. is ripe with imagery suggesting l

.
is ripe with imagery suggesting loss of love
as well as illusions. Brenda's uncle Leo and his wife leave, looking like people "fleeing
a captured city" (p. 84), and to Neil driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, the
desolate landscape looks like "an oversight of God" (p. 84), a phrase that echoes
the image of the valley of ashes in The Great Gatsby. When Brenda leaves for Boston,
"the wind was blowing the fall in and the branches of the weeping willow were
fingering at the Patimkin front lawn" (p. 85).5 At the library things are also changing,