Where the Heart Is

Novalee falls into a bad habit when she begins dating Troy Moffat. It is clear that Novalee was not picky about the men in her life or careful with birth control when she lived in Tennessee. She never had the unconditional love of her parents, so she looks for it in other places. After losing Willy Jack, she looks for love in Troy Moffat, but she has grown enough to realizes she is setting herself up for trouble when she has unprotected sex with him. On the night her period comes, she realizes just how much she has changed because she has expanded her understanding of the world through the books Forney supplied to her. During her ordeal of waiting for proof she was not pregnant again, she found herself thinking of similar stories in the books she has read, allowing her to see herself as a part of a larger world.

Although Letts never gives a full accounting of the childhood Novalee had, she does reveal a few anecdotes that describe a frightening, lonely existence. The descriptions of two of the Christmases Novalee had before she was ten paint a story of neglect and instability. However, Novalee looks back on some of these stories with fondness because of the naivety of the childhood lens she sees them through. Yet these experiences make her compassionate as well; she can easily comprehend the grief and despair in the stories of the people she has gathered around her, specifically Moses and Benny. She recognizes Moses and his wife Certain’s grief in the way they refuse to look at each other when they exchange Americus from one to the other. At the same time, she takes a photograph of Benny that represents a moment of grief, as his grandfather died that day. There is a lot of grief in this novel, both old and new, that weaves in and out of the plot.

Novalee’s relationships with Sequoyah’s residents continue to grow. Forney remains something of a side character, but he is the one who accompanies her on her search for the perfect Christmas tree and is by her side when Americus is rescued after her kidnapping. She grows her friendship with Moses by becoming involved in photography. In this way, Moses becomes her mentor and a father figure, guiding her into a potential profession and a new way of looking at the world.

Superstition and religion come back into the novel in Chapters 19 and 20 when Americus, who is seven months old, is kidnapped out of her bed. While superstition of sevens is the reason Novalee believes Americus has been taken, religion is the excuse the couple who took her offer. This couple believe that Americus was born of evil because Novalee is unmarried and lived in a Walmart when she gave birth. They take it upon themselves to force their beliefs on Americus by stealing her from her home, baptizing her, and abandoning her alone outdoors in the middle of a cold December night. These attempts to force their religious ideals on Americus could have ended in tragedy; fortunately, it does not. Novalee fails, however, to see that although bad luck is associated with sevens, often it is coupled with good luck as well.

Willy Jack is released from prison and runs out of money once again while searching for an agent to represent him in his music career. He is lucky in that he finds an agent just as he becomes desperate, and this agent, Ruth Meyers, begins a transformation of Willy Jack that foreshadows a moderate level of success. Meyers changes his name, turning him into a totally different person. This is not the first time a character is referred to by a name that is not their own, and it touches on the idea that society’s biases often control people by altering their names.