The Fourteenth Goldfish

Some jellyfish can revert to a juvenile state. Melvin acquires a previously unknown species of jellyfish and injects himself with a chemical from that creature, which causes his own body to revert to its early teens. He names the fish T. melvinus in honor of his achievement. The sea creatures are preserved in his old laboratory, but he can no longer access them because his rejuvenated body looks like a kid instead of the elderly Dr. Sagarsky.

Melvin yearns for the acclaim of discovery and tries several times to break into the lab, recover the jellyfish, and present them to the world. Shortly after he manages to get hold of them, Melvin decides to flush them down the toilet because his search for immortality might be wrong. The jellyfish thus represent three things: the promise of eternal youth, a chance for glory just out of reach, and a mad-scientist project gone astray.

Ellie loves jigsaw puzzles. She works on advanced, 1,000-piece puzzles, taking days or weeks to solve them, a few pieces at a time. When Melvin describes to her the life of scientists, with their quests to solve the mysteries of the universe, she realizes that her love of puzzles gives her one of the basic qualities of a scientific mind.

She also has a knack for making useful connections between unrelated things, and her puzzle of a New York street scene comes in handy when its depiction of taxis inspires her idea for getting to and from Melvin’s lab when they try to retrieve his jellyfish. To Ellie, puzzles serve as a symbol of the scientific quest; as she pieces one together, she also assembles her sense of purpose and a new direction for her life.

The toilet at Lissa and Ellie’s house keeps getting clogged. It represents their restricted financial situation and, in a way, the smallness of Ellie’s life before her grandfather moves in. Melvin uses the bathroom as an office, and the toilet and Melvin’s sometimes-oppressive presence both symbolically clog up the small house. Ellie’s father visits and fixes the toilet; his rare presence refreshes her life, and the plumbing repair symbolizes this, along with his love for her.

The toilet is one of several things in her life that get better as the story winds to a conclusion. In the last chapter, Lissa and Ben, newly married, search for a new and bigger house which, no doubt, will contain plenty of toilets that work properly.