Reading Group Guide
Reading Group Guide
The Used World
By Haven Kimmel
Discussion Points
1. The preface briefly introduces the three main characters and their triangular connection. What do Hazel, Claudia, and Rebekah have in common? In what ways are they different?
2. On page 8, Amos Townsend tells Claudia, "I see people all the time who say they are lonely but it's a code word for something else." Do you think this is true in Claudia's case? Why or why not? What is loneliness a code word for in the cases of Hazel and Rebekah?
3. Hazel describes vague memories of a world of women, the men all gone off to war. Are the women in this novel different with one another than they are in the presence of men?
4. What is the significance of the flashback to 1950 on page 15, where Hazel has her nighttime encounter with the owl? Where else does this symbol appear in the novel?
5. How do physical descriptions and personality quirks help define the characters in The Used World? Identify these descriptions and explain what they reveal about each character.
6. The women in this novel all struggle with motherhood, either through their relationships to their actual mothers or through becoming mothers themselves. Describe the ways in which motherhood poses challenges and otherwise changes these characters.
7. Claudia laments the demise of the Old Mother -- exemplified by her mother, Ludie -- and the rise of the New Mother, represented by her sister, Millie. What does Claudia mean by these distinctions? How else does this Old/New paradigm work its way into the novel?
8. Because the point of view shifts to let the reader inside the minds of Hazel, Claudia, and Rebekah, we getan opportunity to learn how each woman sees the others. Do you think they have accurate impressions of one another? Why or why not? How does each see herself in comparison to how the others see her?
9. On page 185, Red says, "Children. It don't matter if they're good or bad, they break your heart every time." Compare and contrast the relationships of siblings Hazel and Edie and Claudia and Millie; consider also single children Rebekah and Peter. How have these relationships or lack thereof shaped the adulthoods of these characters? How do you think the presence or absence of siblings changes each character's relationship with his or her parents?
10. The flashback to 1969 on page 210 describes Hazel's attic vision of Marguerite Henrietta Post, the former owner of their house, and her murdered baby. What is the significance of this vision and the information it gives Hazel? How does it influence Hazel's actions as an adult? Why does Hazel return to the attic to uncover the baby's bones near the end of the novel?
11. When did you first guess who Finney's mystery man was? What clues were there leading up to this plot twist? Does this information change your opinion of him? Why or why not?
12. Hazel seems to expect a lot of Claudia. "I thought you were the most courageous person I'd ever known. I trusted you with a baby and a dog and a pregnant woman," she says on page 267. Why do you think she does this? When did you first suspect Claudia was a lesbian? What clued you in to the fact that Hazel was, too? How do you think this commonality influences Hazel's actions with regard to telling "a story called Claudia"?
13. Though The Used World is primarily about women, there is much said about the duties of men as fathers, friends, and lovers. Identify the male characters in this novel and describe how they do or do not successfully fulfill their roles. Discuss the consequences their actions have for the women in their care.
14. In two generations, there are two relationships threatened by the presence of a man: Hazel and Finney struggle with the specter of Vernon, while Peter comes between Claudia and Rebekah. Compare and contrast these two triangles of love and despair.
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Rebekah Shook's family is a member of the Prophetic Mission, a small church subset of the Pentecostal movement. Though each local church has its own evangelical perspective, you can find out more about the basic worldview of this Christian tradition by visiting religioustolerance.org/chr_pent.htm.
2. Hazel's Used World Emporium is a wonderland of objects that bring the past to life for its employees and visitors, displaying its wares in arrangements that mimic actual rooms. Try visiting a local antique mall with your fellow book club members for a firsthand experience of being enveloped by the past.
3. Most modern towns have spread and evolved as their populations have expanded, but it's still possible to enjoy "Main Street America" disguised as the newly renovated, hipper downtown areas in many cities across the country. Check out your own city's downtown for historic sites and walking tours you can share with your book club members.
4. The author, Haven Kimmel, has written two memoirs and two other novels. To learn more about her and her work, visit her official website, havenkimmel.com and her fan site, purityofheart.org.
Forewords & Introductions
Reading Group Guide
The Used WorldBy Haven Kimmel
Discussion Points1. The preface briefly introduces the three main characters and their triangular connection. What do Hazel, Claudia, and Rebekah have in common? In what ways are they different?
2. On page 8, Amos Townsend tells Claudia, "I see people all the time who say they are lonely but it's a code word for something else." Do you think this is true in Claudia's case? Why or why not? What is loneliness a code word for in the cases of Hazel and Rebekah?
3. Hazel describes vague memories of a world of women, the men all gone off to war. Are the women in this novel different with one another than they are in the presence of men?
4. What is the significance of the flashback to 1950 on page 15, where Hazel has her nighttime encounter with the owl? Where else does this symbol appear in the novel?
5. How do physical descriptions and personality quirks help define the characters in
The Used World? Identify these descriptions and explain what they reveal about each character.
6. The women in this novel all struggle with motherhood, either through their relationships to their actual mothers or through becoming mothers themselves. Describe the ways in which motherhood poses challenges and otherwise changes these characters.
7. Claudia laments the demise of the Old Mother -- exemplified by her mother, Ludie -- and the rise of the New Mother, represented by her sister, Millie. What does Claudia mean by these distinctions? How else does this Old/New paradigm work its way into the novel?
8. Because the point of view shifts to let the reader inside the minds of Hazel, Claudia, andRebekah, we get an opportunity to learn how each woman sees the others. Do you think they have accurate impressions of one another? Why or why not? How does each see herself in comparison to how the others see her?
9. On page 185, Red says, "Children. It don't matter if they're good or bad, they break your heart every time." Compare and contrast the relationships of siblings Hazel and Edie and Claudia and Millie; consider also single children Rebekah and Peter. How have these relationships or lack thereof shaped the adulthoods of these characters? How do you think the presence or absence of siblings changes each character's relationship with his or her parents?
10. The flashback to 1969 on page 210 describes Hazel's attic vision of Marguerite Henrietta Post, the former owner of their house, and her murdered baby. What is the significance of this vision and the information it gives Hazel? How does it influence Hazel's actions as an adult? Why does Hazel return to the attic to uncover the baby's bones near the end of the novel?
11. When did you first guess who Finney's mystery man was? What clues were there leading up to this plot twist? Does this information change your opinion of him? Why or why not?
12. Hazel seems to expect a lot of Claudia. "I thought you were the most courageous person I'd ever known. I trusted you with a baby and a dog and a pregnant woman," she says on page 267. Why do you think she does this? When did you first suspect Claudia was a lesbian? What clued you in to the fact that Hazel was, too? How do you think this commonality influences Hazel's actions with regard to telling "a story called Claudia"?
13. Though
The Used World is primarily about women, there is much said about the duties of men as fathers, friends, and lovers. Identify the male characters in this novel and describe how they do or do not successfully fulfill their roles. Discuss the consequences their actions have for the women in their care.
14. In two generations, there are two relationships threatened by the presence of a man: Hazel and Finney struggle with the specter of Vernon, while Peter comes between Claudia and Rebekah. Compare and contrast these two triangles of love and despair.
Enhance Your Book Club1. Rebekah Shook's family is a member of the Prophetic Mission, a small church subset of the Pentecostal movement. Though each local church has its own evangelical perspective, you can find out more about the basic worldview of this Christian tradition by visiting religioustolerance.org/chr_pent.htm.
2. Hazel's Used World Emporium is a wonderland of objects that bring the past to life for its employees and visitors, displaying its wares in arrangements that mimic actual rooms. Try visiting a local antique mall with your fellow book club members for a firsthand experience of being enveloped by the past.
3. Most modern towns have spread and evolved as their populations have expanded, but it's still possible to enjoy "Main Street America" disguised as the newly renovated, hipper downtown areas in many cities across the country. Check out your own city's downtown for historic sites and walking tours you can share with your book club members.
4. The author, Haven Kimmel, has written two memoirs and two other novels. To learn more about her and her work, visit her official website, havenkimmel.com and her fan site, purityofheart.org.
Read an Excerpt
Preface
Claudia Modjeski stood before a full-length mirror in the bedroom she'd inherited from her mother, pointing the gun in her right hand -- a Colt .44 Single Action Army with a nickel finish and a walnut grip -- at her reflected image. The mirror showed nothing above Claudia's shoulders, because the designation 'full-length' turned out to be as arbitrary as 'one-size.' It may have fit plenty, but it didn't fit her. The .44 was a collector's gun, a cowboy's gun purchased at a weapons show she'd attended with Hazel Hunnicutt last Christmas, without bothering to explain to Hazel (or to herself) why she thought she needed it.
She sat down heavily on the end of her mother's bed. Ludie Modjeski's bed, in Ludie's room. The gun rested in Claudia's slack hand. She had put it away the night before because eliminating the specificity that was Claudia meant erasing all that remained of her mother in this world, what was ambered in Claudia's memory: Christmas, for instance, and the hard candies Ludie used to make each year. There were peppermint ribbons, pink with white stripes. There were spearmint trees and horehound drops covered with sugar crystals. The recipes, the choreography of her mother's steps across the kitchen, an infinity of moments remembered only by her daughter, those too would die.
But tonight she would put the gun back in its case because of the headless cowboy she'd seen in the mirror. Her pajama bottoms had come from the estate of an old man; the top snap had broken, so they were being held closed with a safety pin. The cuffs fell a good two inches above her shins, and when she sat down the washed-thin flannel rode up so vigorously, herrevealed legs looked as shocked and naked as refugees from a flash flood. In place of a pajama top, she wore a blue chenille sweater so large that had it been unraveled, there would have been enough yarn to fashion into a yurt. Claudia had looked in her mirror and heard Ludie say, a high, hidden laugh in her voice, Poor old thing, and wasn't it the truth, which didn't make living any easier.
The Colt had no safety mechanism, other than the traditional way it was loaded: a bullet in the first chamber, second chamber empty, four more bullets. Always five, never six. She put the gun away, listened to the radiators throughout the house click and sigh and generally give up their heat with reluctance. But give up they did, and so did Claudia, at least for one more night, this December 15.
Rebekah Shook lay uneasy in the house of her father, Vernon, in an old part of town, the place farmers moved after the banks had foreclosed and the factories were still hiring. She slept like a foreign traveler in a room too small for the giants of her past: the songs, the language, the native dress. Awake, she rarely understood where she was or what she was doing or if she passed for normal, and in dreams she traversed a featureless, pastel landscape that undulated beneath her feet. She looked for her mother, Ruth, who (like Ludie) was dead and gone and could not be conjured; she searched for her family, the triangle of herself and her parents. There were tones that never rang clear, distant lights that were never fully lit and never entirely extinguished. She remembered she had taken a lover, but had not seen him in twenty-eight...no, thirty-one days. Thirty-one days was either no time at all or quite long indeed, and to try to determine which she woke herself up and began counting, then drifted off again and lost her place. Once she had been thought dear, a treasure, the little red-haired Holiness girl whose laughter sparkled like light on a lake; now she stood outside the gates of her father's Prophecy, asleep inside his house. Her hair tumbled across her pillow and over the edge of the bed: a flame.
* * *Only Hazel Hunnicutt slept soundly, cats claiming space all around her. The proprietor of Hazel Hunnicutt's Used World Emporium -- the station at the end of the line for objects that sometimes appeared tricked into visiting there -- often dreamed of the stars, although she never counted them. Her nighttime ephemera included Mercury in retrograde; Saturn in the trine position (a fork in the hand of an old man whose dinner is, in the end, all of us); the Lion, the Virgin, the Scorpion; and figures of the cardinal, the banal, the venal. Hazel was the oldest of the three women by twenty years; she was their patron, and the pause in their conversation. Only she still had a mother (although Hazel would have argued it is mothers who have us); only she could predict the coming weather, having noticed the spill of a white afghan in booth #43 and the billowing of a man's white shirt as he stepped from the front of her store into the heat of the back. White white white. The color of purity and wedding gowns and rooms in the underworld where girls will not eat, but also just whiteness for its own sake. If Hazel were awake she would argue for logic's razor and say that the absence of color is what it is, or what it isn't. But she slept. Her hand twitched slightly, a gesture that would raise the instruments in an orchestra, and her cat Mao could not help but leap at the hand, but he did not bite.
In the Used World Emporium itself, nothing lived, nothing moved, but the air was thick with expectancy nonetheless. It was a cavernous space, filled with the castoffs of countless lives, as much a grave in its way as any ruin. The black eyes of the rocking horses glittered like the eyes of a carp; the ivory keys of an old piano were once the tusks of an African elephant. The racks of period clothing hung motionless, wineskins to be filled with a new vintage. The bottles, the bellows, the genuine horse-drawn sleigh now bedecked with bells and garlands: these were not stories. They were not ideas. They were just objects, consistent so far from moment to moment, waiting for daybreak like everything else.
It was mid-December in Jonah, Indiana, a place where Fate can be decided by the weather, and a storm was gathering overhead.
Copyright © 2007 by Haven Kimmel
Read a Sample Chapter
The Used World
A Novel
By Haven Kimmel Free Press
Copyright © 2007 Haven Kimmel
All right reserved. ISBN: 9780743247788
Preface
Claudia Modjeski stood before a full-length mirror in the bedroom she'd inherited from her mother, pointing the gun in her right hand -- a Colt .44 Single Action Army with a nickel finish and a walnut grip -- at her reflected image. The mirror showed nothing above Claudia's shoulders, because the designation 'full-length' turned out to be as arbitrary as 'one-size.' It may have fit plenty, but it didn't fit her. The .44 was a collector's gun, a cowboy's gun purchased at a weapons show she'd attended with Hazel Hunnicutt last Christmas, without bothering to explain to Hazel (or to herself) why she thought she needed it.
She sat down heavily on the end of her mother's bed. Ludie Modjeski's bed, in Ludie's room. The gun rested in Claudia's slack hand. She had put it away the night before because eliminating the specificity that was Claudia meant erasing all that remained of her mother in this world, what was ambered in Claudia's memory: Christmas, for instance, and the hard candies Ludie used to make each year. There were peppermint ribbons, pink with white stripes. There were spearmint trees and horehound drops covered with sugar crystals. The recipes, the choreography of her mother's steps across the kitchen, an infinity of momentsremembered only by her daughter, those too would die.
But tonight she would put the gun back in its case because of the headless cowboy she'd seen in the mirror. Her pajama bottoms had come from the estate of an old man; the top snap had broken, so they were being held closed with a safety pin. The cuffs fell a good two inches above her shins, and when she sat down the washed-thin flannel rode up so vigorously, her revealed legs looked as shocked and naked as refugees from a flash flood. In place of a pajama top, she wore a blue chenille sweater so large that had it been unraveled, there would have been enough yarn to fashion into a yurt. Claudia had looked in her mirror and heard Ludie say, a high, hidden laugh in her voice, Poor old thing, and wasn't it the truth, which didn't make living any easier.
The Colt had no safety mechanism, other than the traditional way it was loaded: a bullet in the first chamber, second chamber empty, four more bullets. Always five, never six. She put the gun away, listened to the radiators throughout the house click and sigh and generally give up their heat with reluctance. But give up they did, and so did Claudia, at least for one more night, this December 15.
Rebekah Shook lay uneasy in the house of her father, Vernon, in an old part of town, the place farmers moved after the banks had foreclosed and the factories were still hiring. She slept like a foreign traveler in a room too small for the giants of her past: the songs, the language, the native dress. Awake, she rarely understood where she was or what she was doing or if she passed for normal, and in dreams she traversed a featureless, pastel landscape that undulated beneath her feet. She looked for her mother, Ruth, who (like Ludie) was dead and gone and could not be conjured; she searched for her family, the triangle of herself and her parents. There were tones that never rang clear, distant lights that were never fully lit and never entirely extinguished. She remembered she had taken a lover, but had not seen him in twenty-eight...no, thirty-one days. Thirty-one days was either no time at all or quite long indeed, and to try to determine which she woke herself up and began counting, then drifted off again and lost her place. Once she had been thought dear, a treasure, the little red-haired Holiness girl whose laughter sparkled like light on a lake; now she stood outside the gates of her father's Prophecy, asleep inside his house. Her hair tumbled across her pillow and over the edge of the bed: a flame.
* * *
Only Hazel Hunnicutt slept soundly, cats claiming space all around her. The proprietor of Hazel Hunnicutt's Used World Emporium -- the station at the end of the line for objects that sometimes appeared tricked into visiting there -- often dreamed of the stars, although she never counted them. Her nighttime ephemera included Mercury in retrograde; Saturn in the trine position (a fork in the hand of an old man whose dinner is, in the end, all of us); the Lion, the Virgin, the Scorpion; and figures of the cardinal, the banal, the venal. Hazel was the oldest of the three women by twenty years; she was their patron, and the pause in their conversation. Only she still had a mother (although Hazel would have argued it is mothers who have us); only she could predict the coming weather, having noticed the spill of a white afghan in booth #43 and the billowing of a man's white shirt as he stepped from the front of her store into the heat of the back. White white white. The color of purity and wedding gowns and rooms in the underworld where girls will not eat, but also just whiteness for its own sake. If Hazel were awake she would argue for logic's razor and say that the absence of color is what it is, or what it isn't. But she slept. Her hand twitched slightly, a gesture that would raise the instruments in an orchestra, and her cat Mao could not help but leap at the hand, but he did not bite.
In the Used World Emporium itself, nothing lived, nothing moved, but the air was thick with expectancy nonetheless. It was a cavernous space, filled with the castoffs of countless lives, as much a grave in its way as any ruin. The black eyes of the rocking horses glittered like the eyes of a carp; the ivory keys of an old piano were once the tusks of an African elephant. The racks of period clothing hung motionless, wineskins to be filled with a new vintage. The bottles, the bellows, the genuine horse-drawn sleigh now bedecked with bells and garlands: these were not stories. They were not ideas. They were just objects, consistent so far from moment to moment, waiting for daybreak like everything else.
It was mid-December in Jonah, Indiana, a place where Fate can be decided by the weather, and a storm was gathering overhead.
Copyright (c) 2007 by Haven Kimmel
Continues...
Excerpted from The Used World by Haven Kimmel Copyright © 2007 by Haven Kimmel. Excerpted by permission.
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