August
August experiences a whole life before she gets to New York City where the narrative proper begins. Her adulthood is a clear and sharp break with the miseries of her childhood in which she essentially was the Watson to her obsessive mother’s Sherlock. That is quite a leap, of course, and imagery is used to reveal how it isn’t such an easy transformation:
“Maybe August hasn’t figured out how she fits into any of the spaces she occupies here yet, but the Q is where she hunches over her bag to eat a sandwich stolen from work. It’s where she catches up on The Atlantic, a subscription she can only afford because she steals sandwiches from work. It smells like pennies and sometimes hot garbage, and it’s always, always there for her, even when it’s late.”
When the Levees Break
An allusion to the devastation of the New Orleans area by Hurricane Katrina is painted with imagery that leads to a painful revelation about just how painful it can really be when one is the Watson to someone’s Sherlock. The imagery of a levee breaking in particular, however, also becomes a symbol of the moment in which everything changes for August and she can’t stand the status quo anymore and must make a break for it:
“It wasn’t long afterward that a storm too big for the levees came. 2005. Their apartment in Belle Chasse, the Idlewild place, got eight feet of water. All the files, maps, photos, all the years of handwritten notes, a wet pulp shoveled out the window of a condemned building. August’s mom saved one tupperware tub of files on her brother and not a single one of August’s baby pictures. August lost everything and thought that maybe, if she could become someone who didn’t have anything to lose, she’d never have to feel that way again.”
The Gay Rights Movement
The undercurrent flowing freely beneath the story of Jane and August is the struggle for gay rights. Jane represents an era which was a major turning point in that movement while August represents the positive outcomes to come from that movement. Imagery that is heavy on blurring calls attention to the linkage one of those quick pans in a movie where everything becomes indistinguishable between the starting and stopping point:
“It’s hazy, but she remembers Jane telling her about drag shows she used to go to in the ’70s, the balls, how queens would go hungry for weeks to buy gowns, the shimmering nightclubs that sometimes felt like the only safe places. She lets Jane’s memories transpose over here, now, like double-exposed film, two different generations of messy, loud, brave and scared and brave again people stomping their feet and waving hands with bitten nails, all the things they share and all the things they don’t, the things she has that people like Jane smashed windows and spat blood for.”
August According to Jane
The imagery in the novel is primarily relegated to narrative description. The dialogue is not overburdened with figurative language. But there are occasions when this is tendency is subverted. Such as when August asks Jane what she might tell her friends about her if Jane were to return to her own time:
“There was this girl…There was this girl. I met her on a train. The first time I saw her, she was covered in coffee and smelled like pancakes, and she was beautiful like a city you always wanted to go to, like how you wait years and years for the right time, and then as soon as you get there, you have to taste everything and touch everything and learn every street by name. I felt like I knew her. She reminded me who I was. She had soft lips and green eyes and a body that wouldn’t quit…Hair like you wouldn’t believe. Stubborn, sharp as a knife. And I never, ever wanted a person to save me until she did.”
