45 pages • 1 hour read
Fran LittlewoodAmazing Grace Adams
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Setting
The novel’s setting mirrors the protagonist’s character evolutions. The novel opens in the narrative present. Grace is stuck in her car on the hottest day of the year in gridlock traffic. The geographical, seasonal, and circumstantial facets of this opening scene foreshadow the conflicts to come. The London backdrop also ignites Grace’s distress throughout her day. She is in a busy, unpredictable place that challenges her self-control.
As Grace makes her way through North London to retrieve her daughter’s cake, her surroundings shift. The longer that Grace wanders the streets, the more her mind wanders into the past. Grace’s physical movements through London are therefore a metaphor for her internal journey. Indeed, the conflicts she encounters in her surroundings both mirror and trigger her emotions. In Chapter 1, Grace feels that “she’s been set on fire from the inside out” (1). Her external circumstances convey her internal unrest. In later chapters, Grace’s encounters with the little boy, the bakery clerk, the elderly woman at the corner store, the man on the golf course, the man on the train, the angry driver, and the kind man at the park charge Grace’s ever-shifting setting. As a result of these external changes, Grace’s interior terrain shifts in kind.
Point of View
The novel uses third-person limited point of view. For the majority of Amazing Grace Adams, this third-person narrator is limited to Grace Adams’s perspective and has access to Grace’s mind and heart: The narrator inhabits Grace’s consciousness and delivers her thoughts and feelings as narrative fact. In Chapter 1, for example, the narrator describes the scene according to Grace’s perception of it: “And the fly is on her cheek now, on her arm, in her hair, and the traffic still isn’t moving, and time is jumping forward in units that aren’t as they should be, and she can’t be late, not today, there’s just no question” (3). These lines do not represent an objective assessment of Grace and Grace’s circumstances. Rather, the narrator is adopting Grace’s perspective and depicting the narrative world according to Grace’s state of mind.
However, it is significant that Grace does not narrate her story in her own words. She is a polyglot but has lost the capacity to articulate her feelings, thoughts, and needs. The third-person limited narration reflects Grace’s struggle to communicate while also capturing and conveying Grace’s related crisis of identity. Grace is unsure who she is and what she wants. Therefore, she feels incapable of conveying her experiences in her own words.
In some chapters, the third-person narrator has access to Ben Kerr’s consciousness rather than Grace’s, presenting his thoughts and feelings on the page. These departures from Grace grant perspective on Grace’s character and experiences.
Narrative Structure
The novel’s narrative structure enacts Grace’s fraught relationship with the past. Grace’s narrative does not follow a linear or chronological progression. Instead, it vacillates between depictions of the past and the present. These temporal leaps illustrate Grace’s desire to compartmentalize the past and her simultaneous inability to escape it.
The chapter titles and divisions capture Grace’s efforts to keep her past from tainting her present. The chapters labeled “Now” depict Grace’s movements through London in the narrative present. The chapters labeled with time markers depict Grace’s life in the recent and distant past. Although these temporal eras are structurally separated from one another, they are all written in the present tense. Littlewood’s consistent use of the present tense enacts Grace’s unacknowledged attachment to the past. She wants to deny what has happened to her. She wants to quash her memories, her sorrow, and her pain. However, her past is as alive to her as her life in the present. As the narrative progresses, an increasing number of memories invade the “Now” sections, and Grace is powerless to ignore them: “[S]he’s remembering, she’s remembering...and it’s too late, she’s seen it: she has glimpsed the dark rip in the fabric of things” (26). Grace has tried to draw a veil between her past and present. However, the more the past intrudes on the narrative present, the more Grace succumbs to her trauma. The narrative structure develops the themes of Interconnection Between the Past and the Present and reflects Grace’s inarticulable emotional experience.
