The Genius of Memory
The narrator describes the horrific death of his mother at the hands of the speeding rawhide of a Little League ball sent into flight by a stick of wood. The requisite attempt is made to protect him from future trauma by averting his eyes. But trauma is not so easily muscled:
Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!
God
This is an intensely—and specifically—religious novel. It is specifically obsessed with Christian notions and ideals of faith. And it draws its ontology from the works of Thomas Aquinas:
“there must be a first mover existing above all—and this we call God.”
Climate
Weather is an aspect of setting that is especially subject to the use of metaphor. Some writers take on the project to the point of flight of fancy in their desire to transform simple descriptions of warm or cold into poetry. Then there are the occasions where the metaphor attains a kind of offbeat strangeness simply by virtue of its directness:
“the wind, which is the cruelest kind of cold, kicked up wisps and kite tales of the dry powder”
Point of View
The book is an example of a first-person narrator telling a story that is dependent up another character of maintaining interest. Think of the stories of Sherlock Holmes as told by Dr. Watson as an example. It is actually a strange approach to writing a novel when you think about it:
“Now much else has happened to me. I’m a churchgoer and a schoolteacher…my life has been determinedly unexciting; my life is a reading list.”
Social Criticism
In addition to spiritual matters, the book is also filled with social criticism. Politics and the media take some of the biggest hits. And some of the biggest hits arrive in the form of metaphor:
“Newspapers are even worse for me than ice cream; headlines, and the big issues that generate the headlines, are pure fat.”