Newman’s use of terrorism in her novel, while problematic, does attempt to connect macro-level failures with the micro-level ways in which individual humans experience institutional failures. Newman prompts her readers to consider what makes a terrorist, and Sam in particular has some sympathetic characteristics that complicate him somewhat beyond the flat archetype of a purely evil antagonist. At the end of the novel, Newman portrays the two terrorists as more misguided than innately cruel.

There is a tension throughout the novel between the use of humans as symbolic, passive objects and the reality of humans as autonomous beings whose lives are inherently valuable. This tension is a constant in politics, wherein politicians and those otherwise in power can become desensitized as they make decisions about huge numbers of people. Part of Sam’s frustration is in the emotional distancing of the American public from the trauma and loss that happened abroad, which he experienced on a personal level. Terrorism is the use of violence and fear to achieve political or ideological goals; this term describes the actions Sam takes against the Hoffman family in order to achieve his desired goal, that is, to force the American public to experience the pain he felt in the reduction of his own family to political pawns.