SAY NICE THINGS ABOUT DETROIT
R E A D I N G G R O U P G U I D E
A U T H O R ’ S N O T E
One day in my youth I went over to my girlfriend’s house, and in the driveway I found a souped-up Mercedes with dual-chrome exhaust, twenty-inch back wheels, and rear-mounted speakers behind darkly tinted windows. A drug-dealer car, out of place in this neighborhood. And then my blonde girlfriend walked out of the house with a tall black man whom she introduced as her brother. I didn’t even know she had a brother. Besides, this was Detroit, one of the most segregated cities in the country, where blonde girls didn’t tend to have black brothers, or vice versa (these two shared the same mother). I thought, Wow, there’s an awful lot in the world I don’t know about. I really need to write about this.
And so I finally have.
I got started on this book in 2008. It was several months before Lehman Brothers (my former employer, as it turns out) would go under and almost take the world economy with it, but no one was really feeling it yet. Except in Detroit.
Sometimes numbers can tell a story; in Detroit the statistics are mind-boggling. The city has lost so many people that those who have left outnumber all the people who currently live in San Francisco. The open space inside Detroit’s borders, taken as a whole, is greater than the entire area of Boston. The 2010 census showed that in the first decade of this millennium Detroit lost a quarter of its citizens, or 100,000 more people than New Orleans without a Katrina.
I knew I had to set a novel in Detroit.
The city was already losing population when I was born there, but I was raised to feel great pride in my hometown. In its heyday Detroit was the seat of America’s industrial might—“the arsenal of democracy,” FDR called it—and arguably the world’s most powerful engine of wealth creation. It is the birthplace of the American middle class. Its contributions to American music are inestimable. And it is largely a ruin.
So, how to tackle this in a novel? I decided early on that I wanted to model my story on that most classic of human tales: the journey home. After all, we’re talking about Detroit. Damn near everyone has already left.
All I needed was a way in, and then I remembered that girlfriend and her brother.
I should add that the Mercedes was, in fact, a drug-dealer car. The brother was an FBI agent, and he was using that car for his undercover work. This incident, fictionalized, makes up the first couple pages of Say Nice Things About Detroit. It gave me entrée into the story of race, family, home, and dreams gone awry and reimagined that you find here.
D I S C U S S I O N Q U E S T I O N S
1. Detroit is more than background for the novel—it plays an essential role in the story and in the hearts and minds of the characters. What are some of the landmarks and scenes that help bring the city to life?
2. Everett and Dirk love each other like brothers. David comes, briefly, to think of Marlon as a son. How do the characters in the novel construct and experience family?
3. The Detroit that the novel shows us is deeply segregated, but some of the characters in the novel—Dirk, Natalie, David—are able to transcend the boundaries of race. What are some of the challenges they face in doing so, and how do they overcome those challenges?
4. David and Dirk never meet, but their connection runs deep: David falls in love with Dirk’s half-sister, he buys Dirk’s old house, and he cares for Dirk’s nephew. Does David feel he has inherited a kind of legacy from Dirk? What kind of a legacy?
5. The novel begins just after the murder of Dirk and Natalie, and it ends just after the attempted murder of David and Carolyn. In what ways do these two crime scenes mirror each other? What has changed, from beginning to end, and what, do we suspect, will always remain the same?
6. The novel’s title comes from a slogan on a child’s T-shirt (p. 60). How does the title reflect and comment on the characters’ relationship with their city?
7. Many of the characters in the novel are parents of young sons. What do some of these parent-child relationships have in common? How do they differ?
8. In the end, the reader knows something that the characters never will: how and why Dirk and Natalie were killed. Why do you think the author chose to reveal this information to the reader but not to David or Carolyn? What is the effect?
9. David and Carolyn start a new family and a new life in a familiar place, honoring the past as they move into the future. In what ways will Cory, Dirk, and Natalie remain with them?
10. Carolyn watches her son meet up with his friends at the same fast-food joint she used to go to as a girl. David takes a neighbor to see his favorite childhood baseball team play, but at a new stadium. What does it mean to go home again? Is it possible?
S E L E C T E D N O R T O N B O O K S W I T H
R E A D I N G G R O U P G U I D E S A V A I L A B L E
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Birds of Paradise |
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One Hundred Names for Love |
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Leela’s Book |
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Ship Fever |
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One Upon a River |
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Inheritance |
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A Good Indian Wife |
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What They Do in the Dark |
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The Meaning of Night |
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Bride of New France* |
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Guns, Germs, and Steel |
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Townie |
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Requiem, Mass. |
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The Forgotten Waltz |
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The Painter from Shanghai |
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The Feminine Mystique |
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The Swerve |
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Someone Knows My Name |
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The Red Thread |
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All Other Nights |
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Contents May Have Shifted |
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The Vanishing Act* |
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White Truffles in Winter |
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Not Yet Drown’d |
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The History of Love* |
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The Collective |
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Beneath the Lion’s Gaze |
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In Other Rooms, Other Wonders |
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Heft |
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Wide Sargasso Sea |
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Packing for Mars |
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The Sentimentalists |
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Perfect Life |
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The Size of the World |
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The Cailiffs of Baghdad, Georgia |
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The Age of Shiva |
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The Lonely Polygamist |
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Sacred Hunger |
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Touch |