43 pages • 1 hour read
David BaldacciWish You Well
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Value of the Land
The land features prominently in Wish You Well. The mountains of Virginia, known as “high rock,” prove to be more than a piece of real estate. The value of the region can be assessed in several different ways. To the timber operators, the mountains contain a plentiful source of lumber until the hillsides are completely logged out. To the coal companies, the area is a rich source of ore, until the mines are played out. To the gas company, the underground natural gas reserves could line the pockets of company executives for years to come. The farmers scraping out a living on this land aren’t immune to the promises of quick cash from the companies that promise prosperity but leave after plundering the natural resources of the region.
In contrast to the monetary value that can be assigned to the various resources of high rock, the Cardinal family sees the land as a living thing that can sustain them from year to year without the infusion of cash from big-city outsiders. Although Jack leaves the mountains as a young adult, his nostalgia and fondness for the area permeate his writing. His wife, Amanda, tries to persuade him to return there right before the car accident that ends his life.
Lou’s initial interest in the mountains stems from her concern for settling her family where they have kin to take them in. At first, she fails to see the hidden value that the mountains contain, but her appreciation for the landscape increases as she begins to hope for her mother’s recovery and she begins to have faith in more mystical things, like the wishing well. In this way, Lou’s feelings for the mountain parallel her character development from a purely practical person to a person of hope and faith.
More than any other character, Louisa articulates the deeper value of high rock. It is her home, and she sees it as a source of sustenance and protection from generation to generation. Even more important than its ability to provide food and shelter is the mountain’s enduring connection to the people who dwell on it. Right before her death, Louisa says, “Family that never really left you. That was what the mountain was. And her eyes remained fixed on the familiar rise of rock and trees, even as Louisa Mae Cardinal grew very still” (372-73).
The Power of Belief
At the beginning of the book, Lou’s faith is shattered by the destruction of her family. With her father dead and her mother catatonic, Lou faces a grim future with the grim resolve to face facts as they are. She scorns her little brother’s fanciful attempts to revive their mother by waving a quartz crystal over Amanda’s head. She also rejects the offer to read to Amanda when Louisa presents a packet of letters Lou’s mother wrote. Lou prefers to place her trust in the opinion of medical experts, who deprive her of the hope that her mother will ever revive. Cotton’s attempts to read to Amanda are rejected with even more hostility because Lou perceives him as trying to fill her dead father’s shoes.
When Oz sneaks away to place his beloved teddy bear beside the wishing well, Lou doesn’t interfere, but she also doesn’t share his open-hearted belief that this gesture will do any good. As the family’s circumstances grow ever more dire, Lou has fewer props to rely on. Their barn is burned; Louisa suffers a stroke; the gas company executives threaten to send the children to an orphanage, and the trial verdict seems to support this dire possibility. Once all of Lou’s external sources of support are stripped away, all that’s left to her is blind belief.
The turning point comes when Lou takes the packet of her mother’s letters and leaves them at the wishing well in hopes that Louisa will recover. She also finally professes her love to her catatonic mother even though the formerly hard-nosed Lou asserts that Amanda can’t hear her. In matters of belief, Oz is much wiser than his big sister. He tells her, “Maybe necklaces and holy water won’t help Mom, but me believing she’ll get better will. But you don’t believe, so just leave her be” (309). Things take a dramatic turn for the better when Lou finally learns to trust the power of belief, as their mother recovers from her catatonic state
Defining Family
In Wish You Well, family takes several different forms that don’t fit the traditional notion of parents and their offspring. The Cardinal family is torn apart by the car accident that kills Jack and renders Amanda catatonic. With no parents, Lou and Oz are forced to rely on the kindness of a relative they’ve never even met. They are unknowingly following in their father’s footsteps, since Jack was raised by this same relative after his own family was shattered. His mother abandoned her husband and son, and Jack’s father died of a broken heart. It is up to Louisa to construct a new family dynamic for all of these broken children. She herself has already suffered the same kind of loss since her own husband and children are dead.
Louisa creates an extended family not only for the Cardinal children, but for other orphans of the storm as well. She takes in Eugene, a lame black boy whose parents have died. Years later, she extends her motherly care to Diamond, another child coping with loss after his mother dies and his father is killed in a mining explosion. Although he lives alone in his family cabin and looks after himself, Diamond is considered a part of the Cardinal clan.
In striking contrast to Louisa’s patchwork family, George Davis maintains a nuclear family structure. However, he starves and abuses his wife and children to such a degree that Louisa is forced to step in to provide the familial support that George denies to his own blood relatives. Louisa’s actions suggest that family has less to do with biological ties than with the emotional ties that bind one person to another. She’s even able to establish a kinship bond with the mountain itself when she says, “Family that never really left you. That was what the mountain was” (372).
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