Recurring images of houses and homes throughout the collection act as a motif for simultaneous stability and entrapment. In Groff’s nine stories, houses either offer the characters a respite, a sense of purpose, and familial stability, or domestic spaces limit the characters’ sense of autonomy. In “Between the Shadow and the Soul,” Eliza derives her sense of personal value from her and Willie’s ongoing work on their little stone house near the river. When the project is done, she feels despondent—as if life isn’t worth living because her ability to actively engage with the space is over, rendered void. In “To Sunland,” Joanie flees her childhood home after her mother’s death because she is eager to sever her ties to her fraught childhood and to create a life for herself.

In “Brawler,” Sara Brawler’s home is also a space that threatens to suffocate her, limiting her possibility and robbing her of her youthful freedom. When she enters the house after her diving competition, the house’s “smell crashed into her, sweet rot and her mother’s eucalyptus rub. The dehumidifiers were on, the air conditioners in the windows were on, and even the ozone generator, which the girl felt sure was slowly poisoning her, was on” (84-85). The combination of the stale air, bad odors, the television, and the deafening whir of machines creates a claustrophobic atmosphere which emotionally stifles Sara.

By way of contrast, in the story “What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?,” the very house that Chip fled with his family as a child becomes the source of his perceived transformation and redemption. He sees the caretaker’s cottage and boathouse as evidence of his change and extensions of his innate purposefulness. In this story, too, Pearl Spang’s house is a place of comfort, peace, and autonomy—a place Pearl has carved out for herself where she can escape her past and find rest. In “Annunciation,” the poolhouse offers the narrator a similar sense of autonomy, having left her family and life on the East Coast behind to start afresh on her own. Houses and homes take different forms throughout the collection, but each domestic setting deepens the main characters’ understanding of themselves in the context of their larger society.