Introduction

Editorial Review

In A Window Across the River, author Brian Morton raises a question most writers ask themselves at some point: is it OK to follow your muse when the artistic result may hurt your loved ones?

Nora struggles constantly with this issue--it seems her best characters are always based on the less than attractive qualities of close friends and family. With first-hand knowledge of the havoc this can wreak, she finds herself stuck in a writer's block (and a stagnant relationship) and decides to contact an old love. When Nora reaches out to him, Isaac is having his own creative difficulties, worrying that his artistic integrity has plummeted since he can't seem to find anything he wants to photograph any more. The artists' reconnection is inspiring for their work, but threatens to ruin their relationship.

There isn't much action here--most pages are filled with the internal thoughts of Nora and Isaac. We meet a lot of walk-on characters, whose sole purpose seems to be getting us out of the main characters' heads for a moment. But in the end, the story is an engaging one, filled with funny insights about relationships ("when our lovers try to leave us, we suddenly become lawyers"), and driven by two compelling characters we come to know inside and out. --Brangien Davis

Excerpt

1
SOMETIMES YOU LOSE TOUCH with people for no good reason, even people you love. Nora had lost touch with Isaac five years ago, but he kept coming back to her mind. He would appear to her in dreams (usually looking as if he was disappointed in her); things he'd said to her long ago would bob up into her thoughts; and sometimes when she was in a bookstore she'd drift over to the photography section to see if he'd put out another book. Through year after year of silence, she carried on a conversation with him in her mind. ... view entire excerpt...

Discussion Questions

Questions from Publisher's Reading Guide:

Q> Who's telling the story in A Window Across the River? Comment on the novel's narrator(s), its defining perspective(s), or main point(s) of view. How, if at all, do they echo or enhance the narrative as a whole?

Q> In chapter 6, Isaac wonders: "When had men become women and women become men?" Do you agree with his take on the confusion of modern-day masculine and feminine identities? What other views does author Brian Morton offer throughout the book on the sexes and their distinctions--that is, on how men and women distinctly see and shape the world today?

Q> Discuss the theme of responsibility in this novel. What forms and qualities does responsibility assume? And how, over the course of the book, is this key concept defined and/or understood by Nora, Isaac, Billie, and Renee? And what about the related theme of trust?

Q> One of the primary things Nora and Isaac have in common is that they're both artists. How do these two characters think about art, work, and the nature of creativity? Are their notions and experiences of the artist's life fundamentally similar or different? Explain.

Q> Examine the novel as a satire of intellectual pretentiousness, aesthetic phoniness, professional solipsism, and the like--looking especially at Benjamin and Nadine and at the insulated worlds that they respectively inhabit.

Q> Discuss the book's title. If it is a metaphor, what might it mean, stand for, or suggest? Also, address the recurrent presence of dreams and memories throughout A Window Across the River. To what extent are these characters governed by their inner voices, private reveries, or interior selves? And, along the same lines, what sort of tone does this novel exhibit--realistic, instructive, magical, symbolic, or otherwise?

Q> Explore how A Window Across the River deals with the idea of futility--in art, work, life, relationships, etc. In particular, how does Isaac ultimately come to understand the pointlessness surrounding us?

Q> "Them lady poets must not marry, pal." Why is this quotation from the poetry of John Berryman so important to the novel? Who and what does it refer to here, both specifically and generally?

Q> Reflecting on the journey made by Nora across the full arc of Morton's narrative, what conflicts exist between being an artist and caring for others? For example, why does she keep working on the "Gabriel" story when she knows it will eventually and certainly hurt Isaac? And how, if at all, does the novel depict such conflicts as surmountable?

Q> At the end of chapter 43, Nora is confronted by a "hip-looking" young pediatric nurse who asks her, "Who's your child?" Nora responds perplexingly: "You are." What does she mean by this remark?

Q> Describe the novel's ending. The scene that finishes chapter 44--and the book itself--basically ends in media res. How do you think the rest of this scene plays out? Why? And what about the rest of the story of Nora and Isaac?

Q> Consider setting in A Window Across the River. What role does New York City play in these proceedings? Moreover, discuss the novel as a New York love story, comparing and contrasting it with other novels, stories, and movies you've encountered within this ever-popular category.



Copyright © 2004 Harcourt, Inc.

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