Lock Every Door: A Novel

Content Warning: The source text references multiple deaths by suicide and deals with the psychological effects of trauma, loss, and grief. It also uses stigmatizing and potentially offensive language to refer to people experiencing mental illness.

Lock Every Door’s New York City setting structures its examinations of urban isolation and social status. Jules Larsen’s life is already defined by loneliness and alienation when she accepts her job apartment-sitting at the renowned Bartholomew building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The neighborhood is teeming with wealthy, elite inhabitants, making Jules immediately feel like she doesn’t belong. The impostor syndrome her job at the Bartholomew inspires in her compounds her isolation, and the conflicts she faces result from these socioeconomic dynamics. The novel’s interest in loneliness and isolation is part of a larger movement in fiction in the wake of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Though Lock Every Door doesn’t take its temporal cues from the 2020 lockdown, Jules considers her time at the Bartholomew as similar to “solitary confinement.”

Jules struggles to make ends meet in New York ahead of her job at the Bartholomew. After losing her job, she fears that her limited qualifications will keep her from new steady employment. Furthermore, her lack of family and friends means that she has no support system to go to for help. Her vulnerable socioeconomic status ensnares her in a system that disadvantages her, and her expensive urban environment augments these troubles. In light of her childhood trauma and adulthood tragedies, Jules has learned “how quick others are to judge. And make assumptions. And presume your financial predicament is the result of stupidity, laziness, years of bad choices” (24), despite how hard Jules works. Her experiences at the Bartholomew allegorically demonstrate that Jules occupies a fierce socioeconomic system that actively disadvantages the poor and vulnerable like her. Ultimately, she escapes the expectations of wealthier classes by combining her efforts with fellow disadvantaged people, accepting and lending help to others, like Ingrid, who struggle as Jules does.

Jules’s anxiety and paranoia grow in response to her physical environment. The more hostile her city and apartment appear, the more worried, afraid, and confused Jules feels. Riley Sager suggests through Jules’s experience that urban life breeds socioeconomic competition, as Jules is forced to fight for her survival in all arenas. These cultural dynamics act as the subtext for the novel’s interrogations of the power imbalances in US social, political, and economic systems. Jules’s observation of the Bartholomew’s demolition at the novel’s end is, for her, the metaphoric death of the cultural myth that with hard work anyone can overcome their circumstances and join the wealthy, elite classes.