It’s always a bit of a fine line between satirizing something and sounding like you are just dealing in overused tropes. But, I agree that Jacob probably was meant to be over the top.
I think Hill is satirizing organized religion as well – both as an “opiate of the masses” and as an entity that can do more harm than good, especially under the wrong type of leadership.
Camp Wyndham, with its mandatory chapel and strange group dynamics, is basically a cult, right? https://carm.org/cults-outline-analysis
Check out #4, “Asset Acquirement” – the cell phones! And #8 speaks for itself, lol.
I’ve only been here since 2012, so I’ll never be a “lifer,” either, NerdMom88! This is my favorite book group (I have a couple of others), because of the always-thoughtful discussion, all the links and extra material members post, and because the long time frame lets my thoughts about a book sink in–and sometimes shift.
I think my favorite is still the first one I read here: The Bridge of San Luis Rey. In addition to the novel, through it I discovered the music of Tomás Luis de Victoria (which is mentioned in the book), and from there, other sacred music (and I’m not religious at all). I was excited to be able to hear a live performance of the Victoria Mass last fall. I love how the book discussions here teach me about lots of other things!
So most of my other favorites have probably been the books I would never have read otherwise-not my usual genres!
Station Eleven
Cloud Atlas
Lonesome Dove
Ender’s Game/War of the Worlds
I wasn’t part of the group when I read it, but Let the Great World Spin is one of my all-time favorites.
FYI, today, from the Writer’s Almanac:
It’s the birthday of the creator of Mary Poppins, P.L. (Pamela Lyndon) Travers, born Helen Lyndon Goff, in Mayborough, Queensland, Australia (1899).
^ Ha ha, how appropriate! Although I have my doubts as to whether or not Harper even knows who P.L. Travers is. She was waay too focused on the Julie Andrews musical version.
Did folks find the Mary Poppins references charming or annoying in this book?
Harper’s obsession with Mary Poppins felt abstract to me, like an affectation that was piled on to make her more of a distinctive character but that didn’t really correspond to the way grown-ups act in the real world. It just felt tacked on. It certainly would have been an annoying characteristic in real life, and I was annoyed by it in the book, too.
Oh, and one thing we haven’t talked about was the budding romance between Harper and the Fireman. Did you feel that there was chemistry between the characters? Usually, the prospect of a hot and heavy romance provides enough fuel for me to keep turning the pages, but I didn’t really get invested in this potential couple. Maybe it was because of the dead-but-not-dead wife in the box. But, even before that character was revealed, I wasn’t really all that interested in them as a potential couple. I’m not sure why.
I feel a little guilty piling on with the negative comments but it is still fun to discuss a book even when I didn’t like it. Especially when others have different views!
The Mary Poppins obsession doesn’t bother me. I have a daughter with a Disney obsession and she’s definitely a grown-up.
I don’t buy the romance between Harper and the Fireman either - a budding friendship perhaps. He owes her for her intervention with Nick and she owes him for various interventions. Allie and Nick link them together also. Otherwise, no chemistry to be found. The Fireman still loves his “old flame.” (I do find that funny.) Harper’s still reeling from Jakob’s betrayal and pregnancy. Hill would have done better not to attempt the romance angle.
Annoying.
Joe Hill rendered John Rookwood as just attractive enough to make Harper’s romantic interest in him seem plausible, but when things started to heat up between the two, I was startled, feeling that the proper groundwork had not been laid.
I felt like there was more chemistry between John and Sarah, in flashbacks, than there was between John and Harper. “To have such contentment and lost it was like a burn that never healed.” John never really gets over Sarah. At the end, even after having professed his love for Harper, his final words to Sarah’s fiery form are, “Oh. Sarah. Oh, look at you…Just hold on. We’ll collect up some wood. We’ll keep you going.” How would that have played out in the future if she had consented and all had survived? It would have been an interesting threesome, with no real happiness for any of them.
The other problem with the John and Harper romance is that they have so little “screen time” together. She spends the bulk of the novel at camp, away from him. And when they undergo their final long journey together, he’s on the sled, barely conscious most of the time.
I didn’t mind the Mary Poppins references at first, but there were just too many of them. Joe, I get it, I wanted to say.
Now that I have a better handle on Joe Hill’s sense of humor, I can envision this being a number in a musical version of The Fireman: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3315569/Super-Cambridge-fire-service-dancing-just-hopeless-Firefighters-perform-cringeworthy-Mary-Poppins-song-chimney-safety-video.html
I could see his attraction to her, less so her attraction to him. I agree it didn’t quite work, but it didn’t bother me. And once we realized his wife was in the bucket, it did seemed doomed.
I am probably the only person posting here who has never seen Mary Poppins. I heard all the songs on the radio, and I’ve seen bits of it in pediatrician waiting rooms. I’m not a fan of musicals and not a fan of Disney movies (I’ve seen a handful of 1940s and 1950s era ones, and another handful of ones from my kids’ era.) I threatened dh to make him watch it, but he refused, so I still haven’t seen it. Loved the books though! Read the original four!
But I guess you can put me in the charming - or at least goofy camp.
I think I expressed something along these lines before, but In my opinion, Joe Hill’s saying that Harper modeled herself on Mary Poppins was a lazy way of avoiding the work that would otherwise have been required to reveal/explore her character…
It was the same with other pop culture references. “Reader, you know what I mean because you know who or what _____________is.” Well, what if I don’t?
I liked the Mary Poppins stuff, maybe because I loved the movie as a kid, so I could relate. I agree it was a lazy way to reveal her character, but it worked for me.
I liked the romance, too–though I could have done without the “wife in the bucket.” Who else did the two of them have in that doomed environment? And at least he wasn’t able to use the “he dies, but his child lives on” convention (which I hate), because she was already pregnant.
This article looks at both sides of the pop culture debate: https://electricliterature.com/should-fiction-be-timeless-pop-culture-references-in-contemporary-novels-ce7198a3ea22#.w7i9vt6nk
With The Fireman, I think it falls along these lines:
I read Monday, Monday by Elizabeth Crook. It starts in 1966 (the shooting from the tower at UT) and ends in 2007. The author evokes the setting - the decade - with cultural references. It worked well for me. I recognized the pop-culture references and got pulled into the narrative through their use. I can’t imagine the book working without them.
Fascinating article, Mary, thanks. Welll…in the case of The Fireman, I don’t know what the necessarily specific, historical setting would be.* As I understand it, most of Hill’s cultural references are to the 80s, when he was growing up, though the book is not set in the 80s.To me, that just seems self indulgent.
The article made me much more interested in reading A Little Life! 
*Edit: I mean, the book is set in a fantasy near-future, right?
I think we would all agree that pop culture references can be deployed gracefully and thoughtfully to ground a work in a very specific time and place – just look at Ulysses, for example, which is teeming with references to modern life in Dublin in June 1904. Those references are exciting because they really give the reader a feel for the texture of daily life.
It doesn’t seem to me that Hill was using the pop culture references that way. Hill’s references were generally disembodied, because the world of the book was NOT the modern-day world (though ostensibly set in the present day), and so the references were generally not integrated into the life of the characters. I think the purpose was more to shock us into the realization that “Oh! This is happening now!” as opposed to some unidentified dystopian future. I think they were also supposed to be funny (although that is an area (humor) where Hill and I really did NOT connect). The references were probably much more effective to someone who meshed better with Hill’s sense of humor. The Martha Quinn reference sort of skirted that area for me because it was such an absurdist touch, and I could almost see how someone could find it funny.
The Mary Poppins references to me were used in yet another way – to suggest that Harper had a quirky personality that we didn’t see a lot of other evidence for. That particular set of references was deployed as a short cut to characterization (as NJTheatreMOM noted). The masks that the kids wore seemed to play the same role.
Edited to add after seeing NJTheatreMOM’s post – yes! Why were so many of the references 80s references? Harper seemed much older than she actually was supposed to be. I never believed that she was in her mid-20s.
I agree, and in that respect, the references worked for me. They were often jolting (the fates of President Obama, George Clooney, J.K. Rowling, etc.). I also think that frequent mention of famous people was a jab at the modern public’s fascination with all things celebrity.
But he came mighty close: Harper names the baby “Ashley Rookwood,” using John’s last name.
By the way, a rook is a “black, European crow, noted for its gregarious habits.” Seems to fit our soot-covered, British, chatty, (eventual) bird hero very well.
I was looking over the list of past books that this group has read, and I noticed that you read The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins. Wilkie Collins is one of my all-favorite writers, and what has always struck me about him was how devoted he was to entertaining and delighting his readers. You just felt that he packed every scene, every description with weird and wonderful detail meant to entertain. Thinking about Wilkie Collins (strangely) makes me feel a little bit more charitable toward Joe Hill. Although the book didn’t connect with me, I definitely get the sense that he was trying hard to stuff the book with things his readers would find delightful. The Easter Eggs! The celebrity references! Even the Snuffleupagus!
That aim to please would normally strike (the snobby) me as pandering, but then I think about Wilkie Collins who was totally dialed into the Victorian sensibility and I soften a bit. Obviously, Collins is an infinitely superior writer but that generous aim-to-please quality is not necessarily a bad thing! Thinking about Collins makes me think that it would be fun to have Hill over for dinner. I think he may be a generous writer, not necessarily self-indulgent, as many of us (myself included) have been accusing him of. I don’t know why, but I find it interesting and helpful to compare him to Collins.
(Oh, and a recommendation: One of the weirdest and most delightful books I’ve ever read is The Law and The Lady by Wilkie Collins. Highly recommended. It is nowhere near as literary as The Moonstone or The Woman in White – in fact, it’s positively trashy – but as far as a book that is stuffed to the gills with strange details just calculated to entertain, it can’t be beat!)
True, but even better, Rookwood is a character in J.K. Rowlings fifth Harry Potter book: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Coincidence? I think not!