52 pages • 1 hour read
Laura DaveThe Night We Lost Him
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Fraught Family Relationships
Fraught family relationships are at the narrative and thematic core of The Night We Lost Him. Domestic thrillers often use mystery and suspense to explore themes related to family trauma and dysfunction, and this novel is reflective of that broader trend. Liam’s difficult childhood and the emotional absence that characterizes his parenting style are key examples of The Night We Lost Him’s engagement with this theme, but Laura Dave also paints a portrait of how Liam passes his troubled relational model on to his children: Sam, Tommy, and Nora themselves have a fractured bond, and each sibling struggles in their own personal relationships.
Liam’s childhood is never fully explored in detail, but the flashbacks to his teenage years and early adulthood make it clear that his first educational and career goals are to be successful enough to escape Brooklyn and his family. He acknowledges that his move to California after college is the geographical embodiment of his desire to leave the past behind. Liam is implied to have had an unstable childhood home and lacked a model of functional familial relationships. This instability prevents Liam from forging his own healthy relationships, and he prioritizes work over each of his ex-wives and his children. Nora and her brothers feel the sting of this emotional distance, and she explains early on that while “[she] loved [her] father deeply, there is a limit to how much time you can spend with someone who compartmentalizes their life like that” (28). Liam does “compartmentalize” his life, setting aside only small blocks of time for his family and devoting himself mostly to his company.
Although Nora, Tommy, and Sam struggle because of their emotionally absent father, they themselves reproduce his problematic behaviors and find it difficult to relate to one another. Nora is the product of Liam’s first marriage, and Tommy and Sam are his second wife’s children. However, there is not a sizeable age difference between them, and they share many common interests. Despite what they have in common, including career paths, they are not close. Sam and Tommy work for Noone Properties, and Nora is an architect. Her work often brings her in contact with people adjacent to Noone, but she does not see her siblings as like-minded individuals.
They also mirror Liam’s difficulty in forming functional romantic bonds. Tommy devotes so much time to work that his wife feels sidelined. Like his father, he compartmentalizes his family and devotes only small blocks of time to them. Meanwhile, Sam struggles to pay enough attention to his romantic partner. Although he loved his previous long-term girlfriend dearly and is devastated when their relationship ends, he is never willing to spend enough time with her to make their relationship work. Afterward, he quickly dates and proposes to a woman he doesn’t particularly like. Nora struggles with romance, too, though not because of her career. She is not as money oriented as her siblings, but she can’t escape the impact of her father’s emotional distance. Due to this, she does not treat her partner, Jack, with as much care and concern as she should. She maintains an inappropriate friendship with her ex-boyfriend, not truly understanding how much that relationship hurts Jack.
Ultimately, the novel portrays these relationships as parts of a cycle inspired by Liam—and possibly of Liam’s own parents—who never learned how to love in a healthy manner. He passed that inability to form healthy bonds on to his children, and they must actively recognize and break away from those unhealthy practices. Investigating their father’s death brings Sam and Nora closer together, and the resolution of the narrative inspires them both to be more vulnerable and improve their lives. Learning how to forge functional relationships is a key part of both Sam’s and Nora’s narrative arcs, and this is framed as an antidote to the family dynamics that negatively impacted them throughout their lives.
The Impact of Secrets
The impact of secrets on both families and friendships is another of this novel’s key themes. For Liam, Grace, Joe, and Cece, secrets act both as a binding force within relationships but also as a source of emotional distance from others. Within families, secrets become both a source of rupture and healing: The discovery of Liam’s secrets initially hurts Sam and Nora, but ultimately, uncovering the whole truth about their father leads to growth and self-actualization.
Liam, Grace, and Joe meet as teenagers. Although Joe and Grace date first, it is Liam and Grace who forge a lifelong bond. Because Grace senses Liam’s romantic difficulties and will not marry him, they embark upon a clandestine relationship that will last decades. They are business partners and have spouses of their own, so Joe and then Cece keep their relationship a secret. This is to preserve both business relationships and the feelings of Grace and Liam’s loved ones. Because they are united by these large secrets, their friendships have more weight. Loyalty to one another becomes a key driving force in their lives. Additionally, their friendships are their primary source of emotional stability because all these characters are more devoted to work than their families. This adds to the importance that Joe, Liam, Grace, and Cece place on one another.
However, the secrets that they keep also place distance between them and other people, namely Liam’s children. Joe and Grace feel tenderly toward Sam and Nora, but they cannot get too close to Liam’s children because they must keep his secrets. Both Sam and Nora sense this, and Joe, Grace, and eventually Cece become other older adult figures in their lives who maintain a certain emotional distance. This compounds on Liam’s existing boundaries between him and his family.
Liam’s clandestine relationship is part of why he is so unable to commit to any of his wives or properly parent his children: He would much rather be with Grace and wishes that he had been able to start a family with her. He remains emotionally withholding from his children and obscures a major aspect of his identity in keeping his love for Grace a secret. At times, he seems to want to share more with Sam and Nora, but this never manifests. In one particularly fraught conversation, Nora observes, “It felt like there was something my father wanted to tell me too, something he kept coming right up to the edge of saying, but didn’t” (150). Because Liam never speaks of Grace to his children, they are missing a fundamental piece of who he is.
When they do find out the truth after his death, it catalyzes growth for both Sam and Nora. They realize that their father’s life had been a series of emotional struggles that he went through largely on his own. They do not want to repeat his mistakes, and each alters their unhealthy behavioral patterns in their own way. Sam gives up the career in real estate development that he never truly wanted in favor of a job in the world of sports management. Nora recommits to Jack and vows not to keep secrets from him going forward. They both forgive Paul for accidentally causing their father’s death. The novel ends with the idea that learning the full truth about their father helped his children grow and move on. While keeping secrets can be indicative of a bond between people, it will only ultimately damage others.
The Search for Identity Within Families
The novel focuses often on the search for identity within families, especially in families that prioritize careers over relationships. Liam, Sam, Tommy, and Nora all derive much of their sense of self from work, but each character orients themselves toward their career in slightly different ways.
Liam’s identity is almost entirely derived from his role at Noone Properties and the hotel empire he built. He lays out his career goals while still in high school, hoping to use material success as a ticket out of Brooklyn and a way to escape an unhappy childhood. Because success is what he thinks his happiness hinges on, he becomes intensely driven, devoting most of his mental energy to his job. For Liam, his career is the source of an identity that differs from that of his parents, but it also provides him with enough money to lead a comfortable life. Furthermore, his career becomes his biggest connection to Cory/Grace. Because he brings Grace on as the brand strategist and chief marketing executive for Noone, they are able to spend more time together than they would have otherwise. Liam is unhappy in his marriages and would prefer a more traditional relationship with Grace, but because she is unwilling to marry him, he settles for having a work relationship and long-term, clandestine affair with her. Liam’s identity is thus entirely bound up in Noone Properties: Work provides him with the financial means to differentiate himself from his parents, self-actualization, and love.
Sam and Tommy inherited their father’s work ethic and drive toward material success and wealth. Tommy developed a laser-focus on his career as a young man, and he remained committed to his career goals throughout the entirety of his education and during the early portion of his time at Noone. For Tommy, his identity is his career. Although he is married, he considers himself a career man first and a family man second. Sam has a similar trajectory on the outside, but he is a more complex character than Tommy underneath his polished exterior. His true passion is sports, but his career was thwarted by an injury. Like his father, he derives his sense of self from his career and material success; however, he admits by the end of the novel that his interests lie elsewhere and decides to pursue this path.
Nora also derives her sense of self from work and shares with her father and brothers an intense focus on her job. However, identity is more about creativity and passion than it is about material success or status for Nora. She is drawn to architecture because she enjoys using her visual arts background and keen interest in the human psyche to design spaces that are both aesthetically appealing and functional. Her primary project during the novel is “a memory care facility in Connecticut” that showcases her interests by using a “biophilic design concept to ensure all thirty occupants would be connected to nature and lots of natural light, a calming environment” (150). Whereas Sam and Tommy were content to follow in their father’s footsteps—if only on the surface for Sam—Nora’s search for identity means differentiating herself from her father and brothers. They all value work, but Nora also cares about creativity and self-fulfillment. The combination of Sam’s decision to change his career and Sam and Nora’s pivot in their romantic relationships demonstrates how both are more committed to establishing their individual identities, free from both the professional and emotional expectations inadvertently imposed on them by their father.
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