Book Club Topics
1. A sense of time and place is often critical to building a story. At times, a setting can seem almost like a character in a book. Think the Yorkshire Moors in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Middle Earth in The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien, or the house in The Lake House by Kate Morton. Wrong Hand Right is set in the New York City of the late 1980s, with graffiti-scarred subways, young people sharing commercial loft spaces, and offbeat old men’s bars, and yet with wonders like the magnificent Scribner’s Bookstore, and the old-world gentlemen’s club where Finn works backstage. How successful is Wrong Hand Right in evoking New York City of the ‘80s, how does it compare to other novels that attempt to bring a setting to life, and how does the city color the story and Finnegan Alger’s response to his world?
2. Is sinistrality a real challenge for left-handed people? Has the experience of left-handed children changed from the 1960s (when Finn was a child) to the present? Do southpaws differ from the right-handed (or for that matter the “even-handed” ambidextrous), beyond awkwardness at using tools?
3. Other than Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Henry Ford, Jimi Hendrix, Bill Gates, Babe Ruth and Paul McCatney, what famous left-handed people can you name? Does this list suggest possible advantages to being left-handed?
4. Roskolnikov, Dostoevsky’s protagonist in Crime and Punishment, believes he is superior, a great man in the mold of Napolean or Mohammed, and as such he is entitled to commit murder. Finnegan Alger believes life has dealt him a bad hand, literally, and this justifies him taking everything he can from the “wrong-handed” world. Is there a place in the world for the superior being, who is justified in ignoring the rules that govern the rest of us? If so, what makes a person “superior”?
5. Legal realism is a form of jurisprudence defined by its focus on the law as it actually exists in practice, rather than how it is written in books. It is also a naturalistic approach to law that emulates the methods of natural science; the law does not exist in a metaphysical realm of fundamental rules or principles, but rather is inseparable from human action and the power of judges to determine the law, taking into account a kind of determinism, or the inability of human beings to resist the biological, social, and economic forces that dictate their behavior and their fate. Finn’s tragic early life leaves him feeling unbound by the laws of society. Should he be judged in light of the experiences of his life, or by a stricter sense of the law as written?
6. Book I of The Laws of Plato, quoted by Finn’s philosopher grandfather, states, “What the lawgiver should observe is whether someone employs a just disposition and character in doing some benefit or injury to somebody.” Finn uses this reasoning to justify stealing money from the grocery store where he works as a teenager, and later a watch destined for a landfill. How do you assess this justification? Was Finn wrong to standup a girl he once invited to a dance, but right in taking a watch that would be destroyed in any event?
7. Wrong Hand Right is set at a specific moment in history, the end of 1987 and start of 1988. Ronald Reagan is president of the United States and is accused in the Iran-Contra Scandal, the US is arming Afghan rebels to fight Soviet occupation, the world is still coming to grips with the brutal crushing of mass protests in Tiananmen Square, and the Berlin Wall will stand for only two more years. Does placing a novel within historical bounds add to or detract from the story, generally and in this case? Can you name a successful example of a novel that enriches a personal story with outside world events?