The Family Home
This is one of those stories where the family home is more than just setting. Vivid descriptions of various elements of the house punctuate certain scenes as thematic underscoring. While it is certainly true almost any home can tell you something about the people that live there, in novels and movies there is a tendency by writers to endow a house with familial DNA. Imagery is what conveys that connection:
“…she stopped and tipped back her head to study the high ceiling as if it were a cathedral. Joy followed her gaze as it travelled around the room to the sideboard crammed with framed family photos and ornaments, including the pair of horrible sneering china cats that had belonged to Stan’s mother, and lingered on the bowl of fresh fruit sitting on the table: shiny red apples and bright yellow bananas…Joy didn’t know why she kept buying them. It was as if they were for display purposes only. Most ended up mushy-soft and black and then she felt ashamed throwing them away.”
Any Work is Good Work
They say that every job is useful. Of course, that idea was invented before the job of social media influencer was invented, so maybe the truth of the matter now is not so much. Have you ever stopped to think what a job interview for some of the less common employment opportunities are like? Well, it might go something like this:
"She was a food taster , wasn’t she? That’s right. They’d heard all about the job interview…She’d had to arrange ten cups of liquid in order of saltiness, and then another ten cups in order of sweetness. She was given tiny jars containing balls of cottonwool and she had to identify their smells. She got the basil and mint right, but not the parsley. Who knew that parsley had a fragrance?”
Imagery or Simpsons Gag?
Tennis plays an enormous role in the narrative. Lots and lots of descriptive prose and dialogue about tennis is to be found in this book. There is one imagery-heavy passage that starts out like a gag one might hear on The Simpsons before turning very dark very quickly:
“She’d dreamed of playing at Wimbledon too, and she’d dreamed of seeing one of her children or one of her students play at Wimbledon, and she’d dreamed, far more reasonably and feasibly, of one day being a spectator at Wimbledon, but her dreams didn’t have the same ferocious entitlement as Stan’s, because she was a woman, and women know that babies and husbands and sick parents can derail your dreams, at any moment they can drag you from your bed, they can forestall your career, they can lift you from your prized seat at Wimbledon from a match later described as ‘epic’.”
Who is this Troy Fellow?
There is a character named Troy in the book who is the recipient of what is—arguably, perhaps—the coolest imagery directed toward character delineation. This is definitely an arguable assertion for some because there are some out there whose goal in life is to become the opposite of Batman:
“he had inherited not a single one of his villainous grandfather’s villainous genes, and he liked the fear and confusion on Harry Potter’s face. Harry Potter deserved to feel fear and confusion, because he was legally, morally and spiritually in the wrong. It happened so rarely that you knew that you were right and the other guy was wrong; Troy was Spider-Man, the Hulk, Captain America…Batman.”
