If you’re not sure where to start a conversation in a breakout room during Book Club, find an example in the text related to one of these themes. Or, pick a passage that stood out to you and share it with the group.
- Racialized and gendered stereotypes and expectations, and related interpersonal tensions around race, class, gender and sexuality – made explicit in several scenes between Wallace and his colleagues, most notably Katie, but also Miller and Brigit
- Trauma, family, and personal histories – embodied and affective
- Recurring water imagery
- The “campus novel” as genre
- Structural racism in higher education
- The centrality of embodied experience in the text – both pleasure and violence, via disordered eating, stimulants, sex, violence – in contrast or counterpoint to the microscopic, sterile work in the lab
- “Real life” as observed by Wallace throughout the book