64 pages • 2 hours read
Lisa ScottolineWhat Happened to the Bennetts
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Fatherhood Under Conditions of Stress
Family is a central theme in What Happened to the Bennetts. Jason fights to keep his family together and, at the end, his family is his salvation. His marriage is the core of the family. Jason and Lucinda are the central characters of the novel, and in many ways, the novel is about a marriage in crisis. Just as the marsh unmoors Jason, fighting with Lucinda is the push that undoes who Jason used to be. The novel reveals that their marriage was already in danger, and the events of the novel allow Jason to repair what went wrong.
But Jason is more than a husband. He thinks of himself as the central support of his family: Lucinda, Ethan, and Allison. When everything falls apart at the beginning of the novel, Jason describes himself as his family’s “center” and that the center must “hold” (28). Later, Dom advises Jason to “stay strong” to “get them through this” (117). Jason feels pressure to delay his grief and take action for the sake of his family. When he decides that his family will never survive witness protection, he goes on a dangerous mission to take down Milo. At the end, he is willing to stay married to someone he hasn’t yet forgiven for the sake of keeping them together.
Jason’s focus seems to be on fatherhood specifically, and he often compares himself to his father. In the first few chapters, his father’s voice chimes in often, in italics, to draw a comparison between what Jason is doing and what his father would have done. These moments highlight differences in their generations. Despite these differences, Jason thinks of his father fondly. One reason he is upset at not being able to attend Allison’s funeral is that he is unable to give her a note like he gave his father. That note read: “I hope I am as wonderful a father as you. Love you, Dad” (78).
At the same time, Jason blames the fact that he plays life too safe on his father. His father was a dairy farmer who never had ambition for anything more out of life. He didn’t like risks, and he taught Jason to take safer paths in life. When Jason decides that he needs to start taking risks to save his family, he begins to question the influence his father has over him. He begins looking to other mentor figures in his life—Dom and even Big George—for new models of how to get and keep what one wants in life.
Social Media and Law Enforcement
The detective fiction genre developed around the same time that the Industrial Revolution increased the size and density of cities. People began living in closer quarters to strangers than before while also knowing less about them. Anxieties developed that were related to seeing people they didn’t know. In response, the flaneur figure—the person in a crowd who observes the crowd—and the detective figure appeared in novels. Their social function in many novels is to infer information about the kinds of people living around them. Detective fictions help readers rehearse anxieties that their neighbor might be a criminal.
Sherlock Holmes typified the fantasy that one can look at a stranger and deduce everything about them. And police procedurals soothe anxiety by finding the criminal next door and bringing them to justice. What Happened to the Bennetts takes place in a world where the internet, smartphones, and social media allow everyone, not only the exceptional detective, to investigate their neighbors. As Jason tells Dom during one of their runs: “Facebook changes the ball game” (117).
Specifically, Scottoline posits that the FBI is unprepared for the extent to which law enforcement can no longer control the flow of information. Jason wonders why the FBI suppresses the news of their housefire when everyone will talk about it online anyway. Lucinda watches from afar as her friend Melissa investigates their disappearance through Facebook posts, and Krieger is only one of many amateur detectives online. These investigations lead Jason to the truth while the FBI, it turns out, isn’t investigating at all. Jason is in many ways a traditional detective figure, but occasionally he seems an avatar for other investigative efforts.
The function of the witness protection program, to erase a previous life and create a new one, seems no longer possible when previous lives remain searchable on the internet. Even the CIA, which hacks Jason’s cloud account to delete the photo of Senator Ricks, cannot control the volume and redundant pathways of online sharing technologies. Ricks goes down in the end simply because Jason saved the photo in a different folder.
The Man-of-Action as a Masculine Archetype
Two influential models of masculinity are incompatible with each other: the breadwinner and the rebel. Breadwinners support their families and build networks of influence in their communities while rebels resist pressures to join the establishment community and make sacrifices to carve their own way. As a result, many ideals of masculinity seek to bridge these two models: the establishment maverick or the brilliant entrepreneur, for instance. In popular culture, the man-of-action is the clearest example.
By the 1980s, men who might feel emasculated by the loss of traditional jobs or feel alienated by corporate bureaucracy begin compensating for their anxieties through media consumption. Mass culture began to see breadwinner archetypes struggling to fit into corporate worlds full of sellouts, sycophants, and failed fathers. They wanted to maintain an allegiance to their family and friends, but they embodied desires for rugged individualism. No matter the profession, these men-of-action fulfill the fantasy that strong individuals can transform weak institutions by prioritizing their personal moral compass over “playing by the rules.” In the end, they save the social order on their own, because institutions in place—even the government—have been rendered ineffective by careerism and corruption.
Jason is a successful “breadwinner.” He also enjoys autonomy, having built his own court-reporting business. But his masculinity is threatened when he cannot save his daughter from carjackers, is powerless to keep his family from depression, and discovers his wife cheated on him with someone more rich and powerful. While in the witness protection program, Jason hates having to ask permission for everything. He wants to act, to do something to save Ethan and Lucinda from their grief. His idea of a hero is someone who tries to solve a problem: “a regular dad, trying to fix things for his family” (411).
When he finds out that Lucinda cheated on him with Hart, Jason claims that he is the one exceptional man in the legal profession who tells the truth. Jason then loses faith in the law when he discovers the FBI is protecting Milo. That is when Jason becomes a man-of-action and starts breaking the law. He stops playing by the rules and follows his own agenda. He flees the FBI and buys a gun. The big change in Jason’s character is when he decides that law and justice are unrelated. He chooses a father’s justice over the law. He says of the government that “it was me against them, their power and might, their treachery and corruption” (227). In doing so, Jason defines heroic masculinity as that which does not need to rely on politicized and weak institutions.
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By Lisa Scottoline
