Introduction

At 34 years of age, Scarlet has come home for the passing of her famous mother, the bird artist Addie Kavanaugh. The year is 2002. Though Addie and her husband, the world-renowned ornithologist Tom Kavanaugh, have made their life in southeastern Pennsylvania, Addie has chosen to die at the home of her dearest friend, Cora. This is because their ramshackle cottage in Burnham, Pennsylvania, is filled with so much history and because, in the last ten years or so, even birdsong has seemed to make Addie angry, or sad, or both. These are the things that Scarlet needs to understand. Cora and Lou (the third woman in Addie's circle) will help Scarlet to see her mother in full. In addition, Scarlet carries her own secret into these foggy days-a secret for Addie, one that involves Cora, too. Joyce Hinnefeld's debut novel is rich in so many ways beyond the taut mother-daughter dynamic and the competition among even the closest of women. The natural world, an artist's vision, the intensity of long-lasting love, the flight of a bird's song and the sighting of an extinct-or perhaps illusory-samll creature all work to shape the plot of the novel. Even the prose seems filled with birdsong-at once raucous and transporting. In its structure and style, In Hovering Flight follows in the tradition of writers like Virginia Woolf, Harriet Doerr and Carol Shields: musical and dramatic, with myriad stories and voices. But the evocative language of this soaring novel is Hinnefeld's own.

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Excerpt

This morning’s scene is a familiar one: Cora at the small table on the screened porch in back, glasses perched on her nose and paper spread in front of her, distractedly petting Lucy, her old collie, who’s flopped down at her feet. For as long as Scarlet can remember Cora has been gray, her hair cut sensibly short. She’s also always been pretty. The sweetness and openness in her face and in her wide blue eyes have always somehow invited Scarlet to bare her soul, to share her deepest hurts and most ridiculous longings with Cora—though Cora will never, under any circumstances, do the same. If Cora has ridiculous longings, Scarlet hasn’t heard about them; she knows for certain about the depth of Cora’s particular pain—but she never hears about this from Cora either.

The two women are bundled in sweaters because it’s cool on the porch in the early morning. Sunlight streams in, the early fog burned off by now, and the long, grassy slope down to the beach is wet with dew. A rope clangs against a flagpole several houses down. Tom has been at his scope for an hour or more; Scarlet has been watching him. She knows he’d rather be elsewhere—in the marsh near the lighthouse, for instance—but everyplace screams with Addie’s presence now, and there is so much to be decided today. But for now no one can bear to begin that process, and Scarlet sits with Cora, as if it were a year or two ago and she’d just arrived, sleepless and distraught over her love life, whimpering over the mess she’d made of everything. Worlds away from everything she is feeling today.

. . .

As Cora bends over Lucy, Scarlet watches the play of morning light and shadows on her face, on the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She knows this face nearly as well as she knew her mother’s, before Addie grew so gaunt, if still achingly beautiful, over the past few months, and she knows this comfortable old house nearly as well as she knows the cottage on Haupt Bridge Road. No wonder Addie wanted to die here, she thinks now, with Cora’s soothing presence filling every room—the smells of her baking, the fresh salt air blowing through her windows, the dark glazed surfaces of her pots and vases and mugs, beckoning one to grasp and stroke.

And for a moment she is ashamed of her peevish reaction to Addie’s asking to be brought here, six weeks ago. “Why not at home?” she’d whined to Tom. At the time she’d felt strangely jealous, reluctant to share both her dying mother and Cora in this way. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. What was your immediate response to this novel? Is there anything in your personal experience or of anyone you know that is similar to what happens in the novel? If so, how did that affect your reading of the novel?

2. How would you describe the tone and style of this novel?

3. One of the ongoing debates in modern and contemporary American literature, to some extent in all the arts, is whether Art is or is not, or should or should not be -- “political,” or “didactic.” What do you think this novel is saying about that debate? If you came to this novel with a strong position or opinion about the relationship between Art and Politics, how, if at all, did it affect your reading of this novel? Do you agree with Addie’s assessment of herself as an artist at the end of the book?

4. What themes do you find echoed in the titles of each of the novel’s parts? I – field notebooks; II – k-selected species; III – proximate and ultimate causes; IV – zugunruhe; V – hypotheticals.

5. What is your understanding of Haeckel’s Theory of Recapitulation – “Ontogeny recapitulates Phylogeny,” which Tom always prints up on the blackboard the first day of his class, Biology of the Birds. Why does he use this statement, despite its having been largely discredited? Can you connect its basic meaning to any elements of the novel, including its structure?

6. How would you describe the portrait of family life, marriage, and friendship as presented in this novel?

7. Birds: What about them, in this novel? How many and in what ways can you find that the author uses birds and bird song as symbols, or metaphors, in this novel, or to carry the narrative? Do you believe that Addie ever really saw the Cuvier’s Kinglet? What is it symbolic of, if anything, to you?

8. How did or did not the inclusion of the events of 9/11 affect your reading of the novel?

9. The author says her favorite character is Tom. Which is yours, and why? With respect to Addie, does your opinion of her change over the course of the novel?

10. Whose story is it, do you think?

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