Unsheltered

“She had no hard feelings toward the vehicle boneyard, or these handsome boys and their friends, who all wore athletic shorts and plastic bath shoes as if life began in a locker room. The wrong here was a death sentence falling on her house while that one stood by, nonchalant, with a swaybacked roofline and vinyl siding peeling off in leprous shreds. Willa’s house was brick. Not straw or sticks, not a thing to get blown away in a puff.”

This passage at the beginning of the book characterizes the working-class neighborhood in which Willa and Iano are living. Willa’s observations of the boys’ clothes and shoes establish her as older than them, belonging to another generation. Her reflections about her house’s outward solidity reinforce the idea that she needs safety and stability as the family adjusts to its new life in Vineland.

“How could two hardworking people do everything right in life and arrive in their fifties essentially destitute? She felt angry at Iano for some infraction that wouldn’t hold up to scrutiny, she knew. His serial failures at job security? Not his fault. Plenty of academics spent their careers chasing tenure from city to town. They were a new class of educated nomads, raising kids with no real answer to the question of where they’d grown up. In provisional homes one after another, with parents who worked ridiculous hours, that’s where. Doing homework in a hallway outside a faculty meeting. Playing tag with the offspring of physicists and art historians on some dean’s lawn while the adults swigged cheap Chablis and exchanged companionable gripes about department heads. Now, without complaint, Iano had taken a teaching position that was an insult to someone with his credentials.”

The impact of Iano’s career journey on his and Willa’s children is implied here. The narration paints a picture of children making the best of upheaval, becoming self-sufficient and resilient by learning to make friends and do their homework without adult supervision. The futility of the journey, which has failed to deliver the stability and comfort that the couple had hoped, is alluded to by the words “destitute” at the beginning of the passage and “insult” at the end.

“Those trees had been planted by Rose’s father to honor his daughters, the beech for Rose, the oak for Polly. Not a rose and a hollyhock but trees that now reached for the sky, years after his death. No wonder they worshipped this sentimental man, exactly the type to be lured here by Landis’s elysian visions. The tale of two trees was a household favorite, and Thatcher always tolerated the words ‘planted by Father’ without comment. He’d dug many holes in his early life, irrigation ditches, even graves; he knew how it was done and by whom. Rose’s father would have stood on the grass in a clean frock coat, his pink hand pointing, directing the labor of others—a platoon of Italian boys probably, like those he’d seen this morning trenching earthworks along the rail line. If it came to pass that Thatcher should shake hands with President Grant, as Polly predicted, he would still be a man who viewed life from the bottom of the ditch, not the top. He had managed to rise a little and Rose to fall, arriving accidentally on a plane that accommodated their marriage. But the weight of their separate histories held the plane in uneasy balance.”

This passage reveals several layers of meaning that will shape the story and connect to its themes. First, the women of Thatcher’s household lionize their late husband and father, which annoys Thatcher—he cannot respect the man who profited from the labor of others, having been a poor laborer himself. The social disparity between Thatcher and Rose, which will ultimately lead to their divorce, is also explored through the use of the “planes”