Adriane on the Edge Paul Mandelbaum

INTRODUCTION

Adriane Gelki wants desperately to cultivate a life of devil-may-care, transcendent abandon-the kind personified by her hero, Thelonious Monk. So far she has yet to manage it-to be completely abandoned-except by other people. Like her father, who killed himself when she was fourteen, and her mother, who followed suit ten years later. Now staring down thirty, Adriane's about to embark on a series of misadventures destined to change her life. In very short order, she manages to: get herself busted for flashing an undercover cop, break her court-appointed therapist's ribs, and ruin a perfectly pleasant orgy. For Adriane Gelki, things are finally starting to look up. This charming and incisive novel revels in the tragicomic journey of life-wherever it may lead.

ABOUT PAUL MANDELBAUM

Paul Mandelbaum is the author of Garrett in Wedlock, which won a James Michener/Copernicus Society of America Award from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His short stories have appeared in DoubleTake, Glimmer Train, Harvard Review, New England Review, The Southern Review, and other journals.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. The book opens with a quote from the acerbic wit, Dorothy Parker. What does it mean to be a “swooning soul”? What enraptures Adriane’s tragicomic soul—and what makes it faint away? In the Parker story, “The Little Hours,” from which the quote is taken, the narrator, suffering from insomnia at 4am, says that that her “entire scheme of living is out of joint”—she’s “the only living being awake while the rest of the world lies sleeping.” How is Adriane awakened, and jolted out of (and into) her life, by her haphazard quest for self-understanding?
   
2. When Adriane sketches out her personal ad, she is surprised that her boss Garrett suggests that she include “buoyant” on her list of qualities—but then adds it to the list just the same. Later, she lies on her personality test, asking why the test’s graders thought they were “entitled to the truth, her truth” [p. 46]. Why does Adriane add Garrett’s recommendation and lie on the test? What parts of our identity are too private, or too frightening, to share? What qualities encapsulate our sense of self?
   
3. Shelley Addison’s entrance, via motorcycle and wheelchair, as well as her attitude surprise Adriane and Joan. [p. 7] How does Shelley force them to rethink their ideas about identity, confidence, and sexuality?
   
4. As Adriane walks through Shalom Gardens Cemetery, she wonders how Noah chose which animals to take on the ark, and if he was motivated by altruism or shame [p. 43]. How does guilt enter into Adriane’s actions and choices? Why does she adopt her father’s gambling habit? How does luck play out in her life?
   
5. Adriane’s character—the daughter of two suicides—is conveyed in the book with a sense of abandon from the usual narratives of a tragedy: even her mother’s bitter suicide note is bathed in comic elements, from its storage in a back issue of Martha Stewart Living to her mother’s demand that Adriane keep the piano in tune [pp. 54-55]. The scene is set so that Adriane’s assumption that Dr. Harris has fallen asleep during her rambling confession is a credible and poignant punchline [p. 62]. What issues does the book tackle with comedy instead of tragedy? How does the author use comedy to illuminate Adriane’s character and understanding of the world?
   
6. During her encounters with the caper-pushing Luc and the polka-dancing Greg, Adriane explores, and sometimes avoids, her sense of self-consciousness––to the startling moment when an elderly woman mistakes Adriane for a mirror [p. 77]. How do Adriane’s uncertainty, fear of embarrassment, and identity shift in her parallel courtships?
   
7. Why does Adriane choose to go to North Avenue, and Roberta’s bar, to debut her Monk piano pieces? What assumptions and judgments does she make, and revisit, about the neighborhood? About Thelonious Monk? When she finally attains a state of “relaxed attention” that allows her to hit her own wrong notes, she is interrupted by a robbery—and even at gunpoint, refuses to release her focused state of mind [p. 106]. Why? Can a 50s black jazz legend be Adriane’s role model?
   
8. Adriane is not be a victim of domestic violence, as almost everyone suspects when she arrives at the hospital with her ear torn off, but she does feel like a victim. Why does Joan’s relationship with Molly bother Adriane so much? What does Adriane mean when she talks about “deserving love” [p. 118]? Does Adriane ever come to feel that she deserves love herself?
   
9. On her trip to Montreal, Adriane hunts through a blizzard to find the bagels that Joan wants to give Molly as an anniversary present, but then loses track of the bagels on her flight home. Why does she hold the airline, and not herself, responsible for their loss [p. 130]? Why does Adriane consider their delivery to Joan “the discharge of a profound trust” [p. 135]? What does her fight to replace the bagels say about her ideas of friendship?
   
10. Adriane says that the bond she has with Garrett “contained a kind of deformed beauty” that appears wrapped up in their individual needs for attention [p. 141]. Why does she consider this desire to be both deformed and beautiful? How does it compare to the attention Adriane and Jeremy pay to each other after she realizes that the fourth-grader has not taken her very personal paperweight [p. 158]? To the attention she wants from the other people in her life?
    
11. When Joan and Molly announce their decision to have a child, Adriane “calls” godmother [p. 161]. Is Adriane’s request as naïve and aggressive as her friends say it is? In response, Adriane once again reduces her life to a list—this time a list from a guide to being a godparent [p. 169]—that challenges her spirituality and morality. How does Adriane imagine her relationship to God—the giant, listening ear—and what is her code of ethics? Does she tailor her spiritual beliefs to suit her self-interest?
    
12. When Stan explains the rules for the Polyamory Society New Year’s Eve dinner, Adriane responds by saying, “You’ve actually woken up without regrets?” [p. 195] Do you think it is possible not to have regrets, or is that a fantasy, like Adriane’s idea of a utopian Piafville? When are regrets important? Do you agree with Daniel Minick when he says that a choice, even a suicide, can be renounced [p. 30]?
    
13. Adriane pursues a series of disjointed relationships with potential boyfriends and lovers: her unconsummated adoration of her boss, Garrett ; her infatuation with the amateur pornographer Luc, for whom she walks away from the “cheerful, smart, and kind” Greg; her sexually-charged jealousy when Joan discloses that she’s dating Molly; and her desire to embrace Stan’s polyamorous lifestyle for the sake of finding a boyfriend—if not a traditional one. What do Adriane’s relationships—including her adoption of Barry into her home and her bed—expose about her attitudes toward men and intimacy? How does Adriane wrap her relationships in a protective layer of contorted integrity?
    
14. Over the course of Adriane’s adventures and mishaps, she seems more inclined to wait passively for things to happen to her—she waits for her newly-adopted dog to respond faintly to a potential name; she buys the dress at Luc’s suggestion and then wears it several days in a week hoping to run into him during another lunch—or to imagine that things happen to her—she jumps in her car for a trip to the beach and then discovers that she’s nearly in Salisbury, Maryland, where Molly’s sister lives. In what situations does Adriane break out from this avoidance of decisions? How do Adriane’s choices stand up to her sense of morality, and when do they fail?
    
15. As Adriane watches Barry’s funeral pyre, she realizes that, despite her coddled “suicide gene,” she “was not sati. Maybe someday she would come to see this as a cause for gratitude—that at such a moment of truth she would cling to her own absurd life—but right now her inability to kill herself, the loss of suicide as an option, seemed one more thing to mourn” [p. 239]. Does Adriane let her family history and genetic suppositions determine her actions, or hope that they do? Are we trapped—by nature or by nurture—to recreate our parents’ failures and failings? How much control do we have over the course of our lives?
    
16. At the end of the book, Adriane finally reaches a state of abandon, weeping for Barry as he is cremated on the shores of the Ganges [p. 239]. How is Adriane’s abandon different from her feelings of abandonment? What allows her to give up the hope that Barry will be reincarnated as a suitor and begin to hope that Barry finds moksha, a release from worldly suffering? What does Adriane discover about herself when confronted with Barry’s death? Does she come to terms with the “guilt and terror of surviving” [p. 44]?
    
17. Throughout the novel, Adriane is searching to redefine abandonment in her life. What comfort—and discomfort—does she gain by trying to transform abandonment from a personal rejection of her by others to her own rejection of the rules of others and society at large? Does she succeed in reinventing herself—as an “abandoneer,” or something else?