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Geography and Human Connection
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in NW, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Throughout NW, Smith explores the role that sex plays in human relationships. The two main marriages in the book—between Leah and Michel and between Natalie and Frank—both grow out of strong sexual attraction. As a young person, Natalie, for example, shares a lot of common interests with her boyfriend Rodney, but shortly after she learns about Rodney’s clinical attitude toward sex, she dumps him. Similarly, Leah goes through several sexual partners and sometimes isn’t sure how Michel ended up as her husband, yet the one thing that she can’t deny, even during difficult times in her marriage, is that she has always found Michel attractive. Even the friendship of Leah and Natalie has a sexual component to it, since the two of them used to always talk about boys they liked, and later, Leah helped Natalie discover orgasms by gifting her a dildo for her birthday.
In many ways, the novel challenges the view that sex and beauty are only superficial elements of a relationship. In fact, some of the most superficial sexual encounters in the book, like the one between Natalie and the two university-age boys she meets online, are the ones that involve the least mutual sexual attraction. Still, this doesn’t mean that sexual attraction on its own is enough to sustain a relationship. As the marriages of Leah and Natalie each make clear, communication is also an important part of a relationship, and secrets can lead to conflict and resentment. Sexual attraction can also lead characters astray, or at least complicate things, as it does for Felix, who wants to be with Grace but still can’t find a way to let go of Annie. NW thus shows the foundational role sex can play in starting and maintaining relationships while also acknowledging its inability to sustain a healthy relationship on its own.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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Sex and Relationships ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Sex and Relationships appears in each chapter of NW. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Sex and Relationships Quotes in NW
Below you will find the important quotes in NW related to the theme of Sex and Relationships.
Visitation: Chapter 5
Quotes
Leah believes in objectivity in the bedroom:
Here lie a man and a woman. The man is more beautiful than the woman. And for this reason there have been times when the woman has feared that she loves the man more than he loves her.
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Visitation: Chapter 16
Quotes
— Why do you treat me like an idiot all the time?
Guest: NW6
Quotes
Five and innocent at this bus stop. Fourteen and drunk. Twenty-six and stoned. Twenty-nine in utter oblivion, out of his mind on coke and K: “You can’t sleep here, son. You either need to move it along or we’ll have to take you in to the station to sleep it off.” You live in the same place long enough, you get memory overlap.
Guest: (W1)
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“She’s knows what she’s about. She’s conscious.”
Guest: NW6 (2)
Quotes
“And the stones,” said the kid. Felix touched his ears. Treasured zirconias, a present from Grace.
“You’re dreamin’,” he said.
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Host
Quotes
Keisha Blake thought to the left and thought to the right but there was no exit, and this was very likely the first time she became aware of the problem of suicide.
Perhaps sex isn’t of the body at all. Perhaps it is a function of language. The gestures themselves are limited—there are only so many places for so many things to go—and Rodney was in no way deficient technically. He was silent. Whereas all Frank’s silly, uncontrolled, unselfconscious, embarrassing storytelling found its purpose here, in a bedroom.
Crossing: Hornsey Lane
Quotes
Here nothing less than a break—a sudden and total rupture—would do. She could see the act perfectly clearly, it appeared before her like an object in her hand—and then the wind shook the trees once more and her feet touched the pavement. The act remained just that: an act, a prospect, always possible. Someone would surely soon come to this bridge and claim it, both the possibility and the act itself, as they had been doing with grim regularity ever since the bridge was built. But right at this moment there was no one left to do it.
Visitation
Quotes
“I got something to tell you,” said Keisha Blake, disguising her voice with her voice.
