Little Monsters

“A surge of electricity shot through his limbs, a tingling sensation that made him feel like he was having an out-of-body experience, watching himself from above both as the quarterback and the fan.”

Having closed on a large financial transaction, Ken feels a figurative burst of electricity course through his body. He both inhabits and sees himself from outside his body. The narrative uses a metaphor to describe the experience. Ken is “the quarterback,” meaning that he controls the game. He is also “the fan,” observing the quarterback.

“A familiar dread beat its wings inside Abby’s chest.”

Abby is reluctant to speak of her art as the interviewer for Art Observer walks with her along the beach. Brodeur personifies Abby’s sense of dread. She gives it lifelike, animate qualities, in this case the ability to “beat its wings.”

“A room of her own, she used to like to tell Adam, something every woman needed. A slice of heaven on earth, she called it the Arcadia.”

Adam recalls Emily’s studio, which Abby now inhabits. He remembers how Emily called it the Arcadia, the name for a utopian space in Greek mythology. Reinforcing this paradisial imagery, Adam likens the space to “[a] slice of heaven on earth.” “A room of her own” echoes the title of Virginia Woolf’s 1929 essay “A Room of One’s Own,” which extols the need for women to be afforded the same intangible privileges enjoyed by men in order to create art.

“Abby couldn’t pinpoint a date, but over the last few years, the distance between the three of them had turned into something more palpable, a liquid congealing into a solid.”

As Abby walks to her father’s house, she cycles through their family history of dinners. Noting that their dynamic is strained, the narrative uses a metaphor to make the distance between them literal—“a liquid congealing into a solid.”

“Back then, Adam was their king, ruler of all they could see. God, how his children used to worship him.”

Abby and Ken discuss Adam. He juxtaposes their seemingly patronizing behavior with their youthful idolizing of him. Like Lear, he had once been “their king.”

“And there was this way in which she held the secrets of their childhood against him like a noose around his neck.”

Ken describes Abby to George. He surveys their distance, not mentioning how he molested her. He accuses her of weaponizing their childhood secrets, using a simile that likens these secrets to a noose.

“She’d been Google-stalking her half-siblings like a starstruck teenager, curious to learn how the genes that made her had expressed themselves in these two. Ken and Abigail were as exotic as seahorses.”

Steph has been searching for images of and information about her half siblings online. The narrative uses a simile, comparing her to “a starstruck teenager.” It uses another simile, likening Ken and Abigail to seahorses. This alludes to Adam’s profession as a marine biologist. It also echoes how Adam keeps a souvenir of a seahorse as an emblem of the night he met Steph’s mother.

“Then the poses changed, shifting from silly to artistic, and from artistic to straight-up provocative, the girls brazenly flouting the new real estate of their bodies: backs arched, skirts hiked.”

Abby watches Peony and her friend posing for photos along the dock of Ken’s property. Before she hears her brother comment on their appearance, Abby watches them as they take control of their bodies.

“The painting unlocked an old memory, a story an old friend had told her long ago.”

Steph looks through Abby’s painting depicting a nude woman in a bathtub, with a penis for a faucet. This painting is given agency in its ability to access Steph’s memories.

“Then all at once, Abby’s enormous appetite, her not drinking, the shift to loose-fitting clothes, and the boobs—how had she possibly missed the boobs?—piled up like cars in a collision.”

Abby confesses to Jenny that she is pregnant. Jenny takes account of the signs that she’s missed, from Abby avoiding alcohol to changes in her physical appearance. The narrative uses a simile, comparing the signs to a multi-car crash and emphasizing the suddenness of her realization. 

“Ken felt the familiar sting of rejection, followed by a dull throb of anger.”

Arriving home late, Ken attempts and fails to have sex with Jenny. He feels rejection and anger as physical sensations—a “sting” and “dull throb.”

“His heart felt like a jack-in-the box with a faulty lid—every time he pushed it down, it sprang right back up again.”

Outside Tzuco’s, Adam takes stock of his fluctuating moods, his highs and lows. Without his medication, Adam imagines his heart as a jack-in-the-box that refuses to slow down. This simile reflects Adam’s moods, which go up, are forced back down by prescriptions, and then elevate again.

“The salt air settled over her like a blanket and she lay still, fixed to the sand, tracking cruising satellites and identifying what few star clusters she could: the Big Dipper, Orion’s Belt, the murky dust of the milky way.”

Steph goes to the beach following her meeting with Adam. She shares similarities with her biological father, as both are drawn to the beach. The narrative uses a simile comparing the ocean air to a blanket, conveying how, for Steph, the beach and ocean feel like home.

“Abby placed a palm on her belly where a creature swam in the dark ocean of her.”

Abby remembers that she first noticed her baby move days before. She watches her brother save a bird, on the verge of tears. As she considers her emotional state, the narrative uses a metaphor, likening her womb to an ocean where her baby swims and lives. Calling her womb dark, Abby highlights her strange feelings and changes. This ocean imagery tacitly connects her pregnancy to the seahorse imagery throughout the novel.

“Ken’s armor had served him well. His hyper-vigilance—a strict diet and exercise regimen, attending Sunday services, and never having more than three drinks—was what made him who he was.”

As George highlights how Ken’s defenses cost him emotionally, Ken considers his strategies for protecting himself, linking them to his identity. Using the metaphor of armor, Ken imagines that his methods have worked, creating the version of himself in George’s office.

“She’d been trapped inside this canvas long enough.”

Abby struggles to put her signature on her painting before touching her mother’s ceramic remnants. She signs Emily, her middle name. She acknowledges her multi-layered confinement in the painting—it has consumed her attentions, and Ken’s molestation, one of the subjects, has trapped her.

“But just then, a pod of young biologists slowed as they walked past his office, speaking in hushed tones.”

Adam packs up his office at the CCIO as he considers a trio of photos showing a dead humpback and the life that grows from its carcass. He then spies a group of young scientists who seem to be gossiping about him, stressing the connection between Adam and the humpback. Like the humpback, Adam is aged and decayed. The narrative calls the group of younger biologists “a pod,” which is also the noun for an extended family or collective of whales.

“An elusive but familiar dream was taunting her from the edges of her consciousness. She’d awakened thinking about it, but the images and words blinked in and out like a faulty connection.”

Jenny tries to remember her dream, which is personified in this passage with the human ability to taunt. Using a simile, Jenny likens the dream to the flickering of “a faulty connection.” Separated by death, Jenny and her mother have a less solid connection.

“For all they knew, they were listening to a cetacean Homer, composing songs in the whale equivalent of dactylic hexameter.”

Adam is impressed by his ability to recall epic poetry from his youth. He imagines the whales and their language and sound as Homeric. Dactylic hexameter was often used in Greek or Latin epic or heroic poetry. It consists of six dactyls (a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables).

“It was as if he was shedding his skin, emptying himself, and leaving behind a hollowed-out shell the shape of his absence, like a dragonfly.”

Over drinks, Adam’s euphoric mood and grandiosity slip, and he appears to deflate in front of Abby. She compares this change to the shedding of skin by a dragonfly. The narrative uses an extended simile to link his abrupt transformation and the quiet, sad man he becomes to the empty remains of an insect.

“His mind was no longer an enchanted loom, weaving tangled dreams and scientific observations into theories.”

As Adam recovers from his manic episode, his sleeping increases and his exhaustion remains. The narrative uses a metaphor to compare his mind to “an enchanted loom,” one that weaves together his subconscious and conscious knowledge.

“Once on the ground, the deck felt downy soft, like a feather bed in a dark cave.”

After unveiling her painting, Abby bows to the party’s applause and struggles with a cramp. As she feels a contraction, she falls to her knees. The narrative uses a simile to convey the softness of the deck, comparing it to “a feather bed in a dark cave.”

“And with the conch against both of their ears, Adam drifted off to the soft happiness of sleep, eavesdropping on an ancient dialogue between mathematics and magic, between life and death.”

After the party, Adam fantasizes about teaching his grandson about the wonders of science and the sea. Imagining his grandson listening to a conch shell, Adam picks up the conch shell near his bed, listening while his grandson listens in the future. The narrative depicts sleep as a space where mathematics, standing in for rationality, meets the mystical. This echoes how Adam’s mind is a loom that weaves his subconscious and conscious knowledge.