Heft

The recurring motif of letters and photographs is the novel’s primary device for exploring The Discrepancy Between Internal Realities and External Appearances. These artifacts represent the characters’ attempts to forge connections while simultaneously hiding their painful truths behind carefully curated—and sometimes wholly fabricated—narratives. For two decades, Arthur’s relationship with Charlene has existed almost entirely through correspondence in which he projects the life of a respected, sociable academic to hide his reclusive reality. Moore opens her novel with Arthur’s unsent, written confession, in which he admits, “In my letters to you these two decades I have been untruthful by omission” (13). In Arthur’s life, the motif represents a flawed form of intimacy, one that sustains his loneliness as much as it alleviates it.

Charlene, in turn, uses this motif to drive the plot and manipulate reality. Delivered through the recurring motif of a letter, Charlene’s posthumous confession provides the novel’s pivotal revelation—an attempt to reshape her son’s future by rewriting his past. By naming Arthur as his father, she tries to replace Kel’s legacy of abandonment with a new, more hopeful paternal narrative: “Now Kel I have to tell you something hard that I should tell you a long time ago. Your dad isn’t who you think he is. […] your dad is man named Arthur Opp” (215-16). Charlene also sends Arthur a photograph of Kel that presents him as a promising athlete, omitting the poverty and neglect that define his life. Using this motif, Moore illustrates how characters use indirect communication to construct alternate realities in their struggle for connection and a more palatable truth.