The House of Wolves

“Gallo had been the sworn enemy of Joe Wolf for as long as I had been alive, from the time my father—and not Gallo—had been awarded the right to put the NFL franchise that became the Wolves in downtown San Francisco.”

Jenny sees her father’s business rival John Gallo as the primary threat to her control of the Wolf empire. In the first section of the novel, she has no idea that her brothers are working with Gallo, and she sees this as primarily a conflict between families. Jenny’s naivete at the beginning of the novel is an essential part of her character development.

“Danny Wolf was leaning against the wall next to the door, alone, eyes vacant, ashen-faced, phone in his hand. […] He turned and stared at me, almost as if he didn’t recognize me at first.”

In this passage, Danny and Jenny are in the same room for the first time in the novel. The fact that Jenny uses his full name to refer to him and he does not immediately recognize her highlights their estranged relationship. Jenny’s estrangement from her brothers influences her decision to take over her father’s empire.

“I’ll be watching games from where I always have, the seats I bought for myself on the forty before I ever thought about running this team.”

Jenny’s rejection of her father’s extravagant lifestyle is essential to her character in the first part of the novel. Despite being the team owner’s daughter, she buys her own tickets rather than use her father’s suite. Later, as the team owner herself, she continues this tradition in order to show her players that she is not like her father and that she can be trusted.

“‘Oh, don’t start with that MeToo shit,’ he said. ‘Are you really going to fight me on this?’”

As the new chairman of Wolf, Inc., Jenny faces intense prejudice from men in the male-dominated fields of professional football and journalism. In this passage, the novel’s NFL commissioner Joel Abrams references the #MeToo movement of the late 2010s, which sought to highlight the number of women who faced misogyny and assault in the workplace. Abrams uses this to emphasize that Jenny’s gender puts her at a disadvantage among her new colleagues, who neither respect nor believe the women who came forward with their stories as part of the #MeToo movement.

“The girl who’d grown up with three brothers and never taken any shit from any of them.”

Jenny’s perception of herself as a tough woman who is not intimidated by men is essential to her understanding of herself. Ironically, it is her brothers’ harassment of her as a child that allows her to successfully stand up to them as an adult.

“When it was time for me to leave the school grounds, my players—the ones who had gone to their principal and said they’d all quit the season if he even thought about firing me—formed a circle around me as I walked to my car.”

Jenny’s skills as a football coach are demonstrated by her players’ willingness to quit if she is fired in retaliation for the leaked pictures published in the Tribune. The image of the protective circle of high schoolers is ironic, given the very real threat posed by John Gallo and her brothers; the high school football team would be powerless against them.

“Now she hires this skid-row bum to be one of her quarterbacks. What’s next—she tries to find out if O.J.’s got any life left in his legs?”

This quote from the novel’s NFL Commissioner Abrams reflects the novel’s thematic interest in the Corruption and Prejudice in Professional Sports. It calls attention to the racist thinking patterns endemic in the NFL. Because Money McGee was formerly imprisoned, Abrams considers him a “bum” and compares him to the accused murderer O. J. Simpson.

“Weinstein Island […] It’s like the lost island of Atlantis. Named after the movie guy. It’s the place well-known men get exiled to after they get accused of forcing themselves on women.”

This passage reflects Patterson and Lupica’s criticism of a cancel culture that automatically and permanently punishes men accused of sexual misconduct. Although the speaker is an obvious villain, the plot of the novel does show that innocent men are frequently harmed by false allegations and that some women levy these accusations for profit.

“But there really had been a point, right before that, one of those sliding-door moments, when I wasn’t sure how the night would end.”

The novel is clear that the sexual assault accusations levied against Coach Ryan Morrissey are false. This passage shows that Jenny was so sure of Morrissey’s innocence that she actually considered sleeping with him the night she learned of the accusations.

“It’s the same game plan they were going to use against Ryan with those women. He’s the one who’s totally screwed once the accusation is out there. How it works these days.”

The novel’s villains are not the only ones critical of the #MeToo movement. Thomas Wolf is a sympathetic character whose murder inspires Jenny to do whatever it takes to take down her brother. However, like the novel’s villains, he believes that the #MeToo movement has made it possible for innocent men to be taken down by false accusations.

“At Wolf.com, we prefer to let the readers, many, many of whom don’t read the Times, decide.”

After Jack is fired from the San Francisco Tribune, which is the most conservative paper in the city, he founds an online newspaper that is even more conservative. In this passage, he claims that his readers won’t care that The New York Times has disproved his articles because they don’t trust the mainstream media. The scene points to the novel’s general criticism of media culture and the theme of The Public’s Distrust of Mainstream Media.

“The world is starting to think of you as the oldest Kardashian girl when what you really need is for it to see you as a smart, competent female CEO who’s getting constantly attacked by men.”

In this passage, crisis management consultant Bobby Erlich tries to compliment Jenny by denigrating the reality TV star Kim Kardashian. He means that, so far, Jenny has become popular in the media only for her risqué pictures and romantic associations. In contrast, he wants Jenny to come across as a “smart, competent” businessperson. This quote exposes Erlich’s—and the general public’s—misogynist ideas since he assumes that a smart woman cannot also be a sexual person.

“Jack had always known who, and what, Gallo really was, the way he had always known those same things about himself. And about his father before him.”

A central theme in the novel is the danger of Cycles of Violence in Families. This passage says that Jack’s willingness to hurt others is a result of the hurt he experienced from his father, who was a violent man.

“‘You two have been setting me up for a fall since you signed that junkie,’ Ted said. ‘Or maybe it was your brother—he always had a soft spot for junkies.’”

This passage is indicative of the dismissive attitude many characters in the novel have toward drug and alcohol dependency. Although both Money McGee and Thomas Wolf are in recovery for their former substance dependencies, many characters in the novel treat them like suspicious criminals.

“Ben Cantor did not believe in coincidence. No good detective did. Two members of the family, what he’d just called the royal family of football in San Francisco, dying like this, this close together—well what were the odds of that, Detective Cantor?”

Cantor is one of the few characters in the novel who is granted full interiority in the third-person chapters. This passage, in which he considers how detectives should act and refers to himself as Detective Cantor, offers an insight into his character. His job as a detective is central to Cantor’s identity.

“‘So if she does get voted down this week in Los Angeles, I guess we all need to ask ourselves what the other owners are afraid of,’ Oprah said. ‘Besides a strong woman.’”

Jenny’s brothers and the older team owners suggest that she will try to use her gender to manipulate the media and maintain control of the team. The fact that Jenny interviews with Oprah and that Oprah explicitly evokes gender discrimination shows that they are right to think that Jenny will use her gender to get ahead.

“A book deal, definitely. Maybe a talk show. Maybe a reality series about you and the high school kids. Even if you lose, you win, because you’re going to be more famous than ever.”

This passage reveals the stark differences between Jenny and her crisis management consultant Bobby Erlich. While Jenny wants to help the team, Erlich is concerned only with her potential for fame.

“The antithesis of that was seated across his desk, a person every bit as ruthless and cold-blooded as he was, as ruthless as the only man from whom John Gallo took orders. And feared.”

This passage shows that John Gallo is under the thumb of someone who is even more powerful than him. Because Gallo is the novel’s primary villain, these descriptions help to build suspense by making readers wonder who could be worse than him.

“‘Don’t kids post something on Instagram when they’re “official”?’ Cantor said, putting air quotes around the word.”

This passage is indicative of author Patterson’s attempts to appeal to younger audiences after his decades-long writing career. Although it is unlikely that these characters—who are each in their late thirties and early forties—would refer to being “Instagram official,” the concept would be familiar to younger audiences.

“But it turned out to be the day when Jack decided he’d had enough and proceeded to give his father so much of a beating that Elise Wolf finally called the police because she was afraid Jack might beat Joe Wolf to death.”

Jack Wolf is presented as a likely suspect in his father Joe’s death throughout the novel. This passage is a classic red herring—an intentionally misleading detail intended to make readers confident that Jack is the killer. However, it is later revealed that Erik Mason killed Joe under the orders of John Gallo and Michael Barr.

“John Gallo knew that Barr did enough business with the United States involving legal weapons for the federal government to conveniently overlook the vast illegal business he did internationally, in a world he helped control as formidably as any Saudi Arabian or Syrian or Russian.”

In the final section of the novel, Michael Barr is introduced as the secret power behind John Gallo, who is the primary antagonist to that point. This passage is designed to quickly identify Barr’s status as a villain by suggesting that he is more powerful than the federal government. The references to Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Russia—American political opponents in the 2020s—are also intended to identify him as a villain to the novel’s all-American heroine.

“But for some reason, the lyrics to her big showstopping number have always stayed with me: ‘I’m one of the girls who’s one of the boys.’”

Jenny Wolf is the only girl among her siblings, and, as a football coach, she spends most of her time in male-dominated environments. Her tendency to be the only woman in the room is one of Jenny’s defining characteristics. In this passage, Jenny remembers an appropriate lyric she heard at the age of 12, suggesting that this has long been a part of her personality.

“Learned about the excessive force tags on [Mason’s] sheet before they finally let him go for good. And about the shooting of a gang member on which he’d eventually skated, a shooting that everybody thought looked like an execution. White cop. Black kid. Shocker.”

Erik Mason’s history of violence during his career as a law enforcement officer leads Detective Cantor to assume that he is responsible for the deaths of John Gallo, Joe Wolf, and Thomas Wolf. The sarcastic description of Mason’s career as a “shocker” in the final part of this passage points to contemporary conversations about racial violence in policing.