Two Nights in Lisbon

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses the novel’s storylines about rape and sexual assault.

“Her eyes jump around the room, as if hopping on stones across a stream, looking for evidence of John, but find none, plummeting her into the fast frigid water of a familiar panic: What if she’s wrong about him? About this whole thing?”

The metaphor turns quickly from playful idleness to disaster, inviting the reader into Ariel’s uncertainty. Her panic is “familiar,” which encourages curiosity about both her history and her relationship. Pavone sets up a familiar narrative of spousal anxiety, the deeper layers of which can only be guessed at the novel’s outset.

“The only thing Ariel can detect in this language is tone—good or bad, yes or no. This must be what it’s like to be a dog. What she’s sensing is no. Bad. If she had a tail, it would be down between her legs.”

Ariel appears anxious, out of her depth, or even inept. She compares herself to a dog trying to understand humans, which deepens the sense of her dependence on others. She imagines herself with a tail, abject and humiliated. This passage encourages the reader to see her as the beleaguered tourist that she wants the police to see, not the mastermind of an elaborate plot for revenge.

“It’ll be one minor injury after another, augmented by occasional major ones, plus increasingly severe illnesses, an unrelenting deterioration leading to an ultimate demise. Like climate change, a trend that goes in only one direction and culminates in inevitable catastrophe, with no alternative endings. She realized that whatever she was going to do, ever, she needed to start doing it.”

The catalog is one of inevitability and increasing suffering. Choice is an illusion. Ariel decides, however, that inevitability will spur her to action. The future is limited, so she should act with that in mind. This passage explains why she accepts John’s proposal to team up. Ariel is a publicly devoted spouse and a privately fierce fighter for justice.