62 pages • 2 hours read
Rachel CuskOutline
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A 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 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death and mental illness.
After breakfast with Ryan, Faye returns to the apartment she is renting. The apartment belongs to a writer named Cleia, who is traveling right now. Faye does not know Cleia, though her top-floor apartment seems like a private place. Opposite Cleia’s apartment building is a café, which has a photograph of people on its window; this creates a realistic illusion that always throws off Faye.
The apartment itself is highly organized and filled with beautiful artifacts. Faye describes the artifacts in detail, including wooden models of ships mounted on the wall of Cleia’s study. These are so intricately made that they appear real, as if the wind is rippling their sails. However, when Faye touches the sails, they are not made of cloth at all but of paper.
The kitchen appears functional, but is filled with unpacked devices, such as an unboxed ravioli maker. It is spotlessly clean. The cupboards and drawers in the rest of the apartment are also meticulously organized, with everything in its correct place. In the center of the apartment is a terracotta statue of a woman on a plinth. The statue is large, lifelike, and located in such a place that one must pass it while moving around the apartment.
Faye notices that Cleia’s impressive record collection contains only the classic symphonies. To Faye, this suggests that Cleia wants to cultivate an objective consciousness that pays attention to the whole as the sum of its parts, rather than as an individual entity. The apartment also contains two spartan bedrooms and a large wraparound terrace filled with plants. A few days ago, Faye noticed a bird’s nest in one of the large potted trees on the terrace. A dove sat in the nest, day and night, as if keeping vigil over something. Then, it took off, landing on the rooftop outside.
Chapter 4 Summary
In the afternoon, the neighbor from the plane arrives outside the apartment building to pick up Faye. Faye is sure that he sees her before she spots him, but the neighbor waits for Faye to wave at him first. Outside of the plane, he seems shorter and wider. Faye notices his gold watch and ring, which had escaped her attention on the plane.
The neighbor apologizes for his modest car. Faye thinks that the car is unremarkable but is clean and well maintained. As the neighbor drives them to a marina, 40 minutes away, Faye is surprised at his rough, erratic driving style. She falls silent because she is scared that he may cause an accident. The neighbor tells Faye that he left out important information on the plane: He has been married and divorced not twice but three times. He calls himself “the full disaster” (62). Takis, his son from his first marriage, is currently living with him. The son has schizophrenia and experiences anxiety episodes. The neighbor says that he may get calls from his son during the boat ride. Takis is in his father’s care because his mother, the neighbor’s first wife, unilaterally committed him to an institution. Takis has been in trouble lately because he released all the livestock from a neighbor’s farm, believing that they were endangered. Like many other troubled people, Takis has always been partial to animals that he perceives as in duress.
Faye notes that the neighbor’s descriptions of his first wife now vary in tone from his account on the plane. He describes her as cold and calculating—someone who got together with her current husband, a shipping tycoon, soon after her separation from the neighbor and neglected her children with him. The tycoon, whose name is Kurt, was a strict, exacting stepfather to the children. The neighbor’s daughter with his first wife went on to have a successful career in the US’s Silicon Valley. However, he has not visited his daughter there.
The neighbor and Faye reach the marina. As they head to his boat, Faye notes that the men, most of whom are the neighbor’s age, stare at her in astonishment. To mask her discomfort, she calls her mortgage company in England, where she has put in an application for increasing her loan. The neighbor apologizes for his modest boat.
Inside the boat, he removes his shirt and busies himself with setting up sail. Faye feels sad at the sight of the neighbor’s back, which seems leathery because of his age and sun exposure. She feels that the back establishes the distance between her and the neighbor. Meanwhile, the neighbor starts the motor abruptly, causing Faye to nearly fall over. She is angry at him for not giving her a warning.
They head out to an outcrop of rocks, from where they can dive into the sea. The neighbor gets calls, which he answers in Greek. None appear to be from his son. When the boat drops anchor, Faye notices another boat anchored nearby. In it is a family of three children and a couple. The family scene fills Faye with yearning, even though she knows that what she perceives as happiness is her projection of what she is missing in life. She tells the neighbor about her sons. When they were young, they were inseparable, creating and living in imaginary worlds. They inhabited one reality, “their play a kind of shared trance” (79). As they grew up, one day the trance broke, and the games stopped.
The neighbor and Faye dive off at opposite ends of the boat. Faye feels briefly relaxed by the swim and feels like she could swim out into anonymity. This possibility, too, is an illusion. Back on the boat, the neighbor tells her the story of his uncle Theo and aunt Irini. In the neighbor’s island, it was common for married men to take lovers, though most hid them, unlike Theo. Theo had affairs throughout his marriage with Irini. His beautiful affair partners were a sharp contrast with his wife, whose warts still enthrall the neighbor. Theo and Irini fought viciously whenever the neighbor saw them. However, when Irini died, Theo refused to bury her, keeping her instead in a glass casket that he visited daily until his own death, six months later.
When the neighbor’s father died, his mother had his body stored in the same vault where Irini had been kept. The mother wanted some time to build a family tomb where she could bury her husband. Since she died before the tomb could be completed, it fell on the neighbor to place his mother in the same vault. Later, he had the bodies transported to the site of the tomb; he also exhumed and interred all his other buried family members.
Meanwhile, the neighbor describes his children as the mainstay of his life. He also tells Faye that children have a bittersweet life even when their parents are not divorced. Pain is a part of everybody’s life. As they head back to Athens, the neighbor asks Faye if she is hungry. He knows a great souvlaki place.
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
Characters in the novel often talk about the illusory nature of reality or about their pursuit of an elusive, false idea of perfection. This preoccupation arises from the realization of loss: Faye and the other characters ask themselves if something that they once valued but has since ended—whether a marriage, a way of life, etc.—was ever real in the first place. Unable to reconcile the existence of happiness with its impermanence, Faye finds herself suspicious of anything that is inauthentic or immaterial.
The subject of appearance versus reality predominates in the second section of the novel, with Clelia’s apartment embodying various kinds of illusion. For one, the apartment is filled with artifacts that push the boundaries of verisimilitude, such as the lifelike terracotta sculpture of a woman and the models of boats with wind-ruffled sails. The sails seem so real that Faye reaches out to touch them; however, the material is not canvas but paper, “unexpectedly dry and brittle” (53). Even the view from the apartment building contains an illusion, with a blown-up photograph of a happy couple covering a window in the café on the opposite side of the road. This photo is so lifelike that it seems “terrifying[ly] real” (50).
Faye’s discomfort with the lifelike objects showcases a complex response: She wants to be successfully taken in by—or be part of—an illusion yet experiences disgust and fear at that which is not real. This double response repeats itself when she sees a couple and their three kids on a boat. She knows that the family’s happiness is an illusion, as their present moment does not represent their entire complex reality. At the same time, she wishes to be part of such an illusion, like she was in her married life. Thus, she is torn between the desire to immerse herself in an illusion and the urge to abandon all performance.
While Clelia’s apartment represents the tension between illusion and reality, it itself is an illusion and a performance. Faye describes the apartment in detail, where every bit of décor and organization is meant to convey taste and perfection. However, small details betray the emptiness of the performance: Faye notes that the kitchen is functional, but the ants that descend hungrily onto any crumb suggest that they hardly get any food to eat, implying that no cooking takes place in the kitchen. Clelia’s apartment is an ironic comment on the pressure to appear perfect and functional. Faye feels uncomfortable in the setting, as the apartment’s illusion of order challenges her current, diffuse, passive state.
The subject of illusion runs over into the interactions between Faye and the neighbor, intersecting with the theme of The Roles of Storyteller and Listener in Shaping Narratives. Faye’s impression of the neighbor in the clear light of day varies from her perception of him on the plane. Immediately, she notices that the neighbor appears shorter and older, his person bedecked with gold. Faye had ignored these details in the liminal, dreamy space of the plane’s cabin. This signifies a first break in her illusory perception of the neighbor. The neighbor’s reveal that he has had not two but three divorces shows how his storytelling has shifted, reframing his narrative.
Thus, both the audience (Faye) and the storyteller (the neighbor) change in this section, implying that their shared story will change as well. The text foreshadows this changed story at many junctions: Faye notes that the neighbor is self-conscious about his car and his boat and takes her by surprise with his choppy driving and sailing. This indicates that the neighbor will pile on more less-than-pleasant surprises on Faye. Though Faye does not notice, or deliberately chooses to ignore the fact, the text suggests that the neighbor is trying to impress Faye, building up to making a romantic gesture.
The dove outside Clelia’s terrace and Takis’s animals illustrate the text’s animal symbolism. Animals appear often in the novel, with characters questioning the role that humans ascribe to them in their own lives or in a work of literature. For instance, the flying dove becomes a symbol of something free and pure for Faye because she yearns to be similarly unmoored, whether in the sea or sky. The neighbor suggests that his son Takis cares so much for animals in trouble because he sees his distress mirrored in theirs.
Another element that highlights the theme of The Difficulty of Defining the Self and performance is the allusions to literature, music, and other art forms. As an example, Faye notices that appearances of happiness torture her these days in the same way that Heathcliff and Cathy feel alienated from the Lintons’ warm drawing room in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. In identifying the feelings of these characters, Faye shows that her own self is spread across life and books. It is a symphony of not just Faye’s own feelings but the thoughts and feelings from books and art that have affected her. Faye’s allusions reflect how the self is a collage and a continuum of multiple voices and influences.
The theme of the composite, shifty self is also illustrated through the motif of doubles and parallels (See: Symbols & Motifs), highlighting how people’s realities often converge. In the first section, the neighbor describes a brother left behind on an island on account of his illness; Ryan, too, has a brother who has mental health conditions who has been abandoned by society. In Chapter 4, the mention of children crops up in the accounts of both Faye and the neighbor, echoing the idea that children are the anchors pulling people back to reality.
Accounts of divorce are also repeated throughout the novel, tying in with its theme of The Complexities of Relationship Dynamics. While the neighbor seeks a new self in every romance and marriage—as marriage offers the illusion of a shared, harmonious consciousness—Faye feels that she has to locate herself outside the realm of wifehood and motherhood. The neighbor’s and Faye’s differing takes are shaped, in part, by the gendered expectations around women and men, a topic to which the novel will return.
