Introduction

Kathleen Hill s finely wrought novel tells the story of four generations of an Irish-American family that has lived in the same house for almost a century. Grieving the death of her mother and the imminent sale of the house, the narrator sets out to re-create the hidden, intimate lives of those who came before. Through a series of vignettes she conjures a family devastated in each generation by the loss of a child.

The narrator s project, inspired at the outset by silences that extend backward to the untold story of the Famine, turns into a vast exploration of loss, inheritance, and the nature of memory. In a voice both stark and lyrical, the narrator calls up transformative, often tragic, moments in lives that have shaped her own. Remembering a past she never knew, she hopes to release from its sway the vanishing present.

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Excerpt

That July there had been a spate of clear days and nights so softly luminous that people in Morningside Heights where I live hung around on stoops and street corners during the long twilights, reluctant to go inside. Returning home alone one evening, I passed a dark-haired young man who was stopped in his tracks, staring west toward the Hudson a few blocks away. The rays of the setting sun were lying in low even shafts along 120th Street, and the ginkgos lining the sidewalk floated so eerily in the light you might have thought a storm was brewing. A gleaming shadow was pressed against the far side of each tree, outlining its bright edge of silver bark and shining foolish limbs. It seemed you could see straight through each leaf to its ragged underside, could see around each nubby branch to its hidden spurs and stems. Not a stir of air, not the faintest breeze, and yet the dreamy fan leaves appeared to be advancing in the light, to be turning toward a moment still to come.
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Discussion Questions

1. Why is Deirdre of particular importance to the narrator?
What do you think are the sources of Kate’s silence around her own mother?
2. Most of the characters in the book have to confront the question of forgiveness, both of themselves and of people close to them. For which characters did you find this confrontation most striking?
3. How does the theme of a lost child play itself out in each generation? How do you account for the guilt that accompanies the loss of these children?
4. The house is in some sense a haunted house. How is the legacy of the Irish Famine and the silences surrounding it implicated? Do you feel that events your ancestors experienced - but that you know little about - have affected your own life?
5. Why do you think this book of uncovered memory is structured as it is? How does one character’s story open into another’s? What is it that holds the stories together?
6. The voice that questions the narrator might be said to be an internal self. Do you think this is true? Are there other possibilities?
7. How do the journals and diaries written by some of the characters affect your understanding of them? What about the photographs and images?
8. The narrator’s lack of sympathy for the character, Willie, changes as she attempts to understand his story. What do you think makes the difference?
9. How is the book the story of this country at large as well as the story of one immigrant group? Do you find your own story in it?
10. A reviewer described the end of the book as an exorcism. Does it seem that way to you?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Author Kathleen Hill's web site

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