A Hole in the Universe
by Mary McGarry Morris
List Price: $24.95
Pages: 376
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 0670032883
Publisher: Viking Press
From the acclaimed author of Songs in Ordinary Time comes a moving new novel of forgiveness and redemption
When Oprah Winfrey chose Mary McGarry Morris's Songs in Ordinary Time for her book club, she brought more than a million new readers under the spell of a novelist praised by the Boston Sunday Globe as "brilliantly acute...remarkable" and by USA Today as "extraordinary."
In her stunning new novel, Morris introduces us to Gordon Loomis, who, after twenty-five years in jail for a senseless high school murder, cannot come to terms with the enormity of his crime and its violation of all that is good and right. A giant of a man, he has learned to preserve a polite low profile and meager expectations for his life. Pressed by his family to start over, he stubbornly refuses to leave his old home and neighborhood—now devastated by a quarter century of decline. A Hole in the Universe follows Gordon and the three women who care for him as they force him to confront real life.
Graced with Morris's signature command of dialogue, her talent for creating vivid, unforgettable characters, and her masterful use of suspense, A Hole in the Universe is an engrossing story from "one of the most skillful authors at work in America today" (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).
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1. What is the significance of Gordon remaining mute about the events that put him in prison? Why does he refuse to ease anyone's mind when he is questioned on the subject?
2. Discuss how you initially reacted to each of the characters and how your perception changed as their flaws and gifts were further revealed.
3. Gordon thinks of Delores: "Her charity was earthy and promiscuous. She had done it not for the girl's sake or his, but for her own. In helping others, she was pleasuring herself" (p. 178). How accurate do you think Gordon's statement is?
4. For Gordon, "It was vital that the few people in his life stay the same, to be who he needed them to be. He felt betrayed" (p. 148). How much of Gordon's powerful reaction to his brother's relationship with Jilly is based on the above statement and how much do you think it is simply an ethical response?
5. Why is Gordon so hard on all the people in his life? What in his history causes him to have little flexibility in his understanding of people's behavior?
6. There are various points in the novel in which each character's trajectory could have taken a different turn. Discuss different moments in the novel in which slight changes could have led to an entirely different result.
7. Could Dennis and Lisa's marriage have survived without Gordon's intervention? Are lies ever acceptable in marriage?
8. When Gordon pondered Delores's affair, he thought, "Acceptance was the greater struggle. Forgiveness was words, an easy chant to numb the sin, until with time the loss no longer really mattered or deserved its raw place in the heart" (p. 275). Why is it so difficult for Gordon to accept others' flaws? What is he saying about forgiveness? Why does he need to maintain that "raw place" in his heart? Are there some actions that are simply not forgivable?
9. Where do you see Gordon, Delores, and Jada five years later?
10. In real life, how would you react to Gordon? Do you think it's possible that you could understand and relate to someone like him, beyond the safety of a book cover?
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"Welcome to the world of Mary McGarry Morris—and what a world it is. Richly atmospheric, bristling with dialogue, so tightened with suspense it threatens to snap. Morris is a master at sympathetic portraits of those clinging to the peripheries of society. And nowhere is her talent more evident than in her extraordinary new novel, A Hole in the Universe. Morris [is] a superb storyteller...and [her] undeniable compassion for and intuitive understanding of her characters' lives make us know and care about these people, too."
—Washington Post
"Mary McGarry Morris has a brilliant talent for exploring the dark side of normalcy. She depicts damaged individuals in a way that makes them real, makes them hurt, makes you hope for them. A Hole in the Universe is McGarry Morris' fourth novel and latest achievement. The book is gritty and compelling, placing ordinary characters in extraordinary circumstances. McGarry Morris once again succeeds in shaking up notions of good, bad and normal. She looks desperation right in the eye and then moves it to the house next door, the person across the street. She reveals the inexplicable holes in our well-meaning universe."
—Rocky Mountain News
"Mary McGarry Morris is adept at creating characters we want to follow, even if their paths do take them to crime and jail. [A Hole in the Universe] is a compelling and poignant read about a man who doesn't believe he can start his life over, and the people around him who are determined to help him take the first steps."
—Chicago Tribune
