Content Warning: This guide section depicts physical and emotional abuse and animal violence.

“We don’t walk down the same street as the person walking beside us. All we can do is tell the other person what we see. We can point at things and try to name them. If we do this well, our friend can look at the world in a new way. We can meet.”

In this passage, Nell uses a metaphor to explain her theory that people can bridge the gap between their inner lives through translation. Apart from encapsulating the theory that Nell will describe again in greater detail, Enright deploys this metaphor to characterize Nell’s narratorial voice, emphasizing the creative quality of her consciousness.

“He said, I always thought I would be in Montana or someplace. Big country. Not living in a box. I grew up in the open air, he said. Makes it hard to fit in small. I always thought I would be my own man.

When he turned to me, there were tears in his eyes and we moved towards each other so simply, My heart, I thought. Oh, my heart. This second bout was sad and then a bit frantic. An emptiness in the middle stretch, like he was running the wrong race. Afterwards, I felt we had achieved something difficult.”

This passage captures the moment that Nell falls in love with Felim. Felim opens up about the tension between his past and present life, showing how his pastoral childhood has left him unprepared for the claustrophobia of city life. Though Nell feels deeply connected to Felim, this moment is necessary for setting up the frustration she will later feel with him when he starts to demonstrate abusive behaviors.

“The poems were so gentle and clear, I could hear his voice speaking, just to me. Other girls had fathers, uncles, I had good old Phil, who made things lovely with words.

Sometimes, I look at my mother and wonder where all that went, how the family declined, father to daughter—from subtle to stupid in a single generation. Phil’s work is, above all, tactful. A girl needs tact—this was not, from Carmel, what a girl was ever going to get. When things were bad, I would curl up with Phil and sweeten the hurt.”

Because she has no father figure in her life, Nell looks to Phil as the closest surrogate. Even then, she relies not on the person of her grandfather, since he has already died, but on the poetry he left behind. This creates an idealized version of Phil in Nell’s mind, one characterized by tact. The rest of the novel partly focuses on underlining the discrepancy between Phil as a poet and Phil as a father.