovers.” —The Buffalo News

“Willett's zany humor is blended with intelligence and empathy for people worth knowing. . . . She is never boring, and has a way of bonding the reader to herself.” —The Providence Journal

“A marvelous toy of a book, full of wry surprises and sly twists . . . extremely clever and quite enjoyable.” —Booklist

From the Publisher

Aspiring writers meet a grisly end in the latest from Willett (Winner of the National Book Award, 2003, etc.). Amy Gallup used to be a promising young author. Now, her three novels are out-of-print and she pays the bills by teaching would-be writers in a university extension course. One class is so much like the last that she has to use a crib sheet to keep her students straight, but this term is a little different. This term, there's a killer in the classroom, and Amy's class is filled with potential victims-and potential suspects. This is an entertaining premise for a cozy mystery, but the book is not a cozy mystery. The first corpse appears about 200 pages in. The sluggish pace gives readers ample time to notice the flimsiness of the characters. The bored reader may also reflect upon the utter implausibility of Willett's narrative. The author seems to encourage us to wonder why more than a dozen ostensibly sane adults would insist on finishing a class when an anonymous, demonstrably homicidal sociopath is targeting fellow students. A murder mystery written by someone who maybe doesn't like, and definitely doesn't understand, murder mysteries.

Kirkus Reviews