“Still, it’s funny what a man thinks about when he believes death to be imminent.”

Ira/Ruth’s storyline is a take on the conventional idea that when a person is about to die, their entire life flashes before their eyes. Ruth is a desperate figment of Ira’s imagination constructed as a survival mechanism. He does not want to die alone. He wants to die with the only person who ever comforted him.

“She’d always been a bit of a loner, and, unlike a lot of people in the house, she didn’t live and die by the rules of the sorority.”

The four principal characters in the novel share a common trait: They do not fit in. Ruth is a Jewish Austrian woman fleeing Nazis; Luke is a cowboy, deeply wary of entangling relationships; Ira is a small business owner in an age of big department store growth. Here, we see that Sophia also is an outsider: a displaced New Jerseyite, an art major surrounded by friends in more practical fields, someone who’s never embraced the sorority lifestyle.

“But the girl on the railing interested him. There was something different about her, though he couldn’t pinpoint what. Maybe, he thought, it was the unguarded, almost vulnerable way she stared into the distance.”

The romance novel genre places huge value on the moment of initial attraction. Here, when Luke first spies Sophia at the off-campus mixer, he instantly experiences a mystical connection with her, seeing in her the opposite of his own social affect: She is emotionally open, not closed off.