Signal Fires

“It is encircled—depending on the season—by dozens of varieties of wildflowers, tall, fragrant grasses. Every other bit of greenery in the neighborhood is regularly manicured and trimmed by landscapers, but the oak presides over its own small patch of jungle, a primeval piece of real estate.”

The oak tree where Sarah and Theo’s car accident took place is now referred to as the magic tree by children in the neighborhood, who don’t know the history of the tree. The tree, with its wildflowers, juxtaposes the rest of the well-manicured neighborhood. Unbeknownst to new neighbors, this juxtaposition is due to Ben and Mimi’s reluctance to approach the tree.

“Ten going on eleven. A boy on the verge of enormous change. A boy (here he thinks of Theo with a pang) who is about to wade into a sea of unknowability from which it will take him years to return.”

Ben sees his son Theo in Waldo, because he himself has learned how quickly childhood can be lost to the pains of adulthood. He sees Waldo as innocent, but on the verge of unknowability. Overall, the novel explores lost childhoods and the complexities of adulthood. The novel’s adults have learned many of life’s lessons, and picture future tension when considering children like Waldo.

“Theirs was a neighborhood like any other, with the secrets and heartaches and lies, the triumphs and moments of grace that weave their way through all communities. He had often felt stifled by it—and God knows, it had driven Mimi crazy—but still, he had taken some comfort from the fact that this was his neighborhood. His people.”

The novel’s primary setting is the suburban neighborhood of Avalon. Suburbia is a place where the façade of perfection hides internal chaos. This juxtaposition is important because it highlights how often people are forced to hide their true selves or feel out of place in their environment.

“From this distance, it seems possible that it’s all happening at once: this life, that life—an immeasurable number of lives all playing themselves out in parallel motion.”

Waldo’s Star Walk app exposes Ben to the vastness of the universe, which reminds him of how small he is. This quote reinforces Dani Shapiro’s message that life is made up of many layers, that lives are fragile and sensitive to minute changes. Feeling small in the grand scheme of things, Ben puts his life into perspective.

“His love for his son is a vast and forceful thing; whatsoever threatens Waldo must be destroyed. But given that it’s Waldo who appears to be hurting himself, what can Shenkman do? What can he do?”

Shenkman has difficulty expressing himself. He doesn’t know how to reach out to his son Waldo, whom he’s worried about. He doesn’t understand Waldo, which makes him fear Waldo. This quote is important because it provides Shenkman with a crucial layer of love. He is otherwise so aggressive towards Waldo that Shapiro uses this quote to make the reader sympathize with him.

“That moment when the clock struck midnight—the ending of one year becoming, in an instant, the beginning of a new one—that moment was intolerable. Who wanted to be awake for a whole lot of nothing? Tick, tock.”

The novel is concerned with time—how we construct it, how it passes, and how it has a metaphysical reverberation. This quote exemplifies how the concept of time can be frustrating to people. Many people feel the need to fill their time with as much activity as possible. Shenkman doesn’t care about the slowing of time because a countdown, to him, symbolizes a waste of precious moments. Living in the moment is difficult to do, and in the novel, adult characters are too overwhelmed by stimulations and responsibilities to do so.

“One incident is an invisible trip wire that in turn sets off another and another. Time collapses. There is no straight line. Memory, history—things that happened fifteen years ago, or fifty—are as alive now as if they had just happened, or are about to happen. Close call.”

Time is a social construct that humans use to make sense of their lives. However, time is finnicky and imperfect because it is a human construct. This quote emphasizes how past, present, and future exist simultaneously—as human memory makes it possible to relive the past in particular. Shapiro postulates that we can’t remove ourselves from our interpretations and reactions to the past. This can be stressful and traumatic, as it is in this quote regarding Ben. On the other hand, deconstructing time can be freeing.

“Guilt and silence have hardened over the years into something intractable. Leaving was his one attempt to save himself, but he would have had to stay gone forever for that to have worked. The pull of home—his parents, his sister—no. He had to come back. It turns out there are some things you can’t outrun.”

Theo is largely characterized by his and Sarah’s shared trauma. The guilt he suffers from his part in Misty’s death makes him unable to live in peace. He has few coping mechanisms other than running away from his problems. However, Shapiro demonstrates that you can’t truly run away from your problems; they’ll follow you wherever you go, particularly when these problems stem from an internal conflict. No matter what, Theo is tied to his family, even if his shame makes him want to stay away from them.

“The stars, rather than appearing distant and implacable, seemed to be signal fires in the dark, mysterious fellow travelers lighting a path; one hundred thousand million luminous presences beckoning from worlds away. See us. We are here. We have always been here. We will always be here.”

Signal fires are beacons of light that announce a presence or send a message. In this quote, signal fires are portrayed as the many lives that exist, have existed, and will exist. Though it’s easy to get caught up in the dramas of our own lives, Shapiro suggests that the beauty of the stars is that they communicate our smallness, which should be freeing. Nothing we endure is unique to us, as all humans are on similarly difficult trajectories. Furthermore, like stars, our fleeting lives will leave lasting memories behind.

“He is a practical man, but still in a wordless place within him, Ben Wilf has come to believe that we live in loops rather than one straight line; that the air itself is made not only of molecules but of memory; that these loops form an invisible pattern; that past, present, and future are a part of this pattern; that our lives intersect for fractions of seconds that are years, centuries, millennia; that nothing ever vanishes.”

Ben perceives the world through a scientific lens because he is a doctor. However, even he recognizes that there is deeper meaning to life that perhaps science can’t account for. Time is especially interesting to Ben because he is haunted by the past. He recognizes that the past has hurt his family, and that time passing has not healed them. Yet, he doesn’t see time as linear, emphasizing his understanding that everyone and everything are interconnected in ways we are not meant to fully acknowledge. There is mystery to life.

“He is in the presence of something so much bigger than he is—as big as the whole sky—he can feel it. To even try to understand is to explode something inside his head, so he doesn’t try.”

A formative experience in Waldo’s life is witnessing Mimi’s death. There is a loss of innocence in this quote, in which Waldo discovers the reality of mortality as a bigger concept than his own lived experience. He equates death with the vastness of the stars, a parallel that heightens the mysterious nature of human mortality.

“She’s at a threshold—hovering, diaphanous, all the selves she has ever been. In the playhouse there is a small child, smaller than Waldo. A teenage girl walks down a city street. A young woman falls in love. A wife becomes a mother. A bright, loving presence. The whole crowd encircles them. It isn’t scary. It isn’t anything at all. Maybe every person has an uncrushable heart a hundred billion times stronger than steel. He watches the dance of light and shadow on the walls. Someday, this will be helpful to him.”

This quote portrays the moment of Mimi’s death. Her life flashes before her eyes, which allows Shapiro the narrative structure to highlight how our lives are multi-chaptered. Mimi is an old woman dying in the cold, but in this moment, she transcends her body and illness. She is Mimi at her current age, but also Mimi as a child, a young woman, and a new mother. The scope of Mimi’s life is grander than the moment of her death, reinforcing Shapiro’s message that life is nonlinear.

“And fathers know things. Even when fathers completely screw up and allow every last bit of their own damaged souls to infect their children, still there is a connection. Like the deep layer of dissolvable sutures his knee doctor used when he repaired that tear in his meniscus, there are threads beneath the surface binding him to his boy, and his boy to him.”

This quote exemplifies the unspoken but real bond between family members. Shenkman is disconnected from Waldo, but this disconnect can’t supersede his biological imperative to know and love his son. Waldo is a product of his father in more ways than one, their connection being as nonlinear as time.

“The hushed interior of the playhouse has become, at least for these few moments, a sacred place. A place where Shenkman has put down the burden of his personality and is at one with these people, even the deceased.”

The playhouse is sacred because it represents a moment in which all the characters who are still alive are connected through Mimi’s death. They witness grief and redemption at the same time. This is a formative moment for all of the characters, including Shenkman, who is finally forced to put aside his resentment and understand what other people are going through.

“‘Yeah,’ Waldo says. He’s looking straight ahead, though not at anything in particular. ‘Everything is connected. Everything. The lady. The doctor. Me. You. It’s like we’re part of a galactic supercluster.’”

A galactic supercluster is the largest known structure in the universe, made up of several galaxies. A planet is small compared to a supercluster, which emphasizes how small an individual is. Waldo creates a parallel between people and superclusters by revealing that humans are interconnected in ways that function similar to a supercluster, in which every galaxy is equal in importance and structured off of one another.

“Has she ever paid attention before? No—she’s always been too busy, she and Shenkman, to notice that they are part of a neighborhood made up of all sorts of people who are living their lives in this particular place, at this particular time. Who knows about the impact of any action, any decision or omission, however seemingly random or small?”

Alice is moved by Mimi’s death because it reminds her how myopic she (and all people) can be. People live in communities but are often not fully part of a given community. Alice has learned how valuable community can be, that her actions can impact others in profound ways. This revelation is yet another of Shapiro’s messages about the importance of human connection.

“The magic tree presides over it all. She—Alice thinks of the majestic oak as a she—had been here long before they arrived, and here she will remain, once they’re gone. Her roots spread far beneath the pavement, invisible, a whole system they’ll never see. Hundreds of tiny lights twinkle, even in the sunshine.”

The magic tree represents both destruction and rebirth. Alice doesn’t know the story behind the magic tree, so to her, it is a symbol of beauty and connection. This symbol is important because it demonstrates that although time is nonlinear, perception of time allows for the past to manifest in the present in a positive way.

“The very physical fact of her—the sheen of perspiration on her collarbone, her dark-nippled breasts, the small mole behind her left ear that she may not even know exists—this is what returns him to himself every day.”

This quote is an example of dramatic irony. At this point in the novel (due to its unique structure), the reader is aware that Mimi will die, leaving Ben without his center. This use of dramatic irony inspires sympathy, and sets up the juxtaposition between Mimi as a physical being and the deceased Mimi as energy and memory.

“Mimi used to be fond of the phrase with any luck. He thinks of it now. With any luck, his nieces will continue to grow strong and hardy, like the trees that cast their canopies over Malcolm X Boulevard. With any luck, he will be around for a long time to watch over them.”

One way in which the deceased Mimi lives on is through the memory of her love. Theo holds on to the love he learned from his mother, which he passes on to his nieces. He feels he has failed in many ways throughout his life, but finds an opportunity to nurture love by making himself available to his nieces. Mimi’s love is therefore passed down to the next generation. The phrase “with any luck” also implies that Theo has learned that life can bring accidental happiness as much as it can pain.

“His many years living there are like a layer of sediment that has since been covered over by newer layers. Rachel Carson—he has been reading Silent Spring—wrote that sediments are sort of an epic poem of the earth. The history of every town is its own minor epic, then.”

By being a reader, Ben has learned that his pain and joys are not unique to his individual experience. In this quote, Shapiro alludes to environmental writer Rachel Carson. Like stars that die and form new stars, like the wildflowers that grow around the magic tree, sediment also rebuilds upon itself. Therefore, every facet of life is built upon the past, merging past, present, and future together. This becomes an apt metaphor for Avalon, and Ben’s relationship with his neighborhood over the years (from 1970 to 2020).

“Except the thing is that it all just keeps getting harder and harder. She’s begun to wonder whether clarity is overrated.”

Sarah learns that even after improving her physical and mental health, life can still be difficult; being sober doesn’t heal all her wounds. This emphasizes Shapiro’s message that life is complex. There are no easy solutions to life, only endless mysteries. Theo also learns the same lesson, that healing takes time and effort—and that time itself won’t necessarily fix everything.

“It’s something beyond confession. It’s testimony. Telling the story won’t bring Joey back. Telling the story won’t take away his pain. But telling the story in these rooms filled with broken souls is what saves his life again and again.”

In an AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) meeting, Sarah learns that confessing about the past allows people to move on. At this point in the novel, Sarah, Theo, and Ben have all learned that by avoiding the subject of Misty’s death, all they’ve done is dishonor Misty’s life. This quote (from a fellow AA member) is important because it allows for Sarah’s character development. It inspires her to share the story of Misty and therefore take responsibility for her part in the car accident.

“The bark has grown stronger, a scar over a healed wound. He sits down on the hard, cold earth between two roots that seem to emerge like arms from the ground.”

In this quote, Shapiro adds a new layer to the symbol of the magic tree. The magic tree grows stronger bark that develops mingled roots, representing “a scar over a healed wound.” This scar is the direct consequence of Misty’s death on the Wilfs. It being a healed wound acknowledges the characters’ individual pains and connections to one another.