Multi-Use Furniture
References are made throughout the text to sleeper sofas, sofa beds, beds intended for singles and children to the point that multi-use furniture works as imagery in a way that becomes commentary on their lifestyle. At one point, it becomes explicit engaged as symbolic commentary:
This was an era in which sofa beds were frequently opened and unfolded; at this age people were still floating, not entirely landed, still needing places to stay the night sometimes. They were doing what they could, crashing in other places, living extemporaneously. Soon enough, the pace would pick up, the solid matter of life would kick in. Soon enough, sofa beds would stay folded.
Portraiture
There are many examples in the text where the imagery is specifically calculated to bring to mind a work of art. The scene with the connecting tables in the bar, for instance, definitely has a very “Last Supper” vibe to it. Another example of this recurring kind of imagery is much more explicit:
“Come on, everyone!” she called, flicking open a Zippo lighter. That night the flame gave the women’s faces in those close quarters the stuttering light-and-dark appearance of people in a Flemish painting, all eye-gleam and contrapuntal shadow and rose cheek and curved hand—if, in fact, the Flemish artists had ever painted groups of women together without men.
Book Girl
Greer is a book girl. There are book boys, too, but perhaps their experience is a little different as shared experiences between the sexes tend to be. The imagery that describes her as a reader is distinctly that of a book girl because of her actual life experiences, not because there is something organic and inherent in being a book girl rather than a book boy. In the end, it probably doesn’t matter because what is important is the drive to read, to seemingly always have a book in your hand, and for that book to be the safe place no one can ever take away. Until he or she comes along and does:
Novels had accompanied her throughout her childhood, that period of protracted isolation, and they would probably do so during whatever lay ahead in adulthood…Books were an antidepressant, a powerful SSRI. She’d always been one of those girls with socked feet tucked under her, her mouth slightly open in stunned, almost doped-up concentration…All that reading took. It became as basic as any other need. To be lost in a novel meant you were not lost in your own life, the drafty, disorganized, lumbering bus of a house, the uninterested parents.
The Assault
A frat rat named Tinzler molests Greer at a party. It is her first experience with such behavior and it couldn’t have come at worse time in a worse place under circumstances. Quite possibly the ritualistic stupidity which define a college party contains within its DNA a chromosomal-type switch that turns on the worst aspects of humanity and turns off its best:
No one appeared to have noticed what had happened, or at least no one was surprised by it. This tableau had taken place in plain sight: a guy putting a hand up a girl’s shirt and grabbing her hard and then pushing her away. She was as inconspicuous as Icarus drowning in the corner of the Bruegel painting they’d studied on the very first day of class…Pin the Tail on the Donkey was being played, while several people chanted, “Go Kyla, go Kyla,” in monotone to a blindfolded girl who held a paper tail and took lurching baby steps forward. Elsewhere, a boy was softly puking into a porkpie hat.
