“Your father towered, remarkable and alone, over everyone we knew and certainly over my heart. There can be no true living reflection of such a man left, not even you.”

The premise of the novel is that Madeleine is telling the story of her love affair with Jack to their son, Jakey. These first-person addresses to her newborn son, looking back on her marriage some time after Jack’s death, cast a poignant foreknowledge over the third-person sections that describe Madeleine’s attraction, courtship, engagement, and marriage. Perhaps because she deeply loved him, Madeleine feels throughout the novel that John Jacob Astor IV stands apart and above mortal men—a distinction that will not, in the end, save his life.

“Everything in the Force household, and in Madeleine Force’s world, was exactly as it should be, and everything was exactly as it always would be.”

This note from the third-person narration sums up how Madeleine’s world is regimented by the expectations, activities, and customs seen to befit a young woman of her station. While Madeleine would never act to hurt her family, a hint of rebellion is a strong thread in her character.

“Another moment between them, stretching long and strange and lovely somehow, filling her with both elation and dread, because Madeleine understood then that, despite what she’d said to her mother, she knew she stood at the edge of a very steep cliff, and falling off of it would mean either flight or annihilation.”

This early moment in her courtship with Jack reflects Madeleine’s maturity and self-possession, strong aspects of her character. She tries to be sensible and not lose her head over a man she cannot have, but she is falling in love. This passage, an example of the vivid figurative language used throughout the novel, uses the cliff to suggest how Madeleine’s interest in Jack is leavened with a fear of rejection, while the cliff might also hint at the difference in their social stations, upper middle class versus ultra elite.