Father and Son
At its heart, this novel is a story about a father and a son. The two of them are trying to beat back the dark reach of economic truths in America, but it is the relationship between the child and parent that is tantamount above the critique of capitalism:
“However essential it is to steel against the world’s fangs, he still gets it, can’t be too hard. A boy needs more than a father’s hot ore to grow into his own”
McDonald’s
How often does the average person ever notice the alterations made inside fast food restaurants? They take place since not every KFC looks like it was built in the sixties and Pizza Huts around the country are not still stuck in the seventies. Décor offers a peek into the socio-political zeitgeist of the times if one knows where and how to look:
“Apparently interior décor trends have zero sway on the timeless functionality of tube slides and ball pits. In the glass cube extension housing the PlayPlace, only the furniture has been updated, looking like it’d been drawn up by some brooding Swede determined to undermine the whole American notion of warmth and plenty that those yellow arches outside not only embody but promise.”
The Skinnies
The hardcore drug crowd is notable for several things, most of them unpleasant. However, they are also noted for possessing bodies that the fashion industry regards as the ultimate in perfection. Metaphor is a vital component for character description and the drug crowd offers a wealth of possibilities:
“Al was hardly skinny though. He was so swollen with girth and charisma, it was as if he’d sapped all sustenance and character from the rest of that skeletal, ever-rotating cluster of local junkies and twitchy vagrants: the skinnies.”
Crumbs of Hope
The narrative is a portrait of that spectrum of society that is almost living on what is described as a “crumb of hope.” Daily toiling under the reality of the crushing inequality of the almighty god of America: capitalism. A metaphorical image sums up the future of so many already written before they have even begun the slog:
"Will he end up like all those strangers - hollowed-eyed in traffic, groaning in checkout lines, slumped over shopping carts - and bloat with entitlement? Will he fall into the ranks of their jaded herd? All of them shuffling after the only thing left: more.”
“$89.34”
Each of the chapter titles in the book are dollar amounts and each of them reflects how much money the protagonist, Henry, actually possesses at that moment in time. The opening is “$89.34” for instance and the chapter ends with Henry discovering a quarter on the floor of a men’s room. “89.59” is the title, appropriately, for the ensuing chapter. It is a dark message, but unavoidable: these figures are metaphors for the value of a human life according to strict rules of supply and demand which—supposedly if not actually—control the fairness of capitalist economics so that inequality cannot be artificially injected into it.
