Rapture

Description

The setting is a New York apartment where two long-estranged lovers try to resuscitate their passion. Kay is old enough to be skeptical about men–this man in particular–but still alert to the possibility of true love. Benjamin is a filmmaker with an appealing waywardness and a conveniently disappearing fiancée. As the two lie entwined in bed, Susan Minot ushers readers across an entire landscape of memory and sensation to reveal the infinite nuances of sex: its power to exalt and deceive, to connect two separate selves or make them fully aware of their solitude. Honest and unflinching, the result is a hypnotic reading experience."Minot reaches a new level in her career. . . . Brimming with stylistic and emotional intelligence." –San Francisco Chronicle

"A disconcerting examination of love and war between the sexes." –The New Yorker

"Minot’s story . . . is timeless, and she makes you feel its pure, raw ache. . . . Rapture is erotic, but more: it’s romantic in the true sense of the word." –Miami Herald

"Explores a tragic irony of love and sex: how one partner can reach the heights of devotion at the very instant the other is dumped into the pits of despair." –Time Out New York

"Mesmerizing . . . provocative." –Harper’s Bazaar

"In Minot’s writing, one is often reminded of Henry James. Like James, she pursues the filaments of emotion that almost escape language. . . . Minot’s writing [is] beautiful, evocative, and self-assured." –O, The Oprah Magazine

"A splendid piece of narrative sleight-of-hand . . . that further confirms Minot’s place among our finest novelists." –Minneapolis Star Tribune

"I would challenge any reader to read this and not find moments of gut-wrenching truth, as if Minot had looked straight into each of our hearts." –The Providence Journal

"In language simultaneously rich and spare. . . . [Rapture] has a muscular swagger uncommon in fiction by women." –Vogue

"[Rapture offers] equally convincing portraits of the ways men and women think about love and sex." –Interview

"Minot takes an insightful, intelligent, humorous look at the tangled mess of modern love." –The Toronto Star

"[Minot] draws the reader in with subtle strokes of mood and atmosphere and with her ability to express so much in so few words." –The Oakland Press

"You get the sense that Minot has lived every moment, spoken every syllable, felt every emotion. The weird thing is: so have you." –The Baltimore City PaperSusan Minot’s first novel, Monkeys, was published in a dozen countries and received the Prix Femina Étranger in France. She is the author of Lust & Other Stories, Folly, Evening, and Poems 4 A.M., and wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty. She lives on an island in Maine.We hope the following questions, discussion topics and author biography enhance your group’s reading of Rapture.

1. Time figures prominently in Kay’s and Benjamin’s relationship (e.g., "Now was their time." –page 72; "They spent far more time keeping away from each other than they ever did together." –page 80). Has time, as Kay puts it, "saturated [the] relations between [Kay and Benjamin] with more meaning, not less" (page 9)? From the moment of Benjamin’s first touch, linear time seems to collapse for Kay: "The moment was split for an instant by the future. It was always an unnerving sight, the future. It was uncertain. But during revelatory moments like this, the future asked for a quick consideration to test her orientation. Would this revelation take her where she hoped to go?" (page 32). Do relationships defy the normal laws of time? Does time work for or against Kay?

2. Is it true for Kay and Benjamin that "the only things truly in the past are things completely forgotten" (page 47)? What power does memory have over their relationship?

3. By reliving their relationship in their minds, Kay and Benjamin seem almost to experience it in separate but parallel universes. Where do their experiences intersect? How do Kay’s and Benjamin’s versions of the same events differ? For example, their conversation at the Christmas party (page 83) made an impression on both of them, but for different reasons. To what extent is either one aware of the other’s point of view? If not, how does this perception or awareness affect their relationship?

4. Minot utilizes a relatively brief act of sex during which the ex-lovers mentally span the whole of a three-year relationship. Is this device effective? Are their respective recollections colored by their respective states of sexual arousal over the course of the novel? Is the particular sex act in which Kay and Benjamin are engaged fitting in light of their past or is it somehow ironic? How does the resolution of this one act relate to the resolution of their relationship?

5. Would Kay define love as simply "to give everything out and not ask for anything back" (page 98)? What might be Benjamin’s definition of love?

6. Why does Kay leave Angus (see pages 86—88)? What is Kay seeking in a relationship? Is she looking for "comfort" (page 41) or to escape the "dread" of "what is going to become of [her]" (p. 36)? Does Benjamin offer what Angus did not or could not? Does Kay’s happiness depend on the man she is with? What about self-regard?

7. Can the reader believe Benjamin was really in love with Kay, if to him their relationship was really just something "Vanessa would have blown . . . way out of proportion" (page 35)? Is Vanessa’s total acceptance of him (page 60) something Kay cannot offer Benjamin? To whom is Benjamin referring when he thinks that the bridge to goodness "had burst into fire when he’d not been able to change his life for a person he loved" (page 111)? Does Benjamin’s happiness turn on the woman he is with? What about his self-esteem?

8. Compare Kay’s character to what the reader learns of Vanessa’s character in the brief descriptions on pages 34 and 39. To what attributes is Benjamin attracted in each of them? How do Kay and Vanessa each differ from Benjamin’s ideal woman (page 95)?

9. What is Benjamin really like? Minot writes at the conclusion that for Benjamin there "came a further sinking feeling, lower than all the other ones before it. A sharp little truth hunched there. Whatever goodness he thought he might have had was turning out to be less than he might have hoped" (page 114). Has his character changed, or is it just his self-awareness that has evolved?

10. What do Kay’s sexual fantasies, which include "doing the job of a whore" (page 36) and finding that "her slavelike posture was arousing" and imagining "him saying crude things" to her (page 91), reveal about her? What is Kay really longing for when she thinks "If she was lucky he would break her and demean her into oblivion" (page 104)? Is "oblivion" the only way Kay can feel? Does Benjamin oblige?

11. Is Kay describing herself when she says: "[W]recks were often more likely to give a high priority to sex" (page 88)? Is her statement confined to men, or does it apply to men and women? How does sex confuse and complicate Kay’s emotions? Are Kay’s physical needs separable from her emotional ones? Can sex provide the merging of the physical and the emotional for Kay? For Benjamin?

12. Many of Kay’s and Benjamin’s musings are on gender differences. Did you find yourself agreeing with one or the other’s view of gender differences? Is it the gender differences themselves that affect their relationship or their perception of gender differences? To what extent is their relationship a metaphor for all relationships between men and women?

13. Benjamin and Kay each have careers in movie-making, a producer and a production designer respectively. How do their careers symbolically reflect their romantic relationship? How else does Minot utilize the movie motif in Rapture? Where does Minot situate the reader vis-à-vis Kay’s and Benjamin’s mental replaying of their relationship?

14. One of the sections told from Benjamin’s viewpoint is simply "He kept his eyes closed. He felt as if he were whirling down a drain" (page 65). Minot frequently employs such analogies at the conclusion of each section. (See, for example, page 38, page 43, and page 45). How do these analogies serve to underscore the point of each section?

He lay back like the ambushed dead, arms flung down at his sides, legs splayed out and feet sticking up, naked. He lay in the familiar bed against the familiar pillows he’d not seen in over a year. Eyes closed, face slack, he might indeed have been dead save for the figure also naked embracing his lower body and swiveling her head in a sensual way.

He opened his eyes, barely, and looked down at her. He looked with cool, lowered lids at her mouth pressed around him. As he watched he felt the pleasant sensation, but it was not making it up to his head. The good feeling remained relegated to what was going on down there. It stopped in the vicinity of his hips. He did like it, though. Who wouldn’t? He especially liked seeing her down there after this long time.

He had no idea what had gotten her there.

He certainly wasn’t going to ask her about it. There was no way he was going to wade into those dangerous waters and try to find out why she’d changed her mind or what she was thinking or why she’d let him back in or even if she’d changed her mind. He didn’t want to jinx it, their being in bed together. Besides, he didn’t really want to know. If he’d learned only a few things in their long association–and he considered over three years to be pretty long–one of them was that when Kay did tell him what was going on in her mind, the report was usually not very good. I honestly think you don’t have any conception of what love is. She had a knack for being blunt in a way he didn’t particularly want to deal with at the moment. He preferred this side of her, her solicitous side, which he was getting the benefit of right now.

And even if he did want to know, he no longer trusted himself to ask her in the right way or have the right response ready for what she might say. He’d learned that, for them, there was no right thing to say. Plus, he didn’t want to risk the subject of Vanessa coming up. He couldn’t face that. Whenever Vanessa’s name came up, it always ended badly. Of course, it worked the other way around, when Vanessa brought up the subject of Kay Bailey. If Kay Bailey came up things were likely to take a turn for the worse. He might be dense about some things, but he’d learned that.

But wait, now that he thought about it, and being in this position allowed his mind sort of to drift and wander, Kay had already brought up the subject of Vanessa–earlier while she was making them lunch. She had her back to him, standing at the counter. She did not pause from slicing tomatoes in long, patient strokes when she half turned her face back to him. ‘How’s Ms. Crane?’ she said. A little alarm alerted him to check her face and he saw no clenched jaw which he interpreted as an encouraging sign and so told her that he and Vanessa were still talking, which was true, and that Vanessa had not ruled out the possibility that they get back together, which was somewhat stretching the truth. It was, instead, a reflection of what he hoped the truth might be, despite the fact that Vanessa had told him in no uncertain terms–that was the phrase she used–that it was finally and absolutely over and she could not imagine them ever repairing the damage he’d done. Except that she did happen to be saying this sitting on the edge of the bed where they’d just spent the night together. So all was not lost. She was still seeing him. He didn’t bother getting into these specifics with Kay. He wanted to be honest, but no one wants complete honesty if it’s going to rip open your heart.

Kay had simply nodded, uncharacteristically not reacting, and put the lopsided bread in the toaster. She was in one of her calm frames of mind. At one point while they were eating she looked at him in a pointed way and smiled, beaming.

‘What are you smiling at?’ he said, a little frightened.

‘It’s good to see you,’ she said. She looked genuinely happy. He did not understand women.

Like a draft in the room he could still feel how bad things had gotten and didn’t expect to see her beaming at him this way. He certainly hadn’t expected ever to be back in here either, in her small bedroom with the tall window and the afternoon light going along the long yellow curtain. He looked up at the ceiling. It told him nothing. But he kept his gaze there. If he was going to make sense of this it would be easier if he didn’t look at her or at what she was doing to him. Instead, he thought, he should just bask in the sensation and, if he was lucky, it would take over his mind.

God, he was lovely. God, he was sweet. God. God. God. This had to be the sweetest thing she’d ever felt, nothing had ever been sweeter. It was overwhelming, the feeling that this was pretty much the only thing that mattered, this being with him, this sweetness, this . . . communing . . . this . . . there was no good word for it.

Her fingers encircled the base of his penis and she ran her parted lips up and down him, introducing her tongue like a third lip. Her other hand traveled over his stomach, exploring. It stopped. It moved over his hips. Her palm rested lightly on his skin, as if she were testing the heat over an electric burner. The palm descended, flat. It was a wonderful feeling: skin. Her brushing back and forth was hypnotic and lulled her. With her head bowed she glanced to the side with blurred lazy vision and saw his arm lying there on the sheet. The veins were raised over the back of his hand. She liked seeing his hand there, the manliness of it, and liked the fact that it was his hand and certain, and love for his hand spread through her. It seemed so large for how narrow the forearm was. She closed her eyes and brushed over him, not hurrying. His hand was certain while he had always been uncertain. But this, she thought, this. It . . . was . . . really . . .

But he couldn’t empty his mind. He hadn’t seen her in so long. He’d finally gotten used to not seeing her. When last had he? Once eight months ago. Probably not two or three times in the six months before that. Her refusal to see him had been part of the continual attempt to enforce something. Not that she wasn’t right to, not that he didn’t deserve to be barred and not that it wasn’t the best thing for her and, truth be told, for him. He had himself told her she was better off without him. He himself had admitted he was a sorry bastard and that she ought to have run away in the opposite direction the moment she saw him. He was the first person to own up to that. Not that he actually thought she’d believe him. It’s easy not to believe the bad things about a person when you first meet, particularly if you’re kissing that person. But he had warned her. He couldn’t be accused of trying to put one over on her, or of pretending to be something he wasn’t. He’d let enough people down recently not to be maintaining certain illusions about himself.

Still, he wasn’t going to take the blame for everything. Not everything was his fault. Some things a person can’t help. Was it a person’s fault if he fell in love with someone else? Could he have stopped that? He couldn’t’ve helped it. How does a person help falling in love?

Or, if you were going to take first things first, how does a person help falling out of love? That was the problem before anything. He’d fallen out of love with Vanessa. He still loved her, he’d always love her, but he wasn’t in love anymore. He’d just lost it. So was it not understandable if a person found it difficult to face the excruciating fact that the person he’d fallen out of love with happened to be his fiancée?

Well, he did face it. He hung in there. And, given his reasoning, he didn’t think it so outlandish to believe that if he just stuck with her anyway she hopefully wouldn’t notice that he, the guy who used to plead with her to marry him, to the point that it became a running joke, no longer felt the same lovestruck urgency. After all, they had been together for eleven years, which made the lack of urgency not surprising, but also in a way kind of worse.

So anyway you do your best. You continue with the plan to get married–fortunately no date has been set–figuring she’ll never notice the difference and will be spared the hurt. And it might haunt you a little, but you figure deep down that this is what was bound to happen over time anyway and that one can’t stay in love like that forever. So you are pretty resolved with the situation when into your preproduction office of the movie you’ve been trying to make for the last eight years, which is finally, actually, coming together, walks a production designer named Kay Bailey who has a way of frowning at you and looking down when you speak as if she’s hearing something extra in your voice. And slowly but surely is revealed to you your miserable situation in all its miserable perspective.

The bedspread was sloughing off the end of the bed, the white sheets were flat as paper. This is not what she’d pictured when she asked him over for lunch today. It really wasn’t. She may have changed her shirt a couple of times dressing this morning and put on lipstick, then wiped it off. It was Benjamin, after all. But she was not planning on winding up in bed. She was well aware there’d been other times in the past when she’d met him ostensibly as a friend and it had been known to evolve that some admission like I think about you still or the more direct I still want you would cause a sort of toppling of their reserve and before she knew it she’d find herself blurrily pushing him away at the same time that she was kissing him. When she finally managed to separate she would be half buttoned and unbuckled and the internal army which she’d had at attention to face him seemed to have collapsed into a dreamy, entwined heap. And, she had to admit, there’d been times when things had evolved a little further. She wasn’t perfect. But there definitely were plenty of times when she had remained polite and restrained, when they didn’t talk about matters of the heart or, to be honest, about anything important to either of them. That’s how it’d been recently, for over a year now. Or more, if she thought about it. It always helped to resist him if she were sexually in thrall with someone else. Then the troops would stay at attention, no problem.

But now, at this stage of things, she’d thought as she set out their lunch plates on the Indian bedspread which covered her plywood table, enough time had passed that she could feel safe whether there was another man or not. (At the moment, there was not.) Isn’t that what everyone said? That after enough time had passed you wouldn’t be affected anymore?

What did they know? Look at her now. With him. Time hadn’t protected her at all. Fact is, time had thrown her in the opposite direction. Look where it threw her: back in bed with the guy. And with fewer qualms about being with him than she’d ever had. Apparently time eroded misgivings, too. No one had mentioned that. No one mentioned how time saturated relations between people with more meaning, not less. None of this undressing would have happened without the passage of time.

It wasn’t exactly adding up as she’d figured.

Small tentative blips of danger appeared on her radar screen, but they were easy to ignore. The little alarms of the mind are less likely to be detected when the body is taken over by pleasure.

The first time he met her he was struck by something right away. She was leaning in the doorway of his office, a head with a fur-fronted hat like the Russians wear, talking to his assistant. He hardly saw her, a figure out of the corner of his eye, but that was enough. His chest felt a thump. When she walked in, he looked away. Not that she was so amazing-looking or anything, but there was something promising about her. His body felt it before he even knew what it was. Somehow his body knew she was going to change things.

She was wearing a blue Chinese jacket with all these ties on it, and when she sat down at the table she undid some of them but didn’t take off the coat. She sat and listened to him like a youth recruit listening to her revolutionary assignment. She even knew something about Central American politics. He gave her the usual spiel about the script, which of course she had read or she wouldn’t have been there applying for the job, but he had to rely on automatic because he was feeling strangely backed into himself. He felt as if most of what he was saying was ridiculous, but it didn’t really bother him because he was also feeling strangely vibrant. She stayed very still listening to him, frowning, businesslike which was in contrast to the flaps on her hat, which were flipped up kookily and trembled slightly when she moved. She kept her mouth pursed in concentration. Every now and then a twitch escaped from her mouth, as if it wanted to say something but was restraining. He told her about his struggles to get the movie made and cracked some usual jokes. He made her laugh. That was one thing he knew how to do, make a girl laugh. Her laugh had relief and surprise in it. It had a lot of girl in it. He wanted to keep making her laugh.

She asked him, ‘What was the first thing that made you want to make this movie?’ Her brow was furrowed. Her mouth twitched as if suppressing a smile. It was a normal, regular question, but it seemed as if no one had ever asked him it before, or, at least, not with the interest she had, and he felt as if she’d just inserted one of those microscopic needles into his spine and was making an exploratory tap down into the deepest recesses of his psyche.

It was weird. He liked it.US

Additional information

Weight	4.5296 oz
Dimensions	0.4000 × 5.2100 × 8.0000 in
Series	Vintage Contemporaries
Imprint	Vintage
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780375727887
ISBN-10	0375727884
Author	Susan Minot
Audience	General / adult
Subjects	literary fiction, Literature, book club books, realistic fiction, roman, novels, chick lit, short stories, love story, collection, fire, literary, americana, Cold War, contemporary romance, american literature, gifts for friends, fiction books, books fiction, romantic suspense, realistic fiction books, coming of age, philosophy, feminism, marriage, relationships, family, writing, modern, social, classic, romance, love, thriller, drama, medicine, fiction, suspense, mystery, Friendship, romantic, brothers, 20th century, 21st century