Which characters did you enjoy creating the most?
Oh Frankie! I love the clear sight and confusion in the child, and the fury of the teenager. Frankie cannot bear to grow up. She cannot stand the idea that her family’s ties will have to change as she and her brother grow older. She is in love with her family as it is. Her rage as she tries to hold on to time and place was compelling to me. I loved looking at the world from her point of view. Inhabiting her mind and spirit was a privilege.
Frankie clearly loves her family deeply, but this love sometimes manifests itself through seemingly bratty behavior. What do you think love really means to her? Do you believe that people often struggle to express love?
Frankie is trying to figure out how and if she can cement her future, trying to foresee who will get to stay on the farm, who will have to leave, who belongs, and what a person is if they don’t have a place that roots them. For her, all of those problems, those conundrums, are bound up in the word love. She is at times nothing but raw feeling. She is powerless even as she exerts her powerful self in her household. Back to Willa Cather: In an essay on Katherine Mansfield she wrote, As in most families, the mere struggle to have anything of one’s own, to be one’s self at all, creates an element of strain that keeps everybody almost at the breaking point. Love threads in and out of that “mere struggle.” Certainly in Frankie’s family each member is at different times almost at the breaking point. It’s hard to express love when you are at that point.
Frankie’s family structure is unusually complex, especially the dynamic between Gloria and Jim. Is this tangled web of people—and the heightened emotions that accompany it—reminiscent of your own family? If not, what inspired you to create such a complicated group?
A family business is always a good place to observe tribalism, and the subtribes within the overarching tribe. Mrs. Kraselnik asks her class to think about Who Your Tribe Is? (The word tribe seems strange to the fourth and fifth graders. Tribe? We’re not in a tribe!) I first started to think of tribal society not long after I stopped going to ballet school, in the 1970s. The pecking order at ballet school was brutal! And I’ve continued to think about how we all operate inside and outside of our particular tribes. All tribes, I’m quite sure, are tangled and complex, and my own family is no exception.
Did the character of Frankie evolve much as you were writing? Is the experience of writing a young woman’s coming-of-age story ever like going back in time to your own childhood?
That is the pleasure of writing about childhood and teenagehood! Although Frankie was born around 1987, so her childhood takes place in a very different time than mine. She was born just as Steve Jobs was hitting his stride in his first stint at Apple. It’s tricky, although not impossible, to imagine being a baby now, swiping through the parents’ photos on an iPhone. The challenge and pleasure of writing a child: trying to access how a child lives at a sensory level that is far more intense than the average adult’s: heat, cold, taste, smell—the world new, a heady brew to absorb. One must try as best one can to remember how it all felt, and how bewildering the adult world seemed, and how essential it was to create a private world, a place to which to retreat. When I was a girl I lived in and retreated to the worlds I found in books. Frankie has that escape hatch, too.
Jim encounters many obstacles in running and maintaining the integrity of his orchard, a number of which are raised in the town meeting Frankie attends. Are these issues indicative of difficulties faced by your own orchard?
Yes. Land-use issues are issues for farmers the world over. How can we preserve what we’ve built? How can we live in the world with people who have different values when it comes to land? Should landowners be granted privileges for their holdings, or should they be supported? Are large tracts of woods, owned by a single person, good for the community and the ecosystem as a whole? How much regulation should the government impose when it comes to property and farmland? Time-honored problems.
The section where Frankie interviews May Hill, rather than being a dry, lackluster conversation with an old woman, is interesting in its emotional intensity and horrific elements. Can you discuss what sparked the decision to include this?
May Hill is crucial to the solution of the farm crisis, to the matter of succession. I knew that Frankie had to have a major event with her. Frankie considers marriage to various bachelors who could affect the solution (after she understands that she can’t marry her brother—or her father, for that matter). She comes to believe that May Hill regards her as a frivolous person, as a girl who couldn’t possibly be a serious contender. That first scene allows Frankie to have her initial display as an unfit future farmer.
What was your thought process behind The Excellent Lombards title?
Finding the right title is often a trial-and-error process. The title has to somehow hold the book. At first the novel was called The Boy Who Could Do Anything. Then it was called During the Reign of the Lombards. I very much liked the idea of monarchy in the title. But it didn’t have the right music, that title. And it was a mouthful. When Mrs. Kraselnik says, “Let’s give another hand for the excellent Lombards”—I thought, The excellent Lombards—that’s what this book is about.
Reading group guide copyright © 2016 by Jane Hamilton and Hachette Book Group, Inc.
About the Author
Jane Hamilton’s novels have won literary prizes, have been made into films, and have been international best sellers, and two of them, The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World, were selections of Oprah’s Book Club. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times; the Washington Post; Allure; O, the Oprah Magazine; Elle; and various anthologies. She’s married to an apple farmer and lives in Wisconsin.
Also by Jane Hamilton
The Book of Ruth
A Map of the World
The Short History of a Prince
Disobedience
When Madeline Was Young
Laura Rider’s Masterpiece
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
Epigraph
Early 1. This Story Always Starts Here
2. Two Terrible Discussions
3. The Situation
4. Our Gloria
5. The Four–Five Split
6. The Incident During the Fifth Cloth
7. The Mysterious Family Photograph
8. Meanwhile Stephen Lombard Halfway Moves in with Gloria
9. Winner and Loser
10. How Hard Must the Pumpkin Visitors Work?
11. My Mother Is Right
Middle 12. The New Hero
13. The Mistake, the Worst Mistake
14. Blossom Day
15. The Historical Beginning of the Infinite World
16. A Possible Marriage Match
Late 17. In Which We Play Euchre
18. Mail-Order Bride
19. My Father Holds Back the Waters
20. The Fears of MF Lombard, Part One
21. MF Lombard’s Fears, Part Two
22. The Fruit Sale
23. Future Farmers of America
Acknowledgments
Reading Group Guide
Discussion Questions
A Conversation with Jane Hamilton
About the Author
Also by Jane Hamilton
Newsletters
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2016 by Jane Hamilton
Author photo by Leslie Brown
Cover design by Rebecca Lown.
Cover photograph
Cig Harvey.
Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
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Excerpt from “Bear” from Headwaters (W.W. Norton, 2013) used with permission of Ellen Bryant Voigt.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hamilton, Jane, 1957 July 13- author.
Title: The excellent Lombards / Jane Hamilton.
Description: First Edition. | New York ; Boston : Grand Central Publishing,
2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015044431| ISBN 9781455564224 (hardback) | ISBN
9781455564217 (ebook) | ISBN 9781478939283 (audio cd)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Coming of Age. |
FICTION / Literary. | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.
Classification: LCC PS3558.A4428 E93 2016 | DDC 813/.54--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044431
ISBNs: 978-1-4555-6422-4 (hardcover); 978-1-4555-6421-7 (ebook)
E3
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