The Outside of August

by Joanna Hershon

  HS: Alice’s mother dies in a horrible fire on the family property. Alice suspects suicide and August can’t contemplate it. How do you think this death impacts their relationship and your story? Again, what were the risks in utilizing such a violent occurrence in the development of your narrative?

  JH: Anytime a family member dies—especially in a way that is sudden and violent—there has to be a seismic shift in the family dynamic. In the case of Charlotte’s death, that shock and shift are multifold because while she was alive she was often absent and yet she took up an enormous amount of space in the Green family. Alice and August have such differing reactions to her death and, because of this, they grow further apart. It is this distancing that drives the narrative of the story because the further apart they grow, the more they truly need each other—in extremely different ways. We learn that August is burdened with a disturbing truth that he needs to share (whether he knows it or not), and Alice wants not only to be connected to him, but to learn more about their mother; she wants and needs far too much. When they finally do have it out toward the end of the book, they are left with a bit of a blank slate.

  They’ll need to redefine their relationship outside of their mother—no small task. As for such a violent development in the narrative—well, it certainly raised the stakes, and the challenge, as a writer, was to meet those stakes emotionally, to go as far as I thought Alice and Gus would go. Those high stakes were at the core of what compelled me to write this story, so I suppose I’d say the risks were necessary ones.

  HS: Cady is an extremely interesting character. Her self-possession and sense of self-preservation remind me of

  Suzanne, the girlfriend who comes between the two brothers in Swimming. What draws you to this kind of catalytic character? What do you imagine comes next for her after your story is over?

  JH: I do see a basic similarity between Cady and Suzanne; however, I think that Cady is a far more compassionate and generous human being. I suppose I’m always a sucker for a bit of female mystery, and maybe therein lies the basis of such a catalytic character: Confident girls possess incredible power, and I am always interested in what happens when these girls turn into women. I think Cady is going to be okay after the world of this book. She is ultimately resilient, but I think she also carries around a great deal of loss. She’ll always walk the fine line between light and dark. I could predict much more about Cady—I’m a little worried about that guy she’s seeing. I can imagine her getting married to the wrong person too quickly….

  HS: Second novels are notoriously difficult for young novelists. What was your experience in hitting the drafting boards after the success of your book Swimming

  JH: I think I tried to psych myself out and pretend that it was all one big experiment. The first draft was finished before Swimming was published, so I didn’t feel the pressure until later in the game, when I realized I had to essentially start over. My prior experience helped me in the sense that I knew I was capable of working extremely hard and grappling with my own writing demons, but what I had yet to experience firsthand was how greatly those demons can vary from project to project.

  HS: You are now at work on a third novel. How does it differ from your earlier experiences? Do you feel you are still grappling with some of the same obsessions, or have you moved on to different emotional territories? Have your early experiences in the theater helped or hindered your written work?

  JH: As far as my theater background, I can’t separate it from how I work—it definitely helps my sense of character, conflict, and scene. I’ve been thinking recently about how—as I begin this third novel—I often approach a scene as if I’m inhabiting the characters, working primarily through conflicting motivations. This new project is set largely in a different era, and it’s been a particularly exciting challenge to begin merging my dramatic and aesthetic sensibilities with an unfamiliar time and place. I’ve also been doing a significant amount of research, which my previous books didn’t require. My obsessions seem to be shifting considerably, and I’m still in the process of figuring out what they are.

  READING GROUP Questions and

  TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION

  Our interviewer thinks that the “beating heart” of The Outside of August is the relationship between Alice and her brother. Do you agree that this is what this novel is essentially about? What overall story element, character relationship, or mood made this work resonate for you?

  Structurally this novel is composed of three parts. Part One consists of six chapters, and the chapters are named: Heat, 1977; Water, 1979; progressing all the way to Riddles, 1985. Why do you think Hershon entitled her chapters this way? Why do you think she abandoned the titles in Part Two and Part Three? What response was she hoping to elicit from the reader?

  Readers often talk about characters they love, or characters they love to hate. Hershon’s characters often fall somewhere in the complex, human middle. They are presented

  “warts and all.” How do you feel about Alice? Do you sympathize with her? Do you understand her journey? What about Charlotte? Surely she is a failure as a mother and yet there is something tragic and compelling about her. What is that component of her character? How do her flaws add tension and pathos to the book?

  The title of this book is The Outside of August, and it is apt, as August remains elusive to both the reader and Alice for much of the narrative. How can the absence of someone shape another person’s life? Here we have two characters who mesmerize and disappear again and again, Charlotte and her son, August. Do you find them realistic? Maddening? Do you understand their hold on Alice?

  What motivates Cady? Why does she hang in there for so long? Do you see her as someone who is hobbled by her experiences with this complicated family, or as someone who is set free by them?

  Alan, the father, is a stalwart yet oddly weak presence in the book. He is reliable and physically available, and yet incapable of either rescuing his wife or cutting her loose and saving his children. What is his role in this human theater? What do you think about Alice’s decision (and Hershon’s) to return home to care for him? Who does she do this for, her father or herself?

  Alan is a successful neurobiologist, Cady has a good career in design, yet August and Charlotte cannot hold jobs, no matter how creative their explorations of the world tend to be. By the end of this novel, Alice has found happiness working in the local bookstore. What do you think this novel makes of the world of work? What part does it play in the characters’ lives?

  So much of this story ends midsentence in the middle of the lives of these characters. What do you think will happen next for them? Has Alice found love? Will Cady leave her life forever? What will happen to August and his newfound family? Do you find yourself imagining other scenarios for these characters? Alternative actions or endings?

  Take a moment to savor the prose here. How would you characterize Hershon’s style? What are its pleasures? Excesses? How does she go about building a world and inviting the reader to inhabit it? Pick a scene that strikes you and read it out loud. What are the cadences she employs? Is there music behind the language? Does she vary the rhythm and length of her sentences?

  Hershon is also a playwright. Take a moment to discuss the dialogue in this book. Divide some of it and read it aloud, as if it were a play. Can you see her dramatist’s hand? Does she have a feel for spoken language? How do you think stage dialogue and narrative dialogue differ?

  There is a subtle sexual tension here between mother and son, and even sister and brother. What is the genesis of this tension? How important a component of the characters’ lives is it? How does it repel them from one another and also keep them inextricably linked?

  Now that you’ve had a thorough discussion about such elements as story, character, prose, structure, and device, what do you think is the beating heart of the story? Has it changed for you through discussion? Does it read differently when you go back and look over the pages? In what ways does talking about literat
ure open it up for you, and in what ways does it take away from the private activity of reading? What would you like to see Hershon write next?

  JOANNA HERS HON is the acclaimed author of Swimming. She received a master of fine arts in fiction from Columbia University. She has been an Edward Albee Writing Fellow and a twice-produced playwright in New York City. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, Derek Buckner, a painter.

  Read on for an excerpt from

  A Dual Inheritance

  by Joanna Hershon

  Published by Ballantine Books

  Chapter One

  Fall

  Had he described Hugh Shipley at all over the past three years, approachable would not have been a word he’d ever have used. But one warm autumn night during his senior year, Ed Cantowitz found himself grabbing Hugh Shipley’s arm in front of Lamont Library the way he might otherwise grab a Budweiser at Cronin’s. They were not friends; they’d spoken only in passing this year, and mostly after the Shakespeare seminar in which they were both enrolled, but Ed Cantowitz was not thinking of how Hugh Shipley might find him off-putting or offensive, because, as usual, Ed Cantowitz was thinking about himself.

  “Keep walking,” muttered Ed, and that’s what Hugh Shipley did. He walked as if he hadn’t even noticed the interruption, didn’t so much as slow the trajectory of his cigarette from hand to mouth. Ed watched the cigarette and the dry fallen leaves on the ground—anything not to turn around and stare at the girl. “Do me a favor and keep walking and don’t turn around. Do yourself a favor and just look straight ahead.”

  Shipley nodded. “Might want to take your hand off my arm,” and Ed released his grip before offering a crazed smile as an afterthought, if not an apology. He knew he had a menacing voice, not to mention truly dark stubble (he’d forgone his much-needed second shave of the day), and his husky voice and bulldog build lent him not only an unsavory but even vaguely criminal air. Ed usually alternated between being pleased by these qualities and ashamed, but at the moment he was so focused he didn’t care what Shipley thought. The two young men walked down steps and past a stand of pine trees, kicking crabapples out of their path, and Ed talked. “This girl,” he said, and Shipley nodded again. Ed didn’t sound embarrassed, because he wasn’t embarrassed. This, he believed, is what men did for one another, all kinds of men, he didn’t care who; in the face of beautiful women, men were allied soldiers, at least until proven otherwise. “I can’t stop staring at this girl, but I’m under no illusions that I don’t need strategy. You? You don’t know a thing about strategy, am I right? Because you don’t need it. I need strategy—and make no mistake about it, strategy does work—but when I held open the door for that girl just then, I knew if I let myself do something about her, it would have been the wrong thing. I needed to save myself from myself, as they say. Listen, can you tell me if she’s still there behind us? Petite girl, big eyes—she’s actually kind of cross-eyed—really really really nice knockers?”

  Hugh Shipley looked slyly right behind them. He reported that he no longer saw the girl. “Hadn’t noticed she was cross-eyed.”

  “Slightly,” said Ed, stopping suddenly, short of breath. “Only if you look closely.”

  “Well,” said Hugh, “glad to help.” He sounded sincere, but Ed knew he might have missed the sarcastic edge. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Ed was not a nerd—no, sir—but at this point in his college career, he had to acknowledge that he was—to put it kindly—an outsider. Being at ease around groups of other people—especially lighthearted other people—was not his strong suit.

  He’d barely spoken to Shipley in the three years they’d been classmates; they’d had no reason to speak. Ed was on scholarship and was a rigorous and nakedly ambitious student with a government concentration and a gift for statistics. He was preparing to write his senior thesis on how China would dominate the twenty-first century. Hugh, on the other hand, skipped classes, often smelled like whiskey, and was rumored to be working with a lapsed graduate student on some kind of anthropology film project. He towered over Ed at roughly six foot four, and he was, of course, a Shipley, which lent everything he did a kind of simultaneous legitimacy and scandal. He’d grown up in the famous Brookline home of Clarissa Cadence Shipley—a ubiquitous stop on any Historical Homes of Boston tour. Ed had no idea how he knew this; the family was exactly that famous—one simply knew these things. One also often saw Hugh carrying a camera tripod and wearing dungarees as if he were headed off to the African savanna instead of crossing the street between classes, but—and this was the salient point—there was nothing comical about him. He looked as if he might, in fact, be more comfortable amidst a pride of lions.

  “So it’s Friday,” Ed declared. “Friday night.” He tried—unsuccessfully—not to laugh, which he often did when he had excess energy, which he certainly did just then. Sometimes his laughter came from shortness of breath, sometimes it even came from anger, but Ed was—as the expression went—quick to laugh. He was quick, in fact, with everything except a joke. Jokes he hated; they were never funny.

  “I’m sorry I’m laughing,” said Ed. He understood that he seemed strange, even vaguely crazy, and promised himself he would not be surprised if Hugh walked away right then.

  But Hugh only nodded, as if he was waiting for Ed to stop. Then he stubbed out the cigarette on his shoe and began to strip it down. The wind carried the filter away and Ed stopped laughing.

  Hugh grinned and shook his head. “Some strategy.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, after all that bluster, you’re without a date on a Friday night.” Hugh opened and closed his hands as if they’d been aching. “Maybe you should have figured out a strategy while you actually had the chance.”

  “Hey,” said Ed, nodding toward Hugh’s hands, “you got circulation problems or something?”

  Hugh looked at his fingers as if he’d noticed them for the first time. “I guess.”

  “It’s the smoking. Something about the tobacco. I read it somewhere.”

  Hugh’s fingers were long and lean, aristocratic yet manly, and they impressed Ed more than the expensive clothes, carelessly worn, that signaled a prep-school past or the athletic gait and suntanned face. It was Hugh’s hands that evoked in Ed Cantowitz a rare feeling of intimidation, but just as he was prepared to give over to the feeling, to acknowledge and make room for its uncomfortable presence, the intimidation was gone and what was left in its place surprised him: interest, plain and simple. He was rarely truly interested in other people, and, when he was, it was as if he had an intellectual obligation to follow through on it.

  And something was nagging at him. He kept thinking of the Shakespeare seminar that Hugh and he were both taking, and how—maybe because Ed was alternately too willing to acknowledge that he understood little of what Shakespeare was talking about more than half the time or was overexcited about how much he did understand, and maybe because, okay, he tended to speak up more than most of his fellow students—Ed was laughed at, and often. He was used to being laughed at in class and didn’t act offended—never looking away, preferring instead to look around at all the laughing faces—but of course he was offended. And when he looked around the room, there was one face that was never laughing, and that was Hugh Shipley’s. Hugh always sat in the same aisle seat, his legs outstretched and inadvertently tripping the professor, who was fond of pacing as he taught. Hugh Shipley never laughed at Ed. And this fact was nagging at him and making it somehow essential that Hugh not walk away. He also wondered, as he always did when standing beside another man, whether—though Shipley had a good eight inches on him—he could take him in a fight.

  “Ever boxed?” he asked.

  Shipley shook his head. “I probably should,” he said, in a way that suggested to Ed that this answer was more of a personal aside, alluding to a different, more complicated question. He offered Ed a cigarette, which Ed declined. Hugh shrugged again and lit up, squinting as the lamplights came on. You
ng men were illuminated up close and in the distance; young men were in a rush toward rooms and drinks. In groups and alone, they were saddled with bags—all canvas and army green—full of books, and books and books weighing them down but not holding them back. The whole scene struck Ed Cantowitz, as it often did, as somewhere between funny—a bunch of pack mules!—and poignant, even heroic. Harvard. He’d gone to Harvard. All of these mules and Ed was one of them.

  He wondered if being out on the streets on a Friday night would always bring on this unmistakable charge, as if he were about to get caught for every dishonorable act he’d ever committed, every lie he’d ever told. He also wondered if he’d ever stop picturing his home, with his mother still in it, with the Shabbos table set and the smell of burned chicken and the ironed white cloth with the ghost stains of Shabbos past, stains that—like the people who’d spilled the wine and gravy, the too-salty chicken soup—were never completely gone. All those people no longer crowded into his parents’ dining room, bearing poppy seed cakes and starting in with ritual complaints about their health and the changing neighborhood, the abandonment by their rabbi, the disintegration of their shul. They no longer clamored to compare statistics of how many Jews were left in their community or the steep increases in crime. There was no more lamenting how the schwartzes were moving in and taking over, dragging the neighborhood down. “It’s inevitable,” yelled Uncle Herb, though he tended toward yelling as a rule, making little distinction between his civic frustrations and “This chicken is very tender.”