Reading Guide

Ticket to a Lonely Town depicts characters caught in processes of change, both personal and societal. Loneliness is often, but not inevitably, the result. The stories employ both first person and third person narration, and they range in tone from the contemplative to the humorous. You will want to think about how the characters cope with change, and about the degree to which they are able to control the courses of their lives.

Your book club may find the following questions and suggestions helpful in discussing Ticket to a LonelyTown.

1. The first three stories form a trilogy. How do the stories interact?
2. The narrator of “The Night, the Stars” tells of his personal change and sets that story against a backdrop of social change from the 1960s to the century’s end. Do you think that the references to social change enrich the narrator’s personal story?
3. Hugh thought that eventually we become all that we can be. Does the story dramatize the dangers of such thinking?
4. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the greatest sadness is the realization that one has turned something into nothing. Does this describe Hugh’s life?
5. How does Blake, in “Gliders,” compare to Hugh in the first story? Is Blake also making nothing of something, or is there hope for Blake?
6. Discuss Blake’s gliders as a metaphor for human relationships. Based on your reading of the other stories, is this a metaphor that the author himself accepts?
7. Is the three-part structure of “Leaving Jenny” effective or merely disjointed?
8. In how many ways is Jenny being left? How does the relationship between Jenny and her father compare to parental relationships in the first two stories in the trilogy?
9. Social change is a dominate theme in both “Pablo and I” and “The Celebrated Stripper,” but the author’s “take” on the theme seems to be different in the two stories. How do you reconcile these differences? Whose view of progress do you prefer, that of the narrator of “Pablo” or the narrator of “Stripper”?
10. Stories 5-7 form a second trilogy. How do the stories interact?
11. The narrator of “Ghosts in the Rain” abandons his aspirations to be a writer. Is his reconciliation to the world of business a success or a failure?
12. Notice that the “failed” writer of “Ghosts” reappears as the narrator of “A Tale of Autumn and Spring.” Might he be a better writer for having abandoned the romantic notions about literature that he held as a youth?
13. Billy and Tommy, the young men in “A Tale” and “Boy in the Attic,” thirst for transformation. Compare their needs to that of Debra in “Ghosts.”
14. Discuss the opposition between imagination and the demands of reality in stories 5-7. When can imagination become a liability? When is it essential to civilized living? In thinking about this last question, put yourself in the position of the man on the street in the final scene of “The Boy in the Attic.”
15. The plot of “The Last Bijou” forms a loop, with Andre leaving his apartment in the morning and circling back to it in the evening. Are there other loops in the story, either literal or metaphorical? How does Mary’s citation of the Theodore Roethke poem comment on the metaphor of the loop?
16. Perhaps Andre resists change more relentlessly than any other character in the collection. How do these stories help you think about the negotiations we all make between change vs. permanence, and between loyalty to the past vs. openness to the future?
17. The narrator of “The Night, the Stars” speaks from beyond the grave, and in “The Last Bijou” Andre imagines his deceased parents and sister whispering from their urns. If the fact of death contains a message to the living, what, according to the author of these stories, might that message be?
18. Bruce Henricksen has observed that all stories begin and end arbitrarily, since there are always other directions that a story might have taken. This theme is stated in “The Night, the Stars.” How is the theme followed throughout the rest of the stories in Ticket to a Lonely Town? For instance, does this theme help to explain the three-part structure of “Leaving Jenny”?