Object lessons (28 page)

It wasn’t only the dead that lived with you that way. When she closed her eyes she could hear Helen say “Not to decide is to decide,” and her mother saying, with a great throb in her quiet voice, “Not good or bad. Things just are.” She knew that twenty years from now she would still hear all those voices in her head, and she knew that as long as they stayed there she would be able to do all the things she had to do, to make all the choices she had to make. But yesterday, as she had walked down the aisle, looking into the curled heart of the pink rose at the center of her bouquet, she had heard another voice, telling her to lift her chin, to keep her shoulders square, to walk slowly. And suddenly it had come to her, as she was dancing with her father, the stars of darkness exploding inside her closed lids, that the voice she was hearing was her own, for the first time in her life.

O
BJECT
L
ESSONS

A Reader’s Guide

ANNA QUINDLEN

A C
ONVERSATION WITH
A
NNA
Q
UINDLEN

Jennifer Morgan Gray
is a writer and editor who lives in New York City
.

Jennifer Morgan Gray
:
Was there a particular image or idea that inspired you to write
Object Lessons?
Did you begin with a vision of a particular character, a plot occurrence, both, or neither?

Anna Quindlen
:
Object Lessons
is my most autobiographical novel—like Maggie Scanlan, I am the daughter of an Irish father and an Italian mother—and so the motivating principle was more overarching than it has been in subsequent books, when I’ve often begun with a single character, image, or theme. But I would say that my initial impulse had a good deal to do with the construction of the second-stage suburbs during the 1960s. As much as the counterculture, that sprawl of split-levels and ranch houses changed America and how Americans saw themselves. And it was a metaphor, I think, for taking a good, hard look at the old ways and mores. That’s an important theme of the book.

JMG
:
Was there a mood you hoped to evoke by calling the novel
Object Lessons?
Were there any other titles you considered and then abandoned? What are the “object lessons” that you think the characters—Maggie and Connie in particular—learn in the book?

AQ
: Oy. Do I have to tell the truth about this? I am terrible with titles, although I’ve gotten better and better over the years. But
Object Lessons
was my first book, and so I found it particularly difficult to reduce this one to a handful of words. I remember saying, “Titles are so reductionist,” and having my editor reply, sensibly, “Yes, but a book needs to have one.” In fact I dithered so persistently that we dummied up one version of the cover with the line
Title TK
, which means “Title to come.” Then the director of publicity at Random House read the book and said, “Well, I think it’s all about object lessons, about those central tenets we learn from experience.” It was kind of a
kaboom
moment. I only wish it had been my
kaboom
moment!

JMG
:
You frame the book from its very first pages as taking place in a summer that’s “the time of changes.” Why did you decide to mention explicitly the events that take place later in the novel, like John Scanlan’s stroke and the demise of Maggie and Debbie’s friendship, in the first chapter of the book? Did you know what would happen in
Object Lessons
when you started writing, or were you surprised along the way?

AQ
: I always know what will happen at the end when I begin a novel. The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That’s how life is most of the time, isn’t it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It’s the getting there that’s challenging. Besides, I don’t think the trajectory of
Object Lessons
is about John Scanlan, or even Debbie. It’s about that moment when Maggie can think of herself as an individual separate from others. That’s the ending.

JMG
: Object Lessons
is set in the 1960s as sweeping social changes are beginning to take hold in the United States, but these changes are slow to creep into the town of Kenwood. In what ways did you intend to depict the town as an idyllic place in which to grow up? How did you picture it as being “frozen in time”? How do you think that Kenwood’s reaction to altering the status quo mirrored the reality of the world at that time?

AQ
: I don’t think most of what we call the ’60s actually took place in the ’60s. In San Francisco and New York and on some college campuses, sure. But if you go back and look at photos in most places, of most people, you don’t see long hair or tie-dyes. My high school yearbook, circa 1970, has a handful of hippie looks, but mostly people are pretty straight. But the fault lines were beginning to subtly appear. The changes in the Catholic Church. The growing political disenchantment in the years after the Kennedy assassination. The peace movement and women’s liberation. The earth was rumbling during the time covered by this novel. It hadn’t opened yet.

JMG
:
Some reviewers have wondered if Maggie is, in some ways, a young stand-in for you. How much of your own character is in Maggie? Why do you think that readers are so intrigued by trying to figure out how much autobiography exists in a writer’s fictional works?

AQ
: Oh, I think everyone wants to disbelieve the notion of fiction. It’s too much to think that someone could invent an entire believable world from scratch. And that goes double if you’ve been a newspaper reporter as I was, trained to deal in something approaching literal truth. There are certainly similarities between Anna and Maggie, although she is preternaturally wise and a little judgmental in a way I was not at her age. I find her a bit of a pain.

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.