United States Supreme Court

The U.S. Supreme Court is invoked as a consequential institution in the novel’s political atmosphere, not as the setting for a courtroom scene. Its recent decisions represent, to the people discussing them, an ideologically driven turn toward selfishness and cruelty; for Kelly Kelleher, the Court makes clear why women cannot treat politics as someone else’s concern.

Political Context

At a gathering on the terrace at Buffy St. John’s cottage, The Senator joins a conversation about what the speakers see as the outrage of recent Supreme Court decisions. They connect those rulings to the dismantling of gains from the civil rights movement and to the retirement of Justice Thurgood Marshall, describing it as the end of an era. The discussion places the Court within a larger political contrast between hard-won rights and a wealthy society’s sanctioned indifference.

The conversation is also a performance of political identity. The Senator is friendly and at ease among the guests, but the measured tone and focused manner of his speech suggest his awareness that others are memorizing him. He begins to say more, then changes his mind. The moment presents political speech as both conviction and self-presentation: even a discussion of the Court’s decisions unfolds under the pressure of public image.

Kelly’s Argument

Later, as Kelly and The Senator walk across the hot sand, he suggests that women often find politics boring, reducing it to the monotony of male egos and power-play. Kelly refuses that framing. She answers that women cannot afford to call politics boring at this point in history, naming the Supreme Court and abortion as immediate reasons. Her response shifts the conversation from political spectacle to consequences: decisions made through institutions affect the conditions under which women live.

Kelly’s insistence also distinguishes her from the adults around her. At home, she has confronted her father over his vote and asked her mother how she could support the same kind of politics, only to be reminded that she cannot presume to know how her mother votes. Her sharp reactions to electoral politics, and her volunteer work for Michael Dukakis’s losing campaign, establish a young woman who experiences political outcomes as urgent rather than abstract. The Court is one concrete point in that wider concern.

Narrative Significance

The Supreme Court’s appearances link intimate conversation to national conflict. At Buffy’s, its decisions are discussed alongside the retreat of civil-rights gains; on the beach, it becomes part of Kelly’s rebuttal to the idea that politics is dull or exclusively male. In both settings, the institution matters through its perceived consequences and through the arguments people make about those consequences.

The references do not specify the rulings under discussion or present legal proceedings. Instead, the Court works as a political and moral measure: its decisions help define what the speakers believe is being lost, while Kelly’s invocation of it makes her refusal of political disengagement explicit.