The Local News (44 page)
Authors: Miriam Gershow
1. In the first half of the book, what does Lydia believe happened to Danny? Based on her actions and attitudes, what might she think is the cause of her brother’s disappearance?
2. As Lydia is delivering Missing Person posters through the neighborhood in
Chapter 2
, she confesses, “In the beginning, the sympathetic attention of strangers was still intoxicating”. How does Lydia’s response to such attention change throughout the book? Does she remain, on some level, intoxicated by it?
3. What is your opinion of Danny’s friends—namely Tip and Lola—at the start of the book? Does your opinion of them change by the end?
4. What is Lydia’s motivation for getting involved in the investigation of Danny’s disappearance? Why is she so drawn to Denis?
5. What is the significance of the title? We see a newscast with Kirk Donovan early in the book. Are there other meanings to the idea of “the local news?”
6. How would have Lydia’s story been different if her parents had been “clingers” instead of “drifters”?
7. Through the Saturday searches, the school assembly, and shiva, among other times, we see the larger community respond to Danny’s disappearance. How would you characterize the community reaction? And is this reaction a balm or a burden for the Pasternak family and for Lydia, in particular?
8. How might the family and community have reacted differently were Lydia the one to disappear? Do you think there would have been as much drama, sentiment, and grief focused on her absence?
9. Lydia has three distinct best friends through her tenth-grade year—David Nelson, Lola Pepper, and Bayard. What does each of these friendships reveal about Lydia?
10. Danny left a strong impression on everybody around him. He was known as either a bully, a champion, a leader, or a struggling student. Who was the real Danny? How do all of these pieces of his personality fit together?
11. At the end of the interrogation scene between Denis and Lydia, Lydia watches him shrug and notes, “I had no idea what he meant by it.
Sorry, Charley? Whoops? All in a day’s work?”
. What do you think Denis means by the shrug—and by the entire interrogation? What are his motivations? Does he truly suspect Lydia of wrongdoing? Is he just doing his job or is something darker at work?
12. In the scene of the near car crash, Lydia says of her father’s sudden reassurances from the passenger seat: “I remembered a little bit that he loved me, so I loved him a little bit back”. Who has been most guilty of holding back their affections in the Pasternak family? Lydia? Her parents? All equally? Why do you suppose these affections have been so long suppressed?
13. Lydia spends much of her time estranged from other characters in the book. She’s most dramatically estranged from her parents, but soon also grows estranged from David Nelson, and eventually from Denis, Lola Pepper, Tip Reynolds, and everyone else who crosses her path during this year. Does she detach because of the extraordinary circumstances of her brother’s vanishing, or would she have been a profound loner even had Danny not disappeared?
14. There is a twelve-year gap between the year Danny goes missing and the reunion. What do you imagine Lydia’s life was like during those intervening years? How would she have fared during her final two years of high school? How successful were her college years? Her years in D.C.?
15. At the reunion, Lydia says the “real question” is who she and Danny would have been to each other as adults. Do you think their relationship would have changed or would it have remained the same as it had been in adolescence?
16. The idea of “drifting” comes up throughout the book. Lydia’s parents are classified as “drifters.” Lydia lets herself get swept along with Lola’s enthusiasm and Danny’s friends’ attention and Bayard’s bemused incomprehension of America. Lydia wants to feel a bit lost in the end and theorizes that Danny did too. What do you make of this theme of drifting? What is its significance in the story?
17. In the final car ride with David Nelson, Lydia reflects, “There was a part of me that had long curled in on itself and atrophied, perhaps beginning the day Danny slipped unremarkably out the front door, perhaps long before that. I could feel it unfurling now, churning through my watery belly and rising up my throat, coming out my nostrils and my mouth, dragon breath singeing my earlobes and making my face sweat even in the breeze of the AC”. What exactly is the part of Lydia that had curled up on itself and atrophied? And why is it opening now, in this car ride?
18. The novel ends when Lydia is twenty-eight. Do you think she has, at this point, “recovered” from Danny’s disappearance? Has her mother?
19. In the last sentence, Lydia’s thinking about Danny “jangling with possibility and promise, his future wide open”, and yet we know his future was grim. What do you think this ending might say about Lydia and her future?
M
IRIAM
G
ERSHOW
was born in Detroit, lived briefly in Philadelphia, and spent the majority of her childhood and adolescence in the Detroit suburbs. She graduated from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor with a degree in women’s studies before moving to Oregon in 1994. She has worked as a life skills trainer for runaway and homeless youth, an office manager, a short-order cook, and a state bureaucrat. She cofounded a nonprofit organization that advocated for the rights of recipients of public mental health services. In 2000, she returned to school at the University of Oregon, where she received her MFA in fiction.
Miriam is the recipient of the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, as well as an Oregon Literary Fellowship from Literary Arts in Portland, Oregon. Her stories have appeared in
The Georgia Review, Quarterly West, Black Warrior Review, Nimrod International Journal, The Journal
, and
Gulf Coast
, among other journals. Miriam’s stories have been listed in the 100 Other Distinguished Stories section of
The Best American Short Stories
2007
and have appeared in the 2008
Robert Olen Butler Prize Stories
. She is a past winner of the AWP Intro Journals award and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Miriam has taught fiction writing at the University of Wisconsin and Portland State University, as well as descriptive writing to gifted high school students through Johns Hopkins University. She currently lives in Eugene, Oregon, with her husband, where she is working on her next novel and teaching in the English department at the University of Oregon.
Copyright © 2009 by Miriam Gershow
All Rights Reserved
SPIEGEL & GRAU is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gershow, Miriam.
The local news: a novel / Miriam Gershow. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Young women—Fiction. 2. Brothers—Death—Fiction. 3. Grief-Fiction. 4. Loss (Psychology)—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. 6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.E785L63 2009
813′.6—dc22
2008033391
eISBN: 978-0-385-52970-9
v3.0_r2
