April Meeting

Parrot and Olivier in America
by Peter Carey
Thursday, April 7th

7:30 PM at Alison's House

In this vivid and visceral work of historical fiction, two-time Booker Prize winner Peter Carey imagines the experiences of Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French political philosopher and author of Democracy in America. Carey brings de Tocqueville to life through the fictionalized character of Olivier de Garmont, a coddled and conceited French aristocrat. Olivier can only begin to grasp how the other half lives when forced to travel to the New World with John "Parrot" Larrit, a jaded survivor of lifelong hardship who can’t stand his young master who he is expected to spy on for the overprotective Maman Garmont back in Paris. Parrot and Olivier are a mid-nineteenth-century Oscar and Felix who represent the highest and lowest social registers of the Old World, yet find themselves unexpectedly pushed together in the New World. This odd couple’s stark differences in class and background, outlook and attitude—which are explored in alternating chapters narrated by each—are an ingenious conceit for presenting to contemporary readers the unique social experiment that was democracy in the early years of America.

The Democracy of Story-Telling: A Review of Parrot and Olivier in America by Colum McCann

Colum McCann is the author of Zoli, Dancer and, most recently, Let the Great World Spin, which won the National Book Award for Fiction and was the Amazon editors' pick as the Best Book of 2009. Read his review of Parrot and Olivier in America:

Faulkner famously wrote that the past is not dead, it's not even past. Every now and then a voice comes along to make the proper claim that nobody should forget and, even more radically, that nobody should be forgotten. These voices remind us that life is not yet written down: there is more to the story than meets the original word. Peter Carey has made an exquisite art of this sort of exploration into history and language: he smashes the atom of story-telling and comes up with quirks and quarks and quarries.

Carey is a rogue in the very best sense of the word: we are led by delight into a story that is bound to be profound, complex, tender, demanding, reckless, rigorous, charming, and, indeed, true. The value of good literature is that there's always another story to unfold. And in the unfolding, we are led by mystery towards discovery. Strap on the Carey boots, you’ll encounter new lands.

Carey's newest novel, Parrot and Olivier in America, is the story of two men who begin their lives on different ends of the human spectrum. Olivier is an aristocrat, born in France just after the Revolution, while Parrot is the son of an itinerant English printer. Part of Carey's provocative genius is that, even in the title, Parrot is named before Olivier: it’s the late 18th century and both men have swallowed the handcuffs of history. The servant and master. The dreamer and the dreamt. The men travel to America together, land in New York, embark on journeys that have both private and mythic overtones in the "you-knighted states." Ramshackle prisons. Convict ships. Broadway brawls. Land deals. Penal colonies. The small revolutions of human desire and failure.

The men develop an understanding and a friendship and a complexity that is a hallmark of a Carey novel: it is a wonder, as he points out, how many lives can be held within one single skin. The story is an examination of how landscape forms character, and the instinct towards that most democratic of things, story-telling. The task of fiction is to achieve is, by the power of the written word, a glimpse of truth that we didn't necessarily know was available to us. Part of Carey's genius is his ability to allow the reader to become the instigator of ideas. Parrot and Olivier in America is a fantastic riff on the servant/master relationship that can relate to Tocqueville, or to Hegel, or to Nietzsche’s "master morality," or indeed to the inanities of the Bush generation. Carey is well aware of the looking glass of history. Carey is here by being there. Whoever we are is whoever we have been. To label his work as "historical fiction" is to reduce the impact of what it means, and allows. He has his finger on the pulse. But not only that--he has shaped the vigorous graph of the beats.

I recall my first foray into the Carey world. It was back in the early 80's and I picked up a book called Bliss. Harry Joy's heart attack on his front lawn was my own in literature: it resuscitated me. From there I stepped into the lives of Oscar and Lucinda and then Jack Maggs. One of the greatest novels of the 20th century is The True History of the Kelly Gang which came in 2001 and is, without a doubt, an "adjectival" masterpiece. (I’m going to carry that book with me – along with DeLillo’s Underworld and Ondaatje’s Coming through Slaughter--to the gates of heaven or hell, whichever one will have me.) Recently Carey has written My Life as a Fake, Theft and His Illegal Self, all tours de force. What I love about his work is that it’s smart and funny at the same time. It’s always an adventure to read. I get transported out of myself, into a new world. The reader is allowed the dignity of exploration. It’s a form of travel, a manner of being away and remaining at home. I happen now to have the pleasure of teaching with Peter Carey at Hunter College in New York–-in fact, one of the reasons I’m at Hunter is that I wanted to teach alongside him, to shape my writing and reading, and to learn from him. I do so every time I read a book of his. He’s a master storyteller and a servant of language at the same time: he exists in that landscape with humility and grace. Parrot and Olivier in America is Peter Carey at his best: funny and tender and true.

Questions for Discussion:

1. Why does Carey choose to let Parrot and Olivier narrate their own stories? What makes their narrative voices so distinctive and engaging? What would be lost if the novel were told from a single perspective or by an omniscient narrator?

2. In what ways are Parrot and Olivier uniquely positioned to represent the huge social changes that were sweeping across Europe and America during the late-18th and early-19th centuries?

3. As he arrives in America, Olivier remarks that "the coast of Connecticut was the most shocking monument to avarice one could have ever witnessed, its ancient forests gone, smashed down and carted off for profit" (page 144). What other instances of American greed does he observe? What is the irony of a French aristocrat being appalled by the greed given free rein by American democracy?

4. Carey's prose style in Parrot and Olivier in America is vivid, richly metaphoric, and often extravagantly sensuous. When Parrot and Mathilde make up after a fight, for example, Parrot writes that her "hands were dragging at my clothes and her upturned face was filled with cooey dove and tiger rage. Her mouth was washed with tears. I ate her, drank her, boiled her, stroked her till she was like a lovely flapping fish and her hair was drenched and our eyes held and our skins slid off each other and we smelled like farm animals, seaweed, the tanneries upriver" (page 148). What are the pleasures of such writing? Where else in the novel does the writing reach this pitch of overflowing metaphor?

5. What does Olivier find to be the most appealing characteristics of America's fledgling democracy? What does he find most baffling?

6. Olivier is loosely based on Alexis de Tocqueville, the French aristocrat and author of the classicDemocracy in America. In what ways does Olivier resemble Tocqueville? In what ways does Carey depart from the historical figure to create his own character?

7. How do Parrot and Olivier initially regard each other? What are the major turning points that lead to their unlikely friendship? Why is their friendship possible only in America?

8. At the end of the novel, Olivier argues that America's young democracy "will not ripen well," that it will suffer the "tyranny of the majority" (page 378), and that the American people prefer their leaders to be just as undereducated as they are. He goes on to tell Parrot: "You will follow fur traders and woodsmen as your presidents, and they will be as barbarians at the head of armies, ignorant of geography and science, the leaders of a mob daily educated by a perfidious press which will make them so confident and ignorant that the only books on their shelves will be instruction manuals..." (page 380). Parrot attributes Olivier's harsh judgment to being heartbroken and having suffered as "a child of the awful guillotine" (page 380). But to what extent have Olivier's predictions come true? In what ways can this passage be read as a sly commentary on recent presidents and the sorry state of the press in America?

9. How are Olivier and Parrot differently affected by the leveling of class distinctions in America? Does Parrot benefit from being in America?

10. Why does Amelia break off her engagement to Olivier? Does she make the right decision? Is Olivier better off without her?

11. Of the banker Peek's mortgage loan to Mathilde, Parrot says: "For Peek had played Shylock with her, himself lending her the capital and loading her to breaking point with every type of extra fee, compulsory insurance, brokerage, advance payments on taxes I am still sure that he invented" (page 272). How surprising is it to see this version of today's housing boondoggles played out in in the 1830s? What is the significance of these schemes having such a long history?

12. After he discovers that Mathilde, Eckerd, and Watkins have burned down their house for insurance money, Parrot exclaims: "You are scoundrels, all of you." To which Mathilde replies: "We are artists. We have a right to live" (page 314). Is Parrot right to call them scoundrels? Or is Mathilde's point of view the more sympathetic one?

13. What are some of the funniest moments in Parrot and Olivier in America? What makes Carey's writing so humorous?

14. What does the novel add to our knowledge of the early period of American democracy by seeing it through the perspectives of Parrot and Olivier? In what ways does the era described in the novel mirror our own?