Fred the Dachshund
Fred is the pet dog of the protagonist. While the story is not about the dog, Fred actually does play a major role in the story. In fact, Fred is at the center of an action which drives the thematic exploration as well as the plot. Metaphor helps to situate the dog’s personality early on:
“Fred has a great sense of timing. He throws himself over on his back and starts wagging his tail like a madman. This is his sign that he wants his belly rubbed, so I bend down and give his underside a good massage. He acts like a cat again.”
Living with Drunks
Davy finds himself living with his mother for the first time since his parents split up. He had been living with his grandmother, but it is her death at the beginning of the story which stimulates the narrative progression. His mom is a drunk who only seems to know other drunks. Which is why a bottle of whiskey stimulates this particular simile:
"We drink that like orange juice around here."
Mother
Like all drunks, Davy’s mother is just an all-around pleasant person to be with all the time. One of the unexplored attributes of alcohol is the way it makes everyone who consumes it in tremendous volume an expert on quite literally every topic, not to mention inundated with empathy:
“So I take Fred for walks a lot during these days…Mother keeps saying I'm nuts to talk to him in sentences, that all he understands are short, one-word commands, and that people like me who talk to animals have personality defects. She's all heart.”
Grief
One of the themes the novel explores in addition to its more infamous theme of same-sex attraction is the effect of grief. The narrator is for most of the novel living through the experience of dealing with profound grief over the loss of the one person he thinks ever really cared for him:
“But between what happened to Grandmother in the fall and how I created an ocean by crying so much about that, and what happened to Fred a few months ago and I cried a lot about that, I don't have it in me to cry too much from now on. Instead, I feel sad, not for myself but for the two guys I loved, Fred and Grandmother. What do you do if you feel sad and you don't want to moon around all the time?”
Stephanie
Davy’s stepmother is a woman younger than his biological mother named Stephanie. Fred doesn’t take too kindly to the drunk, but Stephanie is a different sort of deal altogether. A metaphor is used to describe the way he thinks his dog views Stephanie which used to be a quite common part of the slang vernacular. It has over the ensuing decades since the novel was published gone out of style. The reference is here is a metaphor that means roughly something like the greatest thing since sliced bread. Or, for very modern readers, the greatest thing since whatever cool device was introduced yesterday:
“I guess Fred thinks she's the Queen of Sheba, because he won't pay any attention to me and my father as soon as he has rolled around with Stephanie awhile.”
