The Truest Pleasure (38 page)

1. The book begins with Ginny's remembrance of her first revival (
3
–13). It's at this revival that Ginny realizes her capacity for ecstatic worship, for speaking in tongues and receiving the “baptism of fire.” Is Ginny feeling something real, or is she just acting? Is Lily acting when she leaps up to shout? Are revivals more than religion for Ginny?

2. Ginny has an almost mystical view of nature (“It was like the water was talking, quoting scriptures or muttering a poem” [
125
]) while Tom is thoroughly grounded in the literal, physical reality of the world around him (“a fire is just a fire” [
79
]). What is it that attracts these two? Do you believe that opposites attract?

3. Tom is reluctant to talk about his poor relations, and chooses to expend all of his energy working Pa's land. What does land mean to Tom, and what has it meant to generations of Americans? His sister-in-law, Lily, also comes from poverty
(“she tried to act stylish and cultured I think to cover up how poor they had been” [
102
]), yet she and Tom don't get along. What is the source of their mutual resentment?

4. Tom sits up and takes notice when Locke expounds on his theory of work (“He had been listening all along, but really woke up when Locke started talking about raising yourself above yourself through work” [
43
]). When Ginny describes worship, she says, “I had to let go of myself to save myself” (
116
). Are Tom and Ginny describing the same feeling? What are they trying to escape? Is escape, in this context, a negative?

5. In Ginny's experience, is there common ground between religion and sex? If so, what is it? Is her notion blasphemous?

6. Morgan has re-created a world in which diseases are ever threatening and spectral, appearing without warning and for reasons only partially understood. How would your life be different if you knew you could be struck down at any moment by cholera, pneumonia, or typhoid fever? Would you live in fear, or would you just ignore it? How do Ginny and Tom face disease?

7. When Tom, Ginny, and Pa walk their land (
266
–75), are they doing more than settling a boundary dispute? What are they doing?

8. Does Ginny have reason to be jealous of Florrie? Should Florrie have known better than to become too familiar with
Tom (“What I noticed was how close they stood. Wasn't any need for grownup people to stand that close” [
219
])? If there is an attraction between Tom and Florrie, what is its source? How is Florrie different from Ginny?

9. When Ginny, Florrie, and Lily can peaches, it's practically an all-day affair (
155
–69). In the rural Appalachian world of Ginny and Tom, the daily work of living, whether it's making food or building roads or milking cows, occupies much of their time. Are our modern lives similarly occupied? How are they similar, and how are they different? Is this a sign of progress? Is it an improvement?

10. In her letter to Locke, Ginny describes her rapidly shifting moods (
242
–44). Is there a more modern term for what she is describing? How does she respond to her “dumps and blues and vapors”? Is there a positive aspect of her blue periods? When is Ginny most creative? When are you most creative?

11. Ginny says that “nothing makes a woman feel better than to pitch in and work alongside her husband.. . . A woman naturally comes to think like her husband sometimes” (
170
, 173). Do you believe this? Based on what you know of Ginny, is this really true for her? Is Ginny what you would call “an independent woman”?

12. Whom should we blame for the bitterness and fighting between Tom and Ginny? Tom, for trying to deny Ginny her revivals and isolating himself from her for long periods? Or
Ginny, for rising so far above herself while in the whirl of worship that she forgets where she is, even with a child on her hip and bullets in the air?

13. What does Ginny mean when she says, “But it is the time just before I fell in love with something that I look back on with such feeling. It is a kind of homesickness” (
243
). What do you think she means by this?

14. In the end, as Tom succumbs to typhoid fever, Ginny notices she has been changed: “It would not be fair to say that I was thrilled by Tom's sickness. And yet, the worse off he got the more sweetness I found in myself” (
308
). What has changed for Ginny? Had Tom lived, do you think Ginny would have been able to save the marriage? Would Tom have forgiven Ginny for attending Holiness services? When did you know Tom would die?

15. What was Ginny's truest pleasure? What was Tom's?

Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
Post Office Box 2225
Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27515-2225

a division of
WORKMAN PUBLISHING
225 Varick Street
New York, New York 10014

© 1995 by Robert Morgan.
All rights reserved.
Cover design by Janet Vicario.
Cover photo © Yuen Lee/Photonica.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for a previous edition of this work.

E-book ISBN 978-1-56512-891-0

ROBERT
MORGAN
was raised on his family's farm in the North Carolina mountains. He is the author of eleven books of poetry and eight books of fiction, including the bestselling novel
Gap Creek.
Winner of a 2007 Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature and the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Literary Award, he lives in Ithaca, New York, where he teaches at Cornell University. (Author photograph by Randi Anglin.)

PRAISE FOR ROBERT MORGAN'S
The Truest Pleasure

“Eloquent, wise, and heartbreaking.”

—Publishers Weekly,
starred review

“May well be his best work yet . . . Comes together in the end like a complex piece of music, gathering all its earlier themes into a crescendo that swells and washes over the reader.”

—Richmond Times-Dispatch

“
The Truest Pleasure
is an epic love story.”

—Lexington Herald-Leader

“Robert Morgan's writing is as clear and simple as befits farm life, yet it possesses a luminous poetic quality, a rough beauty hewn from the countryside and from old, forgotten ways.”

—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Morgan has succeeded in a most difficult endeavor, writing a thoroughly entertaining and even moving novel about a time, place, and people that most contemporary Americans know only as cartoons.”

—Booklist

“Morgan writes with infinite grace and understanding—his prose is never far from poetry. . . His picture of the region he knows so well by background and experience is clear and true, and his grasp of storytelling, that of a master.”

—The Anniston Star

“Wondrous . . . it is the author's wisdom and understanding of the characters that bring the incredible intensity and the truest pleasure to the reader of this stirring novel.”

—San Antonia Express-News

“So real are the characters that a reader can feel their frustration as they hide behind resentment and spite, keeping themselves apart until a calamity forces them together one last time.”

—The Orlando Sentinel

“His lovely tale of the trials of marriage is perfectly contemporary, a story of love found, lost and recovered, that is not sticky sweet, but earthy and solid, like homemade molasses.”

—Rapport

“Exquisitely detailed, compelling lyricism.”

—The State
(Columbia, SC)

“Beautifully written and extremely moving . . . Morgan has created that rarest of literary creatures.”

—The Commercial Appeal
(Memphis)

“A work of fiction as deep and rich and inset with memorable pictures is indeed one of the truest pleasures.”

—The News & Observer
(Raleigh, NC)

ALSO BY ROBERT MORGAN

FICTION

The Blue Valleys

The Mountains Won't Remember Us

The Hinterlands

Gap Creek

The Balm of Gilead Tree

This Rock

Brave Enemies

POETRY

Zirconia Poems

Red Owl

Land Diving

Trunk and Thicket

Groundwork

Bronze Age

At the Edge of the Orchard Country

Sigodlin

Green River: New and Selected Poems

Wild Peavines

Topsoil Road

The Strange Attractor: New and Selected Poems

October Crossing

NONFICTION

Good Measure: Essays, Interviews, and Notes on Poetry

Boone: A Biography

Lions of the West: Heroes and Villains of the Westward Expansion