NOS4A2

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Part 1, Chapter 5

Part 2, Chapters 6-10

Part 3, Chapter 11-Part 4, Chapter 23

Part 5, Chapter 24-Part 6, Chapter 42

Part 7, Chapter 43-Part 8, Chapter 78

Part 9, Chapters 79-98

Part 10, Chapter 99-Part 11, Chapter 102

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Themes

The Challenges of Parenthood and Responsibility for Others

From the beginning of the novel, Vic’s feelings about motherhood are conflicted. She blames her mother for the trouble in her parent’s relationship more than her father, although her father—by his own admission late in the novel, shares at least as much responsibility. To have a child is to accept—or reject—a grave responsibility. Vic does not believe she ever had a positive role model for parenting, which she uses to mitigate her shame over her struggles with Wayne. However, Vic doesn’t reveal her feelings about motherhood to Wayne. When Manx takes him, Vic experiences all the rage, panic, and terror that any parent would.

It is easier for Vic to make large, courageous gestures than it is to tend to the mundanities of responsible parenting. She never wavers on her determination to rescue him, even though she (correctly) suspects that it will cost her life. Rather, it is the small things that she finds herself unable to do. In the country store, when she thinks about what she likes about women, she contemplates the ideal mother: “She thought of mothering, which was really another word for being present and caring what happened to someone” (254). Parenting is about providing protection and foresight for those who are too young or inexperienced to protect or think for themselves. It is about being present, and Vic’s love of the road, combined with her tendency to misuse drugs, alcohol, and work to distract herself, prevent her from being present.

Vic’s experience with Manx teaches her just how vulnerable children are. When she has a child, it suddenly places her in a position of ultimate responsibility, which terrifies her. Vic does not believe that she is a healthy, well-adjusted, or reliable person. When she contemplates motherhood, she thinks:

She wanted to start a website, a public-awareness campaign, a newsletter, to get the word out that if you were a woman and you had a child, you lost everything, you would be held hostage by love: a terrorist who would only be satisfied when you surrendered your entire future (277).

This is also the nature of connection to others. Love binds one to another and restricts their possibilities. Perversely, Manx is as much—or more—committed to his notions of parenting than anyone else in the novel, in that he is willing to go to any lengths to protect his children from suffering. During the battle at Christmasland, Vic sees:

Manx grabbed the little girl and shrank back toward the open door, the protective gesture of any father. In that gesture Vic understood everything. Whatever the children had become, whatever he had done to them, he had done to make them safe, to keep them from being run down by the world. He believed in his own decency with all his heart. So it was with every true monster, Vic supposed (927).

However, Manx’s children are also, unequivocally, his victims. His idea of protection is self-serving and results in cruelty, not stability. NOS4ATU ultimately reveals that parents bind their children to their reality as much as they are bound to the reality they have made with their children, for better or worse. Only Wayne shows promise in the novel to create a positive reality for himself.

Fiction, Fantasy, and Differing Types of Reality

In NOS4A2, the people who can access the world of the inscapes are split between two realities: the real world, and the world of fiction/imagination. Maggie says, “Everyone lives in two worlds, right? There’s the physical world…but there’s also our own private worlds, the world of our thoughts. A world made of ideas instead of stuff. It’s just as real as our world but it’s inside” (575). In the novel, the characters use the inscapes to travel, but artists are also people who use something like metaphorical inscapes to express something that might be inexpressible in another way.

Fantasy is described in the novel as a “reality that was only waiting to be switched on” (850). The creative world lies beneath the surface. It is the equivalent of the distorted GPS map that shows the inscapes, including Christmasland, in a map that resembles an uncanny, off-kilter view of America. It is more comfortable to reside fully in one world than to straddle them both.

Maggie describes the plight to herself as she wrestles with the diminishing returns of the Scrabble tiles: “It seemed to her sometimes that this was the only fight that mattered: the struggle to take the world’s chaos and make it mean something, to put it to words” (804). She literally refers to her Scrabble tiles as the words that bring order to chaos, but other characters have their own versions of her problem. For instance, Hutter finds tension in the dual nature of information: it is supposed to bring clarity to a problem, but can also increase the complexity of the problem, depending on the starting premise. For her, more information can lead to greater chaos, depending on one’s assumptions about rationality.

Artists who work with words attempt to bring other realities to life in the minds of those who read, watch, or hear their work. Words are the tools by which writers shape reality, just as Maggie uses the tiles, Vic uses the Tuff Rider and the Triumph, and Manx uses the Wraith. Manx describes the world of ideas, with Christmasland as his example:

Christmasland is real enough. It is not so easy to find. It is not so easy to find. You cannot get to it by any road in this world, but there are other roads than the ones you will find on a map. It is outside of our world, and at the same time it is only a few miles from Denver (536).

By allowing his characters to discuss the nature—and value—of fantasy within a work of fiction, the author employs a neat bit of meta-commentary on the justification and need for art and artists.

Adults, Children, Coming of Age, and the Nature of Resilience

Coming of age takes more than one form in the story. There is the literal passage from childhood to adulthood, which comprises the accumulation of years. This typically accompanies the loss of innocence as the sobering realities of adulthood make themselves known. However, the children in NOS4A2 are forced to lose their innocence quickly because of someone else’s actions.

Coming of age can also refer to the loss of innocence or the end of naivete. Vic describes the process like this: “The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way” (758). This is an ironic remark for Vic, given that the strength of her imagination has made her a successful author. Her ideas about resignation refer more to the fact that she cannot imagine herself changing much as an adult.

Similarly, Lou wanted to start his own comic book company, but allowed his father to bully him out of pursuing dreams that he thought were childish. He is constantly frustrated by his inability to take control of his life and ask others for the things he needs.

Vic resigns herself to never being okay, but she does not want the same thing for Wayne. If a mother’s role is to protect her child, then protecting the child’s future—by encouraging resilience—is pivotal to their ability to thrive. Before she dies, Vic tells Wayne, “What’s good stays good, no matter how much of a beating it takes. You’re okay. You’ll always be okay” (965). She ends her life with a reminder that Wayne is inherently good, and that he cannot afford to forget it or give up on his hopes. She does not pretend that the future will not bring more beatings to him but insists that the good in him will outlast whatever pain he experiences.

Similarly, Nathan Demeter understands that his death could alter his daughter’s future. Like Vic’s final words, the note he leaves for Michelle does not pretend that her future will be free of suffering. Rather, it insists that she refuse to cede too much territory to ugliness and despair: “It is all right to cry but don’t give up on laughter. Don’t give up on happiness. You need both. I had both” (740). In Greek mythology, Demeter is Persephone’s mother. Her search for her daughter after Persephone is abducted by Hades and taken to the Underworld results in a world split into seasons: deadfall and frost when without her daughter and growth and plenty when she is with her. Similarly, Hill uses Nathan Demeter to illustrate the inevitability of losing one’s children to their own adulthood and the responsibility of a parent to make that transition as joyful as possible.

At the end of the novel, Lou provides Wayne with a protective act of pure parenting when keeps his promise and breaks the ornaments at the Sleigh House. Together, he, Vic, and, presumably, Hutter, have done everything they can to return Wayne to a state where he can once again progress toward an organic coming of age. The novel’s conclusion also shows the return of Brian and Greta, who have literally not aged since their abductions, raising fascinating new questions about their own prospects for resilience and hope.