The Family Remains

Jewell highlights throughout the novel the connection between a person’s home life and their wellbeing. For the Lamb children, what should been a safe home was instead a place of trauma, abuse, and cruelty. This connects to the theme of Trauma and Moral Responsibility: Growing up in the house at Cheyne Walk impacts Lucy and Henry’s personalities and identities 26 years later. As adults, Lucy and Henry must create their own homes, separate from the “house of horrors” that haunts their past (55).

Since leaving Cheyne Walk, Lucy has never had a real home. While she was married to Michael, the abuse she faced made their house terrifying rather than welcoming. Since then, she and her children have faced housing insecurity; they’ve lived in many temporary situations, including spending occasional nights on the street. When Stella talks about wanting to go home, Lucy wonders what Stella imagines when she says that word. When Lucy gets money from the sale of the Cheyne Walk house, she longs to buy a house where her family can create an actual home—a place to start fresh. She loves that the house in St. Albans isn’t symmetrical, contrasting with the perfect symmetry of the Cheyne Walk house, which she hated. Part of the novel’s happy resolution involves Lucy moving into this off-kilter house with Marco and Stella, finally a permanent place where their family can gather.

Marco, Lucy’s son, also values the idea of home. After moving from place to place his entire life, he is thankful to finally have a stable place to live in Henry’s apartment. He feels safe there, and can invite friends to come over, a privilege he’s never had before. Even though Henry is obsessive about keeping the house neat and organized, Marco loves the apartment so much that he is reluctant to move into a new house because it means another big change in his life. However, Jewell hints that Marco will eventually learn to love Lucy’s new house and feel at home there. Marco’s experience shows that home is more about emotion than location.

For Henry, his apartment is a way to play out his obsession with Phin. Still impacted by his traumatic childhood home life, the psychically wounded Henry chose furnishings with Phin’s taste in mind, not his own—rather than creating a home, he has built a shrine to a crush from his past. When Henry sees the apartment Phin rents to a young man in Chicago, Henry realizes that his interpretation of Phin’s design style was incorrect. Disappointed, Henry moves on from his obsession with Phin, and no longer feels the need to keep his apartment just so—a sign that Henry is healing and learning to let go of the past.

Jewell shows that home is powerful; it can cause great damage, as in the case of the Cheyne Walk house, or it can bring healing, as is the case for Lucy.