Relationships
This is a big novel peopled with lots of characters. Many characters share the same name but nothing else so it can be a little confusing. One of the keys to understanding what is going on in any particular section is paying close attention to the names of the characters and how the narrative prose describes their relationships to each other:
“And now Charles’s world had become his world as well, and for the first time in their friendship there was a trench, and there was no way for her to come to him, and no way that he could return to her.”
Hyperbole
The book itself is divided into three disconnected sections. The second section is itself also divided into two sections with the latter part being narrated in the first-person. This person narration allows for the introduction of some hyperbole into the metaphorical descriptions:
“It was as if I had been delivered to Lipo-wao-nahele—I had not chosen to come there; I had been deposited there, as though some wind had blown me across the island and dropped me beneath the acacia tree.”
Arranged Marriages
The opening section of the novel takes place in an alternative American reality in which the post-Civil War world we know never happened. In so-called Free States which includes New York, gay marriage is legal and adopted by a surprisingly robust percentage. But there is also a long tradition of arranged marriages which confuses those not living among the Free States. The concept is described by one character to another:
“My grandfather’s theory is that, because significant dynasties soon arose from those marriages, it became essential for the financial integrity of the States for them to continue. He speaks of them as one might the cultivation of trees…’the maintaining of a web of roots upon which the nation thrives and flowers.’”
The Marriage Act
America has devolved into an explicitly fascist state in the third section of the book. Legislation designed to criminalize behavior deemed immoral is fully at hand. Such a piece of legislation is one called the Marriage Act and the response makes metaphor blur into the literal:
“I said that the point was the same wherever and whenever homosexuality was criminalized—to create a useful scapegoat on whom the fortunes of a faltering state could be blamed”
Setting
Any book which is set in different time periods is bound to need help with the setting. Similes become powerful tools for bringing setting to life. Even when the particulars of the setting could be situated across the full set of time periods:
“My first thought was that the house was charmed. The street was lined with small, single-story shops and businesses—a dry-goods shop, a hardware store, a grocer—and then, suddenly, as if conjured, was a tiny wooden house. The rest of the block was denuded of greenery, but looming over the structure was a large mango tree, so domineering and leafy that it seemed to be protecting the little building from sight.”
