Held

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-8

Chapters 9-12

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

Beta

Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Ghosts

Throughout the novel, the principal characters all “ache” for some form of “reunion” with their loved ones both living and dead, and Michaels uses varying amounts of ambiguity in her vignettes to create a range of what appear to be ghostly visitations. The wounded John, in the first line of the novel, raises the conjecture that death is not an end, and as the novel progresses, death itself is shown to ebb and flow like the tides: never final, and never only in one direction. Repeatedly, the novel’s characters sense the “presence” of the dead, and two scenes actually take the perspective of ghosts: Anna, who is killed abroad and then visits her family home in 1964; and the dead Aimo, who haunts the café where he and his lover first met decades ago.

Throughout the novel, Michaels’s ghosts flicker through the porous veils of life and memory, and their own memories are piecemeal as well; for example, Anna retains no recollection of her death, and Aimo is “afraid he would remember only enough to wish for [his lover] and not enough to find her again” (218). In every case, it is the emotion of longing that either dissolves the barriers between life and death or rekindles enough memory for a loved one to crystalize like snow in the air. In Held, ghosts serve as metaphors for the imperishability of longing and loss, hinting that deceased loved ones, though gone, will never be quite lost to the living, for they endure in the minds and bodies of those who remain, resurfacing as a memory, a voice, or a gently grasping hand from beyond that unseen border.

Water

As the primary symbol of Held, water represents a versatile range of concepts throughout the novel. Most prominently, water symbolizes the eternal flux of life, history, and memory, which shows no consistent pattern or direction but ebbs and flows unpredictably. The reoccurrence of events, thoughts, language, and physical details throughout the 122-year-long narrative evokes a sense of the flotsam that is often borne by eddying currents: vanishing and reemerging like ripples of destiny. Depending upon the context, this deeper significance takes on a range of emotional tones. For example, the “filthy” water in the friendless, orphaned Gillies’s helmet evokes his stagnant, lonely fate, contradicting the more uplifting image of the flowing rivers and seas that unite the other characters with loved ones and relatives both living and dead. Ultimately, almost every close relationship in the book is associated with the imagery of moving water in one form or another, and even the memories described in the novel come and go in trickles and waves.

Within this context, death itself is portrayed as a gradual drifting: a dissolution into a mysterious sea or river that sporadically gives up its dead again, buoyed by currents of longing. As a whole, Michaels’s fragmented, time-shifting narrative also mimics the flow of a river or a tidal sea, eddying back and forth in time and glittering with recurrent images, paroxysms, and passions. As such, Held, with its lost sailors, river settings, and suicide by drowning, alludes to T. S. Eliot’s fragmentary, river-like poem The Waste Land, which features a sailor’s “death by water.” As Eliot states:

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool (Eliot, T.S. “The Waste Land.” 1992. Poetry Foundation).

As in Eliot’s celebrated poem, the symbolic nature of water in Held explores the continuum and vicissitudes of life, death, desire, and renewal.

Photography

The technology and art of photography function prominently in the novel, as seen in the professions of two of the characters: John, and the unnamed biological father of Peter. As the most precise means of capturing an image, photography itself suggests that science may have the ability to reveal and preserve objective truth in some form. However, the novel immediately undercuts this implicit assertion by demonstrating that certain photographic techniques can subtly manipulate the truth—as when John feels pressured to hide his subjects’ missing limbs and other war injuries in his commissioned portraits. The use of science to conceal and deceive—thereby making deception a part of the permanent record—unsettles John, and he begins to grow disillusioned with his chosen profession. This disenchantment becomes fatal for him when he realizes that his assistant has been carrying the deception much further by secretly adding false images of “ghosts” to his portraits. Upon this realization, John’s rapturous sense that science—in the form of photography—can penetrate the ultimate secrets of life and death suffers a crushing blow, and he drowns himself as a result.

A philosophical contrast to this bleak outcome is offered in the form of Held’s other photographer, the unnamed father of Lia’s child, who earnestly seeks to preserve as much of the world as he can through his photos. However, even his long exposures also conceal and deceive, erasing the presence of humans (rather than adding them in, like John’s assistant does). In these photographs, a kitchen teeming with human life appears as an “empty room,” and this particular interlude therefore suggests that science and technology—two broad tools wielded by humans—can be just as susceptible to human will and desire as the arts have proven to be. By reflecting the human soul primarily in the way that humans manipulate it, the photography in Held embodies both the possibilities and the limitations of science, especially when it comes to humanity’s attempts to penetrate the truths of the universe and of the spirit.