Loverboy by Victoria Redel

Victoria Redel
ISBN:9780156007245
About the book:
In Victoria Redels mesmerizing first novel, the question of what happens
when a mother loves her child too much is deeply and darkly explored.
Left with a small fortune by her parents and the cryptic advice, it would
do to find a passion, Redels narrator sets out to become a mothera task
she feels she can be adequately passionate about. She conceives her son
Paul through a loveless one-night stand, surrounds him with a wonderful,
magical world for twoa world filled with books, music, endless games,
and bottomless devotionand calls him pet names like Birdie, Cookie,
Puppy, and Loverboy. She wonders, Has ever a mother loved a child
more? But as life outside their lace curtains begins to beckon the school-
age Paul, his mothers efforts to keep him content in their small world
become increasingly frantic and ultimately extreme by all definitions.
In this exquisite debut novel, Victoria Redel takes us deep into the mind of a very singular
mother, exposing the dangerously whisper-thin line between selfless and selfish motivation that
exists in all types of devotion.
About the author:
Victoria Redel has published a book of short fiction, Where the Road Bottoms Out, as well as a
prize-winning collection of poetry, Already the World. She currently teaches in the MFA
program at Vermont College and in the undergraduate and graduate writing programs at Sarah
Lawrence College. She lives in New York City.
Discussion Questions:
Q. Names and naming, pet names and real names figure prominently throughout Loverboy. The
mother calls her son by every loving nickname-Cookie, Honey, Loverboy-but never by his given
name, Paul. Pauls sudden insistence on being called by his real name is significant and upsetting
for the mother. What do names signify for both of them?
Q. The narrator is an anonymous narrator who awakes in a hospital. We know her only as Pauls
mother and by the names they have invented for her in their enclosed and magical games. Why
has Redel chosen to keep the narrator unnamed?
Q. As the narrators obsessive relationship to her son and to mothering becomes more obvious,
Redel maintains the readers empathy toward the mother. Do you believe the character remains
simultaneously both a disturbing and sympathetic figure? How does Redel manage this?
Q. Unlike much contemporary literature, Loverboy does not have a happy ending. Nor even one
in which redemption is a genuine possibility. Instead, Loverboy falls into the realm of tragedy as
it seems to draw from the literature of classical tragedy. Can you think about ways in which the
protagonist is and is not a typical tragic hero?
Q. Redel takes on many taboo subjects regarding mothering. In what ways does she do this and
does she manage through an extreme example to say something larger about love and separation?

Q. Loverboy is told in many short chapters, some even less than a page. Is this short vignette
form effective? How does it help create a tone to the novel?
Q. Magic and magical worlds figure highly in the invented world created by Paul and his mother.
On the night before he leaves for school Paul announces, Magically I will cover my eyes and
when I open them, I will be gone. How has the very rich world the mother has created with her
son ultimately backfired on her?
Q. The bird box, the spy game, and the fenced schoolyard are examples of the imagery Redel
uses to indicate a potent internal and external world. These images are compounded by things
lost and things found-for example, the hide and seek game. Even Paul himself seems lost to his
mother in the neighborhood playground. What is the effect of this imagery and what does it
indicate about the mothers psychology?
Q. In short flashbacks, the narrator reveals moments in her own childhood where she pretended
to limp or displayed exorbitant knowledge in order to be noticed and seen by her self-enraptured
parents. How has this childhood affected her? What do these glimpses tell us about the mothers
relationship with her son, even about her decision to have and how to have a child?
Q. The narrators equation, Many men equal no father is the subject of the center section The
City of Fathers. She backs up her equation with facts about the mating practices of other
cultures and even other animal species. How and why does she ultimately revise that equation?
Q. It would do well to have a passion is a repeated phrase throughout the novel. What does this
mean to the narrator and how does it inform and justify her actions throughout the novel?
Q. Throughout the novel there are odd characters-Mrs. Yarkin, Jacob, even Emerson-that have a
brief but enduringly powerful impact on the narrator. Why do these characters figure in the
novel? Is their role largely symbolic or do they represent certain options that the narrator accepts
or rejects?
Q. At the end of the book the mother says, I am saving my son from the ordinary. I am saving
him from an obvious life. What does the exceptional and the ordinary mean within this
novel? And is the mothers judgment or wish for her son entirely wrong for a parent?
Q. The obsession of the mother is clearly outside the realm of most parenting. But do her beliefs
or behaviors represent ways many parents feel or behave? What is the line she crosses? Does
Redel lead us to believe that the mother had a choice?