Nostalgia
Many of the characters in the book are becoming extremely nostalgic and spending more time looking backwards in their lives than forwards. This is true even of Olive, who is by nature quite an upbeat and optimistic character; certain experiences start to make her reconsider the person she was earlier in her life when her character was more abrasive than it is now. She believes she has become a "tiny bit better" of a person but not much. This saddens her. She also reels sadness when she thinks about her relationship with her late husband.
Jack is also given to nostalgic thought that turns to melancholy. He seems preoccupied with his former relatiionships, both with his late wife and then with Elaine Croft, with whom he had an affair before meeting Olive. He fears that he went through most of his life withour really being conscious of it, and is nostalgic for the time again because he feels his life has been half lived.
Denny also feels nostalgic but for different reasons. He is quite a happily married man but he is not appreciating his wife and children because he is too busy mourning the fact that more than half of his life is behind him. He is so busy focusing on the life behind him that hs is forgetting to look at the life that he has waiting for him in the future. Fortunately an encounter with a stranger whose life is saved before his eyes wakes him up to this fact and he is able to look at the future with optimism rather than at the past with regret.
Isabelle has many regrets, most of which involve the way in which she treated her daughter. She and Olive serve as sounding boards for each other's nostalgia.
Bad Relationships
Very few of the characters in the novel seem to enjoy particularly good marriages. The worst of these would seem to be the MacPherson union which has been miserable for over thirty years. They are so divided that they have duct taped their house in the middle to form a demarcation line between their portions of it and each other. However, Olive also sees her marriage as a bad one when she looks at it in retrospect. At the time she treated Henry rather brusquely and coldly, and spoke to him as if he was less than she. Now she sees how wrong this was, and also feels guilty that she has given this example of marriage to her son, whom she witnesses being torn off a strip by his wife. She feels this makes her both a bad wife and a bad mother and is saddened that her husband isn't alive to see the improvements she has made to herself.
The Effect of Random Strangers
There are several random stranger characters in the book that are pivotal in the lives of the main characters who run into them. Olive, too, is able to be that pivotal character in the life of a complete stranger, as she drives a young pregnant woman to hospital only to help deliver the baby in the back of the car on the way.
Denny is also transformed by a chance encounter with a stranger, who is presumed dead and slumped over a park bench but is revived by police. Although he knows nothing about this man, Denny is deeply affected by him, and he begins to see his life not for the opportunities that have passed but for the years to come. In this way a stranger has made him view life differently when his own family were unable to do so.
