Marriage
This is a domestic novel; a tale of a marriage rocked and love challenged. One might not necessarily hope to find the concept of domestic union painted in metaphorical tones, but certainly it should be expected. But when it comes in its most direct form, the comparison may still be unexpected:
“Marriage is like grafting a limb onto a tree trunk. You have the limb, freshly sliced, dripping sap, and smelling of springtime, and then you have the mother tree stripped of her protective bark, gouged and ready to receive this new addition.”
The House with a Moral
Atlanta is not a city that has ever set the world of architecture on fire. A certain homogeneous quality defines practically every neighborhood, but there is an upside to this aesthetic reality. It allows a departure to really stand out and such is the case with the Victorian home in which Celestial grew which became a local neighborhood:
“Set back from the street, partially hidden by a green wall of unkempt shrubbery, it stood like a turn-of-the-century cautionary tale in this community of tidy brick houses.”
Creative Originality
For the most part—say at least sixty percent or so—the comparisons made through the use of similes are not really particularly inventive or original. The writer’s toolbox is filled with comparisons that have been made in one way or another that they can draw upon for the specific occasion. Still, occasions do arrive when a comparison is so strikingly inventive and creates such a vivid picture in one’s mind that has never been there before that it is worth noting. Such an occasion occurs in this novel:
“Big Roy regarded me with a confusion, as though a stray cat suddenly started quoting Muhammad Ali.”
Prison
In the letters which bring the novel to a close, Roy writes to Celestial about prison, suggesting that many have expressed the opinion it somehow saved him. He presents a different take on captivity, transforming it into a metaphor of a crazy house at a Halloween carnival where every glance becomes a question of perception and reality:
“prison is a haunted house of mirrors”
Pop Culture Metaphor
Allusions are a standard mechanism for constructing metaphor. When the thing being alluded to is not from a creative work penned by a person long dead it has come to be known as a pop culture reference. The problem with pop culture referencing is that the thing to which the comparison is made may—quite likely won’t—have the lasting power to one day become a recognizable allusion. It has practicality for the short term, however:
“Before, we were living that Huxtable life. But now where are we? I know where you are and I know where I am, but where are WE?”
