While most of Millhauser's characters do tend to represent various small town stereotypes, his loners and losers, lovers and dreamers are able to join in these rites of mythic consequence, despite being extraordinarily ordinary, precisely because they already move across their suburban landscape like figures at a masquerade ball. Just as Linda Harris dons her black eye-mask and calls herself Summer Storm when she and the other Daughters break into houses, the novella's other characters assume sketchy, but possibly provisional identities that are determined, primarily, by the titles of the interlaced vignettes that make up the Millhauser narrative. Haverstraw becomes "The Man in the Attic." Mrs. Kasco becomes "A Woman Waiting." Others are described as: "Laura Invisible," "The Woman Who Lives Alone," "The Man with Shiny Black Hair," "Coop along the Railroad Tracks," and "Danny Alone."

While some of the novella's personalities do manage to transcend the limitations...