It’s always interesting how much a book club discussion can change your perspective of a book. I’m almost always glad I went to a meeting, especially when I didn’t like a book.
There is a sequel to Frank’s story, Frank Derrick’s Holiday of a Lifetime. From the cover, it seems he makes it the US to visit his daughter. I read this book, but another member listened to the audio and said it was well done. This wasn’t the kind of book we normally read and I wasn’t surprised to hear that our organizer was a fan of the author’s music. If you knew us, you wouldn’t be surprised either.
The book spoke a lot about getting old and the loneliness that it can entail. The older members of our group identified more with frank. When his wife died, he was very lonely. One member has a British husband and she described for us that the attitude toward retirement is very different in the UK. In the US, retirement is a time to travel, indulge your hobbies, and volunteer. Her husband grew up feeling that retirement was when you sat down and waited to die. Thankfully, he’s changed his tune about retiring with an American bend to it.
One reader felt that Frank was a crotchety old man. If he’d been younger, we might not have described his pessimism and sarcasm this way, but because he’s older, the word seems to fit. Many suspected that he was in the early stages of dementia and wondered how that might have accounted for some of his behavior.
The structure of the book gives us only Frank’s perspective. We don’t get anything about how Kelly feels about him or how his daughter is dealing with being so far away. The daughter is a real mystery because we don’t know what’s going on in her house or in her head. She might well suspect that her father is perfectly fine after his accident and that’s why she didn’t come. Or she may really have a financial burden that makes her unable to come to visit. Some felt she was a neglectful daughter and others wondered if she knew her father all too well.
A lot of us wanted to talk about the scene where Frank went swimming. A few thought it was a suicide attempt. Others saw it as a baptismal scene where he was able to wash himself of the loneliness that had surrounded him since Sheila’s death and find a way to move forward. I’d never considered that it could be a suicide, I saw it as more of the latter.
One of our members works with the public in a similar fashion to Kelly. She’s run into situations where the patients didn’t want her to leave and were a lot like Frank in how much they clung to her. I was surprised to find out I was in a vast minority who thought Frank and Kelly’s beach trip was a bit too much. Others said Kelly was kind, and to think of it like a teacher who buys school supplies or clothes for kids who don’t have them. When she became more professional and formal with Frank at the end, it was because she realized they’d gotten too close and that she needed to put up a boundary. I’m still on the fence about this one.
We contemplated if Frank really thought he had a chance with Kelly. He did think she was going to kiss him at one point and he seemed nervous about being bathed by her but he doesn’t explicitly say much else about her. It seemed more like a schoolgirl crush than anything serious to me.
We meet again right after my Greece trip so everyone wished me happy travels. I’ll look forward to sharing my travels with this group.
Until next time, write on.
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Taking On a World of Words 