49 pages • 1 hour read
Adrienne BrodeurLittle Monsters
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Family Dynamics and Secrets
Little Monsters is set against the backdrop of the 2016 election, which featured dueling charges of dishonesty by the two major candidates. The novel also depicts secrets and lies—in this case, their impact on family dynamics. Each of the main characters seeks out the truth while also hiding a secret. This affects the bonds between Adam and his three adult children. For example, as Adam plunges forward in his quest to understand humpback whales, he hides his symptoms of mania. He forces Abby to confront his childhood abandonment of her, which she links to his symptoms of bipolar disorder.
Ken’s abuse has poisoned the family’s dynamics. Ken and Abby have a strained relationship, and Adam’s dismissal of the abuse has created distance between him and Abby. Though he recalls an “uneasy feeling in his gut” (65), he saw the abuse as regular childhood behavior. Ken’s actions reverberate past his sister. They affect his marriage, as Jenny catches him in a chatroom chasing his childhood feelings for Abby.
Ken’s secret echoes Adam’s one-night stand with a teenager the year Abby was born. This saddled Steph’s mother with the secret of Steph’s parentage, which shaped Steph’s life and motivates her to find out who the Gardners are. While Steph’s father urges her to forgive her mother’s secret, Steph says the “the past [doesn’t] feel like the past” (170). Abby maintains a secret affair with David, a married man and the father of her unborn child.
As these secrets come to light, family relationships suffer momentarily. However, Abby, Jenny, and Steph chart a new path. Abby announces her child publicly, and Jenny steels herself in therapy, willing to hear what deep secrets Ken holds. Abby realizes that she “might not have her brother […] but she would have Reid and the people who surround[] her now, the family she’[s] created” (304). Abby reflects on how revealing secrets has destroyed the fantasy of their family while creating a new one based on honesty.
Ambition as a Key Character Trait
Adam and his three children are all ambitious, though they aspire to different things and face different outcomes. Adam is driven to satiate his grandiosity, Ken to erase his childhood sins, and Abby and Steph to create authentic lives and families.
Ambition propels the main characters’ major life choices. Adam, in pursuing the truth about whales, stops taking his medication and embraces mania. Ken papers over the uncomfortable truths of his marriage and his relationship with his children to pursue a career in politics. Abby initially appears not to care for professional success like Ken and Adam. However, she recognizes the power and potential of her paintings. She strives to capitalize on her second chance at fame in the art world and the generative possibilities of both her body and canvas.
Neither wholly negative nor positive, ambition reflects each character’s identity. Abby’s ambition propels positive change and allows her to confront a world of Adams and Kens who would dismiss her. When being interviewed for the Art Observer, she describes how Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein “covers everything: ambition, revenge, loss, a body’s impermanence” (27). Frankenstein, though a novel about a monster, is also about an act of creation. Abby’s answer stresses the link between creation and her own concept of ambition. As Abby creates—both artistically and biologically through her pregnancy—she feels more alive: “For the first time in decades, she was hungry. Instead of wanting to disappear, Abby wanted to be seen” (29). Ambition also connects Steph with Abby. Steph recalls that “her parents had used her premature birth to explain everything from her quick temper to her ambitious nature” (37).
Ken and Adam’s ambition contrasts with Abby’s. Grounded in the self, the two men center ambition in terms of personal gain. After securing his financial future and becoming an equal to Jenny’s father, Ken “had created a path for himself. He punched the air. He was untouchable” (15). However, he remains vulnerable. Like Cain, Ken’s ambition seems hollow to his father, and his wealth can’t stop his guilt. His ambition reveals his pain, an impulse to perfect his broken soul.
Adam’s ambition is an attempt to escape the limitations placed on him through his mortality. After embracing mania, he “bask[s] in an exquisite sensation of déjà vu, feeling a comradeship with other great discoverers: James Cook, Charles Darwin, Jacques Cousteau” (4). Like Ken, Adam’s ambition fails. His attempts to understand whales slip away as his mania recedes.
Adam fails to see the value of women around him. Tessa’s t-shirt at the end of the novel presents another view of ambition—“The Future is Female” (297)—even if Clinton doesn’t win the election as the women in the Arcadia think she will.
Toxic Patriarchy
Little Monsters examines gender and the conflict between feminism and patriarchy, demonstrating how patriarchy hurts all genders. Ken’s abuse of Abby doesn’t only harm her; it also harms himself, eroding his marriage and his relationship with his family.
Adam exemplifies a toxic patriarchal figure. His misogyny is reflected in his comments about politics. For example, he reduces Clinton to her gender and Trump to his behavior, seeing the impending 2016 election as a choice between “a boorish billionaire and an unscrupulous woman” (6). He sees women as wives and mothers or objects of desire. Adam complains about modern standards for men even while he criticizes Trump for his slurs and offensive statements. He feels contempt for behavior that he associates with feminism. Imagining his daughter Abby, “whose buttons he love[s] to push” (136), Adam muses about humorless women. Highlighting what he characterizes as the plight of men, Adam critiques feminism indirectly by making jokes, flirting, and playing difficult. As the man who ignored his son’s molesting of Abby, Adam retreats to a defense of male prerogative that stresses the need for feminism.
Ken echoes many of Adam’s beliefs. He struggles to find peace with the women in his life, including his daughter Tessa, whom he sees as “the family expert on all things PC” (199). He fails to see women as individuals. For example, when meeting Steph and Toni, he reduces them to a political opportunity, the chance to burnish his credentials as a Republican with “relative social progressiveness” (199). As he examines Steph, he reduces her to her physical characteristics. He sees her as a “[p]retty face, great body, shiny hair […] Sandra Bullock?” (201). He misses what Tessa arguably notices—her familiarity as a family member. Like his father, Ken bemoans the so-called plight of the straight white man: “This PC stuff would be the death of him” (201).
Ken’s therapist, George, voices the danger that men like Ken face: It is not political correctness, “woke” beliefs, or feminist politics. Rather, Ken faces harm from “shame […] deeply rooted in the male psyche, part of the legacy of the patriarchy, and […] embedded in [his] family’s pathology” (158). Ken, like Adam, hears critiques of the patriarchy and male privilege as resentment and grievance, rather than a call to feel and escape his shame, “the invisible twin to childhood trauma” (158). He dismisses George’s claim, arguing that he “hadn’t invented the patriarchy” and had “heard enough of this patriarchy crap from the women in his life” (158). Ken disavows the intergenerational damage caused by him and his father precisely by ignoring the possibility of intergenerational trauma—Ken’s claim that he didn’t “invent” patriarchy reveals that he views himself as a discrete individual, disconnected from the past. Ken’s stance is heavily ironic for a reader and ultimately damaging, as it is the past that has shaped him and haunts him, yet his stance as an “alpha” demands that he never acknowledge the factors of intergenerational trauma caused by patriarchy.
