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Summary
Chapters 11-12
The narrator returns to the third person as they introduce Ted Hollander, an art history professor. He’s gone to Naples to search for his missing niece, Sasha. Her stepfather is paying him to find her, but he’s really only there to see art. Today, instead of looking for Sasha, he visits Pompeii. In the evening, he calls his sister Beth, Sasha’s mother, to tell her he’s had no luck. She’s disappointed and Ted worries he’ll be fired. He calls his wife Susan, who’s still in New York. His love for her has dwindled over the years, beginning with a total erasure of his desire for her. Denied both love and sex, Susan eventually gives up trying and now seems distressingly happy all the time. Susan puts all three of Ted’s sons on the phone one after another: Miles, Ames, and Alfred. Ted is bored and anxious after they speak.
Wandering through Naples, Ted fears for Sasha, who disappeared at seventeen and is mentally ill. He remembers wanting to keep his own kids away from her, worrying that she would be a bad influence on them. He visits an art museum and becomes transfixed by a huge painting of Orpheus and Eurydice. He feels stunned by it, and wanders into a maze of Naples’s tiny back alleys. There, he runs into Sasha totally by chance. He follows her into a very low-income neighborhood. She looks older and thinner, and she walks with a limp. Sasha is at first surprised to see him and then sardonic and distant. He asks to take her to dinner, and she accepts. He remembers when he lived with Sasha, Beth, and Sasha’s abusive father Andy. Sasha used to cling to Ted, and he’d worry about her safety.
Sasha comes to join him for dinner, probes him about his marriage, and tells him about her travels. She makes light of some traumatic experiences, which Ted isn’t sure how to handle. She takes him to a club, and while they drink, she asks him why he is in Naples. He lies and says he’s looking at art. Sasha makes an excuse to duck away and steals Ted’s wallet. He goes back to the alleys to look for her, and finds her in a dilapidated, once-grand building. While he waits for her to finish the housework she does to pay for her room, he thinks about a moment when his marriage to Susan was perfect, and then about the fact that she didn’t remember their love like he did afterward. Sasha finally lets him in. He sees a jumble of objects that seem like souvenirs on her bed, and a circle of wire hanging from the window. He tells Sasha it’s much easier to survive when you’re not alone. Sasha waits until the setting sun appears to be caught in the circle in her window to respond to Ted, claiming the sun is hers.
Chapter 12: Great Rock and Roll Pauses
This chapter is unique, as it’s presented as slides from a PowerPoint presentation created by Alison, Sasha’s 12-year-old daughter. The PowerPoint covers events beginning in mid-May, starting with a title slide followed by a multicolored arrow-shaped table of contents listing sections: “1. After Lincoln’s Game / 2. In My Room / 3. One Night Later / 4. The Desert.”
A green Venn diagram lists the family members and their names. One slide has eight interconnected text boxes, which can be read either cyclically or in lines. Following are cycle diagrams explaining Sasha's repetitive habits, which Alison finds extremely annoying. A plain slide notes that Drew works a lot. A blue slide with ochre-toned boxes seemingly randomly inserts Alison’s thoughts on energy credits and Californian water restrictions. Alison describes her brother Lincoln using a green triangular diagram. Lincoln is on the autism spectrum and is fascinated by pauses in rock songs. Alison provides examples of Lincoln’s comments, and then diagrams show their parents’ ineffective responses—her father overanalyzing and her mother half-listening. Lincoln also sometimes loops song pauses to make them longer, which Alison shows as empty text message bubbles.
Alison illustrates how Drew fails to understand Lincoln’s attempts to express love through song pauses. She notes how he always gives vague answers and moves on without reciprocating Lincoln’s affection. Alison then describes the nighttime desert scenery she imagines during Lincoln’s loops. Alison expresses frustration over Sash’s lack of respect for her digital journal. She asks Sasha about a photo in a book written by Jules Jones depicting the “suicide tour” of the lead guitarist of Conduit, but Sasha refuses to talk about it. Alison then diagrams the positions of hers and Lincoln’s beds and their goodnight rituals. Alison realizes she can make Sasha (and anyone else) uncomfortable enough to reveal her true past. Lincoln plays an extended pause, and Alison uses shapes to show Sasha’s found-objects art. She then diagrams Drew’s two possible moods when he gets home: lovely or horrible.
Alison describes her father barbecuing chicken, adding kissing Drew to her list of Sasha’s annoying habits. Alison lists facts about Drew and uses a pyramid-shaped diagram for his laugh. A slide tells about Rob’s drowning, followed by a description of Rob’s face. A seesaw diagram shows Drew’s questions outweighing Lincoln’s responses. Alison draws a representation of Lincoln explaining a pause and not listening to Drew. Drew loses his temper, and his shouting makes Lincoln cry. Drew apologizes, hugs Lincoln, but Lincoln runs away.
In the final section of the PowerPoint, Drew and Alison walk in the desert, discussing Lincoln, Rob’s drowning, death, and Drew’s grief for a child he operated on. They see solar panels collecting moonlight. Back at home, Alison hears Drew asking Lincoln to listen to the desert night’s “pause.” The last slides are diagrams of pauses made by Drew, Lincoln, and Alison.
Analysis
Communication through unconventional means, or the lack thereof, is this section’s central issue. In "Good-Bye, My Love," Ted’s failure to connect with his wife Susan, his children, and even with Sasha shows how common disconnection and silence is in his life. Ted’s phone call to Susan from Naples is perfunctory, filled with unspoken dissatisfaction and a resentment he couldn’t express if he wanted to. He describes blaming his wife for the total lack of sex in their marriage, resenting her for trying to rekindle the spark, and then hating her for ceasing to care and seeming happy. His three boys’ attempts to engage him through news about their camping in the Catskills and their summer sports are met with the same frustrated indifference. He doesn’t like or understand anyone in his nuclear family, and he can’t bring himself to care about what they do. This detachment also flavors his initial interactions with Sasha, where small talk and avoidance of deeper issues dominate their reunion until the very end. Ted’s inability to express genuine concern or emotion for his niece, despite all the hardships she’s undergone, shows how very cut off he’s become from human affection. None of the methods of communication he has available—digital or analog—are working for him.
In contrast, "Great Rock and Roll Pauses" is a chapter which uses digital frameworks to visually represent and document the strained chains of communication in Drew and Sasha’s family. Alison’s PowerPoint presentation, part of the online journal she keeps, is a medium through which she can explore and understand the various quirks of her family dynamics. Alison is a stable, measured child, and the visual format allows Alison to express her observations and emotions in a structured way. The slideshow, as it’s broken up into several distinct units that form a cohesive whole, also reflects the fragmentation that Alison experiences in her relationship with her parents. They’re all living together, but they exist on different slides.
In a similar way, Lincoln’s obsession with musical pauses represents his struggle to communicate with his father, Drew. The pauses in the music are usually overlooked, but they’re as much a part of the track as the music itself. By pointing them out, Lincoln is showing his family things they might not ever notice otherwise. His pauses represent moments of potential connection that are often missed or misunderstood by people whose priorities don’t align correctly. Drew’s inability to grasp the significance of these pauses only widens the communication gap between him and his son. Lincoln is trying to show him he loves him, but Drew just feels like he’s not listening. If Drew listened like Alison did, he’d hear that the pauses are more than just voids without music. They have texture and heft, to the extent that Alison gets genuinely excited when Lincoln shows her a particularly interesting or unusual one.
The way that destiny randomly deals out punishment and reward is reinforced with literary and historical references in “Goodbye, My Love.” Ted’s journey to Naples is driven by a financial reward from Andy, Sasha’s stepfather, but it also contains several allusions that link it to myths about cheating fate. Specifically, Ted’s artistic and historical wanderings lead him to the ruined city of Pompeii, which was destroyed after a deadly volcanic eruption. Before he meets Sasha, he gets stuck in front of a colossal painting of Orpheus and Eurydice. This myth tells the story of a young man who tried to cheat destiny and save his wife from death but failed at the last moment. Ted’s fascination with the ruins of Pompeii and the story of Orpheus and Eurydice reveals several things: his preoccupation with the past and his wife’s indifference, his own feelings of inadequacy and smallness, and his inability to change the course of destiny. Just like the citizens of Pompeii or Orpheus himself, Ted is at fate’s mercy.
In "Great Rock and Roll Pauses,” we also see links between events that could only be the result of destiny’s hand. In this particular tale they show up through the lens of family legacy and individual aspirations. Drew is a doctor, and he became one because of Rob’s untimely death by drowning. He grieves patients he can’t save more than other medics because he sees Rob in them. It’s not a hard connection to make, and Drew does it because it suits him and seems morally right. Alison’s reflections on her family’s history and her relationship with her parents are also presented in a predictable format. They’re slides that have a specific chronological order, building on an argument collecting evidence to support a conclusion. Alison’s depiction of her family life as a series of interlocking puzzles and graphs proves how aware she is of the chaotic world they occupy. The PowerPoint format allows Alison to document and analyze the things in her life which can be predicted, giving her a sense of control over her narrative. Sasha’s sun trap accomplishes a similar thing; she “catches” the sun, the most powerful force in the universe, in order to regain control over her life.
