52 pages • 1 hour read
James Patterson, Mike LupicaThe House of Wolves
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Football
Content Warning: The source text and this guide contain references to murder, violence, suicide, racism, sexism, and addiction.
American football appears throughout the novel as a symbol of the balance between teamwork and individual glory. Jenny Wolf and her ex-husband Ted Skyler have very different attitudes toward football: While Jenny sees football as a team sport that brings her joy, Ted sees football as an opportunity to bring himself fame and financial gain.
At the beginning of the novel, Jenny has rejected her place in the Wolf family’s business empire in favor of coaching the Hunters Point High School football team. Jenny herself acknowledges the disparity between her background and her current position, saying: “[U]ndergrad at Cal. Stanford Law. And about to read an eighteen-year-old the riot act because he’d messed up at a high school football practice” (10). Although her position with the Hunters Point High team will not bring her glory, she stays on at the school because it brings her joy. Even when she does take control of the Wolves, the professional football team her family owns, Jenny maintains her humble attitude toward football, telling her players that she “knew football but had no intention of trying to sound as if [she] had invented it” (57). For Jenny, football is an opportunity to engage with a team and find joy.
The novel’s antagonists, on the other hand—including Danny Wolf, John Gallo, and Michael Barr—see football as an opportunity for personal glory and influence. Jenny’s ex-husband, Ted, too, shares this view. When the Wolves begin winning without him, Ted’s attitude becomes so bad that Jenny is forced to fire him. The fact that he quickly signs with another team shows that Ted’s primary interest in football is his personal gain rather than the joy of belonging and playing for his team.
Fatal Falls
Multiple characters in the novel either fall or are pushed to their deaths, and this is a recurring motif related to the theme of Cycles of Violence in Families. The novel begins with the Wolf family patriarch Joe Wolf falling to his death from his yacht. The word “fall” is explicitly used to describe Joe’s death, even though it is eventually revealed that he was thrown off the yacht by John Gallo’s henchman Erik Mason. Danny associates his father’s death with falling, and he “contemplated throwing himself out the window” when he first learned of the death (13). Thomas Wolf, the youngest of the Wolf boys, also falls to his death from his upper-level suite into a “field-level box” (205). The sight of Thomas’s “broken body draped across two seats in section 115 of Wolves Stadium” remains with Jenny long after her brother’s death (209). Although Thomas’s death is never fully solved, it is implied that he was, like his father, murdered by Erik Mason. Regardless of who was responsible, the fact that Thomas, like his father, died as a result of fall points to the novel’s thematic interest in cycles of violence within families. Thomas’s fall repeats the violence of his father’s death, even as Thomas tries to escape his father’s legacy.
Oprah
Oprah Winfrey is an American talk show host and television producer who is best known for The Oprah Winfrey Show, which was nationally syndicated from 1986 to 2011. She is often ranked as one of the most influential women in American media. Oprah appears in the novel as a symbol of popular trust in mainstream media. Crisis management consultant Bobby Erlich arranges a “prime-time interview with Oprah Winfrey” as a way of helping to rehabilitate Jenny’s image after her private photos are leaked (241). Erlich isn’t the only one confident in Oprah’s ability to sway minds: The NFL owners worry that “Oprah might begin to think badly of them—and that she might tell all the people who hang on her every word that she thinks badly of them” (242). Ultimately, the interview does sway public opinion. The novel says that “any open-minded person who’d watched [the interview] had to be on [Jenny’s] side now” (254). Patterson and Lupica use Oprah’s personal ability to sway public opinion in Jenny’s favor as evidence that mainstream media is dominated by the wealthy and powerful rather than by fact or truth.
The novel’s depiction of Oprah is not universally positive. John Gallo warns Danny Wolf that Oprah will take advantage of the popularity of the #MeToo movement to make Jenny “seem more sympathetic than that actress the prince married” (241). This oblique reference to Oprah’s interview with Meghan Markle shows that not everyone is in favor of Oprah’s power to sway public opinion and many see through these attempts to manipulate public sympathy.
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