the 1960s

The 1960s are a remembered historical period that helps explain the novel’s political inheritance and family background, while sharpening the contrast between an earlier sense of upward possibility and the later crisis on Grayling Island. For Kelly Kelleher, the decade is not a fully remembered personal past: she was not quite four when Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968. Instead, it reaches her through family history, political associates, and the generation’s language of optimism.

Political Optimism and Its Limits

The decade appears as a time of liberal political hope in Kelly’s account of her employer, Carl Spader, who had worked in Bobby Kennedy’s campaign. Its memory is colored by the contrast between the campaign’s youthful sense of power, purpose, and authority and the worsening conditions of the Vietnam War and the home front. Kelly remembers nothing of the assassination itself, but inherits the political atmosphere through those who had participated in that earlier moment.

Carl Spader’s maxim that people in politics are optimists gives this inheritance a practical edge: optimism is presented not simply as a mood but as a condition of continuing political work. His corresponding warning—that someone who is no longer optimistic is no longer in politics—makes the belief sound both sustaining and precarious. The decade’s remembered promise is therefore already shadowed by the possibility of political defeat.

Family Prosperity and Private Anxiety

The 1960s also mark a period of conspicuous professional success for Artie Kelleher. In construction, building, and investments, he describes business as booming and imagines himself riding an escalator toward the top. That public and financial ascent contrasts with his anxiety at home over Kelly’s strabismus, which he sees as a problem he cannot control.

The conflict exposes a limit in the Kellehers’ ideal of well-being. Artie’s concern for his daughter’s health and future at school is bound up with a strong emphasis on physical attractiveness and normality; he fears that other children will tease her. Madelyn and Grandma Ross favor giving exercises a chance, while Artie presses his wife to imagine the consequences if they do not work. The family’s decision eventually leads to surgery at Beth Israel Hospital, after which Kelly’s recovery is swift and her eyes appear normal. Thus the decade’s language of success is set beside an intimate vulnerability that money and professional advancement cannot by themselves resolve.

Social Inheritance and the Later Encounter

The Senator shares a social background with the Kellehers. He attended Andover after Artie, then went to Harvard for his undergraduate and law degrees; Artie attended Amherst and Columbia. Their circles likely overlapped, though the Senator and Kelly do not pursue that connection in their conversation. This parallel background places the later meeting within a world of shared class and educational reference, without making Kelly and the Senator professionally associated.

The political past also matters because Kelly works for Carl Spader, an old acquaintance of the Senator from the 1960s and a former political associate from the Kennedy campaign. Kelly herself has never worked for the Senator, his staff, or his campaign organizers. The novel distinguishes her inherited connection to his political generation from any direct employment or established professional relationship with him.

Memory Against the Grayling Island Crisis

The 1960s enter the present plot as fragments of recollection rather than a self-contained chronological episode. During the drive toward Brockden’s Landing, Kelly recalls being told that she is someone’s little girl as the Toyota travels into an increasingly desolate area at dusk. The memory of family protection sits uneasily beside her immediate dependence on the Senator, who is driving and has insisted that she leave when she does.

The contrast becomes more severe after the car enters Indian Creek. The Senator and Kelly are strangers in the immediate circumstances of the sinking car, even though their political worlds and social backgrounds touch the same earlier history. Kelly’s trapped, disorienting present is framed against memories of childhood care and the period’s language of political possibility. The 1960s therefore functions not as a simple golden age but as a source of inherited expectations—of family security, public purpose, and progress—that the later events place under pressure.