Essay Questions

What’s happening with the Green House?

The Green House is where a woman lives that many think professes to have psychic abilities. This is a rather odd assumption, however, as the woman makes no bones about the fact that there strange powers are not psychic. Rather, she is a healer who gains those abilities through the psychic-like power to “read” the state of a person’s energy. The deal with the Green House is that when a person in the surrounding area gets sick they must rely upon the knowledge of a person educated and trained in the field medicine—sometimes called a doctor—who might or might not be available at the nearby clinic and who might or might not actually know about or be able to do anything to treat the person’s condition. Either that or they can depend upon a woman with the ability to read a person’s energy. It’s a low-wage population health care conundrum.

What is this “rescue distance” that the narrator is constantly calculating?

What the narrator terms “rescue distance” is a concept that every parent or guardian of a child intuitively develops, but usually without giving it a definite name. Rescue distance is the length of space anyone—but especially a parent—calculates is farthest possible that can exist between them and any potential danger the child may be facing. Thus, estimate is always in a constant state of recalculation because so many variables are involved: the level of danger, the potential for the danger to actually occur, the gravity of the potential harm, what the parent must be prepared to do in order to get to the child in order to prevent harm, etc. The most important variable involved—the one without which no serious computation of “rescue distance” can be made—is the location of the child. If the child cannot be seen or heard or otherwise known for sure, the calculus becomes meaningless.

What is the point of the multiple narrative structure of the storytelling?

The process of storytelling is part of the overall thematic framework of the novel. Boiled down to essentials, it is an example of a story-within-a-story in which Amanda is delivering a story secondhand to David, but it becomes more complicated by the complexity of the addition in which David is no mere inactive receiver, but a participatory interlocutor of sorts. It is this interaction between storyteller and listener who becomes more than just a listener that facilitates the slowly rising tension in the overall story. From out of this tension is created the dramatic conflict which many critics deem an essential component of fiction.