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55 pages 1 hour read

Monique Truong

Bitter in the Mouth

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2010

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Character Analysis

Linh-Dao “Linda” Nguyen Hammerick

Linda is the narrator and protagonist of the novel. Born Linh-Dao Nguyen, Linda travels to the United States with her parents as a young child, first for her father’s postdoctoral studies, then—with the fall of Saigon—as refugees. Following a fatal fire that burned down her family’s small mobile home and killed her parents, Linda is taken in and formally adopted by Thomas Hammerick—her biological mother’s former, secret boyfriend from her time studying abroad in New York City—and raised in Boiling Springs, North Carolina. However, Linda’s ethnicity is not revealed until the end of Part 1, and she does not discover how she came to be adopted until the end of the book, at which point she is around 30 years old, as she does not remember anything prior to her new life with any clarity.

Though Linda loves her great-uncle and father, the latter of whom dies when she is still in high school, she has a tense relationship with her mother and grandmother, the former of whom sees only her husband’s one true love, and the latter of whom sees her as a transactional obligation rather than a child to be loved. Further, Linda experiences a form of synesthesia that causes her to experience tastes when she hears words, which she refers to as “incomings.” As a result, her childhood is often painful and lonely, and she chooses to bury herself in schoolwork and otherwise make herself invisible to get by.

She follows in her father’s footsteps and attends Yale after high school, then Columbia Law School; determined never to return to Boiling Springs, she settles in New York City with a medical student named Leo. However, after Baby Harper dies in a plane crash, Linda’s life in New York collapses; she takes an extended leave of absence from her law firm, returns to Boiling Springs, and reconnects with her mother, best friend, and the town with which she had a tortured relationship.

“Baby” Harper Evan Burch

Baby Harper is Linda’s great-uncle, Iris’s younger brother. From the moment Linda meets him as a child, she and Harper hit it off, and they remain close right up until his death. Their closeness is in part due to his kindness and the fact that his natural speaking voice is sing-songy, meaning that Linda doesn’t experience incomings the same way when talking to him. Additionally, though, both Linda and Harper are outsiders, both in Boiling Springs and in their own family, Linda as a Vietnamese American adoptee, and Harper as a closeted homosexual in the rural, Bible-belt South.

Linda calls Harper her “first love” at the start of the novel, and the two remain close his entire life, first through frequent meet-ups and weekly barbecue dinners at Bridges, then during weekly—then biweekly—phone calls after she moves to New York. Harper spends most of his life limited to Boiling Springs and the surrounding area, working as a librarian for nearby Gardner-Webb College. After his sister Iris’s death, Harper officially comes out and begins openly dating Cecil, the funeral home director at Mister T’s; later, after taking his first flight to see Linda graduate from Yale, Harper and Cecil become traveling men, spending most of the year making the rounds in South America. Harper and Cecil die when their plane crashes off the coast of Colombia, and it is his death that brings Linda back to Boiling Springs and reunites her with her mother and best friend.

Kelly Powell

Kelly is Linda’s lifelong best friend. The two initially meet when Kelly, a precocious and ferociously intelligent young child, writes a letter to seven-year-old Linda, which begins a regular written correspondence that continues into the age of email, and even when the two meet up in person—the novel frequently refers to specific letters by which number in the sequence they appear. Kelly and Linda spend a lot of time together as kids; however, ahead of high school, Kelly decides that she wants to be a popular, cheerleader type and undergoes a huge change, and though they continue to write letters to one another, they do not associate in school. Kelly is forced to drop out of high school during her junior year when she unexpectedly becomes pregnant; she moves to South Carolina to give birth and returns to form while living with her aunt, and by the time she returns, Linda has left for Yale. Nevertheless, Linda and Kelly stay in touch for many years, and they reconnect following Harper’s death.

Thomas Hammerick

Thomas is Linda’s adoptive father. Thomas’s family is an old and wealthy Southern family, one that originally made its money through slavery and cotton plantations, then later through a successful, family-run department store. The Hammericks are traditionalists for whom, as Linda tells us, even one change is one change too many.

Thomas both works within and confounds this philosophy. He attends Yale, as the men in his family always had, and then attends law school. However, instead of returning to North Carolina for law school, he instead chooses to remain in the North and attend Columbia Law; further, whereas his family traditionally studied law to protect themselves and the family businesses from it more effectively, Thomas chooses to practice law. Nevertheless, Linda tells us that though disappointed, neither of these choices were what led to his estrangement; although it is not stated explicitly, his final transgression was to adopt Linda, a Vietnamese refugee.

Thomas is what Linda calls a “Reasonable Man,” and one whose gospel is self-reliance. He is a man governed by routine and tradition, even as he eschews his family’s philosophies; as such, he is a good representative of the novel’s balance of tradition and progress. In his later years, though, he allows himself to succumb more to his emotions and impulses; later, long after Thomas’s death, Harper—at DeAnne’s suggestion—sends photographs of a young Thomas in New York City with Linda’s mother to help Linda better understand her life and relationship with her family.

DeAnne Hammerick

DeAnne, Linda’s mother, spends much of the novel serving as an antagonist to Linda, who recalls loving her mother from the ages of 7 through 11 only, then ceasing to love her or even acknowledge her as her mother. Linda’s hatred is in part due to what she sees as her mother’s role in allowing Bobby to gain access to her; thus, she holds her mother responsible for her rape and for willfully ignoring the evidence of it. Moreover, though, it is due to DeAnne’s disinterest in, and later coldness toward, Linda. After Thomas’s death, however, and during the long silence between DeAnne and Linda, DeAnne undergoes a shift in personality; when the two reconnect, Linda learns more about her own background and why this manifested as DeAnne’s coldness toward her. Like Harper, Linda, and Kelly, DeAnne demonstrates the novel’s theme of rebirth, and in the final moments of the novel, she and Linda reconnect—or, in some ways, meet one another for the first time.

Iris Burch

Iris, DeAnne’s mother and Harper’s older sister, is the matriarch of the family and the most representative of tradition and convention, despite her own transgressions and flaunting of it. Iris is known for always telling the truth, and Linda tells us early on that it is the family’s fear of this that maintains order within it. However, Linda also learns from an early age that there are shades of the truth, and that keeping a secret is not always the same as lying.

Iris had a transactional understanding of family, and although she freely admitted to disliking Linda—and, particularly, as we come to find out, the fact that her only grandchild was not a biological one—her dislike didn’t stop her from fulfilling her obligations to her as a grandmother (in stark contrast to Thomas’s family). In fact, it is presumed by Linda that Iris was disappointed in some way by all her family members. However, it is after her death that the family undergo their rebirths and ultimately find happiness in themselves. In this way, Iris represents the bonds of tradition and convention, bonds that must be broken for the family to become whole again.

Wade Harris

Wade is Linda’s neighbor and first boyfriend. The two share a bus stop from the time of Linda’s adoption up until high school, and although they talk at the stop, the de facto separation of boys and girls prevents them from talking in school. This is further complicated by the fact that Kelly develops a crush on Wade; as a result, when Wade and Linda begin dating in eighth grade, she is forced to keep it a secret. Their relationship ends when she tells Wade she isn’t ready to have sex with him; as she leaves, after he thinks she is gone, she overhears him practicing the same line in preparation for another girl. He spends that summer in Tampa, and when he returns, he, like Kelly, has transformed into a popular boy, and he and Linda no longer remain friends. However, he and Kelly eventually do have sex with one another; unbeknownst to him, he is the father of Kelly’s son, Luke.

Leopold “Leo” Thomas Benton

Leo is Linda’s long-term, adult boyfriend and once-fiancé. Like Thomas, Leo comes from an old family; however, unlike Thomas, Leo comes from an old, Northern WASP family, and he does not eschew his family’s traditions. As such, he stands in contrast to Thomas, not least of all for his eventual actions.

Leo and Linda meet on a train to Boston—unwilling to return to Boiling Springs for Thanksgiving, but also unwilling to remain in student housing in New York City, Linda had booked herself a hotel room in Boston as a getaway. Linda immediately likes Leo, in large part due to his name, which conjures the taste of parsnip. He is a medical student at the time, studying to be a psychiatrist, and although Linda doesn’t love Leo, they eventually move in together and become engaged because, as Linda tells us, they are good at being in a relationship with one another. However, Leo asks her to marry him with the condition that she receive a full medical exam first, during which she discovers that she has ovarian cancer and will thus be unable to have children, which is a dealbreaker for him. Following her surgery and recovery, he abruptly ends the relationship and moves out.

Bobby

Although Bobby as a character appears very little in the novel, he is important due to the impact of his actions. Bobby is Kelly’s cousin, an older boy who was in high school at the time that Kelly and Linda were 10 years old. He begins mowing the lawn for Kelly’s mother, who tends to leave while he does to avoid the sound; with her and Kelly’s father gone, Bobby preys on Kelly, forcing her to touch his genitals.

Kelly eventually convinces her mother to also let her leave and go to Linda’s while Bobby is around—using the same excuse of the lawnmower noise rather than telling her the truth—but DeAnne soon hires him to mow their lawn, as well. One day, while home alone, Bobby rapes Linda, who is 11 at the time. When DeAnne sees the evidence, instead of asking Linda or confronting Bobby, she presumes Linda has gotten her first period and silently gives her a purse and a pack of pads; this leads to the final break between Linda and DeAnne, after which Linda no longer considers her to be her mother.

Kelly convinces Linda not to tell anyone about what happened. Shortly after her rape, Bobby dies in a car crash. Years later, after telling Baby Harper about it, the two paint “RAPIST” in red on Bobby’s tombstone.

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By Monique Truong