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Table of Contents
About The Book
Sensitive, bighearted, and achingly self-conscious, forty-year-old Aaron Englund long ago escaped the confinements of his Midwestern hometown, but he still feels like an outcast. After twenty years under the Pygmalion-like care of his older partner, Walter, Aaron at last decides it is time to take control of his own fate. But soon after establishing himself in San Francisco, Aaron sees that real freedom will not come until he has made peace with his memories of Mortonville, Minnesota—a cramped town whose four hundred souls form a constellation of Aaron’s childhood heartbreaks and hopes.
After Aaron’s father died in the town parade, it was the larger-than life misfits of his childhood who helped Aaron find his place in a world hostile to difference. But Aaron’s sense of rejection runs deep: when Aaron was seventeen, Dolores—his loving yet selfish and enigmatic mother—vanished one night. And when, all these years later, a new friend in San Francisco offers Aaron a way to locate his mother, his past and present collide, forcing Aaron to rethink his place in the world.
“Touching and often hilarious...Ostlund writes with acuity and refreshing honesty about the messy complexity of being a social animal in today’s world...” (Booklist, starred review). “Everything here aches, from the lucid prose to the sensitively treated characters to their beautiful and heartbreaking stories...An example of realism in its most potent iteration: not a nearly arranged plot orchestrated by an authorial god but an authentic, empathetic representation of life as it truly is” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). After the Parade is a glorious anthem for the outsider.
Reading Group Guide
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Introduction
Aaron Englund is in search of a new life in San Francisco. But before Aaron can begin his new life, he must leave his old one with Walter, his partner of twenty years. He does so by driving away in the dark of night—the same way Aaron’s mother abandoned him years earlier.
Aaron’s life is divided into a series of befores and afters. After Aaron’s father dies in a freak accident during a town parade when Aaron’s young and after Aaron’s mother abandons him at the age of seventeen, the changes in Aaron’s life are drastic. Even as an adult, the causes of these events—the befores—remain painful mysteries.
As Aaron struggles to settle into a new life in San Francisco, it becomes clear that until he has closure, he will not be able to move forward. When Aaron is unexpectedly given his mother’s address, he must decide if the pain of dredging up the past is worth the chance at a happier future. What follows is a stunning meditation on the ways the past shapes us and how we cannot move forward without first looking back.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. Discuss the significance of the title of the book. Did your interpretation of the title change as you read? In what ways and why?
2. Many years into Aaron and Walter’s relationship, Aaron finds “the Pygmalion aspect of their relationship…the hardest to shed.” (p. 21) How has Aaron’s relationship with Walter shaped him? After Aaron ends his relationship with Walter, Walter tells him “I saved you, Aaron.” (p. 5) Why does Walter say this to Aaron?
3. Ostlund begins After the Parade with two epigraphs. Discuss the significance of each. Do they enhance your reading of the book? If so, how?
4. Despite telling Aaron that Mortonville is “not a place for starting over,” (p. 110) Aaron’s mother, Dolores, chooses to move there after the death of her husband. Why does she do this? Is she right about Mortonville?
5. Why does Ostlund alternate between Aaron’s current perspective and his childhood? How does this shape the narrative?
6. Aaron’s mother tells him “I think about that every day, Aaron—how lucky I was to have that missionary visit our class.” (p. 125) Describe the missionary’s visit. What does Dolores learn as a result? Why is she so grateful for the experience?
7. Describe Aaron’s teaching style. Do you think he is a good teacher? Why has he chosen to teach?
8. As Aaron is leaving Walter “the thought came to him that he was like his mother: sneaking away with[out] saying good-bye, disappearing into the night.” (p. 9) In what other ways is Aaron like his mother?
9. When Aaron’s father has an outburst of anger during a family vacation, “Aaron and his mother got into the car. They said nothing because they know that silence was best in the aftermath of his father’s anger.” (p. 55) In what other ways does silence shape Aaron’s life and reactions to things?
10. Aaron learns that “unlikely friendships…were often the easiest to cultivate.” (p. 185) What other examples of “unlikely friendships” are there in the book? Why are these friendships “easiest” for Aaron?
11. Gloria tells Aaron that Clarence “hate nearly everyone, but especially children…. I always thought it had to do with their size, but after you left that day, he told me he thought you might group up to be ‘more bearable’ than most folks.” (p. 275) Why do you think that Clarence feels disdain for most of people? What is it about Aaron that Clarence responded to in a positive way?
12. Aaron “was not even sure that talking about the past helped. Maybe it did allow you to clarify things so that you could move on, or maybe it just kept pulling you backward.” (p. 295) What do you think? Is Aaron’s trip back into the past cathartic? What does he learn?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Clarence shows Aaron photographs from a book by Diane Arbus, telling him “[i]t is the photographer who has captured my interest.” (p. 133) Explore the work of Diane Arbus with your book club. What about Arbus’s work appeals to Clarence? What did you think about Arbus’s photographs?
2. References to Richard Hugo’s “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg” appear several times throughout After the Parade. Read the poem with your book club and discuss it.
3. Read the author’s short story collection, The Bigness of the World. In particular, read “All Boy” and compare the author’s use of closets in this story and in After the Parade.
The Rumpus Interview with Lori Ostlund
This interview first appeared on the Rumpus.net.
By Richard Russo
December 4th, 2015
Welcome to Guildtalk. For this exclusive series, the Rumpus has partnered with the Authors Guild to bring attention to exciting new voices in American literature. In each installment, an established Authors Guild member will choose an emerging talent or a largely unknown master to interview about writing, publishing, marketing, craft, and teaching. The result should broaden our understanding of what it means to live a literary life. It will also bring us together for a conversation about what it means to be a writer in the twenty-first century.
In this third installment, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Russo returns to talk to debut novelist Lori Ostlund, author of After the Parade. The book follows Aaron Englund, its protagonist, as he travels from San Francisco, California, to his childhood home of Mortonville, Minnesota, and back again; it contains a creative and surprising cast of characters, from a “sardonic, wheelchair–bound dwarf” to Aaron’s “kindly aunt,” who is “preoccupied with dreams of The Rapture.”
Lori Ostlund is also the author of a collection of short stories, The Bigness of the World, which won the University of Georgia Press’s Flannery O’Connor Award.
***
The Rumpus: A new Authors Guild survey shows that income for the majority of writers is down significantly from a decade ago (surveys in the UK and Canada reveal similar results), with many writers now living below the poverty line; that suggests that the writing life (as it is commonly understood—the ability to earn a living from writing) is much diminished. Give us a snapshot of your writer friends, especially the younger ones. How are they faring? Are they hopeful? Despairing? In addition to writing, what kind of jobs are they working at? How much time are they finding to write? Do they feel like they’ve missed the boat?
Lori Ostlund: I’ll begin with my own road to publishing, which is reflective of the general situation that many of my friends face, I think, though not entirely. I came to publishing (though not writing itself) late. My story collection, The Bigness of the World, came out when I was forty-four, and now, at fifty, I’m seeing the publication of my first novel. While so much has gone right for me, it took me this long to get published partly because my stories had a hard time finding their way out of the slush piles and partly because I was busy earning a living. I have spent twenty-plus years in the classroom, all of them adjuncting, and another seven as a small business owner in New Mexico. People are shocked when I tell them that the latter allowed far more writing time than the former, but it did, partly because business didn’t occupy my thoughts nonstop the way that teaching tends to (which probably also explains why the business didn’t last).
In 2008, I went on strike at the fly-by-night ESL school where I had been teaching since my partner (now wife) and I moved to San Francisco in 2005. I had taken a couple of years off from submitting work, wanting to focus on developing my voice without the pressure to publish, but when I began submitting again, I still had trouble landing stories. The strike ended badly, and that summer, jobless and despondent, I vowed to quit writing fiction and find a job that would reward me financially for my work ethic and writing ability: I decided to become a paralegal. I enrolled in a program and secured classes teaching developmental English, and in the way of such things, when I came home from the first day of classes, I had a voicemail from University of Georgia Press: my collection had won the Flannery O’Connor Award. At that time, I didn’t know other writers, except my partner, so I’d been stumbling toward publication blind. I didn’t do an MFA and knew little about publishing, nor did I think of writing in career terms. That is, it didn’t occur to me to think of the writing and teaching of fiction as a way to earn a living. Needless to say, I did not give up writing, nor do I imagine that I would have even without the Flannery news. I also did not become a paralegal, and today I continue on as an adjunct because I love teaching, though this means a low salary and no job security; I have healthcare only because my wife, who teaches high school, claims me on her plan.
I do know other writers now, and here is some of what I hear from them and see discussed on social media. Many want to teach creative writing, so the urgency to publish seems even greater to them because it is the means to both a writing and teaching career as well as a way to pay back student loans. In the meantime, many work as adjuncts and/or have teaching loads of 4/4 and even 5/5, all of which leaves little time for writing. Among my short story–writing friends, there is despair at the difficulty of getting a collection published, especially among those who do not see themselves as novelists. Writer friends talk increasingly about “building a platform” and are much more likely to engage their own publicists, which requires money. And among my older emerging-writer friends, there is the added frustration that publishing seems to reward youth. Overall, I think that writers run the gamut from hopeful to despairing, often on the same day.
Rumpus: Where did the idea for this novel come from?
Ostlund: I don’t think that the idea came from any one place but instead started in several places with ideas that steadily evolved and grew toward one another. The title, for example, refers to the fact that the father of the main character, Aaron, falls from a parade float, onto his head, and dies when Aaron is five. Years ago, I heard of someone dying in this way, and it struck me as at once tragic and humorous, an intersection of emotions that I am always drawn to.
Around fifteen years ago, I started writing about a boy who loses his father in this way and moves with his mother to a town of four hundred people in Minnesota. I grew up in a similarly sized town, a town that I left thirty-two years ago but which nonetheless has had a profound impact on how I see the world, and I found myself drawn to the question of why some people stay in a place where they feel different or unfulfilled, and why others leave. By then, I had come to understand Aaron, my main character. He was a boy more enamored of words than activity, a boy who is sensitive and fearful and lonely. The world can be particularly hard on boys like this, and I knew that part of Aaron’s story would be leaving but that he would find himself drawn to “misfits” and outsiders who could not.
By the time I realized this, I’d written around four hundred pages and Aaron was only in the second grade, so I set the book aside to think and to work on stories. At the time, we were closing our business in New Mexico and moving to San Francisco, where I returned to the ESL classroom, and so the idea for the present story came about because of the sudden turn that my own life was making at that time. My daily life and preoccupations generally have an osmosis-like relationship to my writing, so when I sat down to work on the book again, there was Aaron, moving to San Francisco and teaching ESL. Suddenly, the book had found its beginning point.
Rumpus: Did you think of Huck Finn at all when you were writing Aaron Englund? He has a wonderful innocence about him, and he seems to be surrounded by adults who would corrupt him if he’d let them.
Ostlund: I would like to answer yes, but the truth is that I did not think of Huck at all, though I’m delighted that you did.
Rumpus: Lots of your characters are confined in small spaces. Adult Aaron in his San Francisco apartment, his mother in the closet, Clarence in the clothes basket. Was that part of a conscious plan or just your subconscious at work?
Ostlund: I love this question the way that one often loves a question that points clearly back to something about one’s writing that one has missed. It had not occurred to me that confinement was one of my writing preoccupations. I am not fearful by nature, but I have my fears and silly phobias, most of which I deal with either by making fun of them in my writing (as is the case with my belly button and phone phobias) or by taking the stoic Midwestern approach and ignoring them. That said, I don’t like elevators or sitting in the dentist chair with people huddled over me or riding the subway during rush hour, all of which may have to do with a “game” that my brother used to play when we were young. When I was stretched out watching television, he would throw a beanbag chair on top of me and sit on it for the duration of the show while I screamed and cried and flailed around beneath it.
Speaking metaphorically, I think I have a fear of being trapped in one place, in the smallness of the world, which might account for the ease with which I can pick up and move. My parents owned a hardware store, so we almost never left that town of four hundred people, except to go once a year to the hardware convention in Minneapolis, two hours away. The first time I saw the ocean, I was twenty-four, in graduate school. During spring break, I drove twelve hours west, from where I was living in New Mexico, to Los Angeles. Years later, I attempted to put words to what I had felt, looking out at the Pacific, in my story collection The Bigness of the World. In the title story, a nanny says to her two young charges, “However can you expect to understand the bigness of the world if you do not see the ocean?” While I credit my wife, Anne, with handing me this line one afternoon as we looked out at the ocean here in Northern California, it expressed what I understood in 1989 as I encountered the ocean for the first time—half of my life ago now: there are those who look at the ocean and, overwhelmed by the world’s bigness, want only to hide, and there are those who feel comforted by the fact of its bigness. While I understand the former urge, the simple truth is that I am most often comforted by the bigness.
Rumpus: Aaron is an ESL teacher and his classroom sessions are some of my favorite parts of the book because his lessons in grammar provoke such profound discussions about human behavior. Were these always a part of the book and central to its structure?
Ostlund: When I develop a character, I always need to find a way in, and usually that happens by giving the character some of my traits or experiences. I’ve taught ESL among numerous other subjects, and as I wrote in my acknowledgments, teaching makes me feel useful and hopeful, both of which I need in order to continue writing, and it seemed to me that Aaron might feel similarly about teaching. Like Aaron, I embraced grammar because it struck me as necessary knowledge, as a way to feel more sure of myself, especially as I found myself living in a world much different than the one I grew up in. Like Aaron, I have allowed grammar to become a barrier to communication, including with my students. Also, I liked the idea of writing about the teaching of grammar because I knew that there was potential for humor as well as misunderstanding since the ESL classroom is fraught with both. I drew heavily on my own classroom experiences in writing those sections—the Culture Game, my students’ obsession with learning phrasal verbs, the trickiness of “hope” versus “wish.” My main concern was not to overdo the classroom stuff while still letting the students be more than just a two-dimensional chorus. I credit my editor, Liese Mayer, entirely with helping me find that balance.
Rumpus: The novel is also a story about stories, about the effect of stories on our lives. But often you choose to tell them in a non-linear fashion. You’ll get a big chunk of the story on page 250, and then, just when you’ve all but forgotten, you’ll get that story’s conclusion on page 325. That’s a high-risk, high-reward strategy. To this reader it paid huge dividends, but did it worry you that readers with ever-decreasing attention spans would get frustrated and bail on you?
Ostlund: For me, one of the benefits of not doing an MFA was that I wasn’t exposed to certain guidelines or best practices (to use a term that I dislike). I remember one of my thesis students asking me if she needed to follow a certain “rule” for novel structure, the gist of which I have since forgotten. I told her that since I didn’t know the rule, I could hardly enforce it. To be clear: I think that guidelines generally come from good intentions—our desire to quantify certain aspects of writing in order to make them easier to talk about and teach—and are helpful for a lot of writers, particularly in the early stages. However, I’ve learned that, for myself, considering guidelines or even talking with others about my ideas often has the opposite effect: it shuts doors in mind that I want left open. So, I’ve accepted that if my novel takes longer to write because I don’t know what I’m doing, then I’m okay with that.
With After the Parade, the structure came about because I was trying to mimic the way that memory works, particularly in times of transition or upheaval, when everything you see or hear triggers thoughts of the past, and these memories often come at you in fragments. Using structure, I wanted to create the feeling of being inside Aaron’s head as his memories crept up on him and then overwhelmed him, and I didn’t think that a more chronological structure would create that effect.
Rumpus: To me, After the Parade reads like a plea for understanding and empathy, for the surrender of our national angry, self-righteous default-mode. One of the reasons we like Aaron so much is that he seems to take people one at a time, which results in his having unlikely friendships, like the one with Bill, the detective. Would readers be correct in assuming that his creator shares Aaron’s extraordinary generosity, his determination not to classify people and judge them accordingly?
Ostlund: Thank you, Richard, for this generously worded question. I often refer to myself as a misanthrope, but the truth is that I like people a lot. I frequently lose hope for us human beings collectively, though rarely as individuals. Over the years, I’ve become increasingly sure that the truth almost never fits into one political box or ideology, and when we try to make it fit, we generally end up angry or self-righteous. Which is not to say that I don’t have strong political beliefs. I do, but I don’t lead with them when I write. In fact, a lot of times, I try to write against my own assumptions or beliefs, just to figure out what I’m missing.
Perhaps this is a reflection of the role that I play in the classroom, where my job is to make every student feel welcome and to help them figure out how best to express what they believe. Mainly, though, I think that it has to do with the fact that I was extremely shy well into my twenties, so I primarily got to know people by listening. Because I listened well, people—both friends and strangers—confided in me, and as I listened, I learned how rare a clear-cut situation was. I found my shyness quite painful then, but I think it has rewarded me as a writer. And as I tell my students, the things that make you a better person also make you a better writer: step outside your milieu, engage with strangers, find meaningful work, travel, read.
***
Award-winning novelist and screenwriter Richard Russo is the author of seven novels and two short story collections. Empire Falls won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2002. His most recent book is the memoir Elsewhere. He lives with his wife in Portland, Maine.
Product Details
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster (July 26, 2016)
- Length: 368 pages
- ISBN13: 9781476790114
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Raves and Reviews
"Lori Ostlund's wonderful novel After the Parade should come with a set of instructions: Be perfectly still. Listen carefully. Peer beneath every placid surface. Be alive to the possibility of wonder."
– Richard Russo, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel of Empire Falls
"A beautiful, elegant, honest, and compassionate book about trauma--and the difficult process through which we come to make sense of our lives."
– Hanya Yanighara, bestselling author of A Little Life
“[A] powerful debut novel…After the Parade provides considerable pleasure and emotional power. The teaching scenes, in which Aaron’s adult students ponder the mysteries of American English expressions and American customs, are warm, lively and engrossing. Ostlund richly evokes the rural Minnesota of Aaron’s childhood, where fine distinctions are made between Norwegians, Swedes and Finns; and, through Aaron, she casts a sharp eye on the generation of closeted gay men Walter and his friends belong to, men whose campiness both disguises and expresses their shame. Indeed, while we may be tempted to forget their struggles now that the Supreme Court has affirmed the right of gay men and lesbians to live with the same dignity as anybody else, After the Parade is a moving testament to those adults who contend with the damaging legacy of shame, and the nonconforming children who live in hostile families, trying to stay afloat and save their own lives.”
– New York Times Book Review
"A nearly perfect debut novel…Little Aaron is an imaginatively but realistically drawn child, a rarity in modern American fiction…and the book's end, with its sense of calm over closure, is perfect…Ostlund has won a passel of prizes for fiction featuring gay characters, but "After the Parade" is not "gay fiction." It is the story of an American man who must come to terms with his childhood. This sad, brilliant book is for all of us. Its Minnesota moments make it especially compelling for those of us who live here, especially if we grew up in small towns, where nothing, but everything, happened to us.”
– Minneapolis Star Tribune
“After the Parade is a sprawling, hefty narrative — deeply sad and profoundly moving — and its prose is like a second protagonist: Vibrant, living and practically lifting off the page."
– NPR (Best Books of 2015)
“I would recommend this book to anyone who loves character-driven fiction. It has the two things that I look for in a novel: wonderful writing and three-dimensional characters.”
– Nancy Pearl, KUOW
“After the Parade is remarkable both for the clarity and precision of Lori Ostlund's writing and her seemingly clairvoyant empathy for the misfits of the world: the different, the foreign, the gay, the bullied, the lonely. Aaron Englund is one of the most lovable, quietly heroic protagonists in recent memory, and Ostlund is a gem of a writer.”
– Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man
“Everything here aches, from the lucid prose to the sensitively treated characters to their beautiful and heartbreaking stories…An example of realism in its most potent iteration: not a nearly arranged plot orchestrated by an authorial god but an authentic, empathetic representation of life as it truly is.”
– Kirkus Reviews (STARRED)
“Achingly tender and wise, After the Parade is a heartfelt rumination on reconciling with the past and finding one’s place in the world that will resonate with anyone who has ever felt like an outsider.”
– Buzzfeed
“After the Parade is about leave-taking and homecoming, two instrumental actions that shape the life of every one of us. So rare does one see a wise writer like Lori Ostlund. Her insight comes from understanding her characters yet not dissecting them with a mental scalpel, and portraying life with its most complex and wondrous dynamics in time and space rather than inventing a static canvas. A new talent to celebrate!”
– Yiyun Li, author of The Vagrants and Kinder Than Solitude
“Luminous…Among the many fine fiction releases crowding the market this fall, Lori Ostlund's new novel stands out from the crowd…Plotted with originality and insight…Ostlund is a keen observer of humanity, and her characters come alive on the page…It’s Aaron, her quirky and surprisingly resilient protagonist, who makes this richly comic, quietly affecting novel engaging to the end.”
– San Jose Mercury News
“Ostlund's After the Parade is a generous and full-bodied novel, insightful and quietly provocative. Ostlund gives us characters we believe in and ache for, and she renders them with generosity and sparkling complexity. A confident, moving meditation on home and the construction, and reconstruction, of adult lives.”
– Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise and Almost Famous Women
“As full-bodied and full-blooded a novelas I’ve read in a long time. The prose sparkles, and the author is so smart andso kind to her characters: a rare combination and so refreshing to read.”
– Daniel Wallace, author of Big Fish and The Kings and Queens of Roam
“In her appealing debut, prizewinning short story writer Ostlund writes with acuity and refreshing honesty about the messy complexity of being a social animal in today’s world…Touching and often hilarious…Ostlund captures a child’s viewpoint impeccably: the awkwardness, the amusing misunderstandings of adults’ actions and conversations, and his unusual friendships with fellow misfits. Forming connections isn’t necessarily easier when you’re grown up, as the novel compassionately illustrates, but it’s worth getting up the courage to try.”
– Booklist, STARRED REVIEW
“On a sentence-by-sentence level, Ostlund’s prose is unmatched—smart, resonant, and imbued with beauty."
– Publishers Weekly
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