Pineapple Street

“But on bad days, Sasha felt she was living in a time capsule, the home her husband had grown up in and never left, filled with his memories, his childhood stories, but mostly his family’s shit.”

In the irate tone of this quote, Jackson immediately establishes a source of conflict in the novel: the house on Pineapple Street that Sasha lives in thanks to her marriage to Cord. Yet, although Sasha is a resident here, she is not permitted to truly belong, for the house itself is already a repository—in fact, a borderline shrine—of the Stockton family legacy. Throughout the novel, the house is characterized as being Cord’s, not Sasha’s, because it is defined by the childhood memories it holds. The house’s furniture, décor, and overall vibe all serve as constant reminders that the house is not really Sasha’s. Thus, the rather uncomfortable description of the house also functions as a literary device to establish Sasha’s own outsider status on the very edges of the Stockton family.

“The Stocktons may have let her marry their son, but she understood on a bone-deep level that they would rather let her walk in on them in the middle of an aerobic threesome with Tilda’s bridge partner than have her studying their tax returns.”

This quote exemplifies Jackson’s use of wry humor to satirize the secretive, elitist mindset of the extremely wealthy, and it also adds a tone of lightheartedness to the author’s social critique of the issues surrounding inherited wealth. In this elusive—and exclusive—world, suffering a scandal is preferable to revealing the details of their wealth. This attitude emphasizes the central role that