|
Fulcrum Book Club
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
A Man You Could Love
1. The lead epigraph of the novel is from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: “And could politics ever be an expression of love?” Does A Man You Could Love answer this question?
2. Why does the narrator, Gabe Bontempo, begin the story by talking about growing up on Shelter Island?
3. Why does Gabe make a connection between his dangerously unstable blood count and the on-again, off-again vote count in Florida after the 2000 election?
4. Although much of the novel’s action follows politics in Washington, D.C., and Gabe is from Shelter Island, the story begins and ends in Oregon. Is this really a novel of the West—or, rather, the Northwest?
5. Why is Gabe’s son, Patrick, important?
6. Why does the Vietnam War have such an impact on events in the novel that take place decades after the war’s end?
7. Mick Whelan becomes a politician almost accidentally. How does he grow and change during his years in Congress?
8. Gabe and Mick are both strongly attached to nature. Are their views of nature similar or, in some ways, very different?
9. The novel’s second epigraph quotes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s comment that “a willingness of the heart” is a strongly American quality. Which of the novel’s political characters possess this “willingness of the heart”?
10. Is there a man in the novel you, as the reader, could love?
11. What does the novel’s ending suggest about prospects for the future, both for Gabe, as an individual, and for the United States, as a country?
Buy it Today
| Book Club home |
|
