The children are 5-year-old Ana and 8-year-old Paul.
Of that she has precious little: $3,000 stuffed in a bag and meant to last them who knows how long.Īfter Rittenhouse: What an era of armed protest means for America That concern, though, means Josie deals only in cash. Why a man who rarely pays attention to his children – even on the absent father-designated schedule of weekends and holidays – would suddenly venture from his Florida home to reclaim those same children is, one assumes, a contradiction meant to illustrate Josie’s fraying mental state. She worries that Carl, whom she thinks of as “an invertebrate” and remembers as “a loose-boweled man,” will follow and disrupt her misadventures. Josie wants to stay off the grid in Alaska. Said alliances unravel in a blink, stripping Josie of any hope of stability during her ill-advised Alaskan getaway.
Like driving through Alaska with little more in mind than visiting a quasi-step-sister with whom Josie has occasional, if always fragile, uneasy alliances. These problems, along with the usual assortment of vexations bestowed by parenthood, leave Josie willing to try almost anything to shed her embitterment and disappointment. The latter circumstance stems from the shiftless father of her children embracing the Occupy movement and shunning economic stability, a mindset that causes him to want to abandon any vestige of proximate comfort. She’s 38, she’s lost her dental practice after being sued by a cancerous patient, and she’s lost the mirage of a nuclear family. And it’s explored once again in Dave Eggers’s latest novel, Heroes of the Frontier, telling the tale of a single mom from Ohio who drags her young son and daughter through Alaska in a rented RV. Getting lost as a way of escaping from problems on the home front is an eternal theme.