43 pages • 1 hour read
Rebecca SerleIn Five Years
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Value of the Present
The novel provides the reader with two women who have very different ideas about the best way to experience the present moment. Bella better exemplifies this perspective; she lives her life in a way that she feels is authentic to her feelings and desires. Dannie, on the other hand, lives her life in a way that she feels will best usher in the future she hopes to achieve.
Each woman exerts gentle pressure on the other to come closer to the middle of this spectrum. For Bella, this pressure involves encouraging Dannie to temper her drive and ambition with space and time for pleasure in the present. She does this by folding Dannie as much as she can into her life of travel and art and emotional risk. Ironically, Dannie sees these glimpses as transactional in nature; Bella allows Dannie to participate in the overflow of her whimsical, magical life, while Dannie sees herself as using her own more cautious and pragmatic lifestyle to provide a strong and stable foundation for Bella’s flights of fancy.
For Dannie, the value of the present is the opportunity it presents to craft the future. Repeatedly she insists that she and David are working towards something that will be stable, calm, and fulfilling. What she does not recognize, despite Bella’s gentle influence, is that the present moment matters. The future is not guaranteed; any number of things could derail or destroy the affluent comfort Dannie desires. Death becomes the primary mechanism for that derailment. Forced into a situation where now is the only time they have, Dannie grows to recognize that rather than wisely investing her time, she’s been wasting it in pursuit of a moving target. The future is not a static moment, and in chasing its perfect image, Dannie is devaluing the feelings and desires that may otherwise influence her choices.
One of the most significant moments of this theme is Aaron’s speech to Dannie about the value of love being in its present and not in its future. He tells Dannie, “It’s the only thing that does not need to become at all. It matters only insofar as it exists. Here. Now. Love doesn’t require a future” (183). This statement, especially in the context of Bella’s death, resonates with Dannie in a way nothing else has.
Fate and Free Will
The novel frequently interrogates the idea of fate. The primary mechanism for this is the premonition that Dannie has on the night of her engagement. She is given a precise date, a real location, and specific information about the future she sees. It is clear that Dannie does not want to end up in that apartment on that night with that man. She takes many steps to avoid the scene coming to fruition, but she also recognizes something emotionally intense in it that makes her hesitate to move forward with a marriage to David. Despite having always believed in free will and her ability to act directly to create the desired future, the appearance of Aaron into her life instills in her a new urgency to prevent what she saw from coming to pass.
The steps Dannie takes suggest that she does believe in the fated-ness of the scene. She does not believe that her free will is enough to avoid what she knows will happen on December 15, 2025. Instead, she moves around and behind the event in an attempt to make it impossible: She pushes for a fast wedding with David, she tries to talk Bella out of buying the Dumbo apartment, and she holds Aaron at arm’s length despite how much he loves Bella. None of these actions of free will affect what comes to pass in her dream.
Aaron, too, speaks of fate in the novel. He tells Bella that he was “fated” to end up with her. Considering the framework of the novel’s premonition, the reader may see its fruition as a confluence of fate. Dannie would not find herself in that apartment after Bella’s memorial if Aaron had not renovated it, which he would not have done if he and Bella had not fallen in love, which would not have happened if Bella hadn’t installed the Tinder app on her phone. Dannie may not have needed the apartment if the appearance of the man from her premonition hadn’t exposed her doubts about her and David’s relationship.
Additionally, Dannie questions whether Bella’s illness is fated. She asks herself, “Is the hellscape we’ve found ourselves in the work of some form of divine intervention? What kind of monster has decided that this is the ending we deserve?” (231). Despite everything they do to hold off the cancer, Bella’s death still comes in the timeline Dannie saw a glimpse of five years ago. One of the novel’s most important points is that even knowing exactly what is to come doesn’t give you the knowledge of what it means. This is a theme that appears in other films and media in which a character finds themselves in the future they dreamed of, only to find that they are actually miserable.
The Lasting Effects of Trauma
It is evident that Dannie’s brother’s death profoundly influenced her developing values and perspective. Dannie does not invest much time in considering how impactful it may have been, but she does acknowledge it at several points in the novel. During the first meal with Bella, Dannie thinks, “No one who has lost a sibling at twelve can say with a straight face: everything happens for a reason” (44). The grief and trauma of her brother Michael’s death formed Dannie into the person she is today. Her careful planning, adherence to rules and propriety, and aversion to risk are a direct result of that loss.
Dannie describes Michael as “[s]mart, calm, even tempered” and notes that “Michael never got in trouble. He was the one making chore charts when we were kids, and he did model UN before he even learned to drive” (75). She later describes her parents as “protective and strict” and says they “expected things from me: good grades, excellent scores, impeccable manners. And I gave them all of that, especially after Michael […]. I didn’t want them to miss out any more than they were” (125). Though this tendency to caution and responsibility didn’t save Michael from senseless tragedy, Dannie has internalized it both as a tribute to her brother and as a balm to her parents. At least subconsciously, she has been preparing for the inevitability of the reappearance of loss and pain.
The effects of trauma on memory are also a matter of contemporary discussion, and Serle demonstrates the way that memories can be blurred or altered by trauma. In a therapy session later in the novel, Dannie admits that she can’t remember Michael very well at all anymore (185). Serle demonstrates how trauma can blur other memories, too; on their Hamptons vacation, Bella tells Dannie that they went to the beach house for several years after Michael’s death. Dannie insists that they never went back after Michael’s death and tells Bella that she’s misremembering the house’s appearance. After Bella’s death, Dannie finds a photograph of them at the beach house and realizes that Bella was right about the house after all: It had the blue awning Bella described. This lapse may be included to highlight the clarity that Dannie’s grief affords her after Bella’s death. She suddenly sees through her memories of Bella’s frivolousness and sees the many times Bella was solid and stable and effective.
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By Rebecca Serle
