Saving Noah

Presented through his mother Adrianne’s doting eyes, Noah, the second protagonist of the novel, is a competitive swimmer and honor-roll student in high school before his life changes irrevocably. Noah is described as tall and handsome, wearing his hair long. Adrianne indicates that Noah is universally loved in his former life, “one of those people with a magnetic personality who drew others to him without trying” (66). He is also a dutiful son to Lucas and an adoring brother to Katie. Noah is well set up as a swimming champion with a likely college career, and he coaches younger swimmers at the peewee league, the category for six-to-eight-year-olds. During one of his coaching sessions with Maci and Bella, both six, Noah has a visible erection from the proximity of the children. He lets the curious children explore him, and he touches them, too. Aware that he has sexually abused the little girls, Noah stops coaching the peewee league. Wracked by guilt, he finally confesses his offense to Adrianne, setting off a chain of events that leads him to be sentenced as a Type I sex offender. He spends 18 months in a juvenile rehabilitation home and is placed on the sex offender registry.

The grave nature of Noah’s offense and his remorse make him a complex, morally gray character. While the sympathetic portrayal of a juvenile sex offender may be jarring, the narrative uses Noah’s character to consider whether justice means rehabilitation or revenge. Noah is repeatedly shown to deeply regret his actions, as stressed by both Adrianne and Dr. Park. It is also suggested that Noah himself may have been abused by his father Lucas, a sex offender himself. However, Dr. Park also suggests Noah will always pose a threat to children because of his deep-seated attraction to them. Noah’s desire to write apology notes to his victims raises a red flag for Dr. Park: She can see that on a subconscious level, Noah wants contact with children. Thus, Noah experiences a never-ending conflict between his ethics and his desires, which adds to the complexity of his character.

The narrative compares Lucas and Noah, setting them up as doubles, to highlight Noah’s strong conscience and sense of fairness. While the focus of Lucas’s recovery is hiding his truth and covertly reintegrating into society, Noah thinks recovery should only mean he is no longer a threat to children. Suspecting that his desire means he may always be tempted to touch children, Noah is honest about his guilt. As Adrianne notes, he does not even care if he is tried as an adult. He simply wants to be locked away from society. After the charges against him become known, Noah is beaten up by bullies often and labeled a “baby raper.” Coupled with the guilt, the violence against him, which includes rape, deepens Noah’s despair. His mental state alters, and he launches into a nearly catatonic depression. Noah decides that death by suicide is the only way for him to be at peace and free of his attraction to children. Thus, his character is linked with the key theme of The Complexities of Mental Health and Human Nature.

The redeeming features of Noah’s character are his love for Adrianne, Katie, and even Lucas, his cold, cruel father, as well as his honesty and sense of remorse. Noah is depicted as a redeemable character since he prefers to end his life rather than do harm. After Adrianne agrees to help him die by suicide, Noah becomes more animated. Death signifies relief, and his wish to die makes Noah a tragic character. Noah has a dynamic arc because he changes over the course of the plot, accepting his truth and making a decision about it.

A morally gray, unsympathetic character, Lucas is husband to Adrianne and father to Noah and Katie. Lucas is the only other point-of-view character apart from Adrianne in the book, narrating first-person interludes in a past timeline. Seen through Adrianne’s eyes, he “isn’t classically handsome […] but […] always attractive to me” (5). Lucas is six feet tall and has dimples in both cheeks when he smiles; in his middle age, he has put on weight. Lucas is an accountant, running a successful book-keeping business in Buffalo Grove before Noah’s charge as a juvenile sex offender. Lucas must give up his business, take up a job at an accounting firm, sell his house, and move to a smaller home in Dolton. The uprooting of his life is particularly triggering for Lucas: It is revealed in the interludes that Lucas molested his Uncle Shawn’s daughters, ages 8 and 10, when he was a teenager. Lucas was sent to a reform home, where he was given shock therapy and had to witness older, hardened inmates rape younger newcomers. Determined to never land in such a home again, Lucas buried his desire for children, kept his offense a secret from Adrianne, and built a new life with Adrianne in Buffalo Grove.

Lucas’s character is problematic because he places himself in close and continued proximity to young children despite knowing he has an attraction to them. This immediately sets him up as a foil to the more empathetic Noah, who would rather die than harm another child. Further, Lucas’s reaction to the disclosure of Noah’s offense illustrates his emotional cruelty. For Lucas, Noah now appears as a mirror image, reflecting the worst parts of him. Lucas not only shuns Noah but even takes actions which trigger his emotionally fragile son. Noah tells Adrianne that Lucas advised him to never contact her and Katie: “He swore he’d cut me off if I did” (193). Lucas’s words are designed to unsettle the already fragile Noah. A few hours later, Noah attempts death by suicide.

These actions show Lucas in a poor light, as does his decision to keep his sex offense a secret from Adrianne. The secrecy enables Lucas to cast himself in a superior light and exert power over his family. For instance, he threatens Adrianne with legal action if she tries to keep Katie overnight in the same house as Noah. Adrianne relents because she knows any court will side with Lucas. However, the fact remains that if Katie is unsafe with Noah, by Lucas’s logic, she is also unsafe living alone with Lucas. Had Adrianne known of Lucas’s offense, she could have fought for Katie. Lucas is also a selfish parent since he exposes Katie to the threat he represents, especially with no one else in the home. Worse, though the text never makes this explicit, there is a possibility Lucas may have abused both Noah and Katie.

At the end of the novel, Lucas confesses that with Noah dead, he “can breathe again […] go back to pretending like I’m normal” (249). While it is somewhat explicable that Lucas develops an aversion to Noah because of their commonality, his sudden loss of love for his son appears sinister, suggesting that his own sexual impulses may be severe. So deep is Lucas’s lack of empathy for Noah and Adrianne that he refuses to pick out an urn for Noah’s ashes, or to let Adrianne place the urn in the living room. Adrianne notes that the urn is confined to her bedroom. Lucas’s character is linked with the motif of the lasting impact of trauma and sexual abuse, as well as the theme of The Functioning and Failure of the Justice System. Since Lucas shows no remorse for his actions toward Noah over the course of the novel, he is a static character.

Eight-years-old when the novel ends, Katie is the daughter of Lucas and Adrianne Coates, and the sister of Noah. The baby of the family, Katie is called “peanut.” Adrianne describes her as “dainty and delicate” with blonde hair and blue eyes in a small face (10). Katie is shy and sensitive and prefers to stay away from the limelight. She was a fussy infant, refusing to nap for more than a few hours at a stretch. Katie adores Noah, who is older than her by 10 years. Noah’s conviction has a very negative impact on Katie. She counts the days until their monthly visits, circling the dates with pink hearts on her calendar. Although the narrative is about Noah, Katie experiences stress and trauma as well. She has her beloved older brother, and then her mother, live away from her, and then she must cope with Noah’s death. It is also a possibility that Lucas abuses her while Adrianne is away: Katie becomes clingy when Adrianne starts to live apart, and often begs Adrianne to let her stay with her and Noah. One of the problematic aspects of Adrianne’s narration is that it focuses too little on the enormous changes Katie is experiencing between the formative ages of six and eight.

Although Katie is described as self-effacing, she is also strong, intelligent, and a great storyteller. Katie wants to be a graphic novelist when she grows up and often narrates her storylines for Adrianne and Noah. Adrianne’s description of Katie as a born storyteller sits oddly with her estimation that Katie is reserved and shy, like her. This suggests Katie may be more confident than Adrianne assumes. When Katie says goodbye to Noah after the day on the pier, Adrianne observes that Katie holds onto him a lot longer than usual, almost as if she can sense a finality to the act. Her intuitive understanding indicates that Katie is smart and wise. She is also a resilient character as she begins to manage her grief from Noah’s loss by the end of the book, slowly returning to school. Katie has a dynamic character arc, since she evolves from the baby of the family to a tenacious, empathetic child.