Molly Bonamici announces its literary inheritance before the first chapter begins. Two epigraphs stand at the head of the novel — one from Hamlet, the other from Dante’s Paradiso, the passage in which Beatrice instructs the pilgrim to “open your mind to what I shall disclose, and hold it fast within you,” warning that “he who hears, but does not hold what he has heard, learns nothing.” The pairing is exact. Shakespeare’s play asks what exceeds an orderly philosophy — the “more things in heaven and earth” that no system can contain — while Dante asks what a reader is willing to hold. The novel returns to both questions across twenty-two chapters, and its title names the two currents that carry them: a pastiche of inherited texts on the surface, and an undertow of devotional meaning running beneath.
The Dantean material is real and recurrent rather than decorative. A policeman is named Virgil; the final cab driver is called Bea, short for Beatrice; and the novel’s last movement runs toward sea, light, and home. But the Comedy functions here as a framework inside a realist, comic, often violent life, not as a one-to-one reproduction. Molly’s journey can be read through descent, difficult reckoning, and a final opening toward possibility — her language of dark woods and a steep ascent keeps the echo available — yet the ending returns that pattern to lived time, grief, bodily memory, and an unornamented walk out of the water. The value of the Dantean measure is not that it makes Molly’s crimes harmless or assures a tidy conversion. It establishes an imaginative scale against which the narrator’s coldness, skepticism, and eventual receptivity can be read.
The novel’s deepest work of allusion begins with its protagonist’s name, and any serious reading must begin there too. “Molly” is a nickname that joins Margaret and Mary, so the protagonist carries Mrs. Muldoon’s Margaret Mary Alacoque association from the outset; the final scene falls on the feast of Saint Margaret Mary. What looks at first like a familiar diminutive is in fact an inherited devotional identity, disclosed only after the novel has made a subject of names, nicknames, and the authority to give them. The saint in question is not incidental. Margaret Mary Alacoque, the seventeenth-century Visitation nun of Paray-le-Monial, is the mystic of the Sacred Heart — the devotion whose emblem, a heart ringed with flame and wound, the novel will quietly rehearse in a Bleeding Heart vine and finally place in Molly’s hands as a locket. Naming the protagonist into that lineage plants the novel’s central devotional image before a single word of it is spoken.
“Molly” does not stand alone. It belongs to a long lineage of names that descend, by one route or another, from Mary itself — ultimately the Hebrew Miriam, a name of disputed but suggestive meaning, variously glossed as “beloved,” “bitter,” or “rebellious.” Moll and Mollie are the same diminutive in slightly different dress, historically interchangeable with Polly and Poll, both once common English nicknames for Mary. Maureen comes down through the Irish Máirín, a diminutive of Máire, the Irish form of Mary; Myra, coined by the Elizabethan poet Fulke Greville, is widely read as an anagram of Mary. Maria, Marie, Marion, Mariam, Maren, Mara, and the Hebrew Miryam fill out the family, along with domestic English forms like Mamie, Mame, and Mayme. That so many women, across so many centuries and languages, have carried some version of the same name is itself a kind of argument: a name held in trust and passed hand to hand, the way devotion is passed hand to hand, long after its bearers have been forgotten by everyone but the family that kept saying it.
Miriam is not only an etymological root but a biblical figure in her own right, and the novel reaches back to her directly rather than only through Mary. In the Hebrew Bible, Miriam is the prophetess who leads the Israelites in song after the crossing of the Red Sea and who watches over the infant Moses on the Nile (Exodus 2; 15:20) — the older sister who keeps faith while a helpless child is carried toward deliverance. The novel’s final chapter draws on that inheritance quietly: two sisters are named Martha and Miriam, the same pairing as the Gospels’ best-known sisters, Martha and Mary of Bethany (Luke 10:38–42), with Miriam standing in as the Hebrew original of that second sister’s name. The chapter layers still more scripture beneath the scene without naming any of it — a child spontaneously repeating the parable of the lost lamb (Luke 15:3–7), a cab driver wearing an earring patterned after the sun, a crescent moon, and twin stars, echoing the woman “clothed with the sun” of Revelation 12:1, and Venus rising beside stargazer lilies just before Molly’s baptismal swim, a funerary flower and a planet of desire converging at the moment of a conversion the book never once calls by that name. The effect is cumulative rather than declarative: the novel does not argue for belief, it simply keeps setting belief’s furniture down in the room until the reader notices how much of it is there.
The biblical undertow runs deeper than the Marian names. Molly reads Mark 15:34 at her parents’ funeral — “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani,” the cry of dereliction — and flushes the text down the toilet afterward, an apostasy the novel lets stand. Her mother’s Bible opens to Matthew 7:15, “beware of false prophets… ravenous wolves,” a verse that reads in retrospect as a warning against Nonna; Mary Grace, the student who sees through Molly, prays Matthew 7:6, “do not throw your pearls before pigs.” The Gospel of John’s “In the beginning was the Word” is quoted as a defense of language itself; Jonah and the whale is argued over in class; the fish on the diner wallpaper is named “the symbol of Christ”; the couple’s Florida house is “our own private Eden,” complete with a snake; Josephine means “may God give increase”; and the Visitation — Mary visiting Elizabeth — is the feast on which Molly’s mother was born. Even the name Lazarus, given to Myra Bocca’s wealthy husband, is a biblical name hung over a death and a contested inheritance.
The novel’s Marian dimension is, in the author’s own account, personal as well as structural. He has written that he dedicated the book that grew out of this novel to Mary, the Blessed Mother, out of love for his grandmother, who revered her, and out of a belief that the Blessed Mother represents strength, love that endures without complaint, and the capacity to face hardship without being broken by it. Mary, he argues, has too rarely been given the credit she deserves within the Church that reveres her: a strong woman, and a woman of love that was enduring and unquestioned. That omission belongs to a larger pattern the novel is also concerned with — women’s contributions, foundational to families and to culture, going unacknowledged even as they hold everything together. Naming Molly into that lineage of Marys, knowingly or not, is a way of paying the same respect: to the grandmother, and to every woman whose strength is assumed rather than named.
“Bonamici” means “good friends” in Italian, and the name’s irony belongs to a novel in which loyalty, information, family obligation, and violence remain inseparable. It is more productive to keep the irony at that scale than to make it a single allusion-key: the name measures the distance between a promise of fellowship and the damaged relations through which Molly moves. The same ironic device governs the novel’s other loaded names, a point to which the essay will return.
Defoe, Poe, Fitzgerald, Dickinson, Chopin, and Shakespeare remain part of the novel’s visible conversation. The Defoe parallel places a female rogue inside a confessional first-person tradition; Fitzgerald’s green light is explicitly revised as Molly’s demand for authenticity; Dickinson supplies both Nonna’s instruction to tell truth “slant” and the final vocabulary of possibility. The closing swim closely reworks The Awakening, retaining its sensory pressure and solitary movement into water while reversing its terminal direction: where Edna Pontellier swims out and does not return, Molly rises and walks back to shore. Shakespeare, beyond the Hamlet epigraph, supplies Molly’s sardonic register throughout: “methinks she doth protest too much” sits alongside Measure for Measure’s “to die, and go we know not where” and Macbeth’s “tale told by an idiot,” giving a narrator capable of real cruelty a wit that keeps her readable rather than merely cold.
The novel’s New England literary inheritance is as deliberate as its Catholic one. Emerson’s “To be great is to be misunderstood” is quoted to Felicity, and “Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind” appears in Molly’s classroom years later, beside Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and the Walden counsel to “make the most of your regrets… to regret deeply is to live afresh.” Whitman surfaces in a single knowing sentence — the “barbaric yawp” of the bear subculture, “no fat sweeter than that which sticks to their bones” — and Melville is present in the novel’s smallest, best joke: the policeman who says “Call me Virgil” is echoing “Call me Ishmael” even as he takes the name of Dante’s guide. Dickinson, finally, is not only the “tell it slant” of Nonna’s instruction but two poems quoted in full: “There’s a certain Slant of light,” read on the Christmas night that begins Molly’s turn, and “I dwell in Possibility,” which closes the novel as its last word — the “spreading wide my narrow hands / To gather Paradise” that Molly’s final swim enacts.
Poe’s presence runs deeper than gothic atmosphere. “Bonamici” is the same ironic device as Poe’s Fortunato in “The Cask of Amontillado” — a name that means good fortune, or good friends, hung over a betrayal — and Felicity, the freshman roommate who dies in the dormitory prank, carries the same reversed logic: a name meaning happiness borne by a girl who does not survive to earn it. The allusion surfaces again, more directly, in that prank’s aftermath: Molly checks for a pulse and finds none, and the scene’s claustrophobic setting, its detached mannequin hand flung across the room, and Molly’s own clinical calm in the face of a death she privately feels complicit in all rework the guilt-haunted proximity to a body that drives “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Later, at Mrs. Muldoon’s death, Molly recites Poe’s own language of the curtain and the funeral pall — allusion surfacing as direct quotation rather than structural echo.
The mannequin is the novel’s most nearly verbatim Poe. When the store dummy is dressed for the prank that kills Felicity, the Chaplin derby is missing, and in its place goes “one of those conical jester caps with bells” — Fortunato’s costume exactly, the “conical cap and bells” that surmount Poe’s doomed man and whose bells “jingled as he strode.” The echo is not decorative. After Felicity collapses, “every so often there was a jingling of bells,” the very sound with which “The Cask of Amontillado” ends — “only a jingling of the bells” answering Montresor’s last call. And Mark’s cry over the body, “For the love of God, let her be OK!”, is Montresor’s “For the love of God, Montresor!” turned inside out: the murderer’s taunt becomes a bystander’s genuine plea, and the walling-up of a living victim becomes a prank that kills the wrong girl. The homage is exact in its words and transfigured in its meaning — Poe’s machinery of entombment, borrowed whole, then turned from Gothic revenge toward the novel’s own register of accident, guilt, and the bodies that outlive their jokes.
James Joyce enters through Gabe rather than through direct quotation. The Christmas visit to Gabe’s mother recreates the architecture of “The Dead” — an older matriarch presiding over a holiday gathering, a companion named for Joyce’s own Gabriel Conroy, and a quiet confrontation with mortality at a moment meant for warmth. Since Molly has already been told she is an “Angel of Death,” the scene becomes a small, knowing joke at Joyce’s expense as much as an homage: the living and the dead are shadowing each other again, but the character carrying that shadow this time knows it. The prose itself occasionally admits the debt outright — a late passage watching “two planes… one ascending, one descending, a metaphor for life” while Molly’s “soul swooned” borrows Joyce’s cadence along with his subject, the famous close of “The Dead” in which a soul swoons slowly as the snow falls upon all the living and the dead.
Eugene O’Neill supplies the novel’s comic-gothic machinery rather than a single quotation. Molly’s dormitory, Shelton Hall, is haunted — or said to be — by the playwright, who lived in suite 401 with his wife Carlotta and died, as David reports, muttering “born in a hotel room and goddammit, died in a hotel room.” The prank that kills Felicity dresses the store dummy as Oona, O’Neill’s estranged daughter, who at eighteen married the fifty-four-year-old Charlie Chaplin — hence the cane and the derby that Mark cannot find, and hence the jester’s cap that substitutes for it. O’Neill is present as atmosphere and as plot: a ghost story the novel treats as a joke until the joke turns lethal, the way its other inherited texts keep turning from homage toward consequence.
The Great Gatsby supplies a second death scene, not only the green light. Myra Bocca, a grifter run down by a car, is named as a near-anagram and auditory match for Myrtle Wilson, Fitzgerald’s victim of the same reckless carelessness; the detail of a yellow car doing the killing imports Fitzgerald’s association of that color with counterfeit wealth directly into a Florida strip-mall setting. Flannery O’Connor supplies a second grandmother problem: Nonna’s superstition, her manipulations dressed as piety, and her role in setting Felicity’s death in motion all descend from the grandmother of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” whose own hypocrisy and big mouth get her family killed. Molly’s eventual refusal of the “Angel of Death” role she has been handed is the novel’s answer to the Misfit’s theology that people behave decently only under threat of death: she declines both the grandmother’s hypocrisy and the Misfit’s fatalism, and finds her release in water instead of violence.
The novel’s quieter preparation is easier to see once the naming is understood. A gecko watches the work’s one sustained theological dispute; a cardinal arrives as Gabe asks for a sign; and a Bleeding Heart vine droops and revives with Molly’s changing state before the Sacred Heart is named. These are not arguments by themselves. They give the final chapter a prepared visual vocabulary of animal witness, sign, wound, and renewal — and the Bleeding Heart vine, in particular, is the Sacred Heart of Margaret Mary Alacoque rehearsed in botanical form, the devotion’s wounded, flaming heart grown on a trellis.
A therapist’s office supplies a smaller, quieter gallery of allusion: Munch’s The Scream and Van Gogh’s Starry Night hang on the wall where Molly is asked to name what she feels, one canvas externalizing the panic she keeps flat in her own narration, the other offering a turbulent, spiritually charged sky as its unspoken alternative. Socrates’ “I know that I know nothing” does similar work in the same scene, standing in for a confession Molly cannot yet make in religious language. None of these three is argued into the text; they furnish it, the way the gecko and the cardinal do, so that a reader who notices them finds confirmation rather than instruction.
The novel’s philosophical furniture is as eclectic as its literary. Molly’s “lost in dark woods” borrows Dante’s selva oscura and St. John of the Cross’s “dark night of the soul” in a single breath; Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling sits on her shelf and supplies Gabe’s “there are two ways to be fooled”; Jung’s synchronicity is named outright when Molly opens to Dickinson’s poem by “coincidence”; William James and Elaine Pagels are the reading she shares with Gabe; Marx’s “religion is the opium of the people” is quoted to her students; Freud’s “penis envy” is flung at Dr. Diver; and Hunter S. Thompson’s “we are all alone, born alone, die alone” is the secular creed she carries into the deaths that follow. The effect is not name-dropping but a mind assembled from what it has read — belief and unbelief both arriving as quotation.
The novel’s most tender allusion is musical rather than literary, and it belongs to Mrs. Muldoon rather than to Molly. Sober and gentle for once at Molly’s graduation party, Mrs. Muldoon sings “Moon River” to her — “my huckleberry friend” — and dies within weeks. A hundred pages of comic exasperation with this drunken, unreliable widow are spent so that the song lands as the moral center of the book rather than as sentiment. In the closing pages, Molly gives a watch and a Sacred Heart locket — the same devotional emblem the Bleeding Heart vine has been rehearsing all along — to two Jewish girls on a plane, a small, unforced gift that carries Catholic iconography across a religious line without asking anyone to convert. It is the same generosity the novel keeps extending to Mary herself: devotion offered freely, without argument, to whoever is in the seat beside you.
The women who recur around Molly should not be treated as hidden instances of one unchanged grandmother. The books work through altered doubles: similar household roles, phrases, gestures, and moral mixtures recur, but each reappears under new pressure. The resemblance between Nonna and Nana is therefore a form of composition, not a license to collapse two novels into a single continuous biography.
A full census of the novel’s proper names settles a question the doubled name raises. Mulhern does not run a moral code through his naming: sacred names are not reserved for the devout, nor secular ones for the cruel. He loads a small set of hinge-names, usually against their bearers, and leaves the walk-ons semantically ordinary. Agnella carries the Italian and Latin sense of lamb, chosen by a woman it does not describe. Felicity is the Latin virtue-name for happiness, set on a life short of it. Gabriel, the messenger, belongs to a former priest. Hulga arrives straight out of Flannery O’Connor, and Dr. Diver out of Fitzgerald. The restraint is the point: names carry meaning here only where the novel wants pressure applied.
The novel withholds its religious language on purpose, and the withholding is visible if the first page is set beside the last. It opens in choking domestic violence, no seed of the sacred anywhere in it: “I opened the front door, I heard them arguing in the kitchen… my father was pressed against my mother, who leaned back over the stove; he was choking her.” It closes twenty-two chapters later on the opposite register entirely: “There was a faint hum, like bees, and the smell of stargazer lilies seemed to fill the air around me… Believing in possibility, I spread my arms wide and swam slowly to the shore… grateful to be home at last.” The novel does not plant its religious meaning early and let the plot pay it off. It manufactures the meaning only at the close, retrofitted onto a childhood the opening page shows as simply violent.
The same restraint governs the narrator’s voice. Molly does not become scriptural at sacred moments, and it is worth saying so plainly, because a religious reading would prefer that she did. Her domestic prose alternates between sensuous catalogue and flat inventory; violence contracts into terse Anglo-Saxon; death expands into clinical, Latinate observation; the funeral Mass turns formal and hypotactic because she is examining its claim rather than assenting to it. Even the sea, the novel’s most charged element, is rendered comparatively plainly, with a single personification in place of biblical parallelism. What actually raises her diction is interpretation itself — the moment she consciously reads an event, whether through a rite, a literary memory, or water. Belief, in this novel, is a late act of reading rather than a settled register.
Mulhern has described this practice with a modesty that matches its manner. The allusions, he has said, are first of all an homage — a way of honoring the writers he most admires by letting their voices sound quietly beneath his own. The religious element is less calculated: it grows out of an Irish Catholic upbringing and a spirituality still finding its shape, and only occasionally is it set down deliberately, to enrich a passage. Where it appears unbidden, it appears because it is simply what he is — the expression of a man trying to live an authentic life, in Emerson’s sense, so that the art reflects the voice and the beliefs rather than reaching for them. It is the quietest of claims, and the one most consistent with the novel, which never insists on its meanings but lets them surface in the ordinary course of a life.
A few debts are smaller but no less deliberate. Gabe courts Molly for Florida with Marlowe’s “Come live with me and be my love,” the pastoral she dryly corrects as “not exactly Fort Lauderdale terrain”; Langston Hughes’s “Salvation” is the essay she teaches, a child’s crisis of belief set beside her own; T. S. Eliot’s “In my beginning is my end” sounds as she returns to the hospital where Nonna once staged a fall; Dante’s Vita Nuova — “a gentle Lady is in Heaven” — rises when she thinks of her mother; and O’Connor’s Wise Blood, not only “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” sits open in Mary Grace’s hands. Even Verdi’s La Traviata, the opera of the courtesan Violetta, plays in the background of Molly’s childhood, and Shakespeare’s “the world’s mine oyster” is the proverb she literalizes when she pockets Nonna’s pearls. The novel’s allusiveness is, in the end, its subject: a narrator who has read everything and believed almost none of it, until the language she has dismissed turns out to be the only thing that can carry her home.
Read together — the Dantean frame, the doubled name, the Italian surname, the Poe irony, the Joyce and O’Connor grandmothers, the Gatsby deaths, and the novel’s overt literary debts — these make a layered pastiche rather than a puzzle with one answer. The book uses inherited texts to make judgment harder, not easier. Its final possibility is earned neither by innocence nor by a doctrinal resolution, but by a narrator learning that the language she has dismissed may still describe something she can receive. That is the undertow the title promises: a current of meaning running beneath the surface pastiche, felt rather than announced, and strong enough to carry a woman who has spent twenty-two chapters drowning back to shore.