The Couple Next Door

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2016

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-8

Chapters 9-14

Chapters 15-21

Chapters 22-29

Chapters 30-37

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Tools

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Discussion Questions

Symbols & Motifs

Baby Cora

Cora symbolizes all of the moral failings of the adults around her. Save for a passing moment when a distraught and guilt-stricken Anne recalls Cora’s curl of hair on her forehead, the novel offers no actual physical description of the baby. She is what she eats or will not eat, she is how often she cries, and she is the onesies that she wears; Thus, she is objectified.

For all Marco’s protestations that he just wants the daughter he loves back, she is an opportunity to restart his business. For Alice, the fussy baby is a constant reminder of how much she disapproved of Anne’s marriage and how little she has taken to being a grandmother. For Cynthia, Cora represents everything that she despises: motherhood, sacrifice, maternal bonding. For Rasbach, Cora is a disturbing puzzle, a riddle he must solve, the reward for diligent investigation. For Anne, Cora represents her anxiety about motherhood. She cannot find a way to bond with the baby and so the baby remains for her a constant reminder of her socially perceived failure. For Bruce Neeland, who carries the baby off the night of the kidnapping, Cora is merely cargo, a kind of contraband he must direct. Most heartless of all, for Richard, his granddaughter is a vehicle he can use to end his marriage and all the while position himself as a hero. In short, the baby mirrors the emotional, psychological, and moral imperfections of the adults. It is interesting to note the name Cora is a birth name of the Greek goddess Persephone, born the embodiment of innocence and sweetness who through machinations of her own family came to be the queen of Hades, surrounded by the worst of the Underworld.

The Mirror

The mirrors in the novel symbolize how deeply both Anne and Marco deny reality. The mirror is vehicle for truth telling. The mirror simply, cleanly, and honestly reflects the world as it is.

Mirrors figure in the novel twice. Reeling from the realization that her daughter is gone and worried about how the kidnapping of her child while she was next door getting drunk with friends will look in the light of day, Anne retreats to the bathroom where she glimpses herself in the mirror, Marco standing right behind. There, by the unblinking reflection of the mirror, are the parents who have conspired to lose their child. It is too much honesty, too much reality, for Anne and she raises her hand up and “smashes at the reflection…in the mirror” (9). Smashing the mirror is a manifestation of Anne’s larger struggle with handling difficulties—her tendency to black out, her retreat into pharmaceuticals, her intense depression, her alcohol. Later Marco shows a similar resistance to the truth telling symbolized by the mirror. Mired in the failures of what was supposed to be an artfully executed faux-kidnapping, Marco hides in the bathroom and happens to glance at his reflection. He sees the worry lines, the bags under his eyes reflecting his sleeplessness, his unshaven chin that reflects his drift from the simplest routine, and his blood-shot eyes that reflect the strain of worry. Rather than experiencing an epiphany in which he sees the toll his ego and his greed have taken, he “turns from the mirror quickly” (178). Marco turns away from the considerable evidence that using his own daughter as a pawn to save his failing company is no game, the risk is real and the threat is imminent.

Photography and Abstract Art

Abstract art, the market in which Anne deals, resists representational forms and conceptualizes emotions in shapes, colors, and lines. By contrast, cameras capture the literal images of life. Anne Conti is an art history major with a professional interest in contemporary abstract art. Cynthia Stillwell is a professional photographer whose house is rigged with a video surveillance set-up on the porch to record her seductions, unbeknown to the men and occasional women, for Graham’s pleasure. Abstract art and photography then symbolize two diametrically opposed systems of perception that in turn reflect the nature of the characters. Anne retreats from reality, avoids difficult emotions through alcohol and drugs, and has a disorder that renders her amnesiac in moments of extreme stress. Cynthia, conversely, uses the cameras to take control of reality, to put herself in a dominant position of and direct reality. Her video recording of Marco heading out to the garage is exactly the kind of revelation of reality that Anne struggles to comprehend. When Cynthia shows her the tape, “Anne feels all the blood leaving her extremities” (251). She cannot respond. She says nothing. If abstract art suggests the ability to recreate private worlds of individual integrity, the camera suggests the tonic (and toxic) impact of seeing the world as it is. Here Anne understands that what she thought was the worst—her husband sleeping with her neighbor—is in fact far worse than she imagined. Her husband kidnapped their child. Cynthia’s array of cameras capture the world of the novel for what it is: brutal, contradictory, and painful.