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While it would be hard to say that this novel has a true protagonist, Sasha comes the closest. Her tale spans several chapters, and she's also a supporting character in almost everybody's narrative in this novel. Sasha is obsessed with trying to form connections with people, an issue that seems to stem from her extreme self-consciousness about the patterns of relationships in her life. She tries all sorts of strategies to compensate for her failure to know and be known, a struggle that manifests primarily through her kleptomania. As a young woman she runs away to Asia with a band, the Pinheads, and then heads to Naples. She gets stuck there, beginning a life of crime and prostitution to escape her abusive, controlling stepfather.
Sasha has always stolen things in order to make her life manageable; when her uncle Ted finds her in Naples, she even demonstrates to him that she’s been able to “steal” the sun and trap it in a wire frame in her window. When she returns to the US and goes to NYU, Sasha begins to steal things which seem meaningful to people and to display them around her apartment. She feels a great deal of shame around this, to the extent that she can’t say the word “stealing” aloud. This shame is one of the main reasons that she goes to therapy, though it doesn’t seem to help her much. She eventually loses her job as Bennie Salazar’s assistant because she steals from him, though it’s also implied that he fires her because she rejects him sexually.
A key aspect of Sasha’s character is her fear of aging and her anxiety about not achieving her goals. This fear drives her reckless behavior, as she sees stealing as a way to avoid becoming “boring” and losing her youth. She eventually marries her college friend Drew, and the pair have two children they name Alison and Lincoln. They move to California and start a new life in the desert near an enormous solar farm. As a mother, Sasha redirects her impulse to steal into making collage and multimedia art from found objects and garbage. Instead of displaying the things she’s stolen like trophies, she displays the things she’s made in an effort to reconcile her present with her past.
