Point of View

The novel is narrated entirely in the first person, with the unnamed narrator controlling all access to events, relationships, and interpretation. This choice limits the reader’s knowledge to what she observes, remembers, or chooses to articulate. In many first person novels, such restriction produces psychological intimacy, drawing the reader into the textures of a single consciousness. Here, however, the effect is more distancing. The narrator’s perspective is marked less by interior richness than by passivity, which makes the sustained use of first person feel curiously hollow. The narrator has no revealed name, no profession, and few identifiable interests outside her roles as wife and mother. Her life appears to consist almost entirely of reacting to events initiated elsewhere, Sam’s affair, the dissolution of the marriage, the cancer diagnosis. As a result, the first person voice does not accumulate a strong sense of...