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Discussion
Questions
1. The original title for this novel was Leavings, before the author
changed it to Shadow Play. The word "leavings" can mean "things left
behind," or it can refer to people leaving other people; it can even refer
to waste. How would you relate these different kinds of leavings to each
other in the plot of the novel? If something is left behind, or forgotten or
discarded, is its loss always a source of grief or sorrow, or does its
absence ever confer a certain kind of freedom?
2. In the classic nineteenth-century German short novel Peter Schlemihl (1813)
by Adalbert von Chamisso, the protagonist makes a deal with the devil. He
sells his shadow for riches but is mocked thereafter by other people in his
community for being different—having no shadow—and so his riches do
him no good. How can this novel be read as a modern version of von Chamisso's
tale, and in what sense does Wyatt lose his shadow? Who or what is his
shadow, and would you say that he ever gets it back?
3. In this novel there appears to be a division in gender roles that grows
wider from the midpoint of the story onward. Wyatt, Cyril, and Schwartzwalder
seem to be concerned with one set of principles, and, in their very different
ways, Jeanne, Susan, Pooh, and Ellen seem to be concerned with another. The
men think a great deal about appearances (Schwartzwalder at one point says
that appearances are not deceiving), and the women think a great deal about
whatever lies behind the appearances. Jeanne becomes so disaffected and
distracted from common language that she begins to make up her own words, her
neologisms such as "corilineal." In your reading of the novel, what are
Jeanne and Ellen searching for, and would you argue that they find it?
4. In several recent American novels, such as Don DeLillo's White Noise,
Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, Jonathan Franzen's Strong Motion,
and this novel, there is a preoccupation with the price Americans may be
paying for prosperity, and a concern for those who are particularly vulnerable
to making compromises for the sake of short-term gains. A critic might argue
that these books are part of a genre of the contemporary "pollution-novel."
Indeed, the price of such prosperity may be paid by individuals and by
communities as a whole, and all of these novels (Shadow Play included)
make an effort to picture a community. How does Shadow Play portray
the community of Five Oaks, or its other, smaller, communities, including the
various families portrayed within it, starting with the family that Wyatt
runs away from in Chapter One?
5. After Cyril's death, Wyatt goes through a spell in which he is "not
himself." How would you account for his behavior during the time when he
misbehaves? If he has been an upstanding, solid citizen (even something of a
conformist) up to this point, what has he become?
6. Shadow Play contains several stop-time moments, including the
narrative-spiral in Chapter One, the moments of frozen time in Wyatt's meal
with Cyril in Chapter Fourteen, and such moments grow pronounced and more
frequent as the novel progresses, especially in those scenes that include
Ellen. What is the effect of these freeze-frames, these moments of lost time
and time-spirals, on the characters themselves? What sort of psychological
conditions appear to give rise to them?
7. A considerable part of Shadow Play is devoted to the faiths people
live by and the elusiveness of God, and, perhaps in a metaphorical sense,
salvation and loss. A recurring dramatic image in the novel has to do with
drowning, and the novel continually goes back to images of water, both as
liquid (with Wyatt and Cyril) and as solid (the story that Ellen tells Cyril
about the face in the ice in Chapter Seventeen). If there is a common thread
running through these episodes, how would you define it? Why does the image
of water turn up so often? How are these characters lost, and how are they
saved, if indeed they are saved?
8. In Cervantes' Don Quixote, the hero, crazed by his reading of
medieval romances, goes on a solitary quest to correct injustice and to
rescue those he feels are most in need of rescue. But Don Quixote often sees
enemies that are not there; he hallucinates his own opposition. As a result,
there are constant dramatic ironies at work in his story. Is that also the
case in Shadow Play? Has Wyatt become crazed in his effort to right
the wrongs that he sees, or does he simply see what no one else does, a
genuine menace? If he wishes to correct a social injustice, why doesn't he
try to incite social or political (i.e., group) action?
9. Geography seems to play a large role in this story, and there is a notable
shift when Wyatt moves his family, including his mother, from the Midwest to
Brooklyn at the end of the novel. In his meditation on New York, Wyatt
thinks of its "pleasing luminous wreckage." He sees this wreckage as a
release and a relief. A release or a relief from what? Is there something
puritan or puritanical in the Midwest that he needs to escape? Or something
puritanical in himself?
10. Shadow plays are, in Asia, created by using stick-driven puppets, and in
this novel there are several references to plays and set-design and theater,
and to the recurring sense that some of the characters have that other people
are putting on a performance, an act. Jeanne feels that she herself is a
character in a play, that she is reciting lines that have been written for
her. How do you interpret this preoccupation with theater, actors, and
play-acting?
11. At the beginning of the novel we are introduced to the object that
Wyatt's father, Eugene, is making, and at the end this object turns up again,
an object that "never turned into anything recognizable . . . always . . .
part of Wyatt's inheritance . . . with no known use in the world." How do you
interpret this object and why is it a key to Wyatt's inheritance, to the
human being he has become?
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