This Must Be the Place

by Maggie O'Farrell

Overview

An irresistible love story, an unforgettable family. The New York Times bestselling author of The Marriage Portrait and Hamnet captures an extraordinary marriage with insight and laugh-out-loud humor in what Richard Russo calls “her breakout book.”
 
Daniel Sullivan leads a complicated life. A New Yorker living in the wilds of Ireland, he has children he never sees in California, a father he loathes in Brooklyn, and his wife, Claudette, is a reclusive ex–film star given to pulling a gun on anyone who ventures up their driveway. Together, they have made an idyllic life in the country, but a secret from Daniel’s past threatens to destroy their meticulously constructed and fiercely protected home. Shot through with humor and wisdom, This Must Be the Place is an irresistible love story that crisscrosses continents and time zones as it captures an extraordinary marriage, and an unforgettable family, with wit and deep affection.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780345804723
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/16/2017
Series:	Vintage Contemporaries
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	57,867
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

MAGGIE O'FARRELL was born in Northern Ireland in 1972. Her novels include Hamnet (winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award), After You’d Gone, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, The Hand That First Held Mine (winner of the Costa Novel Award), and Instructions for a Heatwave. She has also written a memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death. She lives in Edinburgh.

Read an Excerpt

This Must Be the Place

Maggie O'Farrell

The Strangest Feeling in My Legs

Daniel Donegal, 2010
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "This Must Be the Place"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Maggie O'Farrell.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

The Strangest Feeling in My Legs 3

I Am Not an Actress 35

Down at the Bottom of the Page 45

It's Really Very Simple 58

Auction Catalogue: Claudette Wells Memorabilia 75

How a Locksmith Must Feel 93

Enough Blue to Make 101

Where Am I and What Am I Doing Here? 112

The Kind of Place You'd Have Trouble Getting Out Of 119

Show Me Where ft Hurts 133

Severed Heads and Chemically Preserved Grouse 140

Something Only He Can See 167

The Tired Mind Is a Stovetop 182

Oxidized Copper Exactly 199

The Girl in Question 211

The Dark Oubliettes of the House 222

The Logical Loophole 237

A Jagged, Dangerous Mass of See 245

You Do What You Have to Do 253

When All the Tiny Lights Begin to Be Extinguished 265

Down the Line 278

And Who Are You? 284

Absolutely the Right Tree 294

An Unexpected Outcome 312

To Hang On, to Never Let Go 320

Always to Be Losing Things 331

Gold-Hatted, High-Bouncing Lover 353

For Dear Life 367

Acknowledgments 385

Reading Group Guide

The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of This Must Be the Place, the dazzling new novel by Maggie O’Farrell, acclaimed author of The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox.

1. For an epigraph, O’Farrell selected a quote from a poem by Louis MacNeice: “World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural.” What does this mean? Why do you think she chose it?

2. We see various parts of the story through the eyes of more than a dozen characters, jumping back and forth in time. How do their points of view build on one another?

3. Daniel introduces Claudette to readers by saying, “My wife, I should tell you, is crazy” (page 5). Now that you’ve read the entire novel, do you believe he means this?

4. Why does Daniel’s hearing Nicola Janks’s voice on the radio set the entire story in motion?

5. On page 31, Daniel thinks, “That same feeling of dislocation between what you thought you were doing and what you actually did envelops me as I sit there, as I press my elbows into the surface of my desk. All along I’d thought my life had been one thing, but it now seems it might have been something else entirely.” What does he mean? Is he right about that?

6. The first chapter from Claudette’s perspective, “I Am Not an Actress,” is told from the first-person plural and second-person point of view. Why do you think O’Farrell chose to tell that portion of the story like that? What effect does it have?

7. What does Niall’s eczema symbolize?

8. On page 59, Phoebe describes her feeling of dissociation, “Like I’ve been cut down the middle and I’m in two places at once, or I’m getting radio interference from somewhere, or I’m just a shadow.” On page 361, Marithe describes a similar sensation. Aside from sharing a father, what is the connection between the girls?

9. What do we learn from the auction catalog of Claudette’s memorabilia?

10. When Myrna advises Daniel to go home—“ʻLeave whatever this is alone. What can be gained from turning over old coals?’” (page 118)—why doesn’t he listen? What could have changed if he had?

11. Several chapters are told from the perspective of minor characters, such as Lenny and Maeve. How does this reset your understanding of what’s happening?

12. Pascaline describes Daniel as “someone who is so . . . different on the inside from how they are on the outside” (page 134). What does she mean by that?

13. Why does Daniel’s career as a linguist, studying the way language changes, matter to the story? What does it tell us about his character?

14. What propels Daniel to track down Todd?

15. Why didn’t Todd give Daniel’s letter to Nicola?

16. How does Teresa’s story affect your understanding of Daniel’s behavior? What purpose does her story serve in the novel as a whole?

17. On page 249, Ari describes his stammer as being like an iceberg, “ʻOnly a small part of it is visible, while under the water is a large, jagged, dangerous mass of ice.’” What else in the novel might be described this way?

18. Grief affects some characters more profoundly than others. What similarities do you see in how Daniel and Niall dealt with Phoebe’s death? And differences?

19. Why does Claudette react the way she does when Daniel tells her about Nicola?

20. In the interview transcript, Timou tells the interviewer that Claudette ran away because of “you.” “ʻNot you personally but what you stand for. You are the synecdoche for what she ran away from’” (page 314). What does this mean?

21. Rosalind’s chapter, “Always to Be Losing Things,” reads almost like a stand-alone short story. Why do you think O’Farrell chose to add another layer to the novel? What do we learn here?

22. Rosalind tells Daniel, “ʻI have a theory . . . that marriages end not because of something you did say but because of something you didn’t. All you have to do now is work out what it is’” (page 351). Does Daniel work this out? What does he say to Claudette?

23. Siblings—step-, half, full—play major roles in the novel. How might things have been different if, say, Lucas wasn’t always there for Claudette, or Ari didn’t eventually gain siblings of his own?

24. Toward the end of the novel, Daniel disarms Claudette by complimenting her on her parenting. Why does this have such an effect on her?

Editorial Reviews

Intensely absorbing. . . . O’Farrell writes novels in which you can happily lose yourself.” —NPR

“Compassionate. . . . Few contemporary writers equal Maggie O’Farrell’s gift for combining intricate, engrossing plots with full-bodied characterizations.” —The Washington Post
 
“Heartfelt.” —Vogue

“Marvelous, a contemporary and highly readable experiment whose ambitious structure both enacts and illuminates its central concern: what links and separates our 21st-century selves as we love, betray, blunder and soldier on (and back) through time.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“Extraordinary. . . . An engrossing novel . . . from a writer of impressive, perhaps masterly, skills.” —The Washington Times

From the Publisher

"World is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural," reads the epigraph to Maggie O'Farrell's seventh novel—a quote from Louis MacNeice's poem Snow that might serve as an appetizer (or warning, depending on your proclivities) for what's to come. This Must Be the Place is an "incorrigibly plural" book, offering its story through a kaleidoscopic proliferation of points of view, fractured chronologies and geographical shifts. The result…is marvelous, a contemporary and highly readable experiment whose ambitious structure both enacts and illuminates its central concern: what links and separates our 21st-century selves as we love, betray, blunder and soldier on (and back) through time…This wide-ranging novel has a vivid sense of play, despite its sometimes sober subject matter. Mostly, its experiments bear fruit.

The New York Times Book Review - Elizabeth Graver

★ 06/06/2016
O'Farrell (The Vainishing Act of Esme Lennox) spins a magical story in her new novel. On the surface, the story is about the unlikely meeting of Daniel, an American, and Claudette, a French-English former actress; the life they make together; the lives they lived before that. and their struggle to hold things together in the face of a secret from Daniel's past. But this description, though accurate, doesn't convey the depth of perception and detail. O'Farrell offers not just backstory, but surround-story, using first-, second- and third-person points of view to depict Daniel and Claudette's children, Daniel's mother, Claudette's brother and his wife, an ex-lover or two, a former friend, a bewildered assistant, and a woman Daniel meets by chance in the Bolivian high plains (who has her own story of betrayal). Across the present and the recent and more distant pasts, in Donegal, Ireland; Brooklyn; London; Sussex, England; and points south and east, relationships start, end, and last. There is enough possibility and randomness for three books, yet the story never feels overstuffed, and when it ends, the reader is stunned and grateful, relieved that in the face of all that can go (and have gone) wrong, some things have come right. (July)

Publishers Weekly

02/15/2016
Winner of the Betty Trask, Somerset Maugham, and Costa Novel awards, O'Farrell surfaced most recently with Instructions for a Heatwave, a shimmering, pull-you-in tale of family dynamics that the new novel should match. On holiday in Ireland to escape the stress of a terrible custody battle, young American professor Daniel Sullivan meets and falls in love with celebrated actress Claudette, who has left behind her sex-symbol days for a quiet life in the country. They end up living blissfully together and have two children of their own, but a secret from Daniel's past won't stay put.

Library Journal

★ 2016-05-03
A reclusive French film star, her American linguist husband, and their exes, parents, siblings, and children from various marriages feature in a sophisticated story about love. In an interlocking series of narratives set from 1944 to 2016, in places ranging from Sussex to Goa to Brooklyn, with titles like "The Tired Mind Is a Stovetop," "How a Locksmith Must Feel," and "When All the Tiny Lights Begin to Be Extinguished," British novelist O'Farrell (Instructions for A Heat Wave, 2013, etc.) unfolds the history of Daniel Sullivan and Claudette Wells. After being discovered in her early 20s by a Swedish film director, Claudette became an international icon and obsession on the most extreme scale possible—until the day she disappeared so completely she was assumed dead. Actually, she was hiding at a remote location in Donegal, where unhappy Berkeley professor Daniel, in Ireland to collect his grandfather's ashes, finds her broken down by the side of the road. From that literal and figurative intersection—as the title says, "this must be the place"—the story shoots out in many directions, past and future. Almost every character struggles with some burdensome disability—stuttering, eczema, anorexia, agoraphobia, infertility—and yet all have a magnetic star quality courtesy of O'Farrell's excellent characterizations. The scenario is glamorous, the writing is stylish, the globe-trotting almost dizzying, but there's a satisfying core of untempered feeling as well. Here's Daniel, reunited with Claudette after a separation: "I don't think our language contains a word with sufficient largesse or capacity to express the euphoria I feel as I bury my face in her hair….What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another." Or sister-in-law Maeve, upon picking up her adopted daughter in Chengdu, China: "If she was a liquid, she would drink her; if she was a gas, she would breather her in; if she was a pill, she would down her; a dress, she would wear her; a plate, she would lick her clean." Juicy and cool, this could be O'Farrell's U.S. breakthrough book.

Kirkus Reviews