Disability

Individual struggles with various mental and physical disabilities function as the backbone of the novel's reckoning with place and community. Alcott spends a great deal of time generating empathy, dignity, and humanity in three of her characters—Edith, Paulie, and Thomas—who each struggle with a separate disability, taking care to lend their lives meaning and wisdom without sugarcoating the experience of disability in an ableist society. At the same time, Alcott looks to the community around these characters in order to interrogate the responsibility and obligation borne by able-bodied individuals in the lives of these characters to look after them.

Throughout the novel, Alcott makes reference to the struggles faced by these individuals, and indeed makes clear that, as far as Edith is concerned, the apartment building at the center of the novel's narrative is intended as a kind of safe harbor for individuals who...