46 pages • 1 hour read
Kathleen RooneyLillian Boxfish Takes a Walk
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2017A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Road of Anthracite”
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses pregnancy loss, racism, alcohol use disorder, suicide, mental health conditions, and anti-LGBTQ+ biases in connection with the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.
The narrative has a fairy tale introduction: “There once was a girl named Phoebe Snow” (1). Lillian describes the character used to advertise railroads when she was a child; her Aunt Sadie who lived in New York City would send postcards with the ads because Lillian loved them. She recalls her admiration for Sadie and her mother’s disapproval, both for the same reason: She was a single woman living in the city with a career of her own. Lillian reflects that Sadie led her to New York while Phoebe led her to poetry and advertising, as she modeled her ad copy on the short poems from those postcards, even sending her job applications in rhyming verse. She says, in some ways, getting a job at RH Macy’s saved her life but in other ways ruined it.
Chapter 2 Summary: “New Year’s Eve”
On New Year’s Eve, 1984, Lillian gets a call from her son, Johnny (also nicknamed Gian). He tells her that his stepmother Julia had a heart attack and will likely die before the new year. He then changes the subject to Lillian, noting how dangerous the city and her Murray Hill neighborhood have become, asking her to move to Maine. He reminds her of the Subway Vigilante, a man who shot four teens on the subway when they demanded $5. Rather than being horrified, much of the city praised his action. Lillian is disgusted, saying “Incivility is not incivility’s antidote” (11), and she tells Gian that the good people have to stay to keep the city going.
Lillian changes the subject, telling him she has the same plans as always: dinner at Grimaldi’s, then early to bed with a book. They say goodnight, and Lillian is horrified to discover that she has been mindlessly eating Oreo cookies while on the phone—not only did she not realize that she was eating them, she does not remember buying them, and now she is too full to want dinner. She dresses carefully for her evening out and dons her mink coat, which she notes with pride that she bought for herself in 1942. As she sets out, she observes that Murray Hill has indeed seen a bit of a decline.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Your Brain is Showing”
The novel flashes back to Lillian’s “reckless and undiscouraged youth” (19). She gets her job at RH Macy’s, which gives her a sense of rightness. By 1931, she becomes the highest-paid advertising woman in the country, and an article about her is put out in the New York World-Telegram. The day it comes out, she brings a copy to work to ask her boss for a raise.
Lillian finds that her colleague, Olive Dodd, is already in Chester’s office with a copy of the paper. Lillian dislikes everything about Olive, describing her as a “fancy pigeon” who is “in the habit of saying ‘honestly’ so often that even a child could see that she must be deceitful” (23). Even worse, she writes terrible copy. Chester praises Lillian for managing to get one of Macy’s advertisements into the article, including an illustration by her best friend Helen McGoldrick. She asks him to pay her what she’s worth, but Chester insists that it cannot be done because her male counterparts have families at home to support, so they need higher salaries. Olive sides with Chester, saying that Lillian should be grateful for what she has. Lillian accepts Chester’s offer to take her out to lunch as his meager way of making up for it.
Later, Olive brings Lillian ad copy to review. It suggests that women have to disguise their intellect and appear empty-headed if they want to attract a man. Lillian explains why they cannot use it. Olive says that it’s easier for happy people like Lillian to be funny, a comment that Lillian finds absurd.
Chapter 4 Summary: “Great with Imagination”
Back in 1984, Lillian stops for a drink at a bar called the Back Porch. The bartender, Sam, is friendly and her drink is excellent, but she is annoyed that she still feels full from eating the Oreo cookies and dismayed to find that the bar owner has installed a television. She watches a Wendy’s commercial where an “ancient dame” asks, “Where’s the beef?” (35). Adding insult to injury, an Oreo ad comes on next, and she reflects on the decline of advertising—it used to be artful, but now it’s just jingles designed to prey on people’s anxieties and desires. Lillian is discouraged.
Chapter 5 Summary: “Lunch Poems”
In November 1931, Lillian walks to her publisher’s office on her lunch break; her first book of poems will come out in the spring. As she walks, she admires the Empire State Building, which stands out to her as a thing with beauty that outweighs its foolishness—a bit of grandiosity in the midst of the Depression. She feels similar to the skyscraper, her fortunes rising as others’ fall, and is grateful.
Lillian likes her editor, Artie, who is the first person who believed that she could put together a book-length collection; she notes that her father is proud, but her mother is embarrassed. After praising her book, Artie says that its title, Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises, is more cynical than her work as a whole. He asks if this is how she wants to present herself to the world, noting “[y]ou scoff at love now, but may yet change your mind” (49). He suggests that she change it to Frequent Wishing on the Gracious Moon. Lillian replies that she is not some “moony” girl and she is certain that she wants to keep the original title, to which he agrees.
The book is a huge success, reprinted four times. Lillian receives rave reviews and often gets fan letters, mostly from young men insisting that they can convince her to fall in love. Chester observes that the best way to make people want something is to tell them that they can’t have it. He also suggests that Lillian might be dulling the power of her advertising by making her poetry so readily available, asking, “[n]ow that you’ve become fashionable, aren’t you in danger of falling out of fashion?” (56). She comforts him by insisting that the more she writes, the more inspired she feels, and he asks for her autograph.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
Phoebe Snow and Aunt Sadie demonstrate how deeply advertising and poetry have played a role in Lillian’s life and how much she values independence. Notably, the most important and influential people in the novel are women, and the women are divided into two camps that represent The Evolving Roles of Women in 20th-Century America: Her mother, Miss Lockhart (introduced later), and Olive Dodd represent the values of the previous generation; Sadie and Helen represent the new possibilities of the 20th century, and Lillian’s admiration for them both is clear.
RH Macy’s represents the office politics and dynamics typical for women in the workplace at that time. Lillian’s relationship with Olive is particularly fraught because Olive imagines herself to be Lillian’s equal, while Olive represents for Lillian the worst stereotypes of women: dishonest, lacking creativity, and unable to rise on her own merits; only “some muddled sense of Ivy League loyalty between Chester and Olive’s father led her to be indulged, kept on in a way she wouldn’t be otherwise” (29). The fact that Lillian has earned her position makes it all the more galling for her that Olive imagines that they are equals and attempts to sabotage any further success for Lillian. Her failure “to understand that her own self-interest might be attached to the interests of others like her” emphasizes that women like Lillian had to struggle against the barriers put up by generations of patriarchal structures (26).
The men in Lillian’s life also represent the power structures of the time. However, while Chester, Artie, and Johnny think themselves superior, they are all undercut or manipulated through Lillian’s sheer force of will and independence. Chester admires Lillian’s ads and her poems but does not think deeply about whether she deserves to be paid more; by using the passive voice to say “it’s been decided” that he can’t give her a raise (24), he avoids taking personal responsibility for the decision, a tactic Lillian is quick to point out. In her professional relationship with Artie, she is respectful but in control—it is Lillian who sought out the publisher and not the other way around—and she has the wherewithal to maintain creative control of her work when he suggests an alternate title. Artie seems more willing than other men to meet Lillian on equal footing; when he baits her by saying that such a “profusion of wit” is rare in women, her response that wit is “damned uncommon in men as well” is received with a beaming smile (46).
Lillian’s life in 1984 and her conversation with Johnny demonstrate that much about her has remained the same while the rest of the world has changed; their conversation and their relationship convey The Power of Memory Versus the Inevitability of Change. Their conversation about muggers and the Subway Vigilante emphasizes that the city is not the place it was and has become “a mean-spirited action movie complete with repulsive plot-twists and preposterous dialogue” (10). This establishes Lillian as an observer of changes akin to a movie-goer, underscoring her role as the detached observer of such change.
Neither is advertising what it once was, as Lillian’s encounter with the Oreos and the jingles on the television at the Back Porch suggest. Lillian’s disgust with the Oreos is mirrored by her disgust with their new ad strategies, and she worries that The Influence and Illusion of Advertising have been successful at appealing to her worst anxieties, or that she might be succumbing to old age. Her reflections provide a sense of the poignancy of time passing, a tone that recurs throughout the novel.
