This Must Be the Place

“To all appearances, I am a husband, a father, a teacher, a citizen, but when tilted toward the light I become a deserter, a sham, a killer, a thief. On the surface I am one thing, but underneath I am riddled with holes and caverns, like a limestone landscape.”

Daniel’s description of himself and his acknowledgement of his split identity are connected to the seismology motif. Just as the earth has layers, “holes and caverns,” so too does Daniel’s traumatized identity.

“Our sense of different locations began to mesh. One day we grasped that we didn’t need to change tube lines to get from Leicester Square to Covent Garden: they were just five minutes’ walk apart.”

The use of second person in Claudette’s first point of view chapter connects her experience to The Dissociating Nature of Trauma. Although the “our” and “we” in this excerpt refer to her and her college friends, there is a metaphorical nod to Claudette herself being split as a result of what happens in London—both meeting Timou Lindstrom and establishing her acting career.

“Niall doesn’t know it, but there is something about this moment that will imprint itself on his mind: The geometric shapes of sunlight in the unit waiting room, angling themselves over chair arms and table-tops; his father turning from him toward the woman, the woman’s voice saying, your glasses; the piece of yellow paper that his father accepted, then hid; the hard edges of the gyroscope pressing into his finger pads through the meshing of his gloves.”

The gyroscope that Niall uses to ground his memory of his father and the secret affair suggested with the mother in the waiting room tie the seismology motif to The Isolating Effect of Secrets. Niall’s memory of his father is tied to the gyroscope, which is a tool used in seismology, and that memory is colored by the presence of a secret note exchange.

“I don’t know why I’m thinking of Stella all of a sudden and why I’m feeling so strange. Like I’ve been cut down the middle and I’m in two places at once, or I’m getting radio interference from somewhere, or I’m just a shadow, like the people up there watching the game, and the real me has gone off somewhere on its own. Dissociation, my brother said, that time when I told him I get like this sometimes. ‘dissociation’ is the word.”

Phoebe’s description of her dissociation is a central metaphor that shapes The Dissociating Nature of Trauma. She feels disconnected from herself, and the memories she’s experiencing are confusing to her, as though her mind has split to accommodate painful realizations. This echoes many clinical descriptions of trauma-induced dissociation.

“He should have tried to explain something to her, about the holes in his life, the underground rivers, about the sudden towering urge to fix as many as possible.”

Daniel’s recognition that he’s wrong to keep secrets from Claudette highlights The Isolating Effect of Secrets. There is also a metaphorical connection to the seismology motif with The Dissociating Nature of Trauma, as the “holes” and “underground rivers” he describes have been induced by trauma.

“And she began a sentence she never finished. I would, to this day, give almost anything to have heard it in its entirety, but, then, life is full of unanswered questions, as we all know.”

Daniel’s mother’s inability to tell him about her love for Johnny Demarco spotlights The Isolating Effect of Secrets. Had she been able to share her secret with Daniel, it could have allowed Daniel to connect with Johnny when they encounter each other at Teresa’s grave. Instead, Daniel remains isolated in his grief.

“All he could think was that he had, his entire life, been a terrible liar. As a child, he used to get into trouble for things he hadn’t even done, so badly did he handle interrogation. He could never think on his feet, come up quickly with an excuse, had no aptitude for dissembling. It was a quality that intrigued him in others: how to convince people of something entirely untrue.”

Lenny’s inability to lie foreshadows Claudette’s escape from stardom and Timou. He is unable to successfully lie about Timou’s infidelity and secrets, which increases The Isolating Effect of Secrets and lays the groundwork for the life-altering lie that Claudette fabricates when she disappears.

“Her mother takes her face in both hands and tilts it up. She regards Marithe for a long moment, and when she does this, Marithe knows she is looking down, right to the bottom of her, that her mother can see all of her and thinks it will be okay.”

Claudette is characterized as a devoted mother throughout the book, but this instance in particular highlights her seriousness and her devotion to genuinely caring for her children. Her attitude allows Marithe to live free of secrets and the isolation they cause because she knows that her mother is so connected with her that secrets are unnecessary.

“‘It’s just a house,’ she says, and breaks away from his gaze, walking toward the window. ‘In case I ever needed to…get away. It would be somewhere to come, somewhere to be. Just for a while.’”

Claudette’s explanation to Lucas about the purpose of the house ties The Isolating Effect of Secrets to the Donegal house directly. The house gives her a place to secret herself away, keeping her safe but also keeping her disconnected from the world.

“The chill is reaching my shoulders, my neck, and I feel as though I may never speak again. Is this, I find myself wondering, how Ari feels when he’s about to stammer? That uncertainty, that doubt, the risk that words will never come again, that it’s just silence from here on in?”

Although Daniel’s patience with and understanding of Ari’s stammer is a large element of what brings him and Claudette together, this firsthand sense of the emotional element of the stammer connects The Isolating Effect of Secrets and The Power of Language. Daniel can’t verbalize his secret, even to Todd, who knows more of the truth than Daniel, and Daniel’s inability to speak maintains the gulf between them.

“After this, she thinks, it will live only in the head of one person, and when he dies, it will be gone. […] No one, she knows, would guess his true link with her, not even Daniel, her son, who naps next to her, looking washed up and burned out and too thin and already grieving, who guesses and divines to much about people always: it is his blessing and his curse.”

Teresa’s unrequited love with and for Johnny is a counterpoint to The Isolating Effect of Secrets. Although her secret creates space between her and her family to an extent, it also preserves an element of her identity that she can hold onto even while focusing on Daniel as she dies.

“‘Shh’ was her first word to me. (Does it, in fact, even qualify as a word? I’m not sure it does. ‘Phonic’ might be more accurate. Her first phonic to me.”

Daniel’s account of his second meeting with Claudette ties The Power of Language to The Isolating Effect of Secrets. Daniel’s rumination on their interaction focuses on the importance of strictly defining her use of language, while the sound she uses is meant to silence him and prevent him from sharing the moment with her.

“Maeve looks at her. She looks and looks. If she was a liquid, she would drink her; if she was a gas, shoe would breathe her in; if she was a pill, she would down her; a dress, she would wear her; a plate, she would lick her clean.”

Maeve’s experience of motherhood, her intense connection to her adopted daughter described here, ties her linguistically to the other mothers in the novel. Although not a major theme, motherhood is a common thread linking the characterizations of Teresa and Claudette. The language here echoes the intensity of Teresa’s and Claudette’s love for their biological children, subtly arguing that parental love is not limited to biology and genetics.

“There exists a theory in speech therapy…that a stammer is like an iceberg…Only a small part of it is visible, while under the water is a large, jagged, dangerous mass of ice.”

Ari’s connection of his stammer to an iceberg connects The Power of Language to the seismology motif. Language has the power to reveal what is hidden, while an iceberg is affected by the movement of the earth and ocean beneath it. Overcoming his stammer to reveal what he thinks and sees is therefore connected to digging below a rocky formation of ice.

“Did she tell him the story of the girl who ate six of those red seeds—such duality in them, that opulent, bursting flesh and that mean, hard little kernel—and was condemned to live underground for half her life, shackled to the king of the underworld?”

Daniel’s memory of Teresa telling him the story of Persephone evokes the hidden elements of seismology that connect to The Isolating Effect of Secrets. The core of Teresa was always hidden from those she loved because she kept the secret of her love for Johnny, just as Persephone is isolated from the world by her marriage to Hades.

“What redemption there is in being loved: we are always our best selves when loved by another. Nothing can replace this.”

Daniel and Claudette’s initial reconciliation in Paris offers a counterpoint to The Isolating Effect of Secrets and The Dissociating Nature of Trauma. Daniel feels that his best self is brought out by the love he feels and receives in Claudette—she is a healing force because of their shared love. That love is available to him because he tells her the truth about Nicola, erasing the isolating effect of his secrets.

“But she can’t say ‘procedure,’ can she? Not to this man, who has based whole papers on ownership of expression, on the importance of squaring up to semantic, to using the most perspicuous and apt word for something.”

Nicola’s understanding of Daniel demonstrates The Power of Language. She can’t find the right word to describe her abortion to Daniel because no word is appropriate for the complexity of her emotions. This reveals her true desire to have the baby rather than go through with the abortion.

“It’s this: the curved fringe of lashes along Nicola’s closed lids, the mapped waterways of veins in her neck, the way the cuticles lap over her fingernails. It’s the precarious membrane between this, two people in a café, deciding their fate, and the beyond, the oblivion, the nothingness that they will all, in time, have to face.”

Daniel’s realization of the reason he doesn’t want Nicola to have an abortion shows the universality of parenthood. The way he looks so closely at Nicola and sees a future in her—a sense of escaping mortality by bringing life into the world—underscores all the descriptions of parental love throughout the novel.

“[F]rom behind her steps out the girl, Marithe, this time minus her accordion, and her reappearance shocks Niall all over again, like an electrode applied to a temple, shocks him to his marrow: the length of red-gold hair over the shoulder, the milk-white skin, those wide-spaced eyes, the angle of the nose.”

The moment that Niall sees the reflection of his dead sister in Marithe is the culmination of the reflection motif. Phoebe and Marithe have never been placed together in the novel, aside from their familial relation, but Marithe is so similar to Phoebe that Niall sinks to his knees, reinforcing the metaphor of the well earlier in the novel.

“Claudette looks down the curve of the stairs and up at the skylight, which is turning a deep, inked blue. ‘The Witching Hour,’ Daniel always called this time of day. He used to go out in it, every evening, and have a last cigarette as he walked the perimeter of the garden. He liked the moment, he said, when it was neither day nor night, but indefinably both.”

The Dissociating Nature of Trauma is reflected in Claudette’s thoughts about Daniel. The dual nature of twilight is appealing to both Claudette and Daniel because it is a space where the fractured elements of their psyches can co-exist, just as the Donegal house has allowed them to create a safe life together before the emergence of their traumas.

“Daniel’s voice is low with menace, and Lucas can see that the other Daniel, the Daniel they all know and love, who reappeared for a moment there, has been subsumed by this other, frightening, furious alter ego.”

In the wake of his most significant trauma, Daniel’s two sides become so disconnected that Lucas can see one and then the other. The Dissociating Nature of Trauma keeps Daniel from seeing his wife and children while simultaneously attacking the people trying to help him. He can’t be one whole Daniel until he recovers from the traumas of his life.

“A terrible crevasse has somehow opened up in the conversation…She has seen this before, the taut-eyed expression of despair, felt the atmosphere of silent, gagged tension: it will mean a breach, a loss, an inconsolable termination of some sort. Something has happened, something has ended, something has been wrenched from them.”

The Power of Language is revealed in Rosalind’s awareness of the meaning of Daniel and Niall’s silence, which also relates to the seismography motif. The silence in the conversation, the inability to express what they’ve experienced, is described as a “crevasse,” which is measured by scientists like Niall.

“Marithe felt those tears pricking at her eyelids now. To never feel that again, that idea of yourself as one unified being, not two or three splintered selves who observed and commented on each other. To never be that person again.”

Marithe’s experience of “splintered selves” in the wake of her father’s leaving and the simple trauma of leaving childhood and entering adolescence indicates The Dissociating Nature of Trauma. She feels disconnected from her body and the reality around her because she feels like she has been split into multiple selves.