THE HEWLETT-WOODMERE READERS:

A Monthly Afternoon Discussion Group

2010 – 2011

OUR ELEVENTH SEASON OF GOOD READING!

Mondays at 1 PM

Monday, Feb. = 7 at 1 PM: THE IRRESISTIBLE HENRY HO= USE by Lisa Grunwald=

Discussion Leader: Candace Plotsker-Herman

It is t= he middle of the twentieth century, and in a home economics program at a prominent university, real babies are being used to teach mothering skills to young women. For a young man raised= in these unlikely circumstances, finding real love and learning to trust will prove to be the work of a lifetime. In this captivating novel, bestselling author Lisa Grunwald gives us= the sweeping tale of an irresistible hero and the many women who love him.=

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Monday, Mar. = 7 at 1 PM: THE THREE WEISSMANNS OF <= st1:place w:st=3D"on">WESTPORT by Cathle= en Schine

Discussion Leader: Ellen Getreu

It may be hard to envision a novel of manners set in o= ur ill-mannered times, but accomplished author Schine has captured the essence= of Sense and Sensibility and dropped it into today’s Manhattan and Westport. The Weissmanns, elderly mother and two mature daughters driven to penury by divorce and career reversals, must rely on the beneficence of Cousin Lou for the shabby roof over their heads. Annie, still modestly employed as a librarian, has both salary and an apartment to sublet, so it falls to her to provide the income for the three. Alas, the other two spend money as if it = were still the old days. Mother Betty affects widowhood as it is easier than the pending divorce. Sister Miranda finds inappropriate love. The wide-ranging = cast of characters—fools, scoundrels, poseurs, the good-hearted, and secret heroes—provides interesting interplay.Wild coincidences abound, so th= at Manhattan, Westport, and Palm Springs are but mere extensions of the classic drawing room. There is sadness but also love in this thoroughly enjoyable, finely crafted modern novel. -- Danise Hoover, Booklist

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Please Pass the Baby

By LIESL SCHILLINGER

THE IRRESISTIBLE HENRY HOU= SE

By Lisa Grunwald.

Perhaps you’ve heard of a controvers= ial animal study that took place half a century ago at the University of Wiscons= in. Known as the “wire mother” experiment, it was overseen by a psychologist named Harry Harlow, who separated baby rhesus monkeys from the= ir birth mothers and placed them with mother surrogates: one a cylinder of rol= led chicken wire, the other a block of wood covered in terry cloth, both rigged= , in alternating experiments, to provide or withhold milk. The scientists wanted= to see how important “contact comfort” was to an infant’s attachment to its mother — whether, given the choice, a baby preferre= d a “mother” that fed it or one that cuddled it. The babies, they w= ere surprised to discover, overwhelmingly chose softness over sustenance.

In 1960, when news of this experiment reaches Martha Gaines, the woman at the center of Lisa Grunwald’s new novel, “The Irresistible Henry House,” it shocks her, but not for the reasons you may suppose. Mrs. Gaines, a “stern and precise” home economics professor at an all-female institution called Wilton College, feels some chagrin about the mistreated monkeys, but her real dismay is prompted by the study’s results, which contradict the child-rearing guidelines she imparts to her students. She “had spent two decades teaching that a baby needed to be fed and kept clean,” she self-righteously fumes, “not cuddled a= nd coddled as if somehow just the state of being alive required some kind of sympathy.” How could what she’d espoused have been wrong?

At a child-care conference many years earlier, Mrs. Gaines had met a ris= ing star in her field, the “anti-expert” Dr. Benjamin Spock, and bridl= ed at his “permissiveness.” His advice to mothers to trust their instincts, pick up their babies at will and give every child “a feeli= ng that he belongs to you and that you belong to him” led her to harrump= h, Mary Poppins-style, “Since when did belonging matter?”

But as Mrs. Gaines considers the monkeys and thinks back on the 16 babies she’s raised in the practice house at Wilton, she’s haunted by = the “notion that the attachments babies made in the first year of their l= ives could matter that much” — particularly as it applies to a pract= ice baby named Henry House, whom she loved so intensely that she kept him inste= ad of returning him to the orphanage as she’d done with his predecessors: Helen House, Harold House, Hannah House, Harvey House and so on. Adorable, dark-haired, green-eyed Henry was cooed over in his crib by half a dozen co= eds and was the beneficiary of every modern parenting method Mrs. Gaines could muster from 1946 (when he was born) to 1960 (when he got himself shipped of= f to boarding school to escape her smothering care). But somehow, despite his lo= ving and academically approved upbringing, Henry has turned into a maladjusted t= eenager. When beloved “Hanky” refuses to write home or to speak to Mrs. Gaines (or “Emem,” as he calls her), she suffers. Belonging does matter, she recognizes, belatedly. And she wonders, as any parent would, wh= ere she went wrong. How has her well-meaning nurturance produced such a thankle= ss child?

Hold on, you’re thinking. Orphanage? Practice baby? Coeds? Practice house? What?

Unbeknownst to many of us, for 50 years in the last century, before and after the time of the monkey studies, human babies were used as guinea pigs= on American campuses, imported from orphanages to home economics programs to h= elp college students hone their mothering skills. The consequences of treating a baby like “a human baton, continually handed off in the grueling rela= y of the first hundred weeks of life,” weren’t taken into account, Grunwald explains. A popular novelist (“Whatever Makes You Happy,R= 21; “New Year’s Eve”) and a former magazine editor (Life, Esquire), she came upon this startling chapter of our social history a few years ago when she noticed a photograph of a smiling practice baby on a Cornell University Web site. For decades, she learned, the school had maintained a practice house where students “learned homemaking, complete with a live baby whom th= ey took turns mothering.” Similar programs existed across the country: “Hundreds of infants started their lives being cared for by multiple mothers.” Grunwald asked herself what might have become of such a bab= y, once he grew up. This novel is her answer.

Henry Gaines (formerly House) is not only a practice baby, he’s a boomer baby, and in imagining his life, Grunwald spins a tale that’s = both eventful and familiar, revisiting cultural touchstones from 1950s Manhattan, where some of Henry’s practice moms land Rona Jaffe-style career-girl jobs; to Burbank in the early ’60s, where Henry, an exceptionally gif= ted artist, is hired as an “in-betweener,” drawing cartoon penguins= for Walt Disney’s “Mary Poppins”; to Berkeley in the days of student protest, drugs and free love; and on to swinging London, where Henry joins the animation team for the Beatles’ “Yellow SubmarineR= 21; movie.

Grunwald allots Henry a heaping portion of coming-of-age troubles as he lollops toward his majority. In boyhood, he’s infuriated when he discovers that Emem hid the truth about his parentage. In adolescence, he r= uns off to hunt down his birth mother (who lacks any maternal instinct) and fal= ls into a funk when he finds his baby book on her shelves. In the detailed pag= es of that scrapbook, filled in by Hanky’s dedicated student mothers, he sees “a life so acutely observed that it wouldn’t have been cle= ar to anyone if the center of all that attention had been a person or a thing.” If that’s objectification, it’s a kind any baby m= ight wish for.

Mostly, though, like any ordinary teenager, Henry resents the burden of Emem’s love and “the depths of her need.” When he vents a= bout her to his girlfriends (18-year-old Henry is as popular with the ladies as 18-week-old Henry was) one of them becomes exasperated. “All she want= s is for you to be her son,” the girlfriend says. “Why is that so terrible?” But by the age of 21, Henry has quit grousing about Emem, = has acquired a serious girlfriend (a former practice baby herself) and appears unscarred by his experimental upbringing. If one takes the long view, the <= st1:place w:st=3D"on">Wilton College home economics department seems to have deserved a collective A+. The kids = are more than all right; they’re positively groovy. But what about the wo= man who gave them their start? Does she get overdue credit for a job well done?=

Alas, the character in “The Irresistible Henry House” who co= uld use better nurturance isn’t the self-possessed Henry but the disposse= ssed Mrs. Gaines. At the beginning of her story, Grunwald recreates a nostalgic “Dick and Jane” world of saddle shoes and certainties, bottles = and bibs and lesson plans, in which the nursery serves as a laboratory for human perfectibility. Yet as Henry gains confidence and autonomy, his foster pare= nt loses hers. The son she loves shirks their bond. New students are “embarrassed” to sign up for home ec, and in 1963 Wilton closes its home economics program because, as the college president explains: “Haven’t you heard? Women want to be liberated from all that.” Emem has “stopped believing that she was right — about thumb sucking, about sleep schedules, about child rearing in general.”

Yet there’s solace in this surrender. Unlike other parents of diffident children, Emem can point to something outside herself to explain = her son’s coldness: science. Was it her fault if the rules changed while = her work was in progress? And if she was wrong, does that necessarily mean Dr. Spock was right? In any era, it takes more than a textbook to raise a happy child. And to raise a grateful one? That may have more to do with the child than the parent. As Grunwald’s thoughtful novel suggests, babies were= n’t the only participants in the behavioral experiments of the last century: the caregivers were also guinea pigs. And “contact comfort” takes t= wo.

Liesl Schillinger is a regular contributor to the Book Review.

LongIslandPress.com

Book Review: The Irresistible Henry House, By Lisa Grunwald

Our crit's thoughts on= a new novel that will "make you wish the author would write a thousand m= ore pages"

By Jenn Kane on April 8th, 2010

The Irresistible Henry House

By Lisa Grunwald

A truly good book makes you stay up late, miss your train stop, forget t= he weather. It makes you wish the author would write a thousand more pages, ju= st letting the characters’ lives roll on and on as if they were friends = you can catch up with all at once. I felt this way about The Irresistible H= enry House, the new novel by Lisa Grunwald. It’s been compared to John Irving’s classic The World According to Garp, and the similarities are less direct references and more pleasant reminders of Irving’s bes= t novel (arguably). Grunwald eases along the story of Henry, opening in his infancy, where he is a “house baby” for the fictional Wilton College. This was, apparently, a real practice in the ’50s and ’60s, whe= re orphaned babies were given over to Home Ec programs so young women could le= arn and practice modern child-raising skills. The babies were then more desirab= le to be adopted, having been “trained” and all. Henry House, howe= ver, stays on at the practice house and is adopted by the stern, childless teach= er, Martha, who ends up being the quintessential clingy mother. He grows up wit= h a million practice mothers, charming them from a young age—a skill that carries over to his dealings with the fairer sex as he grows up. Henry is a charismatic character and it is a pleasure to shadow him as he lands a job = at Disney in the ’50s and then moves to London for the Swinging ’6= 0s, chock full of go-go boots and Beatles cameos. Grunwald ends the story as He= nry reaches his mid-20s, but hey, I’m a dreamer: Maybe she has a sequel (= or two) in the works.

Bookreporter.com

THE IRRESISTIBLE HENRY HOUSE
Lisa Grunwald
Random House

When most people think about home economics education, they might think about courses in basic fashion design and sewing, cooking, baking and house= hold management. But what about child rearing? With actual children?

Novelist Lisa Grunwald was surprised to learn about the phenomenon of “practice babies” as elements of home economics education at do= zens of colleges and universities. These babies, found at orphanages and children’s homes, were “adopted” for short periods of tim= e by colleges to teach undergraduate women the basics of baby and toddler care a= nd were then permanently adopted by outside families, only to be replaced by another “practice baby” the following academic year. When Grunw= ald learned about the existence of a practice baby program at Cornell University<= /st1:PlaceType>, she did what any good novelist would: she asked herself what would happen to those practice babies as they tried to make their way out of the classroom = and into the real world.

Granted, the practice baby at the center of THE IRRESISTIBLE HENRY HOUSE doesn’t quite have the typical experience. At the end of his scheduled time at Wilton College’s home economics pra= ctice house, the baby, Henry House, stays on --- claimed by Martha Gaines, the he= ad of the program. Swayed by the unusual facts of Henry’s parentage and = her own unexpected fondness for the boy, the usually iron-fisted Martha becomes devotedly attached to him, even as he grows up surrounded by a revolving ba= nd of young women, each assigned to care for him in turn.

Henry’s babyhood in the 1950s coincides with a fundamental shift in parenting philosophies that is played out in Martha’s imagined encoun= ter with the newly famous baby guru, Dr. Spock. Far from adopting Spock’s more intuitive approach to child care, Martha doggedly sticks to her convic= tion that children should be placed on a schedule from birth, never coddled, and treated with a scientific objectivity guaranteed to raise a consistently independent and well-adjusted child. Aside from her imagined encounter with= the famous baby doctor, Martha’s philosophy is at odds with those of her = home ec students, many of whom rush to pick up Henry every time he cries, a prac= tice Martha first forbids and then scorns.

But what about Henry, raised not only at the crossroads of modern parent= ing philosophies but also in an environment where it’s impossible for him= to develop that close emotional bond with a single mother figure, a relationsh= ip that Spock and others viewed as essential for a child’s emotional well-being? Henry doesn’t have a single mother --- or any real mother figure at all. Instead, he’s constantly surrounded by women who indul= ge and admire him but inevitably move on.

As Henry grows up and learns the truth about his parentage, Grunwald explores these questions. She considers how Henry’s relationships ---= not only with Martha and his birth mother but also with a variety of female playmates and, eventually, love interests --- are shaped by the expectations about women he formed in very early childhood. Not surprisingly, Henry rema= ins both deeply interested in women and empathetic towards them, but also fundamentally distrustful --- and often with good reason. As Henry makes his way from preschool to a stint at a boarding school for troubled children to= a career as an animator at Walt Disney Studios, his days as a practice baby continue to shape his life and loves.

Of course, Henry’s mid-century relationship crises develop in the context of the sexually charged post-World War II milieu, when returning soldiers and women’s greater desire for independence resulted not onl= y in a bumper crop of babies but also in rapidly changing sexual mores that eventually birthed the modern women’s movement. In that way, Henry’s story is just an extreme version of the sexual and romantic confusion and complications that were everywhere in the mid-20th century. Henry, however, is also a fully realized individual character, not just a “type.” Readers will be moved by his vulnerability and will hope for his prospects for love, happiness and a genuine relationship with one w= oman --- even if it comes about much later than Dr. Spock would have hoped.

--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl

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The Irresistible Henr= y House: A Novel
by Lisa Grunwald

Reading Guide Questio= ns

Caution! It is likely that the following reading guide will reveal, = or at least allude to, key plot details. Therefore, if you haven’t y= et read this book, but are planning on doing so, you may wish to proceed w= ith caution to avoid spoiling your later enjoyment.

Trust is a recur= ring theme in Lisa Grunwald's novel. Which characters are most deeply affected by its presence or absence? What makes us trust another person, and what happens if that trust is betrayed? Can a relation= ship recover after trust has been broken?

For Martha Gaine= s, "there was no future for her without Henry. There was only her tiny world, bordered by practice walls and practice floors." = (p. 113) Why does Martha become so attached to Henry, and how would you describe their relationship?

Is it possible to love a person too much? Have you ever felt smothered by love? Is t= here a secret to building a relationship where both people feel equally loved?

According to Mar= tha, "a child was something to manage, not to be managed by."= (p. 44). Do you agree with her ideas on raising children? Describe and compare the different child-rearing approaches that are explored in this story. Are they all outdated now, or do any of them still hold weight?

How does Henry's early experience—being tended by a number of devoted practice mothers—affect his personality as he grows up? What is the downside to his unusual upbringing? What are the benefits?

As a child, Henry covers the walls of his closet with his own drawings, so that the closet becomes "a place of deep colors, vast distances, and g= reat possibilities." (p. 141) How is Henry's life shaped by his artistic gifts? In what ways do these gifts fall short? How are th= ese shortcomings reflected in his relationships with women?

"Henry's silence gave him a refuge, an excuse not to participate, but it was also a weapon for keeping Martha at bay." (p. 145) What brings on Henry's silent period and what pulls him out of it? Why = is silence such a powerful weapon? What other psychological weapons d= o we use against those closest to us?

Why is Henry dra= wn to Charles and Karen at the Humphrey School, an= d why is the couple's home so important to him? How does their marriage compare with other romantic relationships depicted in The Irresistible Henry House?

At Martha's fune= ral service, what does Henry discover as he describes her accomplishme= nts? Do you think his epiphany is a momentary vision or a permanent cha= nge of heart? Is there anything truly redeeming about Martha?

What makes Henry choose Peace Jacobs, after so many girls and women have pursued hi= m in vain?

Discuss the life= long relationship between Henry and Mary Jane. How does Henry's blindin= g of Mary Jane affect their friendship? What makes their connection to = each other unique?

What does Grunwa= ld's portrayal of the lives and career options of women like Martha, Be= tty, and Ethel say about the opportunities for women in the mid-twentie= th century? How much has changed since then?

As the author depicts Henry's journey from practice baby to grown man, vivid historical details are revealed. When you look back at the various locations and decades that are depicted in The Irresistible Henry House, which scenes strike you as the most memorable, and why?

Over the course = of the novel, Henry uses, betrays, and lies to nearly all the women w= ho trust him. Do you consider Henry a likeable character despite this= ? To what extent can we blame his behavior on his upbringing? Is there a point at which we must take responsibility for our own actions?
Henry never meets his father or discovers his identity. Discuss the effects of this absence on Henry's relationships with other men. What characters a= ct as father figures for Henry?

Near the end of = the book, Henry expresses gratitude toward Betty for choosing to go through with her pregnancy and giving him life. Beyond this initial gift, has Betty given anything to Henry as a mother? Has Henry inherited any of her characteristics?

Henry longs to f= ind lasting love and a home of his own, but he finds himself chronical= ly incapable of trust. Do you think there is hope for Henry? Can we e= ver truly transcend the effects of our upbringing?

What do you think will happen after the novel ends? Will Henry get to live in the ho= me that he and Haley are drawing?

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