READERS GUIDE

Questions and Topics for Discussion

INTRODUCTION

In a quiet neighborhood a short train’s ride away from New York City, the residents of Sylvan Street celebrate the beginning of summer with an annual pool party at Billy and Maggie Cane’s, the wealthy and childless couple who live in the big house at the end of the street. The children of the other families get a chance to swim, and their parents can take advantage of their neighbors’ kindness and affluence. This summer, however, the pool party takes quite a turn – Billy discovers a case full of money in his pool shed, and suddenly all of the adults are faced with the idea that they, too, might have a chance at a life made easier by fast, cold cash.

The money is split among the households, and a pact is formed among recipients – not to spend the money conspicuously and arouse the suspicion of outsiders. This proves more difficult for some than others, but what proves true for every family is the power the money has over their relationships, careers, and even identities. The packs of hundred dollar bills, secreted away in each household, act as a catalyst to problems, issues, and resentments that had lain dormant up until now.

Part mystery novel, part morality play, Sylvan Street is a captivating novel written in eloquent prose. Through a large cast of characters and a page-turning plotline, Schupack explores what happens when our internal, private lives collide with our public, material ones, and when our wildest fantasies become very real, and inescapable.

DEBORAH SCHUPACK is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, as well as numerous short stories and newspaper and magazine articles. She runs a copywriting firm, King Street Creative, and lives in the Lower Hudson Valley.

Q. Sylvan Street has an entire neighborhood of protagonists. What challenges came with writing about so many central characters? Which characters were easiest to write, and which were the most difficult?

Once I came up with the idea for Sylvan Street and a neighborhood modeled on my own, households started to flourish in my head (although they are very different from my neighbors). My routine—and it was a pretty idyllic one, surely one I’ll never be able to duplicate—was to go on a midday bike ride around the hills and reservoirs of the Hudson Valley, and just let my mind write a scene. I often had a nugget in mind, and biking in the midst of my beloved scenery, the old rock walls, the neat idiosyncratic houses up here, was amazingly generative.

Many characters, and whole sets of characteristics, came to me pretty round and full. Sally, for instance. I heard her voice perfectly. I could listen closely to her and write a whole scene that way. Keith, too. His voice, his stance. I felt I could just write and write whenever Keith was around.

In the early part of the writing, I felt I knew a lot about Maggie and Billy’s relationship, but less about each character. In paying attention to developing them, I became more and more charmed by Billy. I fell not for his obvious charms but more for the humility and genuine talent I saw behind that pretty-boy exterior. He really grew on me. Shoshanna and Maggie were the most difficult to write—oddly, although maybe tellingly, because they are the ones closest to me, at least in terms of age and gender (though not, mercifully, circumstances).

The greatest challenge was to keep all the characters’ complexities and interactions within a tightly structured, lean story line. I ended up cutting some scenes that I’m really proud of but that slackened the plot. With the wonder of the internet, I’m able to “preserve” some of those scenes on my website and offer them to the reader in a different venue—adding to the reading experience, I hope, while not taking away from the shape and through line of the story.

Q. When you began writing the novel, did you have an idea of how the story would end, or how the characters would ultimately come to terms with what they’d done? Did you have an idea of what you wanted to say with the book, about morality and ethics, before you began writing it?

Oh, I have no idea even now what it says about morality and ethics. As a writer, I am firmly lodged within the world of the book, along with my characters. I rationalize or judge their decisions more as one of them would than as a reader might. Yes, I know intellectually that Daniel made a terrible choice to leave his wife for a married woman, not to mention a new mother. But that choice makes sense to me in the context of Daniel’s life. To the extent that I judge him wrathfully, it’s on Shoshanna’s behalf, and on behalf of his kids, rather than objectively. Same with Maggie. Because her transgression with April always felt inevitable to me, I cannot judge her—because I feel (and I feel she feels) that she couldn’t help it. Also, it seems to me the least of Maggie’s poor choices. As for Toomer and Nishal, I offer no statement about morality; I simply followed them up and down the street, and hoped they wouldn’t get caught!

One of the most fascinating aspects of publishing a novel is getting insight from readers into what you’ve written—hearing readers’ takes on the characters, their choices, their relationships, and broader notions like morality, themes and symbolism. But I think if you, as a writer, set out to say something about these things, you run the risk of being reductive or polemical. In any case, you surely lose an element of discovery that is key to good fiction.

As for the ending, I had a general sense that it would all come to no good. I knew I wanted the final scene on the street to look roughly like the prologue: a loose collection of folks at the bottom of the street with no particular agenda except to bear witness. By setting that scene—with its assorted secrets and lies, transgressions and progressions—against the prologue and its communal feeling of good will, I got a sense of what my characters’ journeys had been and what they had come to.

I did know—not from the beginning, but once I was, say, two-thirds done—that Nishal would prevail and might indeed be the (only) one launched into a better life. And I knew Toomer would have to be sacrificed; even he knew that.

Q. You live in the suburbs of New York City, but what made you set your story there? What motivated you, too, to have the tragedy of 9-11 play so prominently in the storylines of two of your characters?

I was in the middle of—okay, stuck in—another novel, which is set on an exotic island and is, in many ways, about foreign-ness. I think it made me homesick for where I was right then: I had just moved to this Hudson Valley cul-de-sac that I just loved, and I wanted to dwell in it.

I felt, and still do feel, very close to my neighbors—it’s an idyll on my little old-fashioned cul-de-sac. I was fascinated by this relationship that had just taken on such a central role in my daily life: that of neighbors. It’s such a particular balance of proximity and distance. It’s a tightrope, really. The closer you get, the more danger. And, actually, the more distant you drift, the more danger. In a relationship, in a marriage, you’re working in one direction (ideally speaking), toward intimacy. In a neighbor-relationship, you may get closer over time and circumstances, but you’re always striking a balance.

The 9/11 piece felt unavoidable to me; it is a definite before-and-after fault line—in America in general, I would think, but certainly in the New York area. Anyone who lives in or around New York can tell you exactly where they were that day.

I was very concerned with striking the right distance from 9/11—in terms of time, geography, the degree of adjacency or centrality to my characters’ lives. I was after not the bright, horrible glare of it, nor the pitch darkness of the immediate aftermath, but the oblique shadow that lasts and lasts. For Daniel and Keith, the day is certainly still with them, more in terms of longing than loss—a turnabout that I would never have predicted when I started to write about 9/11. In that severe clear, things were for once starkly defined, right and wrong, good and evil. For Daniel and Keith, their mission was, for a moment, clear. For Keith: be a cop, do your job, help. For Daniel: get the hell out, run, walk, survive.

Q. You’ve taught writing at the New School and Yale University. What’s the common bit of advice you give to beginning writers of prose fiction? What was the greatest or most useful piece of advice that you received when you began writing fiction?

The most frequent advice: be specific. Gabriel Garcia Marquez said, “If you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants in the sky, people will probably believe you.” It’s amazing how much better any piece of fiction (and, for that matter, nonfiction) gets when the writer takes care to be specific.

I have a writer-teacher friend who says she’s lately told her classes that she’s looking for something fascinating in each piece. It might be an image, a character, a piece of dialogue, a plot development, even just a detail or a turn of phrase. But there must be that fascination factor.

So, be specific and be fascinating.

One helpful piece of advice I still recall from graduate school was from E.L. Doctorow (though he himself may have borrowed it): Writing fiction is like driving at night with your headlights on. You can see only a limited distance ahead, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Q. What are you working on now?

I’m working on another novel, tentatively titled Penny: A Life, but I hesitate to say any more than that. It seems to be changing by the minute, so I don’t want to commit to anything! I’ve found this in previous novels (both finished and un-)—by describing them before they’re fully formed means I’ve made a commitment to the outside world that is in danger of falling apart within the novel itself. So, I don’t think I can commit to anything before the novel itself has committed to what it wants to be.

I liken writing a novel to trying to make a vessel out of clay at the same time you’re trying to fill the vessel with liquid. I feel like I’m in that stage right now—and if I commit to anything too soon, form, content, character, it could all fall apart on the wheel.

I did mention the title. A title seems a finished thing unto itself, and for some reason I feel I can bandy that about with impunity, even while the novel may or may not become what it is today. So, Penny: A Life. Who knows what it will be?

1. How does the prologue set the stage for what happens in the book? Why do you think Schupack chose an eclipse to open the novel?
    
2. What did you make of Billy and Janic’s friendship at the beginning of the book? Do you think the money Billy found changed that friendship? Or was it the art commission from the German collector and Billy’s newfound dedication to his sculpture?
    
3. What other friendships changed as a result of the found money? What did finding the money, sharing the money, and trying to hide and spend the money reveal about the quality of the friendships between these neighbors?
    
4. Similarly, what did it reveal about the married couples? None of the couples were unaffected by the money that came into their lives, but which relationship suffered the greatest? Did the money actually change their relationships, or did it allow problems that had always existed to surface?
    
5. Out of all of these characters, who did you like the most, and why? Who was the most complex? The most surprising? Who did you like the least?
    
6. Similarly, as the neighbors of Sylvan Street mulled over their separate money problems, whose predicament could you relate to the most? Which couple or character did you find most sympathetic in their “need” for the money?
    
7. Discuss the character Tasmin Toomer de Silva and his cousin, Nishal. Compare and contrast them with the residents of Sylvan Street – how were they intrinsically different, and how were they essentially the same in the ways they viewed the money? What was the effect of having their storyline parallel the storyline of the Sylvan Street residents as the novel progressed? Did you guess early on how Toomer and Nishal fit into the novel’s plot?
    
8. How surprised were you at what transpired between Maggie and April in Paris? Why do you think Maggie kissed April? Was it really Maggie’s attempt to jeopardize herself? What did it reveal about Maggie and her quest to become a mother? What did you think of Maggie’s own take on the incident with April?
    
9. When you learned that Billy and Maggie’s share of the money had been stolen, who did you suspect, and why? Was Nishal justified in taking the money? What did you think about what he did with the money, and the end of the book?
    
10. Compare and contrast the following characters: Billy and Ash, particularly in respect to their careers as artists; Shoshanna and Jen, as mothers of young children; and Keith and Daniel, as family men and husbands, and also as persons involved in the 9-11 tragedy at the World Trade Center. What is revealed through these parallel characters and their very different perspectives and actions?
     
11. What statements about money, morality, and even mortality do you think Schupack is making with this novel? What are the central themes of the book?
     
12. Based on the characters in the book and what happened to them as a result of finding this money, what would you do in a similar situation?