Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

From the Publisher

National Bestseller

Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year
 
Kate Atkinson’s dazzling debut novel is a deeply moving story of family heartbreak and happiness.
 
Ruby Lennox begins narrating her life at the moment of conception, and from there takes us on a whirlwind tour of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of an English girl determined to learn about her family and its secrets.

Fiction Digest

From the moment Ruby Lennox announces her own conception with the shout, "I exist!"—an event she attributes to the five pints of bitter her father drank—it is clear she won't leave anything out of the account of her Yorkshire family. She describes her great-grandmother's affair with a French photographer, her mother's dashed dreams of Hollywood glamor and her sister's unsuccessful attempt to upstage the queen of England. A first novel.
Synopsis copyright Fiction Digest

Megan Harlan

In her offbeat, playful, and often poignant first novel, the young British writer Kate Atkinson offers us the voice of a jubilant, irreverent narrator, Ruby Lennox, who at once celebrates and mercilessly skewers her middle-class English family. From the moment of her conception in York in 1951 (the novel is smartly launched with the exclamation, "I exist!"), Ruby casts a frank and omniscient eye on her disjointed clan, viewing with growing alarm her distant, philandering father George, her profoundly irritable mother Bunty, and her two emotionally overwhelmed sisters. Life for the Lennox clan revolves around the family petshop, the occasional tragedy (such as when the petshop burns down), and visits with a bevy of eccentric relatives. Atkinson, who has won the UK's prestigious Ian St. James Award for her short stories, seamlessly alternates this normal, workaday world with darker family secrets -- including an odd "feeling of something long forgotten" that will haunt Ruby throughout her life.

Through a series of lengthy "footnotes" that follow each chapter, Atkinson also recounts tales drawn from over a century of the family's history -- tracing the passage of oddities and flawed traits from one generation to the next. A few of these work as colorful snapshots, as when Ruby's great-grandmother runs away with a French magician, or when we learn that the Second World War, for Bunty, was not so much a matter of getting a husband as acquiring a personality. But the majority of the tales (such as the one in which her grandmother buys new boots after the Boer War), do little to illuminate the more compelling modern-day narrative. Worse still, they lack Ruby's clever voice. In the end, Atkinson is so successful in creating her wry, witty central character that any other perspective seems like a digression we don't want to follow. -- Salon

Hilary Mantel

"Delivers its jokes and tradgedies as efficiently as Dickens once delivered his, though Atkinson has a gameplan more sophisticated than Dickens....will dazzle readers for years to come." - The Long Review of Books

Ben MacIntyre

"Remarkable...full of the grimness, grit, and grandeur of Yorkshire life...one of the funnies books to come out of Britain in years." -- The New York Times Book Review

Georgia Jones-Davis

"Stunning...out Copperfield's David Copperfield's....The power has such storytelling, a treasure chest bursting with the painful, pitiful, sad, always fascinating details of the most ordinary of lives." -- The Los Angeles Times

Product Details

• ISBN: 0312150601
  
• ISBN-13: 9780312150600
• Format: Paperback, 333pp
• Publisher: Picador USA
• Pub. Date: November 1999
• Edition Description: REV
• Sales Rank: 8,409

• Reading Group Guide

Reading Group Guide

2. More than one reviewer compared Behind the Scenes at the Museum to Tristram Shandy and to the works of Marcel Proust and Charles Dickens.

3. What might these novels have in common? How does Kate Atkinson update or expand upon the earlier books' use of narration and history?

4. One of Atkinson's innovations is her use of footnotes. Why do you think she adopted this non-fiction technique in a novel?

5. Although this novel is very much about a specific time and place, it has been embraced by audiences in twelve countries, in as many languages.

6. What gives Behind the Scenes at the Museum such a universal appeal?

7. What is the meaning of the book's title?

8. What other fictional narrators does Ruby Lennox bring to mind?

9. What does Behind the Scenes at the Museum say about women's roles and opportunities in the family and in the world at large?

10. What do the four generations of women in Ruby's family have in common?

11. Behind the Scenes at the Museum generated controversy in England when a critic called it "anti-family." How would you defend the book against this charge? What other novels, now considered classics, might have had to face this sort of accusation?

Kate Atkinson, in her own words:

How would you summarize Behind the Scenes at the Museum?

"Almost impossible to do (it has a very complex structure). It's the story of Ruby Lennox from birth to the age of 40, her family, and the secrets hidden in the family's story. It also contains flashbacks to other members of the family -- in the past -- and so builds up a story/family tree that spans four generations. It's about history, time, loss, coincidence, self-knowledge. (It's also about cupboards -- but no one seems to notice that!)"

What was the inspiration for your book?

"A photograph of my great-grandmother. The silver teaspoon (an event that really happened)."

Who are your favorite authors? What authors have most influenced your work?

"Anne Tyler, Jane Austen, Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Hoffman, Margaret Atwood, Henry James, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, F. Scott Fitzgerald. Most influential -- Jane Austen and Kurt Vonnegut."

What did you do before your novel was published?

"University tutor, legal secretary, welfare benefits administrator, home help, creative literature tutor, supervising home visit service to the homebound and elderly, chambermaid, community education tutor -- anything and everything!"