Nostalgia

The nostalgia demonstrated by Irene within the novel shows the boundaries of what the human spirit and an individual family may withstand. Although all of the adult Telemachus children must contend with the void their mother’s early death left in their lives, and their father's subsequent mental absence, Irene begins to retreat into herself in order to cope with the trauma, leaving Irene to find out how to take care of her teenage son and begin a new romantic relationship. After meeting Joshua, she creates her own individual delusions of escape and return to an easier way of life through her burgeoning dependence on another person to save her.

Matty, who has grown up on stories of the Amazing Telemachus family, finds himself unable to separate the family myths with reality. He knows that "he was unusually nostalgic for a kid, though what he pined...