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Chapters 22–25

Summary: Chapter 22

Ginny and Ty begin building an expansion to their hog operation. Ginny takes Larry to the chiropractor and promises Rose that she’ll talk to him about getting some exercise. As they drive, Ginny thinks about how Jess has changed her life. When they get to the office, Larry insists that Ginny wait in the car for him. Afterward, he refuses to walk to the café, where he orders a big lunch. When Ginny tries to bring up better eating and exercise, he bristles, claiming that he never talked this disrespectfully to his father. Larry tells a story about a boy with polio whose father made him work hard in the fields. Ginny realizes her father will never think about her point of view.

Summary: Chapter 23

Ginny takes Larry home. A storm is coming. Rose calls to say that Larry has taken Pete’s truck without permission, and they are furious. Ty and Pete go looking for Larry, and the sisters stay with the girls. Ty returns with Larry, who insists on staying outside in the rain. When Ginny tries to get him to go home with Rose, he calls her horrible names, including a “barren whore.” Larry says his daughters are making him crazy. Rose says she’s done with him, and his reply triggers a memory for Ginny: When she was eleven, she lost her shoe, and her father beat her with a belt despite their mother’s pleas not to. Larry keeps ranting. He punches Pete, who comes inside, upset. Ty follows Larry down the road. The rain lets loose, and the electricity goes out.

Summary: Chapter 24

Ty and Pete leave while Rose, Ginny, and the girls stay at Ginny’s house. Rose and Ginny talk about their father being crazy. Maybe he’s reacting to all the chemicals, like a crop sprayer Rose has heard about. Rose admits that she used to imagine their mother returning and taking them to a new life. She asks Ginny if she remembers how their father went after them when they were teenagers, into their separate bedrooms to have sex with them. Calmly, Rose tells Ginny that Larry did this to both of them, but Ginny claims not to remember. They do not know if their father also did this to Caroline. Rose admits that she keeps her daughters away from Larry and sends them to boarding school to protect them from him. Ginny resists the truth and cries. Rose says that she will not let Larry get away with it. 

Summary: Chapter 25

The storm subsides, and Ginny checks on the girls. She crawls into bed with Rose and wakes up to find Jess in the doorway. Downstairs, Jess tells her that they found Larry in the rain, ranting about his whore daughters. Jess tries to calm Ginny down. Ginny is acutely aware of her body as she tells Jess everything, from her father taking the truck to the details of the sexual abuse. Ty shows up and Jess tells him where Larry is. Ty and Pete disagreed about Larry, and Pete wanted to kill Larry. Ty goes to check on the fields. Ginny looks at her gardens, which have survived the storm, and imagines herself a horse contained in a tight stall. 

Analysis: Chapters 22–25

This section of the novel is dominated by the storm: its approach in Chapter 23, its sudden fury in Chapter 24, and its diminishment in Chapter 25. The storm is both external and internal to Ginny and her family, both physical and psychological. Damage is done in both cases, but as with Ginny’s tomatoes, it is not irreparable damage. Smiley uses the storm both to evoke the power of nature and as a symbol of the family’s failure. In Chapter 23, thunder rolls and lightning strikes as the younger girls hide upstairs. The storm knocks out the power, showing that sometimes humans are not quite as in control as they like to think. During the storm, Larry’s mental state starkly deteriorates. In Chapter 25, Jess is described as passionate yet entirely disconnected from reality. Larry’s hateful, sexist scorn toward his daughters exposes something unwholesome and unnatural he has felt and done since his wife died, perhaps even before. Larry objectifies his daughters as incompetent sexual objects. Now that he’s lost some of the obvious power that comes with owning the largest farm in the area, he must channel some of that energy into dominating in other ways.

During the storm, the truth peeks out from lines of dialogue between Rose and Ginny, words spoken in the dark by the light of a kerosene lamp, a light both literal and figurative. Right in the physical center of the novel, what readers may have imagined comes to light. Rose illuminates the past, and by the end of the chapter, Ginny has accepted the memories of sexual abuse that she has repressed all these years. The power that Larry exerted over Ginny still exists in some ways, but the possibility exists that this situation will change with her newly uncovered knowledge about her past. When Rose compares their relationship with their father to the one he has with the landscape and animals of the farm, she is calm, simply because she has thought about this for many years. For her, the memory has not been repressed. For Ginny, it’s as if it’s happening anew.

Concern for her daughters’ well-being motivates Rose to take action to protect them from Larry by sending them to boarding school. The girls also motivate Ginny because she loves her nieces as if they were her daughters. In this way, Smiley offers a possibility for family redemption with a new generation that can be protected from the family’s failure. Larry rises clearly and unequivocally to the role of villain in the book’s heart. There is still the second half of the novel to be played out. The storm and the hidden underbellies of truths that it revealed may seem like a climax, but they are not. There is still much action—and reaction—that will ensue. Lives have been altered, but none has yet been lost.

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