by Peter Orner
You think all you have to do is take root. Fill up the drawers with clothes, the cabinets with pots. She listens to the low growl of the refrigerator as the day begins to rise over the lip of the window.
Night Orders
March 5, 1946
En route from Ponape Is. to Yokohama in company with 29 LSTs. Base course 317° T. Speed 10 knots.
Read standing night orders.
Be prepared for emergency breakdown signals.
Check watertight integrity throughout the night. Report every hour and log it.
Water the prisoners.
Wake me if in doubt or for any other unusual occurrences.
Do not stop for man overboard. No exceptions.
S. Popper
Capt.
CARY AVENUE BEACH
You’ll not find another place, you’ll not find another sea.
—Baudelaire
Midwinter and the lake heaves ice slowly up the beach. Popper stands with his gloveless hands jammed in his armpits and watches the lake and listens to it groan. The remains of the jagged breakers rising out of the water like broken teeth. The cement sandbags at the bottom of the bluff, plumped and ripped, not stopping the erosion that will never be stopped. The lake is always east. East is always the lake. Anywhere else he’s ever been he never knows where he is. Snow begins to fall slowly, like paint chips. Chunks of ice ride the bloated waves.
The lake is always smaller in January. It doesn’t stretch itself out blue as far as you can see. It’s contained, circumscribed, deadlier. If you fall in, you’re a goner. It happens every year to one or two smelt fishermen, pulled down by the welcome weight of his clothes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author wishes to express his gratitude to the Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations for generous fellowship support, as well as to the editors of the following publications, where some sections of this book appeared in a different form: The Believer, Bomb, Canteen, Conjunctions, Granta, Jewishfiction.net, McSweeney’s, New American Writing, Ploughshares, A Public Space, and StoryQuarterly.
Thank you also to Katie Crouch, Phoebe, Ellen Levine, Pat Strachan, Rhoda and Dan Pierce, Ronald and Mitzi Orner, Edward Loiseau, David Krause, Alex Gordon, Rob Preskill, Chris Abani, Katsuhiro Iwashita, Nick Regiacorte, Melissa Kirsch, the Civitella Ranieri Center, and Anna Leube and Piero Salabe of Hanser Verlag. And to Eric Orner for the drawings.
In memory of Lorraine Spinner Orner, who danced (1915–2011).
Reading Group Guide
LOVE
AND
SHAME
AND
LOVE
A NOVEL
BY
Peter Orner
A conversation with the author of
LOVE AND SHAME AND LOVE
Peter Orner talks with Ted Hodgkinson of Granta
Reading this book got me thinking about the capricious way that memory often works: not necessarily in neat chronological order but associatively, moving outward in a starburst from one image to the next. I began to see the novel as a compendium of images that were bursting from the Popper family’s memory banks. There’s actually a scene in the book when Leo Popper eats a cookie as a parody of Proust’s madeleine—clearly another writer fixated on being truthful about how memory works, or doesn’t. Is there a truthfulness about the function of memory in this lateral structural movement of the book, and did you find it a challenge to trace the lines of memory across generations of a single family?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately. I wonder if the word memory itself doesn’t somehow send the wrong message. There’s something about it that suggests truth when it is so often not even close. Scientists and criminal lawyers have been proving this for decades now. Our memories lie like a rug, as my grandmother used to say, and then laugh her head off. Or did she? See, I’m doing it again. My grandmother, who we called Sally Grandma and not Grandma Sally, used to say, ‘Don’t lie like a rug.’ But when she said it, she was saying, Don’t be a lazy meshuggener. So she wasn’t talking about memory and lying at all, but only about the fact that I was a slug. I still am a slug. Where was I? Our memories lie. And I’ve come to also believe that our own autobiographies are merely compilations of the greatest hits of our own bullshit. How often do we actually tell the truth about ourselves? I think in this novel I was trying to trace the strange way memory operates and how it’s so tied up in fiction that they’re almost indistinguishable. They are indistinguishable. The first fiction man ever created was when—for the very first time—a single hairy caveman began to recount something that happened yesterday. I wanted to build a book around a person who can’t stop doing this, who remembers and lies and remembers and lies.
Though the novel certainly has a wholeness, it is constructed of lots of small moving parts: fragments of letters, brief vignettes, oblique and not exactly “plot-driven” chapters through which a large cast of characters move. Taken individually, the sections of the book operate in a way similar to your short stories—capturing a moment or an image and distilling it down to a potent essence. Did writing this novel allow you the possibility of seeing further into your characters’ lives? Do you think of plot as something you have to resist in order to write fully realized people?
I’m not sure I resist plot as much as feel that the conventional definition of plot is a little cramped. For me, the strange moments that make up our lives are plot. I forget, but there must be some classic definition of what the word plot actually means. Hang on. I’m going to go look it up in an actual dictionary. “A small area of planted ground.” No. “An intrigue, conspiracy, cabal.” I like that, but no. Wait, “The main story of a literary work.” That’s it, but it’s as dull as hell. It isn’t that I don’t think something should happen in stories, and I hope things happen in mine, but what fascinates me the most about living on earth are the people I will never know. All the people I walk down the street and see, I will never, ever know what they are thinking, what’s gone on in their lives. So for me, character, the creation of a character on a flat page, is the most exciting thing. It’s less the “what happened” and more the memories they lug around, the loves, the regrets.
And as you say, I guess I try to zero in on the quieter moments of their lives in order to give characters life. This morning at the coffee shop down the street, I watched a guy reading a little book. He was really into the book and he was holding it really close to his face. I wondered if this was because he was nearsighted or because he was loving the little book so much he wanted to get as close as possible to the words. It may well have been the first reason, something wrong with his eyes, but I like the second one better. And so I imagined (probably wrongly) that I had a small window into this guy’s life. I’ll bet he’s still there, reading that little book.
Some of these characters reappear, albeit in a different incarnation, from your first book of stories. The character of Seymour Popper also appears in your short story “The Raft,” but he seems very different in the novel: he’s much less demonstrative in some ways. Did returning to the character prompt you to see him in a new light?
I’m sure you’re right that he’s different now. To be honest, I didn’t go back and reread the stories about Seymour before writing about him again for the new book. I think I didn’t want to be influenced by my previous imaginings of him. I do know that I missed him and I wanted to bring him back to life. The difference might be that “The Raft” is almost entirely from the perspective of a little kid, whereas in Love and Shame and Love I try to take in the totality of Seymour’s life. And people change, of course. And our vision of the people we have loved changes. And I love Seymour. I love the fictional guy and the guy he’s based on, too, and they never stay especially consistent in my head. I remember once I was walking to my grandparents’ house, my actual grandparents’ house, and on the way this cat started following me. I must have been about ten. So the cat follows me to their house. They aren’t home, but the back door is always open. I go in
side and lock the cat in the bathroom with a little plate of dirt, you know, kind of like my own idea of kitty litter. Then I go and raid the refrigerator. My grandparents come home. By this time I’ve forgotten about the cat. My grandfather goes to the bathroom. He starts screaming. I mean, totally freaking out. This is a guy who captained a ship in World War II and a cat in the bathroom totally unhinges him. So our real people, as well as our fictional people, are always acting in ways they aren’t supposed to, according to what we understand about their characters. My grandfather weighed something like 265, and he was no match for that cat.
Animals and sometimes insects in the book are often creatures whose plight seems to embody the whole of the human comedy and tragedy that encircles them. The fate of a fly seems poignant and absurd in a way that recalls the Popper family’s struggle as the fly wanders across a desk lamp and wonders where all the other flies have gone. “And I alone,” it thinks, “I alone lived to… lived to what?” The Popper family dog is a central character, and at one point is tellingly described as being more affected by silence than by hunger. Do you think that animals, particularly family pets, can be portals into the stormy core of a family, and does part of their power in the novel come from the way they seem to be often overlooked by the Poppers?
I love this idea of our pets as portals into the core of a family. Imagine if we could interview our pets and ask them about us. I think I had in mind, when I was writing about the pet dog in the book, Sir Edmund Hillary. The dog knows the Poppers too well, and he isn’t especially fond of them. But what choice did he have? He’s their dog. Dogs can’t choose their families any more than we can. I’m sitting here in my garage in San Francisco with my dog. Bud is very bored watching me type. Her name is actually Daisy, which embarrasses me when I am at the dog park, so I call her Bud, which she is happy to answer to if I have treats. Otherwise, she generally ignores me. But she knows everything about me, all the things I lie about. So I guess I’m glad she can’t talk.
The Chicago you describe here has a particular, almost mythic quality, as if you’re hooking up with an image of the city that belongs to a deeply American, Chicagoan tradition that includes writers like Saul Bellow and Stuart Dybek. When you’re writing about the Windy City, how often are you conscious of wrestling your image of it away from those writers who have come before, or are you wanting rather to engage with that literary conversation about it?
I think maybe all the places we tell ourselves we love are actually myths. Chicago is impossible for any one book or piece of prose or poem or whatever to capture. So is London. So is Cleveland. So is the state of Delaware and the country of India. And Madagascar. And yet I think this is why writers keep trying. And we keep trying in spite of—or maybe because of—the fact that we are conscious of the great writers who have come before. In my case, Bellow, Algren, Dybek. I’d also like to mention the work of Aleksandar Hemon, a relative newcomer to Chicago, but a writer who captures its essence, or some of its essences, as well as anybody. I think I write with all these people in my mind, to, yes, as you say, have a conversation with them. But then, as you know, conversations sometimes run off the rails, and we move in our own directions. As far as place goes, I think we get a myth in our heads about a place and we try to convey this myth to a reader. So yes, for me Chicago is the mythical place I grew up in. Call it Chicagoland, which is one of my favorite stupid advertising slogans. But Chicago is also a very real place where, among other things that happen, young kids are killed at the most alarming rate imaginable. I try to address how hopeless this feels in one scene in the book: Kat reads about a young girl being raped and then can’t figure out what to do about it. She feels so useless, all she can do is go sit on the stoop. She’s paralyzed. She wants to act, to do something, but she doesn’t know what to do. She’s twenty-five years old and new to the city. What can she do? Raise her voice? March in the streets? Write a letter to Richie Daley? I relate to Kat’s hopelessness in that scene. You write a story about a myth, your myth, the myth you love, and then you open the Sun-Times and you fall apart. Does this make any sense? Writers, like most everyone else, see what’s wrong but aren’t sure how to fix things. So we shine a little light. But I reserve my most profound respect for those people who actually make change, and there are people in Chicago who devote their lives, every day, to making it a safer place for all its citizens.
The book is very frank and funny about the difficulties of adolescence, particularly the difficulty of talking to girls. Do you recall that period of time fondly or with a grimace?
Fondly, at least concerning those few times things worked out in this particular area. With a cringe concerning the majority of it.
The book itself is chock-full of books, from Alexander’s reading lists at college to the Rozencrantzes’ pointedly impressive library. Is this in some ways the story of how books can shape lives and how they have shaped yours?
Absolutely. Popper is, from the very first scene, obsessed with his own personal library. Or the idea of his library. Another thing we lug around. Our books. Now I hear people boasting about how many books they have on their Kindle and isn’t it great, no more books to carry! And my thought is, and I know I am rapidly becoming a dinosaur, books are made for carrying. Nancy Sinatra didn’t walk in any virtual boots. Books are weight, the weight of our lives. Shove three or five or eight in your bag when you take a trip. They are supposed to ache your heart—and your back.
Adapted from an interview that originally appeared on December 13, 2011, on granta.com. Reproduced by permission.
Questions and topics for discussion
1. The way memory wanders is one of the central themes in Love and Shame and Love. Popper is obsessed with the passage of time and the impossibility of going back—the closing off of options as time passes us by. How would you describe your relationship with memory and time?
2. Another important theme is love (or the lack of it) over the course of four generations in one family. Were notions of love (or the lack of it) on your mind while you were reading?
3. Love and Shame and Love features many wonderful minor characters. Do you have favorites? The Rosencrantz children? Coach Piefke? Manny Laveneaux? Hollis Osgood? Do you mind that some characters exist for just a few pages and then are gone forever, or do you think they worked to support the greater narrative?
4. Politics figures prominently in the novel—the autumn of Dukakis, the Democratic Convention, the mayoral races in Chicago. What’s the relationship between politics and other concerns—love, for instance, or commitment—in the book?
5. In the Washington Post, Ron Charles wrote, “Orner is unusually gifted at creating freighted moments… that generate far more impact than their size would suggest.” In what ways did the mosaic of short sections help or hinder your engagement while reading Love and Shame and Love?
6. “Only our disgraces are permanent?” (here) is a powerful question, posed in the context of the Poppers’ broken home. Do you think that shame outlasts love? Do you think that in the Popper family disgraces were the only thing that lasted?
7. Some elements of Alexander Popper’s life reflect the author’s—childhood in Chicago, University of Michigan, law school. Yet the author himself rejects the notion of autobiography as being any path to actual truth, saying that the more autobiographical the elements, the less truthful the fiction. If you were to write a novel based loosely on your own life, how might you structure it? What do you think are the benefits or disadvantages of using familiar material?
8. In a letter Alexander writes, “But we do tend to judge our fathers. For what exactly, we don’t always even know” (here). Do you think we judge our fathers more harshly than we do our mothers? Do you think Alexander did? If so, why?
9. Peter Orner is able to say a lot about his characters (Miriam, Kat, Seymour, and others) by listing the books they own. Do you think that your books say something meaningful about you? Can the books that people choose to read say something deeper ab
out them that they might be unable to communicate explicitly?
ALSO BY PETER ORNER
Esther Stories
The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo
AS EDITOR
Underground America
Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives (coeditor, Annie Holmes)
Praise for Peter Orner’s
LOVE AND SHAME AND LOVE
California Book Award in Fiction Silver Medal
Finalist for Hadassah Magazine’s Ribalow Prize
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A San Francisco Chronicle “Lit Pick”
A Chicago Tribune Editor’s Choice
“Teeming yet not hyperactive, full of emotion without being mushy, elegant yet intimate, this is a book that gets into your head and makes itself at home there…. Like the James Salter of Light Years and A Sport and a Pastime, with their acutely observed domestic and sexual tension. There’s something noble and moving about Popper’s resolute sorrow, about all the Poppers’ largely unsuccessful struggles to connect to their times, to their city, to others. Love and Shame and Love doesn’t end so much as fade into a Lake-Michigan-in-winter mood of quiet devastation. It doesn’t grab for glory, but it wins a big share anyway.”
—Maria Russo, New York Times Book Review