Leeway Cottage
A Guide for Reading Groups

“A gifted storyteller.” —New York Times Book Review “Few in America write as well about the family ties which both unite and torture us all.” —Pat Conroy

About Leeway Cottage
Hailed as a writer of extraordinary talent and vision, Beth Gutcheon is renowned for storylines that open our hearts and stir our imaginations. In this beautifully written tour de force of a novel, Gutcheon takes readers back to the coastal village of Dundee, Maine. There, in a Victorian summer house called Leeway Cottage, we witness the scenes of a long 20th century marriage.

In April of 1940, as the Nazis march into Denmark, a rich girl of the Dundee summer colony named Sydney Brant marries a gifted Danish pianist, Laurus Moss. They believe they are well-matched, as young lovers do, but almost at once, their views of the world and their marriage begin to diverge. Laurus’s beloved family is in Copenhagen, hostage to what the fortunes of Hitler’s war will bring, especially as his mother is Jewish. When Laurus chooses to leave Sydney in the fall of 1941 to help build a Danish Resistance from London, Sydney is dismayed. By the time they are reunited four years later, Laurus’s family and the reader have been through one of the most stirring stories of the war, Denmark’s courageous grass-roots rescue of virtually all 7000 of the country’s Jews.  Sydney in America has led a group knitting for the war effort, and had a baby.
In the decades to come, many people, especially their three grown children, will wonder if these two very different people understand each other at all. If they do, how do they stay together? Laurus likes to claim that in heaven you get to see the movie of your life, with all the blanks filled in.  In their old age Sydney fears what he might see and why he wants to know; their children fear he’ll die and there won’t be any movie.

But there will be.

We hope that the following questions and discussion topics will enhance your experience of this stirring epic. For more information about Beth Gutcheon and her previous works, visit www.bethgutcheon.com. For additional William Morrow reader’s guides, visit us at HYPERLINK "http://www.harpercollins.com" www.harpercollins.com.


Discussion Questions

1. How would you characterize the narrator’s voice, which sometimes echoes the sentiments of the characters? Describe the storyteller you envision as the novel unfolds. How does this narration compare to that of the many contributors to the Leeway Cottage Guest Book?

2. What do you make of the fact that Sydney’s musical talent does not evolve into a profession for her, despite her desire for an unconventional role in the world? Do she and Laurus have a similar appreciation for the arts? In what way does she embody a shifting chapter in American cultural history?

3. From joining the Resistance to integrating his local YMCA, Laurus is willing to be an agent for justice at every turn. From where does he derive this courage? How does his understanding of compassion compare to that of the other men in Sydney’s life, including her father, her son, and Neville?

4. Leeway Cottage captures the jealousy Candace feels regarding Sydney’s relationship with her father, an emotion Sydney comes to understand when she is a mother herself. Do you believe this dynamic is common or rare? What factors contribute to it?

5. What theories do you have about the reason for Berthe Brant’s suicide? Did her marriage to James mirror Sydney’s marriage to Laurus in any way?

6. Discuss the role of Gladdy and her family in Sydney’s life. What is the significance of Sydney and Laurus making their home at Leeway Cottage, rather than the house built by Sydney’s ancestors?

7. Were you surprised by Sydney’s infidelity with Neville? How do you interpret the scene in which she and Anselma have an awkward run-in with Gladdy? Do you consider Laurus to have been unfaithful to Sydney during the war?

8. What is the effect of Nina’s closing chapter and its position in the novel? Why did Sydney so dislike Nina? What is your understanding of the bequest Nina made to Hans Katz?

9. The novel focuses on many little-known aspects of Nazi occupation, such as Niels Bohr’s ultimatum and the Rosh Hashanah plot against Danish Jews. What history did you learn from Gutcheon’s telling of it? In what way is this history the centerpiece of the novel?

10. What was your reaction to the death of Sydney and Laurus? Do you believe their deaths were due to dementia and accident, or would it have been in character for them to take their own lives? Why do you think Laurus’ “movie” was about his sister, rather than about events that came later in his life?

11. In the last paragraph of her notes regarding the novel’s historical inspiration, the author writes “their marriage lasts, as did so many in their generation, but whether it actually worked, and if so, how, becomes the mystery at the heart of their family.” Gutcheon also reminds us of how little Sydney understands about her husband’s inner life. Is the Moss marriage a product of its generation? Do contemporary couples have different expectations of love and relationships?

12. How does Gutcheon’s use of Dundee in this novel compare to her use of it in More Than You Know? What makes Maine an appropriate setting for both books?

An Interview with Beth Gutcheon

1. How does the summer colony portrayed in Leeway Cottage
reflect your own sojourns to Maine? What draws you to this locale?

The summer colony in Dundee resembles many in coastal Maine, from Fortune’s Rocks to Bar Harbor, but that said, there are some such colonies where money and a certain plutocracy matter, and others founded by artists and academics where culture matters far more than cash. Dundee combines the qualities of both in a way that is its own.

What draws me personally to Maine is natural beauty, and the fact that in places it is like going back in time, and still possible to experience village life in a way that has disappeared elsewhere.

2. You have expressed gratitude to a tremendous number of sources for assisting your extensive research on the Danish Resistance. How many years in the making was this manuscript? What significance did this history have for you personally?

It’s five years since my last novel appeared, so I guess five years is the answer. It took two years of reading and coming at it from different directions to reach the point at which I could write a proposal, meaning I knew the setting, what it was about, the arc and the ending. Then a very concentrated year’s work to write from the beginning through the Danish section, before actually going to Denmark, two more months to finish a first draft, then a year and a half of rewriting. What it means for me personally, is, I hope, the same thing it means for the reader. But I always hope that.

3. The novel contains many vivid details about classical music and the process of training to become a professional musician. How did you acquire such knowledge of this field?

I chose the piano for Laurus because it’s the only instrument I can remotely play, and I wouldn’t say that I play so much as I use the instrument as an aide in a specialized kind of reading. You understand a piece of music quite differently if you read it while actually trying to hit the notes than if you only listen to it. But for Laurus’ professional life and repertoire I relied on Jerri Witt, a beautiful pianist who is also a particularly skillful reader of both music and prose. When Laurus teaches piano, he is channeling Jerri. Sydney’s vocal training I learned from books.

4. How do the relationships described in Leeway Cottage, particularly those between mothers and daughters, compare to those in your other novels?

Both of my Dundee novels, More Than You Know and Leeway Cottage, have intensely painful mother-daughter relationships, but the personalities involved are so different it felt like exploring different phenomena. In the two mother-daughter relationships in More Than You Know, my sympathy was all with the daughters, whereas I have sympathy for Sydney, up to a point. In this book I was trying simply to understand her from the inside out, whether I liked her behavior or not. Her daughters have to take care of themselves in this novel (although their innings are coming.)

On this subject, I wonder how many readers of Leeway recognize that Jimmy’s mad bad girlfriend Franny is the daughter of Hannah from More Than You Know.

5. Laurus Moss believes that when you die, you’ll see the “movie” of your life with all the blanks filled in. Do you share Laurus’ belief?

Not exactly. But you don’t choose such a strange way to make a living as to sit alone in a room your whole adult life writing about made-up people if you don’t find that curiosity, about the way the world really works, about why people do what they do, love what they love, become what they become, is a very powerful force. Writing novels is an extended response to such curiosity, perhaps analogous to trying to play music in order to understand what it’s made of.

6. What are you writing these days?

I’m circling around a novel that follows Leeway Cottage, in which the three grown Moss children inherit the house together. Inheritance politics are interesting, perhaps particularly so when siblings have not been treated even-handedly while the parents were in life. But also, when my father died, a friend of mine who had grieved terribly for his parents surprised me greatly by saying “No one tells you that there’s also something good about being an orphan. You own yourself in the universe in a way you never can while you have a parent living.” I’m looking forward to seeing what happens to Eleanor, Monica and Jimmy when they own themselves in the universe.

About the Author
Beth Gutcheon grew up in western Pennsylvania and earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in English literature from Harvard. Her six previous novels include Still Missing, which was made into the feature film Without a Trace. She has also written several film scripts, and the narration for a feature-length documentary on the Kirov ballet school, The Children of Theatre Street, which was nominated for an Academy Award. She has spent most of her adult life in New York City, except for sojourns in San Francisco and on the coast of Maine.

Also by Beth Gutcheon
More Than You Know
Five Fortunes
Saying Grace
Domestic Pleasures
Still Missing
The New Girls

LEEWAY COTTAGE

By: Beth Gutcheon

William Morrow
ISBN: 0060539054
EAN: 9780060539054
Carton: 20
$24.95

On Sale: 5/3/05