69 pages • 2 hours read
Karen Thompson WalkerThe Age Of Miracles
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
Imposing Human Values on the Natural World
Essentially, “the slowing” is a natural event that leads to catastrophic consequences for human beings. To bypass those catastrophic consequences, humans adapt and impose “unnatural” values to survive. When crops die out, they build greenhouses; when famine strikes, they take mouthfuls of vitamins to stay healthy. In Chapter 9, the President of the United States announces that society will resume a 24-hour clock time. Those who reject “clock time” and embrace the new natural order of Earth are persecuted and cast from society. The motif of humans imposing their values on an unwieldy and unmanageable natural world can be found throughout the book.
Deception and Lying
Lying and acquiring a comfortability with deception is key to growing up in The Age of Miracles. As Julia eventually comes to see it, lying and deceit are painful but necessary parts of adulthood. Julia’s father best highlights the use of deceit to navigate life in the time of “the slowing.”When Joel returns from work after losing a woman during childbirth, he offers his daughter a lie to not alarm her. He tells Julia that the woman did not die, yet Julia knows this is not the truth. This event marks the first instance when Julia “for some reason […] really began to worry” (29) about the effects of “the slowing.”
Joel’s affair with Sylvia is the first major deception in Julia’s life. Because she deeply trusts her father, it takes Julia by complete surprise: “The next morning my father walked in through our front door as if he were the same man I had always known” (130). When Julia catches her father in another lie—he said he was at work, but really he is at Sylvia’s house—she becomes concerned that he will leave with Sylvia and abandon his family.
Julia’s feelings about deception change when her mother fatally runs over a pedestrian and her father lies and says that the pedestrian is alive: “And here came the lie, crisp and smooth and clear: ‘I found out today that he survived’” (161). Joel offers this mistruth to comfort his distraught and increasingly unstable wife. Even though Julia is deeply disturbed to know that her father lies, she finds herself lying as she transitions through adolescence into adulthood: “I was taking big gulps from my water bottle. Deception, like algebra, was a newly learned skill” (154). Julia is confronted with the realization that relationships are complicated and that sometimes the “right” thing to do is not often the obvious choice. When Julia sees how happy and relieved her mother is to learn that the pedestrian has lived, Julia can’t help but admit that “the lie improved everything” (162). Seth also employs lies to conceal the extent of his illness. He does this as a comfort to Julia so that she does not worry about him, yet she senses his false face: “After a few minutes, the bleeding stopped. I noticed nothing else. He hid his symptoms well” (257).
Memory
Many of the characters have memories that do not abide by “clocktime.” That is, for many of the characters, certain memories expand in importance, even when the incidences themselves may be brief. For example, Julia’s grandfather’s time in Alaska only lasted a few months, but those stories grow in his mind because he cherishes those memories: “‘The whole thing reminds me of when I worked in Alaska,’ he said. Alaska was one of his favorite subjects.” (63). As such, memories are just as flexible as time itself in The Age of Miracles. When Julia finds out about her father’s cheating, she is surprised that time keeps marching forward. The moment seems so significant that everything should stop: “For days afterward, a series of magical thoughts flew through my mind. For instance, it seemed somehow surprising that the hours continued to pass in spite of what I knew. It was almost shocking that time did not, in fact, stop” (131). Memory, emotions, and time are inseparably intertwined and brought to light as “the slowing” escalates.
