One of the themes Dubus explores most intently explores how people misperceive each other even as they fear others might hastily judge them. This theme is thoroughly established in the novel’s first chapter, which describes Behrani’s shame at being negatively judged for working as a manual laborer. Every day he parks in a garage belonging to an expensive hotel. When he enters the lobby, the clerk asks him if he needs help, of which at first Behrani takes little heed. It isn’t until he walks in on the clerk helping a wealthy couple that his seemingly innocuous question—“May I help you, sir?” (22)—causes Behrani to feel a tremendous sense of shame at the dirty nature of his work. This establishes a pattern that Dubus builds upon throughout the novel, in which the thing that leads to a character’s shame isn’t the content of a given interaction or statement but its broader social context. As the character who has fallen the furthest, Behrani is most prone to such feelings, although they deeply affect almost everyone in the novel. Dubus uses this recurrent theme to critique the superficiality of social interaction.

Lester is the character who embodies anxieties about others’ external gaze most dramatically and violently.