51 pages • 1-hour read
The View From Lake Como
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Themes
Prioritizing Courage Over Conformity
Jess grows up with the knowledge that there is a certain “role” her family expects her to play, so she gives up on attending her dream college when her parents ask her to, marries hometown hero Bobby Bilancia, and accepts the carer role for her family after she ends that relationship. The pressure to conform to these roles leads to Jess’s anxiety attacks and lack of self-respect. When she begins to prioritize courage over conformity, however, she not only gains self-confidence but also happiness and peace.
When the novel begins, Jess is already aware that she is unhappy with conformity, but she doesn’t have a plan to break off into her own path. She understands that she needs to get away from her parents, but she also fears being by herself. She has recently begun to pursue renting her own apartment in nearby Hoboken, but she hasn’t taken the steps to actually secure it. Further, Jess dreams of Italy, admitting, “I wanted to see the villages of my ancestors. Truthfully, I was afraid to go alone” (19). Jess is often conflicted about her desire to be a “good girl” and her wish for greater independence. Feeling at odds with herself produces more anxiety and creates a lack of self-esteem because Jess feels weak and ineffective.
When she prioritizes being courageous over conforming to her prescribed roles, she starts to gain confidence and self-respect. She goes to Italy, where she has new and interesting opportunities to be brave. In Lake Como, Jess faces her fear of crossing a suspension bridge to a waterfall and instantly reaps the rewards. She says, “The falls are both powerful and serena; these two truths exist in the same natural state, and together they are bigger than my terror and were worth the risk of crossing the old bridge” (291). Jess takes a similar risk when she goes to visit Pisa. Though she fears heights, she says to Conor, “How about we climb the tower? [….] I choose to be brave” (228, emphasis added). These opportunities and Jess’s new willingness to face her fears give her the self-esteem she needs to ignore others’ expectations. She says, “To be unexpected, in a life where I have tried so hard to meet every expectation of me, is a gift” (286).
When she goes on a visit back to New Jersey, Jess carries the strength and resolve she acquired in Italy with her. She tells her mother, “I don’t blame you for not seeing me for who I am. People put you in a […] box or a role because they hope you will stay there. It took Italy to teach me that life is not supposed to be a struggle; it’s supposed to be fun” (363). Jess thus learns that prioritizing courage over conformity leads to greater happiness and peace than trying (and often failing) to conform to others’ expectations.
The Damaging Nature of Family Secrets
One reason Jess struggles so much with her family’s expectations is that family is so central to her sense of identity. However, by hiding the truth about various events and even family members, Jess’s family has prevented her from truly knowing herself. In addition, Claudia’s father lied to her about Louie, keeping the secret of Louie’s actual fate and consigning his daughter to a life without love and his grandson to a fatherless existence. The novel thus explores how family secrets can be damaging to one’s sense of self and make it harder to find happiness.
Two of the most harmful secrets Jess’s parents kept are her premature birth and its consequences, as well as the real reason she could not attend her dream college. When Jess finally learned about her seven weeks in the NICU, she says, “It took this revelation to understand why [my mother] held me back, raised me risk averse, and discouraged me from going to sleepaway college. She feared I would die” (221). It’s not that Jess is weak or somehow lacking, but her first weeks of life were so traumatizing for her parents that it led them to become more controlling, making her think that she was incapable or inept in some way. Further, when her parents finally confess that they used her college money to fund her brother Joe’s law degree, she tells them, “I thought I wasn’t worthy of my own dreams because they never seemed to come true” (129). Jess could never understand how it was that she did everything right, yet was still denied opportunities that her siblings had. She blamed herself when the problem was her parents’ financial difficulties.
Family secrets therefore never lead to anything positive in the novel, and this is one reason Jess decides to tell Claudia and Mauro the truth about Louie and to tell Lil about Mauro as well (though she never gets the chance to do this). She learns from experience that such secrets can have wide-reaching and unpredictably harmful effects on one’s sense of self, and so decides that it is better to live with transparency and truth.
Independence as a Catalyst for Transformation
Jess understands that she needs to get away from her family if she wants to transform her life. While she is constantly subjected to others’ expectations of her, she’ll never be able to fully escape them. If she wants to find what makes her happy, she must strike out on her own and discover who she really is and what she wants. Through Jess’s experiences and personal growth, the novel examines independence as a catalyst for transformation.
When Jess moves to Italy, she quickly realizes that solitude and distance from her family is exactly what she needs to make more fulfilling choices. Almost as soon as she arrives, Jess feels peaceful—a big departure from the anxiety that her life in New Jersey inspired. She says, “A sense of calm comes over me. Is it possible that I can fly far enough away from New Jersey that the past can no longer claim me?” (137). She becomes aware of sunrises and sunsets in a way she never has been before, and she “look[s] at the world differently” (156) now. While Jess used to fear living alone—going from her parents’ house to her apartment with Bobby, then back to her folks’ basement—after she gets to Italy, she realizes, “I have discovered that my great fear of living alone was completely unfounded; solitude is a gift and an essential pillar in an artistic life” (169). Solitude, or independence from her family, is the key ingredient Jess needs to create a life that feels like her own.
Once Jess understands her own strength and agency, it becomes even more important that she stay away until she feels she can return and withstand the demands her family will inevitably try to make on her time and energy. She feels that “[she is] committed to change, and that takes work [….]. [She hasn’t] been able to [forgive her parents] just yet, so until [she] know[s] what to say, [she] will say nothing at all” (266). She even longs for home, especially around the holidays, “but not enough to get on a plane” (266). When Bobby meets Jess at her hotel in Lake Como, she says they “can be honest with each other. This is what it means to get distance” (299). Similarly, even though Angelo confesses his feelings for Jess when she visits him in Milan, she returns to Carrara by herself, because, as she says, “I want to be alone to plan my goals” (305). Thus, she requires independence from her family and anyone who might influence her choices to assess her goals and transform her life.
Ultimately, Jess had to leave home to find herself and to teach her family how to treat her when she returns. Her mother is fully conscious, after Lil’s funeral, that Jess has “outgrown” Lake Como, New Jersey. To this end, Jess says, “Perspective is the gift you receive when you leave home. The way to make yourself whole is to understand what shattered you to pieces in the first place” (380). She feels that she gets a “do-over” when she goes to Italy, finally building an independent new life which she finds so fulfilling.
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