55 pages • 1 hour read
Erica BauermeisterA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
William, having retired slightly early from his job as a civil engineer, is on his way to begin a new life as the caretaker of a ghost town in remote Northeastern California. He’s recently lost his wife to cancer, and he hears her voice in his mind, urging him to “shake things up.” As he drives toward his new life, he reflects on the unexpected things that have happened in his life—most notably the unplanned pregnancy that led to the birth of his now-grown daughter, Clara. William admired the spirit of adventure with which his wife greeted the news, and now he aspires to be more like her.
Now that he’s on the road, William wonders if he’s making the right decision. The ghost town’s location is extremely remote, and the drive is treacherous. He tries channeling Abigail’s encouragement.
The building where William will stay is dirty and decrepit. He hopes he’ll be okay here alone. In the morning, William feels absent-minded and overwhelmed. He wants to go home but realizes, having sold the house after Abigail’s death, he no longer has a home. Selling the house, he thought at the time, was a way to gain closure after Abigail’s death and a way to end the story of their relationship. Now, though, he hears her voice telling him that he can’t stop the story.
Abigail loved stories and books. She and William met in a literature course. Throughout their relationship, they shared stories too.
William surveys the ghost town. He lists the repairs he should make and wonders whether he’ll be able to stick around long enough to make them. In spite of his doubts, William busies himself throughout the next days. One night, he opens Clara’s box and finds four of Abigail’s old novels.
William starts reading Theo, the fourth book in the stack. William typically prefers nonfiction but finds himself enjoying Theo. His mind drifts into memories of Abigail and Clara. They often read together. Abigail was reading Theo on her deathbed. Clara read the end to her when she got too sick to read alone.
William starts to worry about his well-being in the ghost town. When he feels lonely, afraid, or down, he forces himself to go outside.
One day, William finds an old postcard while cleaning. It’s addressed to someone named Allie. He senses an unnamable emotion in the card. It makes him think about Abigail and Clara again.
William spends his days cleaning, caretaking, and hiking. Twelve days into his stay, he realizes he’ll have to restock his supplies soon, but he puts it off, not wishing to undertake the treacherous drive again. He gets lost in hiking and reminiscing about his past, his late wife, and his daughter. His relationship with Clara has been strained since Abigail’s death. He realizes that losing Abigail made him lose his sense of the future. He has his memories of Abigail but has nothing new to look forward to with her.
William is horrified when he wakes up and discovers that he’s snowed in. If the storm continues much longer, his supplies will run out.
William passes the days by reading Theo. Reading distracts him from his hunger and dwindling supplies. He’s delighted by the book and excited to find Abigail’s annotations in the margins.
Reading Theo makes William feel reconnected with his late wife. The book also inspires his reflections on Clara and Abigail’s relationship. Shortly before Abigail’s death, William discovered that Clara was helping Abigail die. Abigail was sick with cancer, but Clara was letting her starve at Abigail’s request. The women had hidden this truth from William to protect him. He hadn’t handled the revelation well. Theo’s story conjures his reflections on this struggle.
William realizes he must survive. He sets Theo aside and decides to venture out into the snow for supplies. He’s knowledgeable and skilled. He’ll try his best to get out.
Juliet works as an intimacy coordinator for movies—a line of work she regards as a natural fit for her, an outgrowth of interests that began in her early adolescence when she saw Romeo and Juliet performed on stage and became fascinated with the choreography of a duel and excited by the kiss between the two leads. She began to read voraciously after that, searching for the same feeling she experienced when she saw that kiss.
In college, she took up fencing, and when a beautiful young actor named Rowan came to the fencing class to practice for a sword fight in a play, her skillful advice eventually caught the attention of the director—starting her on a path toward a career as a fight coordinator. Her unique talent lay in her ability to make fight scenes feel like part of the story, and she easily parlayed this skill into choreographing sex scenes as well, which she regards as fundamentally not much different from fight scenes. She and Rowan became friends and slept together once. Although they appreciated one another, they lost contact when Rowan stopped acting.
At 30, Juliet met and fell in love with a political consultant named Richard. They soon married and had their daughter, Josie. Richard’s work led them to move from New York to Southern California, and their lives fell into a comfortable routine—pleasant if a bit monotonous.
At the same time, increasing public awareness of sexual abuse in Hollywood has made Juliet’s expertise as an intimacy coordinator more in demand than ever before. Her career takes off.
In the present, Juliet is flying home to California from France. She was working on a film in Paris. She feels restless and wishes she had something to read. Then she remembers that her friend sent her the audiobook of Theo. When she starts listening, she discovers that Theo is read by Rowan.
Six hours into the audiobook, Juliet reaches a love scene and wonders if she could choreograph it. The scene she envisions is an echo of the scene she saw in Romeo and Juliet as a child—the lovers’ hands reaching out to touch and the camera focusing on their faces as their expressions change, “one into joy, the other into healing,” suggesting that their love will be sustaining rather than destructive.
Juliet continues listening to Theo on her drive home from the airport. She has to stop the book to greet Richard and Josie. Though she realizes she’s doing nothing wrong by listening to the book, she wants to keep it a secret. She wonders if her feelings have to do with Rowan.
Juliet and Richard have sex after putting Josie to bed, but the experience is unsatisfying for Juliet. Lying awake, she wonders if there’s something wrong with her marriage. She finishes listening to Theo and applies the book’s lessons to her life, realizing that her marriage isn’t bad but that the routines of work and childcare have created a distance between herself and Richard but that distance can be bridged. She reaches for him and, when he wakes, says, “Let’s try that again” (272).
Madeline Armstrong has been a literary agent for over 50 years, but her life and career have changed in recent days. After falling and injuring her wrist, she hasn’t been able to work at the office. A doctor’s visit for the injured wrist leads to a diagnosis of cerebral amyloid angiopathy—a buildup of plaque in the arteries of her brain. She learns that she has already experienced several small strokes and that more and bigger ones are likely to happen in the near future, threatening her cognitive function.
Madeline’s assistant takes her back to her apartment. On the way, she remembers a personal essay she read in the New York Times’s Modern Love column, written by a young woman who had helped her mother die of starvation to avoid a more protracted and painful death from terminal cancer. The essay ended by criticizing the cruelty of laws against assisted suicide, and now Madeline fears that she too may be prohibited from ending her life when it becomes too painful to continue.
After the assistant leaves, Madeline thinks about how the less senior agents will already be quietly vying for her spot as head of the agency. She looks at her house, less than 12 feet wide and four stories tall, with steep, narrow steps—and realizes that it is hardly suited for a person living alone with a neurodegenerative illness. She thinks of all the books she’s accumulated—a monument to her long career—and realizes that she’ll need to sort them and figure out what should be done with them when she either dies or has to leave her home for a long-term care facility.
Madeline hires a young girl named Nola to help her sort the books. Madeline is surprised by Nola’s intellect and empathy. Nola is an enthusiastic worker and is interested in books and reading.
Nola finds Theo while working and tells Madeline about reading the novel in high school. Madeline remembers Lara finding the manuscript. She remembers her own communications with the author, Alice Wein, too. Madeline urged her to change the ambiguous ending, but Alice was adamant that it remain the way she’d written it. Madeline worried the book wouldn’t sell, but it had done well.
One morning, Madeline wakes up disoriented and confused. Nola finds her on the floor, and Madeline asks Nola with her eyes not to call for help. Nola stays with Madeline until she dies.
Alice Wein attends Madeline’s memorial reception at the New York Public Library with her new boyfriend, Kit. She retreats from the gathering and wanders the library.
Alice hasn’t been able to think of another story idea since publishing Theo. She’s learned that a story will present itself to her when it’s ready. She walks through the library, wondering where her new story is. When she finds a book called Found Art, inspiration strikes her. She sees an image of a statue with book pages for wings. She begins to wonder about the sculpture’s life, personality, and past. She knows she’s found her story and rejoins the guests at the memorial.
In the novel’s final chapters, the narrative assumes a circular structure and form. William’s, Juliet’s, and Madeline’s storylines foster new connections between Bauermeister’s cast of characters. In Madeline’s chapter, the narrator reveals that Madeline heard about William’s, Abigail’s, and Clara’s story in a podcast. Madeline is also the agent who sold and published Alice Wein’s novel, Theo. Nola’s character recurs in this penultimate chapter, too, when Madeline hires her to sort her book collection. In Juliet’s chapter, the narrator reveals that Juliet and Rowan were friends and lovers in university. When Juliet listens to the Theo audiobook, she is discovering Alice’s fictional world while revisiting scenes from her own past. In the novel’s Epilogue, Alice returns to the page once more when she attends Madeline’s memorial service. In this final scene, she discovers Miranda’s sculpture in a book. Such narrative revelations reinforce the characters’ subtle connections to one another. They all lead separate lives, wrestle with distinct questions, and discover unique revelations but are all connected to one another via reading, story, and books. The narrative’s overarching themes are reiterated and underscored in these concluding chapters.
The last four chapters of Part 3 trace the novel’s descending action, denouement, and resolution. No Two Persons does not follow a traditional linear narrative arc. However, the novel’s latter chapters offer hopeful resolutions to the characters’ lives and conflicts. In William’s chapter, “Northeastern California 2017, The Caretaker,” William finds healing and hope when he reads his late wife’s copy of Theo. The fortitude he draws from this experience allows him to escape the snowed-in ghost town in the mountains, a literal illustration of Books as Escape and Deliverance. In Juliet’s chapter, “Southern California 2018, The Coordinator,” Juliet decides to try her marriage again after listening to Rowan’s audio recording of Theo. In Madeline’s chapter, “New York City 2019, The Agent,” Nola guides Madeline from life into death after the two connect over Alice’s novel. This network of transformative incidents illustrates the themes of Literature as a Pathway to Healing and Story as a Form of Connection.
The novel’s concluding events present books and stories as symbols of hope. In the context of William’s storyline, for example, William feels hopeless and lost when he sets out for the ghost town after his wife’s death. He wants to believe his new caretaking job can change his life, but when he arrives at the ghost town, he starts “second-guessing every decision [he’s] ever made” (218). The longer William is alone in the abandoned town, the more despondent and defeatist he feels. Therefore, finding and reading Theo is a metaphoric lifeline for William. The book distracts him from his hunger and transports him out of his sorrow. The book reignites his spirit and rekindles his courage. Abigail’s death stripped his life of newness and possibility. Therefore, when William lost Abigail, he lost his sense of the future. Theo reinfuses his life with meaning, possibility, and hope. He enjoys Theo’s story and finds inspiration in his wife’s annotations of it.
Like William, Juliet also finds the will to try again after she reads Theo. The book conjures her memories of the past. When she hears Rowan reading the novel, she mentally returns to the scenes and passions of her former life. She also starts to question her decisions. At the same time, Alice’s novel reminds her to cherish the good in her life. By the end of her chapter, she learns to make amends with her past and to embrace her present. The book helps her to reconcile these disparate seasons of her life. The same principles apply to Madeline’s storyline. Madeline is literally passing from life into death at the end of her chapter. Theo, and all of the readers who have enjoyed the book, make this transition less painful for her. Indeed, as she lies on the floor dying, she reflects upon the books she has published and the lives she has touched through these books. She is reconciling with her life and her work while learning to let go of both.
The novel’s Epilogue resolves the overarching narrative conflicts. At the same time, the Epilogue lets the novel’s characters live beyond the confines of the page. When Alice has her creative revelation at Madeline’s memorial service, she is entering a new stage of life, one that Bauermeister doesn’t include in No Two Persons. However, the story Alice will write promises to reach another network of individuals in the same way Theo has done throughout No Two Persons. In these ways, Bauermeister’s narrative world, characters, and thematic explorations transcend their own literary parameters.
By Erica Bauermeister
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