76 pages • 2 hours read
Tim WintonThe Turning
Fiction | Short Story Collection | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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Beta“On Her Knees” and “Cockleshell”
“On Her Knees” Summary
The story begins after Vic Lang’s father has left the family. Vic is sixteen, and his mother Carol has taken to cleaning houses. She is very good at it and is well-regarded by her clients. Vic doesn’t like this, and thinks the work is undignified, but he helps her do the work when she asks, as he knows that she is proud of her good name.
Carol is accused of stealing a gold earring when Vic is home from law school, and she is given a week’s notice by the client. Vic urges her not to go back to clean the house one last time, but she does anyway, and he goes along, angry at the indignity of the accusation and his mother’s pride in finishing out the contract.
Vic tells Carol that her client just wants an advantage over her, and when they go back to the house he cuts corners and cleans lazily while she still does her usual excellent work. He also snoops, discovering that the woman is a professor at the university he attends, which causes him to wonder if she knows about him, and if the fact that she didn’t report the theft to the police was an act of mercy toward him.
While snooping, Vic finds the missing earring, which causes his mother and he to argue more. He thinks she should press the matter, and she knows there’s no point. She says, “all I’ve got [is] my good name. These people, they can say anything they like. You can’t fight back” (111). In anger, Vic throws the earrings in the cat’s litter box, but after his mother packs up to go without taking the woman’s money, Vic changes his mind, and leaves the earrings next to the envelope with his mother’s payment.
“Cockleshell” Summary
Brakey, a high-schooler in Cockleshell (a neighboring town to Angelus), finds himself attracted to his neighbor Agnes Larwood, and has taken to watching her fish with a gidgie (a fishing spear) in the shallows. Agnes comes from a large immigrant family whose father Eric used to be a violent alcoholic, but there hasn’t been any evidence of that from Brakey’s point of view in several years. Brakey’s home life isn’t great either, as his father has left, and his mother bitterly expects Brakey to abandon her too.
When Agnes confronts Brakey about being watched, he asks if he can come along with her fishing, and she agrees. As they fish, he thinks about the times Agnes and her family spent the night at his house because of her father, and he wonders if that’s why they don’t speak anymore. He’s barefoot, and it’s not long before he cuts his foot and has to go home. While he tends to his injury, he thinks about his mother, who thinks they are better than the Larwoods.
The next night he joins Agnes again, and when he asks her how much she earns fishing, she gets upset, telling him she’s not doing it for the money. She’s doing it to get away from her family. Ever since her father stopped drinking, she feels like the house is dead inside, and her mother doesn’t understand why things aren’t good now. He tries to reach for her, and she punches him, then apologizes. That night, the Larwood house catches fire. The family waits on Brakey’s lawn for their father to come out, but he won’t. Brakey tries to fight the fire, but it’s too late, and the two families watch the house go up.
The story then moves into the future. Brakey has moved into the city, and he has become someone who “has learned not to declare himself” to women (131). Agnes is also living in the city as a surgeon, and Brakey is afraid that one day he will meet her and blurt out the question that’s been on his mind ever since: how come Agnes was the only one in her family who didn’t seemed surprised by the fire?
“On Her Knees” and “Cockleshell” Analysis
In “On Her Knees,” the economic and personal consequences of Bob Lang abandoning his family is made clear: Carol has become a house cleaner to send her son to law school, and Vic and Carol live “as though [they] kept the peace at all costs for fear of driving each other away” (102). The accusation that Carol faces breaks this silence, and drives the two of them into open conflict about her job. Vic doesn’t just think the work is undignified: he feels a great deal of shame about the fact that his mother is doing this work for his benefit, and that shame is deepened when he realizes that the professor might know who he is, and that not calling the police on his mother might be an act of charity. The central conflict between the two is the driving force of the story, and the resolution of Vic taking the missing earrings back out of the litter box is an admission of two things on the character’s part: that his mother is right to cling to her pride, and that she’s in a situation where her name is the only power she has.
The class divide resonates with Vic’s conflict with his mother: the “annihilating self-assurance” that Vic sees in the professor whose house they are cleaning is the same attitude he takes toward how he sees his mother (108). As a law school student, Vic is upwardly mobile, and his mother is working class. The rift between them is rooted in a growing embarrassment on Vic’s part and Vic’s inability to fathom a life without power or career options.
Brakey’s family dynamic in “Cockleshell” closely mirrors the Lang family: a father who has left, a mother who feels her life has become circumscribed, and a young man who obsesses over a young woman who hasn’t given him the time of day. The class dynamic is reversed, though: Brakey’s mother looks down on the immigrant Larwoods, and Brakey himself makes assumptions about the Larwood’s financial situation. Agnes Larwood and her father serve as a counterpoint to Brakey’s household (and Vic’s, though he is not part of this story): he stayed, he stopped drinking, and still things are bad.
The story offers no real escape from the damage that fathers inflict on their children. Brakey’s mother repeats that “they all leave you in the end,” but Eric Larwood stayed even as his house burned around him, leaving another kind of broken family behind (131). The fact that Agnes may have lit the fire complicates this further: her self-actualization comes at the cost of her father’s life, and though her escape leads her to an adulthood as a surgeon, Brakey is terrified that he will run into her and unbury her past. Intended or not, the fire that killed Agnes Larwood’s father was freeing for her.
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