I finished “The Sign” by Elizabeth Strout a few minutes ago, and I’m still not quite sure what exactly it is that I am feeling about it. It was kind of a weird story but a completely ordinary story at the same time, and I feel uneasy, I guess. There’s a completely normal, simple story of a man driving home, thinking about his life, and then stopping by his neighbor’s to see how he is doing. As the story goes on, the background to the story becomes more complex with possible arson and abuse, so the plot gets a little more bizarre. However, I think the character of Tommy makes me the most uneasy, which I’m guessing is how Strout wants me to feel; otherwise she would have written a book about rainbows.

She accomplishes this uneasiness about Tommy in a couple of different ways that all tie together in the end. In the beginning of the story, he seems like a genuinely good, laid-back kind of person. He cares about his kids; he gives his wife credit for dealing with their barn burning down. He deals with the terrible events of his life quite well. He seems almost too easy-going and too okay with everything. That threw me off for most of the story, especially when he was talking to Pete about his father possibly burning down Tommy’s barn. What kind of person is just okay with their whole existence being changed (possibly through someone else’s maliciousness)? And then, he knows all the names of the kids at school and he seems to care about them and he is the kind of person who checks in on his neighbors. On a base level, he left me uneasy because of how flat he seemed, purely kind and laid-back. Then, under that, there was a weird obsession with Lucy Barton, and it seems as though nothing happened and maybe it was just a kindly janitor caring about a small girl, but it also seems to be more than that. Strout left it ambiguous enough to leave me quite unsure about him and her. If she had flat-out said something creepy was going on, the mystery would have been solved and it would have been more conclusive and wouldn’t have left me wondering about it.

Then, all of a sudden, Tommy stops wanting to see Pete, and he’s still going to visit him, fitting in with the nice-guy persona, but he doesn’t want to and he focuses on his bad smell. At this point in the story, I had just come to terms with Tommy’s niceness and then learned that underneath it, there was something more going on with him, and that threw me off again. If he had just remained as a kindly, old janitor, then I don’t think it would have left me with the same sense of uneasiness.