Search for Self-Identity
One single couple, Jack and Sarah, appear in five of the stories in this collection. Notably, those stories are not presented in chronological order. For instance, the opening story in this book shows them in a state of holy matrimony. Much later, another story will reveal how they met. Only at the end do they finally actually get married. They are the same characters, but they navigate among the other stories included here in a such a way that they are not necessarily the same people. Jack and Sarah lead very lives in each of their stories that are just slightly different enough to make them question their sense of identity. This search for identity is packed within a number of tales about men trying to determine whether they are a son or father while women are seeking the same establishment of self within their worlds of being wife, mother, and daughter. A character famous to the world as Mistress Mickle is really a woman named Jenny Early bearing little relationship to her public alter ego. There is even a story with a title directly addressing the theme of self-identity set in a place called the Hotel Narcissus, “It’s Not You.” Narcissus, of course, is the mythological figure who fell in love with his own reflection in the water.
Loneliness and Isolation
Almost every story here engages a mood of sadness at some point in telling stories about people who are isolated from the world, other people, or—as in the story of Mistress Mickle—even themselves. The story “Proof” begins with the opening line that a character is not even sure what beach he’s on. Puppets and dolls pop up in a number of stories and they are presented as metaphorical counterparts of humanity that are isolated from real emotions and genuine confrontations. The title of the collection as a whole and a single story within it points to this theme as well. Souvenirs and museums represents things and places that have been removed from their point of origin and put on display in isolation from similar objects.
The Inescapable Presence of Repetition
The word “grackle” appears in the opening paragraph of “A Walk-Through Human Heart” no less than six times. Over the course of the story it is easily the most often repeated word that is not a pronoun or a “be” verb. This example is the most insistent and obvious example of how these stories present a world where lives are a series of repetition. Almost every story features a character taking a trip somewhere, even for a holiday or a day’s amusement. An unusual number of the stories revisit the experiences of father and sons desperately seeking to make a connection with each other before the opportunity is lost forever. The fact that in a collection of stories otherwise unrelated to each other five of them focus on the repeat engagement of a single couple at random moments in their relationship speaks directly to this them of life being a cycle of the same things that differ only slight in the details.
