The Astral

1. Harry Quirk's obsession with his imploding marriage forms a central arc of The Astral. Do you trust his narrative of the marriage and its dissolution? How does your opinion of him evolve as you read the novel?

2. Luz is convinced that Harry is sleeping with Marion. Although her accusations of sexual intimacy are unfounded, Harry and Marion are very close friends. Do you think that it is possible to commit emotional infidelity, and if so, is Harry guilty of it? How would you define an "emotional affair"?

3. In Chapter Fourteen, Harry visits his wife's therapist, Helen. What do you make of Harry's animosity towards her? Why do you think the author included this confrontation?

4. Harry's work-in-progress, "an epic poem of loss and displacement," is titled The Astral. How does this echo the symbolic role of The Astral apartment building in the novel?

5. During the course of the novel, Harry and Karina pay several visits to Hector at the Sag Harbor compound. How do these experiences compare, and what do they contribute to our understanding of Hector and his situation? Do you think Hector is a true believer of the Children of Hashem cult, or is he an opportunist like his older consort Christa?

6. The Astral portrays a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, rapidly changing Brooklyn of artists, artisans, immigrants, and long-settled locals. Discuss the tensions inherent in such a quilt of social types. How does the author portray the interactions between immigration and gentrification?

7. Kate Christensen once wrote an influential essay titled "Loser Lit" in praise of such books as Lucky Jim, A Confederacy of Dunces, Jernigan and Wonder Boys, whose books center on self-defeating characters whose often comic misadventures as they slide to the bottom have garnered these novels fervent cult followings. To what extent do you think Harry Quirk qualifies as a Loser Lit antihero?

Trouble

1. Do you empathize or disagree with Josie's decision to leave Anthony and her reasons for doing so? Did you find Josie to be a sympathetic character at the beginning of the novel? In the end? Why or why not?

2. In Chapter Two, we see Josie in four psychotherapy sessions with her clients. Why do you think the author included these scenes in the novel? Do Josie's training and experience as a therapist enable her to have increased insight into the people around her?

3. Mexico City serves as a needed escape valve for both Josie and Raquel. Why do you think the author chose this city for the setting of converging and diverging paths of these two friends? What role does Mexico itself play in the unfolding story?

4. There are several instances and places during the novel in which a ritualized encounter takes place, among them the paparazzi descending on Raquel, a bullfight, and references to the human-sacrifice rituals of the Aztecs. Are there other instances of such encounters? What do you think the author is suggesting about the apparent ongoing human need for them?

5. On page 307, going home from Raquel's mother's house in a taxi with Wendy, Josie reflects about the kind of friend she has been to Raquel: "Maybe she and I had failed each other by allowing each other the freedom to be ourselves, and maybe that was the inevitable consequence of true friendship." What do you think she means by this? Do you agree?

The Great Man

1. The novel opens with Oscar Feldman's obituary, which states that Oscar was survived by his sister and wife. The obituary mentions neither his mistress nor their daughters. How did this affect your reading of Chapter One, which is about Teddy St. Cloud? Did you find it confusing? Ironic? Did it take a while to figure out who she was? Why do you think the author chose to begin the book this way?

2. How does the fact that there are two biographers rather than just one add to or detract from the dramatic tension of the book? How would you characterize Henry's and Ralph's aims, feelings, and ideas about Oscar at the beginning of the book? How and why do these shift and change during the novel? What, if anything, does the book review at the end add to the story?

3. Maxine Feldman has some rather complex and very strong feelings about her brother. How would you characterize these feelings? What are some of the reasons behind them? Do you empathize with her?

4. Abigail Feldman tells Henry that she's surprised that she ended up married to a man who came and went, cloistered in an airless apartment taking care of an autistic son, with a black housekeeper for her best friend. What are some of the reasons you think she might have chosen this life instead of the life of an unmarried English lit professor she had always thought she wanted? Do you believe the life she ended up with was more or less happy or fulfilling for her than the one she didn't choose?

5. Do you think any of the women in the novel felt happy and fulfilled by their lives? Did any of them have as much control over their own actions and fates as Oscar had over his?

6. How does this quote from "The End of the Novel of Love," by Vivian Gornick, relate to Oscar Feldman's women and biographers? "How many women and men have I, in my short, obscure lifetime, watched subjugate themselves to The Great Man, the one who seemed to embody art with a capital A or revolution with a capital R? Our numbers are legion. We ourselves were intelligent, educated, talented, none of us moral monsters, just ordinary people hungry to live life at a symbolic level. At the time, The Great Man seemed not only a good idea but a necessary one, irreplaceable and unforgettable."

7. Did the revelation that Maxine painted "Helena" surprise you? Does knowing this necessarily change the way the painting is seen? Do you agree that it also changes the way "Mercy" is seen as well, as Ralph says? Why or why not?

8. Throughout the novel, Oscar is a kind of focal point that unites all the characters and provides the story with its drama and flow, even though he's dead. Did you find that Oscar came alive for you in everyone's various feelings about and memories of him, or did he remain somewhat incomplete and shadowy? How do you feel about Oscar-do you admire him? Disapprove of him? Wonder why all the women were so in love with him? Envy him?

9. "If you were a woman, you could never have everything," Teddy thinks at the end of Chapter Two. "[My mother's] a control freak," Ruby tells Ralph at the end of Chapter Three. How do you think Teddy's awareness that she couldn't have everything, coupled with her evident desire for control, affected her decision to be the mistress for many decades of a man who was married to someone else and faithful to no one?

10. The book ends at Maxine's retrospective—Maxine died famous, but with the bittersweet knowledge that her pride prevented her from finding lasting love with Jane; Teddy has fallen in love with Lewis, but their time together is limited; and Abigail and Lila have become friends, but neither of them ever found the fulfillment in work each had hoped for as a young woman. Meanwhile, Henry is having a passionate love affair with Ruby, which sickens him with dread about his marriage; Ralph is financially secure now because of his secret deal with Abigail, which is essentially to whitewash the truth about his former idol, Oscar. Each of them has in some way received what she or he wanted, but in a compromised way. Is this a sugary, happy ending, a realistically true-to-life one, or an ironic and complicated one?

The Epicure's Lament

1. What exactly is Hugo's lament? What about people and life causes him such antipathy? Do fine food, cigarettes, and sex provide satisfaction or fulfillment for Hugo?

2. Hugo claims that he desires to be alone, but he often finds himself surrounded by people. Does he ever choose company instead of solitude, and what do these choices betray about Hugo's character?

3. Is there anything enticing or appealing about Hugo's character? Why do women find him attractive? Why does his family care about him? Does the reader come to care about him, too? If so, why? Does Hugo change his attitude with respect to his family by the end of his memoirs? Does Hugo really want to die, or might Hugo's carefully planned Christmas Eve suicide attempt be, ironically, a final attempt to connect to his family?

4. Over the course of Hugo's memoirs Christensen slowly reveals to the reader the cracks in his tough outer shell: his strong love for his father and his deep-seated resentment of his mother [pp. 69 and 268]. These feelings culminate in a tearful therapy session at the end of the book [p. 342]. Does the damage to Hugo's childhood psyche by the loss of his father and the treatment he received from his crazy mother explain his behavior as an adult? Is the emotional revelation during Hugo's therapy session at the end of the novel satisfying or frustrating?

5. Is Hugo really a victim and not a malefactor? Is it true, as Hugo states, that he "never knowingly caused harm to another person" [p. 309]?

6. Hugo observes wryly, "Dennis and I are limited to well-built old American cars and ordinary women with pedestrian tastes, which seem to suit both of us equally well, one of the few things we have in common" [p. 44]. What is Dennis like, and do Hugo and Dennis have more in common than Hugo claims? Could Hugo's description of Dennis as a "narcissist" [p. 48] apply to Hugo as well?

7. How thoroughly does Christensen develop the secondary characters in the novel? How is the reader's perception of them affected by the fact that characters such as Sonia, Dennis, Marie, Stephanie, and Hugo's parents are presented only from Hugo's viewpoint in his notebooks? Are any of the other characters more or less sympathetic than Hugo?
8. Hugo tells Stephanie, "My wife left me because I both defied and bored her" [p. 59]. Is this an accurate explanation for Sonia and Hugo's separation? What is the nature of each of the marriages portrayed in the book? How would Hugo, Dennis, and Stephanie each describe their own marriages and marriage in general?

9. Hugo informs us, "I began to write; I disliked it very much and still do. However, it never seemed to be a matter of preference but absolute necessity" [p. 90]. Why does Hugo write? How has his failure as an author affected him?

10. What kind of inspiration does Hugo find in the writings and lives of M.F.K. Fisher and Montaigne? How are these two literary figures alike and how are they different? How does Christensen use other literary works [e.g.,Anna Karenina, (pp. 32 and 298) and Hamlet(p. 252)], as metaphors in the novel?

11. Hugo describes himself and his feelings about his family home: "I, as a laissez-faire, elitist man of no people, am of the (minority) opinion that the ludicrously named Waverley and the equally ludicrous life-style it was meant to support have reached a necessary end. . . . In these rooms I feel the intolerable pressure of too many things, all the historical significance of a family whose names are, in the end, more important and memorable than any of the individual souls who bore them" [pp. 39–41]. What does the image of Waverley symbolize about American society? How does Hugo both personify Waverley and defy it? Is Hugo's distaste for his family heritage somehow hypocritical or, at least, disingenuous?

12. Hugo writes, "The beauty of human domestic existence is the control we exert over our surroundings. Nature is only attractive to me insofar as I can mow, cook, kill, or change its components to my liking. The tree outside my window is a microcosm of inhuman order" [p. 73]. What does the tree's resident, a bird Hugo names Erasmus after the medieval theologian, symbolize for Hugo? Is Hugo's obsessive-compulsive behavior regarding order evidence of deeper psychological problems?

13. A review of The Epicure's Lament in Publishers Weekly describes Hugo as an antihero. What is an antihero? Does Hugo fit this literary archetype? Christensen herself has described her novel as belonging to a genre she labels Loser Lit. She explains, "It is kind of like pornography—you know what it is when you see it. For me, it has to do with failure, anger, a kind of desperate hilarity and arrogance. In Loser Lit, the hero has no odds to overcome. They are anti-pluck. They have been given everything at the beginning and they screw it up." (Review of The Epicure's Lament in TheJournalNews.com, February 22, 2004). How are the concepts of Loser Lit and the anti-hero similar or different?

14. Does the specter of September 11, 2001, referenced in several instances [pp. 19 and 83], impact the behavior of the characters in the novel or the mood of the novel in any way?

15. How are the Jewish characters (Shlomo, Tovah and Louisa) and the religion of Judaism ("the greatest religion in human history," p. 79, according to Hugo) portrayed in the novel?

16. Is Christensen, as a female writer, successful in creating a believable male voice in Hugo?