regression in the discomfort of evening

The author explores the complexities of understanding and reconciling loss through Jas Mulder's various encounters with death. Beginning with the tragedy of her brother Matthies's drowning, Jas's world becomes defined by the things she is losing. In an attempt to hold onto what is fragile, Jas begins stuffing her coat pockets with mementos. Over the course of the narrative, her pockets fill with dying toads, severed whiskers, and candy wrappers. Despite her obsessive habit of collecting, Jas still feels incapable of controlling her surroundings. It is not only Matthies, after all, that Jas has lost.

After their firstborn son dies, Jas's parents suffer their own existential deaths. Overcome by sorrow, Mum and Dad retreat increasingly into themselves. They become so distant, Jas is convinced both of them will soon die as well. In order to make sense of their behaviors, Jas looks to math solutions and Biblical passages. Her efforts to make sense of her world appear increasingly unsuccessful as other facets of her world dismantle. Not long after Obbe accidentally drowns his hamster, all of the family's cows become infected with foot-and-mouth disease. The family then must shoot the entire herd. Meanwhile, Dad threatens to leave the family and Mum promises to kill herself. Incapable of stopping the devastation around her, Jas attempts assuming a position of power over death instead. She refuses to continue allowing others to take things from her, and attempts to take things from others, injuring her friend, Belle, shoving her sister off a ledge, and murdering the rooster with a hammer. In the final chapter of the novel, Jas closes herself inside the basement freezer in an attempt to die and reconvene with her brother in the beyond.

The author uses this network of scenes and images to illustrate the ways in which loss is capable of overcoming the individual's psychic and emotional understandings. Unable to liberate her true self from the metaphoric shield of her coat, unable to physically free herself from her home and into The Promised Land, Jas seeks comfort in the possibility of death. By the end of the novel, then, death becomes a form of escape; death holds the promise of the amorphous future.