READERS GUIDE

Questions and Topics for Discussion

1. Why do you think Lee steals? What is the “itch” that stealing scratches in her?

2. Do you think Edie was always using Lee, or was there genuine friendship there? What do you make of the bird metaphor Edie uses when describing why she chose to befriend Lee?

3. Lee is a quiet character, but is she passive?

4. The Station Master asks Lee about whether she understands the nature of desire. He says that she knows “what it is to want, perhaps even to yearn, but true desire is something else entirely.” What do you think differentiates desire from yearning? Is there something that Lee desires?

5. Tomi argues that paintings have aura because they are “one of a kind,” and that “to go and see a painting is a kind of pilgrimage, a ritual.” He also says that “aura is not in the thing but in the relationship between the viewer and the thing.” Do you agree with Tomi?

6. Do you think the Undertaker would have killed Tomi if he hadn’t drawn first? If Lee had returned With Hidden Noise, would the Société Anonyme have stopped pursuing her?

7. Of all the places to go, why do you think Lee chooses to return to Annie’s home when she is on the verge of death?

8. Do you think Lee’s mother knew that Steve was contacting the S.A. when Lee returned home to steal the car? Edie actively betrays Lee, whereas Lee’s mother betrays her perhaps through inaction. Which is worse? Are they both equally culpable?

9. Do you believe the Priest when he says that the S.A. was created with noble intentions? At what point did the S.A.’s obsession transform from benign to malevolent? And if the Priest’s theory about Marcel Duchamp’s work had proved correct, would the ends have justified the means?

10. Why do you think Lee chooses to keep her child?

11. Near the end of the novel, Lee returns to the abandoned aquarium to find Tomi’s body has disappeared. What do you think happened?

12. In the final scene, Lee finds in the Undertaker’s safe a single, small portrait of a young woman mixed in with a stack of stolen paintings. It is “the kind of work, Lee knew, that Duchamp would have dismissed as retinal.” Why do you think she takes it? Why this particular painting?

13. In the epigraph the author quotes Marcel Duchamp: “There is no solution, because there is no problem.” What do you make of this quote, after finishing the book?