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Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.
The Responsibility to Navigate One’s Own Happiness
The novel’s four main characters, the college friends JB, Malcolm, Jude, and Willem, face different challenges as they navigate their own paths toward happiness. In the modern New York City they inhabit, the common, everyday struggles of humanity are very distant. None of the four college friends fears hunger or war, so feelings of unhappiness seem ungrateful and even irresponsible. Nevertheless, they struggle with a feeling of emptiness about which they feel guilty but which they also strive to fill.
One definition of happiness is to live better than one’s parents, but that goal does not seem realistic for either Malcolm or JB, both of whom are descended from pillars of the Manhattan community who blazed novel and interesting career paths, and both of whom are rather traditional and subdued in their artistic sensibilities. Willem and Jude could hardly escape living better than their parents, given that neither of them has family ties to act as a basis for comparison. So each friend must find a way of being happy that does not rely on comparison with others. `
They all enjoy their work, and their success, due to a combination of talent, skill, and dedication, brings them pleasure. They also enjoy each other’s company, and their relationships with one another constitute perhaps their greatest source of happiness. Of course, those relationships require tremendous investment, given their personal flaws. They each have to learn to forgive and forget, and Jude in particular has to learn how both to accept gestures of love and kindness and how to reciprocate without damaging his psyche.
The Debts We Owe to Family and Friends
The main characters understand that their friendship is a labor of love, and they struggle to identify one another’s social cues. This task is particularly difficult for Jude, whose childhood did not equip him with the tools for navigating friendships. By the time Jude arrives at college, he understands intuitively that people sharing stories and secrets want more than appreciation. They expect reciprocity, but he struggles with how much to share given the sensitive nature of his past and his fear about their possible reactions. Jude is obviously afraid of rejection, but as he contemplates possible responses to his own childhood anecdotes, he also fears inflicting his trauma on others.
Nevertheless, friends and family like Harold, Andy, and Willem are motivated by far more than curiosity. Given that these people provide Jude with physical care that he needs because of what has been done to him, it seems reasonable for him to offer some explanations. Harold should know why his son does not want to be hugged. Willem needs to understand why Jude cuts himself after they have sex. And Andy, who is violating his professional ethical guidelines by not reporting Jude, deserves an honest answer about the risk Jude poses to himself. The fact that they do not have these answers only partially absolves them of their complicity in Jude’s demise. Jude’s withholding nature can make it difficult to fully support him, but nevertheless, his friends give him too much leeway in the name of respecting his choices, and as a result, they fail to protect him from himself.
The painfully slow process through which Jude is forced to pay his “debt” to his friends and family is complicated by Jude’s belief that contract law is the basis of all society, which would cease to operate should people decide to break their contractual obligations. No one can walk away from their debts and responsibilities without consequences, a statement that is equally true morally as it is legally. Jude makes that decision repeatedly and with full knowledge of what will happen. He cannot cut himself off from his obligations to be a son, a partner, and a friend without cutting off his chances at life.
The Miraculous Improbability of Life
In a world where abuse, pedophilia, and cruelty abound, life feels improbable, and the idea of a safe, content, or happy life seems absurd. Nevertheless, these young men persist when confronted with trauma, racism, and other challenges. In the competitive New York professional context, from varying family backgrounds that each pose their own challenges, and within their own internal networks of fears, anxieties, and phobias, Malcolm, JB, Willem, and Jude each find a way to make a life worth celebrating. In Jude’s case, that life is particularly miraculous because of the many odds against which he fought. From infancy to death, Jude endured seemingly every malignant aspect of humanity and still found moments of respite, moments in which he loved and was loved, in which he was surrounded by family and friends, and in which he felt safe.
Appreciation for the miracle of life is balanced against the precariousness that dominates it. Both Willem and Jude came from relatively difficult childhoods, so they have a greater appreciation for the things that Malcolm and JB take for granted, such as the apartment on Lispenard Street. While Malcolm and JB are appalled at the substandard living conditions, Willem and Jude cannot believe their good fortune at getting to live on their own in New York chasing their dream careers. In small, quiet moments, Jude often reflects on the beauty of the simple things that others take for granted. Yet Jude resonates with the German lied Ich bin der Welt, which laments, “I have become lost to the world / In which I otherwise wasted so much time.” Jude’s attachment to this world is precarious, so he lives perched between this world of torment and the next of absence, tethered only by the rare feeling of sufficiency and the even rarer feeling of abundance.
