payment page
Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.
Bennie’s Gold Flakes
Bennie Salazar sprinkles gold flakes into his coffee in an attempt to combat his sexual impotence and regain his liveliness. He’s sick of being sexually frozen out by his wife, and of having consciously abandoned his desire to have sex when she drew away from him. He feels moments of very intense sexual desire for Sasha, but they’re never when he wants them to be, and he’s always rebuffed. The remedy he takes for this issue is an expensive placebo, but it represents Bennie’s desire to reclaim his youth. It’s important that the medicine is real gold flakes; Bennie, who’s obsessed with money, is trying to cure himself of all his ills with pure currency.
The Wallet
In the first story, Sasha steals a wallet from an unsuspecting woman in a restaurant bathroom during a date with Alex. This act of theft is the first instance of Sasha’s kleptomania in the novel, and it foreshadows her deeper psychological issues. Sasha has to fight with herself to decide whether or not she should steal the wallet. She’s terrified of becoming boring and losing the currency of youth, so she pushes herself to do it. The wallet quickly takes on symbolic power, representing Sasha’s ability to think and decide for herself what she should do. This is addictive behavior, a compulsion to take control over her environment through stealing. It’s important to note that Sasha does return the wallet at the end of the story; throughout the book, there’s an ongoing battle between her self-destructive impulses and her desire for change.
The PowerPoint Presentation
One of the chapters in this novel is both a symbol and a distinct story in itself. In “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” Sasha’s daughter Alison tells the story of her family’s dysfunction through PowerPoint slides. She tries to quantify all the things in her life she doesn’t understand, turning them into graphs and figures so she can process them together. Her presentation reveals her perspective on her family, especially her brother Lincoln's obsession with pauses in rock songs, and it represents a very modern way of getting information across, which in some ways is aligned with Lincoln’s refusal to talk about anything but pauses.
