Saving Noah

This section raises the spectrum of ways a parent might react when their child is revealed to be an aggressor. When Noah tells Adrianne about touching Maci and Bella, Adrianne is “paralyzed with fear and disgust” (86). She notes that all the worst-case scenarios she’d feared about her children involved them in peril, but “none of them included [the children] in the role of a perpetrator” (86). This revelation is so jarring that Adrianne goes into shock, thinking, “[T]his couldn’t be my son” (86). Again, the text uses Adrianne’s reaction to Noah’s disclosure to pose another difficult issue: An idealized and wholly objective parent would perhaps give their child over to a rehabilitation-focused justice system, but the ways the parent and child might cope with social ostracism are less clear. This section considers what a parent might experience when the justice system paints an absolute, one-dimensional picture of their child as a juvenile offender, offering no room for reformation. It also presents two opposite approaches to parenting a teenager who is also a juvenile offender: Lucas detaches completely, and Adrianne makes herself completely available to Noah. Perhaps neither approach is the most helpful, but the novel does not try to present a clear answer as to what approach would be most appropriate. These ethical dilemmas are presented as thought experiments rather than prescriptive ways to handle major life upheavals, and they explore the interiority of two opposite parent characters. Lucas’s detachment can be read as an act of self-protection: Lucas knows that he is a pedophile, and the flashbacks to his time in Reuters are violent and frightening. He never wants to return to this part of himself, but his denial of his full self also means that his son is left without context that might have helped him deal with his own pedophilic impulses. Lucas and Adrianne’s contrasting approaches speak to the theme of The Complexities of Mental Health and Human Nature: Neither parent knows how to navigate taboo mental health topics even though Lucas has experienced pedophilic impulses, which the text describes as a mental health condition.

Adrianne faces the pervasive assumption that her parenting is to blame for what Noah did. Often, Adrianne reflects that pedophilia is an accusation against the entire family, not just the offender. When Adrianne reveals at the courthouse that Noah is here to register as a sex offender, the clerk gives the mother and son a disgusted look. Adrianne is resigned to the clerk’s expression as “[she] was familiar with the look. It was the one everyone gave [her] when they found out who he was” (90). At the same time, Adrianne’s own view of Noah’s offense remains clouded and, to an extent, one-sided and without consideration for the victims. For instance, she reflects that she hates the sex-offender registry, which uses the label of sex offender for people like Noah and rapists. While Adrianne’s questioning of juveniles being placed on the registry is rooted in real-life debates and conversations, her assertion that Noah is different from other offenders seems short-sighted. Adrianne also loses sight of Katie in her pursuit to protect Noah. She assumes Katie is safe with her son and doesn’t observe her husband keenly enough to discover that his behavior is raising major red flags. All these actions show that Adrianne is a complex character who is in denial. After she keeps Katie without Lucas’s permission, she tells Lucas she is just trying to keep her family together. Lucas snaps that “we’re not a family anymore” (123), shaking Adrianne out of her presumption. Adrianne expected life to fit such a particular mold that she has limited tools when the revelation of Noah’s crime emerges, as well as during the aftermath.

Noah and Adrianne’s journeys in the novel illustrate its third important theme, The Search for Redemption. Aware of the impact of his actions on the little girls he sexually molested, Noah is driven by the need to redeem himself. Noah never defends his actions, telling Adrianne, “I’m a terrible person” (83). In the previous section, he chides his mother for hiring a lawyer to fight for him. Noah wants to tell the judge he is guilty the next time they go to court. For Noah, being locked up or removing himself from society is the best way to make amends. Adrianne feels guilty for her erroneous decisions after Noah confessed his offense to her. Feeling overwhelmed and disgusted, she walked away from Noah after he told her. Adrianne feels she wronged her anguished son, leaving him when she should have been comforting him. Every protective action she now takes for him is meant to make up for failing Noah “at the most critical point in his life” (88). The narrative is especially interested in the extremes to which the drive for redemption pushes Noah and Adrianne. Both characters make controversial decisions in their quest, whether it be Adrianne’s blinkered defense of Noah or Noah’s desire to end his life to make amends.

The theme of The Functioning and Failure of the Justice System continues to be highlighted in the interludes section. Lucas describes how he and the other inmates are given electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) to retrain their brains, with “electrodes […] strapped to [his] head” (99). The electrodes are meant to administer shocks to the brain to change brain chemistry. While ECT can be a useful therapy, in contemporary medicine, it is deployed mostly as an emergency or last-resort measure. Thus, the ECT administered to Lucas appears painful and excessive, and an example of how the justice system often traumatizes inmates instead of rehabilitating them. Since ECT in contemporary medicine is usually given under anesthesia and painless, Lucas’s fear of the therapy is the first clue that his timeline is not situated in the recent past.