"Change one thing and everything changes. A tremor here sets off an earthquake there. A fault line deepens. A wire gets tripped. His foot on the gas."
This novel tells a story that is dependent upon one thing changing and creating this earthquake of subsequent dominos falling until everything changes for one family. And it is also a story of a family that keeps making bad decisions and changes the intended trajectory of the lives of each member. One could and perhaps may even be intended to assume that the foot on the gas refers to the owner of the foot as being the victim of a tripped wire. That wire triggers an explosion that costs the very life of a girl whereas the brother and sister who actively made their choice wind up only having to deal with the guilt of every decision made for the rest of that evening being wrong. So, in a way, the novel puts forward a narrative that actually may be debating the point seemingly being argued here.
“Everything is connected. Everything. The lady. The doctor. Me. You. It’s like we’re part of a galactic supercluster.”
Waldo is a young boy with no friends who are delivered by the father of the boy whose foot is on the gas. The birth is an emergency and he can be said to have saved Waldo. Waldo is also the son of their across-the-street neighbors with whom, despite this connection, they do not establish even the least neighborly of relationships. Waldo is the only thing that connects the stories of the two families for most of their lives as neighbors. That will change one fateful night, but even that incident illustrates Waldo's point. Waldo explains that superclusters are the largest known structures in the universe and that not every galaxy in the universe is part of one. Of course, he might as well be describing the neighborhood, and families within the neighborhood, and even relationships among each family. This is essentially what the book is about.
"Ben Wilf has come to believe that we live in loops rather than one straight line; that the air itself is made not only of molecules but of memory; that these loops form an invisible pattern; that past, present, and future are a part of this pattern; that our lives intersect for fractions of seconds that are years, centuries, millennia; that nothing ever vanishes."
Ben is the doctor who delivers Waldo. He is the father of the boy with his foot on the gas. And he will make a horrific decision on the night of that drive by his unlicensed son that will impact not only his own family but another. Again, this is a quote that speaks to the larger themes of the book; its overarching theme of being connected in a universe so fragile that one wrong decision by one person in one moment of uncertainty can have far-ranging effects. Ben will establish a connection with Waldo, but it is superficial at best even though it will become a moment of great significance to him. Waldo will connect with Ben more deeply in a much more meaningful way at a time when Ben is physically nowhere near. This is what the story is all about in the end. How humans make big things out of small moments and often are completely unaware of the major moments in their lives taking place far away and without them even knowing it is happening.
