Reagan years

The Reagan years signify the political disillusionment Kelly Kelleher reaches only in retrospect: she had believed the American public would see the era’s spiritual debasement, hypocrisy, cruelty, and lies, but later recognizes that she had been the one who was blind. The period’s political defeat echoes, without simply explaining, the novel’s more intimate scenes, where Kelly struggles to distinguish her own desire from the demands and danger surrounding her.

Political Disillusionment

Kelly’s earlier confidence rested on the conviction that the public would recognize what she regarded as the moral failures of the Reagan years. Looking back on the Fourth of July, she laughs at her own former certainty, turning the disappointment into an anecdote against herself. Her retrospective judgment reverses the direction of blame: it was not a perceptive public that failed to respond as she expected, but Kelly who had misunderstood the political moment.

The Senator does not share her amusement. When Kelly recounts her former optimism, he responds vehemently that he had nearly wanted to die when Stevenson lost to Eisenhower, because he had loved Stevenson. His memory gives political defeat a longer personal history, while his seriousness contrasts with Kelly’s later ability to tell her own disillusionment as a joke.

The Body Under Pressure

The novel’s treatment of the period sits alongside scenes in which Kelly’s experience is shaped by physical contact and unequal desire. During a hike through the dunes with The Senator, the wind catches her hair and the surf beats nearby; his fingers grip her bare shoulders. Kelly thinks that the encounter cannot be happening even as she senses that something is about to happen and cannot be stopped. The scene holds anticipation and apprehension together rather than presenting the encounter as uncomplicated mutual desire.

That tension becomes explicit when The Senator kisses her on a beach that is not deserted. Kelly feels the jolt of desire, but identifies it as his desire rather than her own. She has long experienced kissing in this way, as an electric shock of the male other’s wanting. Once she catches her breath, anxiety and guilt follow: she fears that having made him want her means she can no longer refuse him. The sequence makes her constrained sense of choice part of the scene’s physical and emotional reality.

An earlier memory of G----- likewise connects intimacy with pain. When he grips her hand, he squeezes just hard enough to provoke a perceptible sting; Kelly associates the gesture with the unconscious hurt he sometimes caused while making love. The recurrence complicates any clean division between affection and injury: the body registers pressure even when the person inflicting it is described as acting unconsciously.

Danger and Retrospective Understanding

The movement from desire to danger becomes literal in the Rented Toyota. As it skids off the road and sinks into black water, Kelly is trapped in the passenger seat. Later, as the water rises around her and fills her lungs, she remembers that The Senator had kicked her in his panic as he tried to escape. She understands that he had not known what he was doing, and holds onto faith even as the car fills around her. The period’s political disillusionment is not presented as the cause of the crash; rather, the novel places Kelly’s retrospective political judgment beside an immediate struggle in which understanding another person’s panic cannot undo its consequences.

In that struggle, Kelly bargains with the imagined emergency rescue team: they may amputate her right leg or both legs if necessary, and she promises to sign a release and not sue. Her thought turns to Artie Kelleher, whom she identifies as the family member teased for being litigious, and she imagines explaining the circumstances and taking the blame herself. The details make survival an urgent negotiation with bodily loss, family character, and responsibility, not an abstract wish to live.

Narrative Significance

The Reagan years give Kelly’s political memory a structure of mistaken confidence followed by belated recognition. The same gap between what she expects and what she later understands shapes the intimate and traumatic scenes: she senses that an encounter is becoming unavoidable, recognizes that the desire she feels may belong to someone else, and, in the sinking car, understands The Senator’s panic without being able to escape its effects. Read together, these moments show how the novel links public judgment to private perception while keeping their stakes distinct: political disillusionment becomes a story Kelly can tell against herself, whereas bodily danger remains an experience she must fight through.