Our next book is "Suite Française" by
Irène Némirovsky.
Meeting in San Francisco on Saturday, October 13.
What a great book club we had on Saturday! We had a surprise guest - Art's sister from New York, Eileen, who had read the book about a year ago.
There were two aspects of the book that we didn't get to touch on. We never talked about the fabulous costs involved in getting John to the hospital and treating Quintana over an extended period. I know the Dunne-Didions were wealthy from their involvement in Hollywood (there were hints that they weren't exactly hurting for money even before the script-doctoring days) but it must have cost a fortune to medi-evac Quintana across the country and treat her for six months at the Rusk Institute (anything with the word institute in the title is going to cost some bucks).
We also didn't talk much about the difference between how she treated the memory of John and how she treated her daughter. I know that when the book was being written she expected her daughter to recover and live so there is a fuller treatment of her relationship with John. But I think I detected testiness, irritability with her daughter's illness. Several times in the book she mentions that she had to push Quintana out on her own again to help her recover. Did I misread that as Didion's inability to focus on the grave situation her daughter was in while investing so much in grieving for John? Was it part of her "magical thinking" that she couldn't understand how close to death her daughter was even while she was getting clues from every doctor?
