Oprah Winfrey named her newest book club pick: Douglas Stuart's "John of John." Here are questions to guide you as you read the novel. 

Reader's Guide Questions 

by Paula Cooper 

1. John of John begins in a solitary red phone box in Edinburgh as Cal Mcleod is summoned home after four years in art school by his strict Calvinist father, John.
2. While Cal's postgraduation life in Edinburgh sounds bleak, returning to his sternly pious father after a taste of modernity and freedom is less enticing still. Did you question his decision to return home to Harris? Would you, in a similar situation, have stayed in Edinburgh?
3. The Isle of Harris presents a hypnotic but severe backdrop of hard stone, dark skies, scabbed hillsides, and black tar roads that impact the mood of nearly every scene. Yet, as traditional Scottish home weavers, John and Cal see the world in vividly distinct color. How did John and Cal's shared—and deeply sensitive—reckoning of color stack up against an otherwise cold, difficult relationship?
4. Doll's self-assessment is brutal. Speaking of the girls he knows from the island, he says, "They look at me like I'm a life sentence." Being the only Macdonald son, he is the darling of his mother's eye but is sentenced to life at the croft, and on the boat. Being tied to land you will never own and will die poor trying to keep seems a heavy burden to bear in an emptying village. Can you think of a comparable familial or professional scenario now, thirty years on in the United States?
5. Throughout the story, the characters' relationships are partly defined by the use of Gaelic vs. English. This usage can indicate intimacy, remove, respect, exclusion, or ownership, and Gaelic cloaks the cruelty of the scripture with its beauty and rhythm. When the characters slipped out of Gaelic and into English, or punctuated English usage with Gaelic, how did you feel? Were you surprised to discover which characters ultimately understood Gaelic?
6. Once back at the family croft in Falabay, Cal is abruptly faced with a present littered with unresolved conflicts and relationships from his childhood, including the decades-long fallout of his father's closeted homosexuality. While the reader is let in on this secret early and steadily throughout the story, Cal doesn't realize until the end that his father has been in a relationship with their close friend and neighbor Innes since before Cal was born. What did you make of Cal's blind spot as you moved through the story?
7. It's easy to imagine that Cal's escape to Edinburgh for college would lead to a carefree sexual emancipation. However, he is still a product of his strict Calvinist upbringing and part of the generation that sees the horrific rise of AIDS. Despite the complicated nature of homosexuality in Cal's era, he still briefly considers coming out to his father on the car ride home. Conversely, John doesn't even have the vocabulary to define his lifetime of loving another man, let alone the self-acceptance. How did you square these divergent points of view as father and son separately try to navigate their sexuality? Have you ever experienced a comparable generational challenge?
8. Cal's college debt poses a financial burden beyond John's imagining. When the daunting past-due bills and credit card statements are heaped on their kitchen table, John says, "I was thinking we could take on more sheep." That simple statement sums up not only the slender margin of survival in the crofts, but also the tectonic collision between waning subsistence living on the remote western islands and the explosion of excess and spending in 1990s mainland Scotland. How did that societal and cultural clash strike you?
9. Water is a towering character in John of John: the sea in which Cal never learns to swim; the unrelenting rain the islanders stoically endure but from which they never seem to catch their death of cold; the narrative power water has to characterize people, like John, "a tireless tide," or Innes, "who was never pushy, but he had the quiet determination of water—he could flow around a thing, coming at it gently, insistently, until he got his way." How did the author's use of water to set so many moods and drive so many plot lines shape the story for you? What about our relationship with water is so affecting?
10. On the day of Cal and John's Sabbath fight over Cal's hair, Reverend Rose delivers a sermon that focuses on wickedness and fear. But the reverend also intuitively understands that his captive congregation already polices itself—through shame and petty retributions meted out by neighbors. Do you think John clings so fiercely to scripture because it casts its net universally—and blindly—when compared to the more personal judgment of his community? Which mechanism for control do you think is more powerful?
11. Women are typically held to a higher standard than men in failed marriages with children, judged much more harshly for leaving them behind. Grace's departure is handled carefully in John of John, even buried under the gross tonnage of John Mcleod's flaws and relentless self-flagellation. Did her discovery of John's secret justify her departure to you? If yes, did that opinion change when the nature of her departure—involving young Cal—was revealed?
12. Early in the story, the Macleods' bellwether ram, traditionally the leader of the flock and symbolically a figure that portends future events, comes down with the fluke—a severe liver infection—and is put down by John. Likewise, the lambing season, which traditionally represents renewal, starts out disastrously with the loss of several lambs under cruel circumstances. These are viewed as especially dark omens. Did the symbolic subtext of the sheep affect your internal experience of the novel as you moved through it, or even quietly predict elements of the story?
13. In a touching passage in the kitchen of the Macleod croft, Ella transforms a threadbare sheet from the laundry tub into a ghost costume. Cal then quietly fashions the sheet into a Greek goddess's robe, which he fits perfectly to her body. What did you make of Cal and Ella in this scene? What did it reveal about their relationship?
14. John is frequently unable to differentiate between his core identity and his behavior, as though being gay were comparable to being a thief or a cheat. His enduring love for Innes, his ability to see Innes's goodness and kindness so clearly without assigning the same wickedness to him that he does to himself is one of the book's greatest contradictions. Why do you think John can accept Innes's homosexuality in a way he can't accept it in himself? Could you imagine him ever being able to express himself differently in another setting or set of circumstances?
15. Did John's affair with Anndra in Tolsta come as a surprise? What did it reveal about John that you didn't otherwise sense?
16. Doll's drinking, his sexuality, and his death are left largely unresolved. While Doll was notoriously unlucky in love with the girls in Falabay, Isla seems to intimate that Doll's drinking was connected to his shame over having sex with Cal. Cal could also never quite discern whether Doll didn't or couldn't love him. What did you make of Doll's alcoholism, his sexuality, his death? Do you think his drowning was an accident?
17. Given the darkness that lingers behind many of the relationships in John of John, Cal's friendship with Isla feels like a breath of fresh air as they fall into the easy rhythm of old friends reunited. And yet, Cal's thoughts are surprisingly harsh when she becomes pregnant. Was it off-putting when he admitted to himself that he thought her more of a slut for sleeping with a stranger three times instead of just once, even though he'd said earlier, "If you have sex, be safe, but, also … get shagged rotten"? How did you experience this aspect of their friendship? Did it feel revelatory about wider community morality and judgment?
18. In the final scenes of John of John, there is a clarity and generosity of Cal's spirit. Everyone, at one time or another, must face the kinds of complicated truths that can lead either to a re-rendering of the hurts and resentment of our loved ones, or a turn away from this to something new. How generous can you imagine being in Cal's place? Would the relief of knowing why—so intimately in this case—John behaved as he did with Cal act as a counterbalance to any potential pain?