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“Look: you know what is the true difference between these people and me? They don’t want to move forward, they don’t want to have nothing better than this. But I’m always moving forward, thinking of the next thing.” 

Michel’s ambition and desire do not stem from mere greed or materialism. Instead, the statements he makes about his goals show that his ambition is tied to his understanding of social class. By mentioning differences between those who want to advance and those who do not, and by directly stating that one path is “better,” Michel makes clear that he sees ambition as tied to quality of life. 

“Privately she thinks: you want to be rich like them but you can’t be bothered with their morals, whereas I am more interested in their morals than their money, and this thought, this opposition, makes her feel good.” 

Though Leah struggles to find purpose and to understand Michel’s ambition, the challenges she faces are deeply connected to the values that she does hold onto. In the supermarket, she realizes that she is bothered by their inability to afford fair trade and local items because she values ethical principles, while Michel is bothered by it because he values economic standing. Throughout the course of the novel, Leah demonstrates a social and ethical consciousness in spite of her existential crisis. 

“[Barnes] rapped the tree with a knuckle and made Felix stop under it and look up: an enclosing canopy of thick foliage, like standing under the bell skirts of a Disney princess. Felix never knew what to say about nature. He waited. ‘A bit of green is very powerful, Felix. Very powerful. ’Specially in England. Even us Londoners born and bred, we need it.’” 

Barnes is one of the few characters in the novel to make direct reference to the importance of nature. Felix, like Natalie and others, feels thoroughly city-bred and cannot grasp what Barnes means about the power of nature and its necessary contrast to the urban landscape. Ironically, Felix compares the look of the tree to a Disney princess, like the cheap plastic figurines that Grace collects. This reference draws an explicit comparison between manufactured commodities and natural imagery. 

“Maybe the next cloud overhead would open up and a huge cartoon hand emerge from below, pointing at him, accompanied by a thunderous, authorial voice: TOM MERCER, EPIC FAIL.” 

Though Tom’s appearance in the novel is relatively brief, a passage of stream of consciousness in “Guest” shows that he faces many of the same existential crises as other characters. Despite having an interesting job in marketing, a home, and a girlfriend, Tom is plagued by feelings of inadequacy and a lack of fulfillment. Like Natalie, Leah, and Felix, his parents’ judgments also remain a pervasive influence on how he feels about himself and the world. 

“They were all three familiar to Felix; he’d seen them many times over the years. First her alone; then he moved in. Then the baby turned up, who looked now to be four or five years old. Where had the time gone? Quite often, in good weather, he had watched the woman take pictures of her family on a proper camera set atop a tripod base. ‘Oops,’ said Annie, ‘trouble in paradise.’” 

Felix watches a family dine on the rooftop of the building across from Annie’s apartment, realizing how time has passed. This passage of time coincided with his years of addiction, and seeing it crystalized in the family underscores the urgency of his desire to turn his life around. The family also represents the ideal of domestic life that he yearns for, and so Annie’s sarcastic remark when the woman drops a tray of food emphasizes the contrast between she and Felix. 

“‘You know, Felix’—a dainty little voice, like a waitress reciting the specials—‘not everyone wants this conventional little life you’re rowing your boat toward. I like my river of fire. And when it’s time for me to go I fully intend to roll off my one-person dinghy into the flames and be consumed. I’m not afraid!’” 

Most characters in the novel either yearn for something they do not have or struggle to even define what they want from life. Annie, on the other hand, expresses contentment with her way of life. The startling effect of her point of view comes from the ironic fact that the features of her life—drug addiction, a lack of career ambition, disinterest in family or domestic relationships—are vastly different from what other characters long for or represent. 

“He hurried to the stairs, and was a few steps down when he heard a thud on the carpet above as she went down on her knees, and he knew he was meant to feel heavy, but the truth was he felt like a man undergoing some not-yet-invented process called particle transfer, wonderfully, blissfully light.” 

Felix’s motivations for visiting Annie and his final sexual encounter with her are somewhat ambiguous, but the note on which they part leaves no doubt that Felix has changed: While Annie falls, sinking back to her life, he feels reborn. The moment of drama when Annie and Felix argue, first in her apartment and then outside of it, provides a contrast to emphasize just how resolved Felix is to turn his life around.

“Felix felt a great wave of approval, smothering and unwanted, directed toward him, and just as surely, contempt and disgust enveloping the two men and separating them, from Felix, from the rest of the carriage, from humanity.” 

Felix’s experience on the train sets his tragic end in motion and illuminates two sides of racism that the novel’s characters can face. The white woman who Felix helped on the train mistakenly assumed he was traveling with the other black men on the train, simply because they were of the same race. On the other hand, the other black men (who later mug and stab Felix) see him as weak and contemptible for helping the white woman and for not living up to their view of black male machismo. 

“‘We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking,’ read Rodney, and then made a note by this sentence: ‘So what? (fallacious argument.)’”

The very beginning of the relationship between Keisha and Rodney demonstrates how much of it is built around their shared academic and career ambitions. As he diligently studies a book by the philosopher Albert Camus, Rodney reads this quote aloud and makes a note of it. Ironically, he dismisses Camus’s point as erroneous, though it encapsulates how Keisha and others devote more time and energy to going through the motions of life than contemplating their sense of purpose. 

“There seemed no point of entry. The students were tired of things Keisha had never heard of, and horrified by the only thing she knew well: the Bible.” 

For several years, much of Keisha’s energy has been concentrated on academic achievement and the goal of entering college. Once there, however, she experiences an extraordinary sense of alienation, due to the stark differences in cultural background and socio-economic status between her and other students. This foreshadows later experiences when her achievements in career and family life do not turn out to provide the fulfillment they seemed to promise.  

“They were going to be lawyers, the first people in either of their families to become professionals. They thought life was a problem that could be solved by means of professionalization.” 

Confronted by a new-found awareness of class structure and socio-economic divides after beginning college, Rodney and Keisha both set their analytic minds to the task of finding a solution to overcome them. Drawing comparisons between themselves and the people that surround them, they decide that the key to eliminating these divides is career success. While Natalie’s later career as a lawyer does provide economic stability, it fails to provide life purpose. 

“Rodney raised his head from his tort casebook. He had a ruthless look on his face. ‘We don’t care about trees, Leah,’ he said. ‘That’s your luxury. We haven’t got the time to care about trees.’” 

Buried in the pile of law books he is studying, Rodney openly rejects Leah’s ethical consciousness. The basis of this rejection is rooted in his awareness of class distinctions. He expects that people like he and Keisha, who come from humble economic origins and minority races, must work harder to succeed than someone like Leah, who is white and from a solid socio-economic background. This situation leaves them, in Rodney’s mind, no opportunity to take up causes like Leah’s environmental crusade. 

“Although you may turn up in court armed with reason, we live in an unreasonable world.” 

One of Natalie’s law instructors, Professor Kirkwood, makes this comment in the course of a lesson. For Natalie’s character, the comment is less about reason’s role in law and order and more about her attempts to control her life. Despite her intelligence, planning, ambition, and outward success, she finds herself running into conflict. Her rationality, in other words, is not enough to hold existential crises at bay. 

“‘Really good to see you,’ said Leah. ‘You’re the only person I can be all of myself with.’ Which comment made Natalie begin to cry, not really at the sentiment but rather out of a fearful knowledge that if reversed the statement would be rendered practically meaningless, Ms. Blake having no self to be, not with Leah, or anyone.” 

Both Leah and Natalie struggle to define themselves, and both are crippled at various points by their own awareness of this struggle. Even when Leah and Natalie are in college, with more opportunities to freely explore and express themselves, Natalie grapples with this problem. This particular crisis of identity, however, closely coincides with major transformations (Keisha’s decisions to change her name to Natalie and to break up with Rodney), showing Natalie’s tendency to respond to challenges by making resolved choices that feel rational to her. 

“As one learns very quickly in this profession, fortune favors the brave—but also the pragmatic.” 

Almost as soon as Natalie begins to succeed professionally, she experiences new crises. After facing inappropriate advances from a male lawyer she is working for, Natalie is advised by a senior female lawyer to ignore the issue and focus on opportunities to advance her career. The episode indicates the discrimination that professional women like Natalie deal with and the decisions they consequently face. For Natalie, these sometimes loathsome decisions exacerbate her struggle to navigate her layered roles as a professional, wife, mother, daughter, woman of color, and child of immigrants. 

“Upon closer inspection the cloud of white separated into thousands of tiny flowers with yellow centers and green bits and pink flecks. A city animal, she did not have the proper name for anything natural.” 

Natalie’s entire upbringing has taken place in an urban environment, and she has focused on aspects of urban life such as attaining material stability, becoming educated, and navigating the intersections of multiple identities. However, she feels compelled to pluck an apple blossom from a tree and take it with her as she heads to the train. Inexplicably, the symbol of natural beauty draws her in, suggesting nature’s power and the sharp contrast between nature and the built environment of the city. 

“Daughter drag. Sister drag. Mother drag. Wife drag. Court drag. Rich drag. Poor drag. British drag. Jamaican drag. Each required a different wardrobe. But when considering these various attitudes she struggled to think what would be the most authentic, or perhaps the least inauthentic.” 

Natalie’s catalog of her diverse roles and identities is long and contradictory—she is both rich and poor, and British and foreign, for instance. All of these stick with her, enriching her personality and confusing it. As she moves through the varied spheres of her life, Natalie attempts to alternate her roles and identities as needed. Yet the vast array of them becomes dizzying, and conflicts between them are inevitable, as when she struggles to juggle being both a mother and a barrister. 

“Walking was what she did now, walking was what she was. She was nothing more or less than the phenomenon of walking. She had no name, no biography, no characteristics.” 

At the moment of her greatest crisis, after Frank discovers her secret affairs, Natalie is at a loss. All of the identities and achievements she bears are shed. Significantly, she takes to the streets when she does not know what else to do, or who she really is. By walking the streets, even aimlessly, Natalie retains the barest sense of being: Thoroughly a Londoner, she can at least blend into the city’s landscape. 

“What you crying for now? You ain’t got shit to cry about.” 

Fleeing with Nathan through the streets of their neighborhood, Natalie confronts the people and spaces of her personal history. Nathan—a drug addict, possible pimp, and probable murderer—ostensibly has little room to criticize Natalie’s existential woes. On the other hand, because he comes from and continues to inhabit her old neighborhood, humble economic roots, and racial identity, Nathan ironically has the authority to confront Natalie. This confrontation begins a chain of events through which she begins to walk back to some kind of stability. 

“In the country, if a woman could not face her children, or her friends, or her family—if she were covered in shame—she would probably only need to lay herself down in a field and take her leave by merging, first with the grass underneath her, then with the mulch under that.” 

As she fleetingly contemplates suicide, standing on a bridge in the midst of cosmopolitan London, Natalie thinks about life outside of the city. Her vision of country life is fanciful and erroneous, but it nevertheless shows that her mind is dwelling on both escaping her personal crises (through suicide) and escaping the city that surrounds her. By reflecting on natural imagery and the country in this moment of crisis, Natalie obliquely demonstrates the powerful effect that the city itself has on her consciousness. 

“Normally all of her energies would be in defense—she was trained in it—but as she spoke her mind traveled to what felt like open ground, where she was able to almost imagine something like her friend’s pain, and in imagining it, recreate some version of it in herself.”

Speaking to Michel on the phone, as he frantically seeks help with Leah’s nervous breakdown, Natalie snaps out of her own personal drama. She lets down her guard (like the reflexes that stem from being a defense lawyer) and instead simply accepts the privilege of being in the presence of Michel’s pain. After she has spent much of the novel in a struggle to define her own identity, the act of laying her self aside to attend to someone else’s pain provides a turning point.

“The Cock Tavern. MacDonalds. The old Woolworths. The betting shop. The State Empire. Willesden Lane. The cemetery. Whoever said that these were fixed coordinates to which she had to be forever faithful? How could she play them false? Freedom was absolute and everywhere, constantly moving location.” 

Natalie rattles off a list of familiar sites in the geography of her London neighborhood, describing them like coordinates on the map of her existence. She draws a contrast between these sites, which seem fixed in both time and space, and the constant movement of life. While she rejects the sites as fixed and confining, the fact is that she has chosen to remain in London. The conflicts she faces are rooted in a struggle to find an authentic way to inhabit this space rather than in the space itself. 

“If candor were a thing in the world that a person could hold and retain, if it were an object, maybe Natalie Blake would have seen that the perfect gift at this moment was an honest account of her own difficulties and ambivalences, clearly stated, without disguise, embellishment or prettification. But Natalie Blake’s instinct for self-defense, for self-preservation, was simply too strong.” 

Though broken down by her domestic drama with Frank and the shock of Leah’s mental health crisis, Natalie nevertheless holds on to the self-control that she has trusted when making decisions throughout her life. Instead of empathetically discussing her own struggles and crises with Leah, Natalie suggests that her friend remember what is good in her life. Even at this late stage in the novel, Natalie is propelled more by rational choice than emotion, in spite of the problems doing so has sometimes created.