Mother Watching TV
Imagery is used as a leitmotif throughout the text through a recurrence of certain scenes and concepts. One of the scenes which is referred to repetitively throughout is that of the narrator’s mother sitting almost catatonically watching the news on TV: “and she wipes the weary from her eyes still glued to the no-good glued to the high definition glare of low-definition life.’
George Floyd
The book is a free-flowing rhapsodical commentary on the events taking place during the Covid-19 epidemic. This becomes obvious not as a result of direct mention in the text since the narrative is structured more like a jazz composition that allusively creates context through its use of recurring leitmotifs. One of those recurring instances is about protests. Anyone familiar with the events of the summer of 2020 should automatically recall the stimulus of those protests, but future generations will have to depend upon familiarity with the allusive nature of the text and one of the few direct implications through explicit imagery. Most of the illustrations are devoid of physical detail of the humans populating them, but there is one very notable exception. In concert with the very first mention of protests is now iconic and unforgettable face of George Floyd, the man whose public murder at the hands of cops being filmed was ignition of the wick leading to those protests that summer.
Isolation
Every character in this family is isolated throughout the book. The mother just sits incessantly watching the news on TV. The narrator’s brother is in his room playing video games and constantly trying to break his own record. The sister is in her room on the phone texting with friends. And the father is behind a closed door doing little more than trying not to keep coughing. It is a chillingly accurate portrait of life during the quarantine of Covid made all the more distressing because this alienation of family members even from each other will need no explanation to any reader for many years to come.
Breathing
The book is divided into three sections: Breath One, Breath Two, and Breath Three. Within the narrative itself, breathing becomes another of the recurring leitmotifs working in conjunction with each other to become a fully realized and complex composition. The concept of breathing—or, more precisely, not being able to breathe—is another aspect of the very specific time period in which the story is set that is instantly familiar to those who were there. It is, however, a stroke of genius on the part of the book’s two collaborators to recognize and identify this singular unifying element that ties the protests of the summer of 2020 to Covid quarantine. One of the identifying symptoms of Covid was the inability to breathe normally while the rallying cry of the protests against excessive force by the police was George Floyd’s heartbreaking cry for mercy to merciless officer Derek Chauvin: “I can’t breathe” which he repeated—and Chauvin ignored—over twenty times.
