Visitation Street: Discussion

Ivy Pochoda's Red Hook mystery was well liked by a few members.  Others found its characters too unrealistically good to be "great" literature.  Much of the discussion has disappeared from this blogger's memory...a winter virus having wiped out any ambition to do anything especially anything involving thinking.  When low and behold,  BB, sent her piece on Visitation Street and its possible meaning.  (The author could have named her book after another gentrified street:  Pioneer Street, let's say.)

Thanks B.B.

Visitation Street: we didn’t talk about the title. There is a Visitation Street and a Visitation Church in Red Hook. In the book, the church The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary is mentioned so frequently that I think the reader is supposed to make something of it. In Luke’s gospel The Visitation is the story of Mary, pregnant with Jesus, hastening to the hill country to greet her pregnant cousin Elizabeth, whose baby leaps in her womb at Mary’s greeting. So, maybe it’s by design that the novel begins with two girls of similar background, Val and June, and that near the end we see two girls, Val and Monique, who represent two sides of a divide. And maybe we’re to see that hope for a more fruitful, united future lies within these two and others of their generation whom they represent. 

When I raised this connection to DR, she thought it likely, but thought also that visitations referred to Marcus and June, an obvious connection that had totally escaped me.

Nevertheless, the book group discussion was rich and enjoyable.