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.
Themes
The Painful Nature of Growing Up
Even as humanity faces the dire reality of Earth’s deceleration, the usual awkwardness, cruelty, and curiosity of adolescence pervades Julia and her preteen companions’ lives. With the backdrop of an extreme natural disaster like “the slowing,” the author emphasizes that there is nothing that can stop the march of progress toward adulthood. Regardless of whatever is happening in the world, some experiences are universal, and the trying nature of growing up is one of them.
One of the many adolescent pains that Julia endures has to do with socializing: “Maybe it had begun to happen before the slowing, but it was only afterward that I realized it: My friendships were disintegrating. Things were coming apart. It was a rough crossing, the one from childhood to the next life. And as with any other harsh journey, not everything survived” (92).
There are parallels between “the slowing” and the way Julia’s adolescence unfolds, particularly how slight changes go unnoticed at first. Julia reflects on how orderly life seems until the disruption: “How extraordinary it would seem to us eventually that our sun once set as predictably as clockwork. And how miraculous it would seem that I was once a happier girl, less lonely and less shy” (102).
Throughout the novel, Julia’s character is used to explore loneliness and social isolation as aspects of adolescence. As an only child with a quiet, sensitive nature, the trying times of adolescence is particularly unrelenting for Julia: “It was that time of life: Talents were rising to the surface, weaknesses were beginning to show through, we were finding out what kind of people we would be [...] And I worried that loneliness might work that way too. Maybe loneliness was imprinted in my genes, lying dormant for years but now coming into full bloom” (189).
Julia relates the transition from childhood to adulthood as an extraordinary event, similar to Earth’s deceleration: “This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove. Our first flaws were emerging, but they were being corrected” (43).
The Loss of Personal and Planetary Ecosystems
Most of the characters experience a profound loss, whether it be the deaths of loved ones of the loss of something they once knew. Seth loses his mother to cancer; Julia’s mother loses the fidelity of her husband; Julia’s father loses his own father; Julia’s grandfather loses his life; and Julia loses Seth.
Personal losses parallel the planetary shift in The Age of Miracles. As Earth’s ecosystems spiral irreparably out of control, so do the characters. Loss pervades the book and is exhibited in characters ranging from young Seth to Julia’s elderly grandfather. Regardless of age, religious beliefs, or social status, loss affects every character in some way. Julia often thinks back to a time when things were more orderly: “It’s hard to believe that there was a time in this country—not so long ago—when thick almanacs were printed every year and listed, among other facts, the precise clock time of every single sunrise and every single sunset a year in advance. I think we lost something else when we lost that crisp rhythm, some general shared belief that we could count on certain things” (96). The time before “the slowing” is linked to childhood—a simpler time when things felt safer and were more predictable.
Small Changes Have Large Consequences
Insidious changes lead to huge and overwhelming transformations, and this theme is present in numerous ways throughout the book. The experience of adolescence and the progression of “the slowing” reflect this. In “the slowing,” it becomes evident how adding just a few minutes every day can lead to solar storms, radiation poisoning, and worldwide famine over a period of months. Julia encapsulates this devastating transition: “Still the slowing went on and on. The days stretched. One by one, the minutes poured in—and even a trickle, as we have come to understand, can eventually add up to a flood” (165). In adolescence, this same principle is exhibited in how children grow and change in small ways every day. Those changes are never visible until they are—and, at that point, the children are no longer children, but adults. With each catastrophic event, both in the physicality of “the slowing” as well as in the emotional struggles of life, Julia is forced to confront adult issues such as loss, deceit, sexuality, and death.
Chaos and Order: Religion’s Role in Society
While Julia’s family is agnostic, many different types of religious figures populate the book as background characters. Julia witnesses how “[a] woman in a pink-floral-print dress hurried between the cars, shipping orange flyers beneath windshield wiper blades as passengers looked away: The end is now! Repent and save yourself!” (59). The division between “clock-timers” and “real-timers” is drawn along lines of belief, and many of the “real-timers” have secular beliefs that put them in greater touch with the natural world. The “real-timers,” much like the cultists and other zealous people, are looked upon as aberrations: “There was no way around it: The real-timers made the rest of us uncomfortable. They too often slept while the rest of us worked. They went out when everyone else was asleep. They were a threat to the social order, some said, the first small crumbles of a coming disintegration” (121).
“Clock-timers” parallel the order associated with non-secular belief systems, and those who adhere to the government-mandated “clock time” resent and fear the “real-timers,” who they view as a “threat” (121) to the structure of society. In an instance of vandalism, someone spray paints “Get the fuck out”(225) on “real-timer” Sylvia’s garage. “Certain countries in Europe had made it more or less illegal to live the way Sylvia did. On that continent, the real-timers were mostly immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East, off the clock for religious reasons” (149). Eventually society splits into two undeclared factions, and “real-timers” tend to relocate to a communal compound called Circadia. In the novel, “real-timers” are represented by bohemians like New Age Sylvia, the hippie couple Tom and Carlotta, rebellious young Gabby as well as the Kaplans, a Jewish family.
