45 pages • 1 hour read
Marissa StapleyLucky
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A 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 Power of Luck and Hope
As the title indicates, Lucky examines luck, which is often intertwined with hope. Being adopted by a grifter as an infant means that Lucky is raised around crime. The odds are not in her favor when teenage Valerie leaves her on the church steps for John to find. However, Lucky believes that the “odds couldn’t stay stacked against her forever. And when they changed, she’d truly be the luckiest girl in the world” (29). The text suggests that believing in luck gives people hope that motivates them to strive for different circumstances.
In the beginning of the novel, Lucky’s luck takes a downturn. She wakes up without her boyfriend, Cary, in Vegas after missing their flight to Dominica. Lucky believes that he has flown without her. However, she later learns that Cary’s mother paid to have him beaten up and detained while the flight was taking off because he owed her money. Lucky, having missed her flight, faces the repercussions of being wanted by the police. By beginning the novel with such dire circumstances and transforming them by the end, Stapley reinforces the power of luck and hope.
The central repercussion of being a fugitive is that Lucky cannot cash her winning lottery ticket, though she is lucky enough to pick the winning numbers for a large prize. Lucky plans to use the winnings to make amends for her crimes: “She would find a way to secretly pay it back, if she ever got that lottery money. She would make it right” (97). This means that she will use her luck to work for redemption. The lottery ticket itself is a symbol of luck and hope. Lucky considers it a type of scam: “That, right there, was the grift itself: that moment of hope, that quickening of pulse, the what if, what if it’s me, what if it’s my ticket” (64). This, along with the new identities that Lucky attempts to inhabit throughout the text, suggest the brutal power of hope: that it can lead people to believe in something that may not come true.
Luck is considered a factor in John and Lucky’s con that involves Darla and Steph. Steph believes that luck, or kismet, brought her and Lucky together. Knowing the truth, Lucky knows that “it had not been kismet. It had been bad luck” (79). When Lucky seeks out Steph many years later, she references Steph’s love of the concept of kismet. In her disguise as a potential buyer at one of Steph’s real estate properties, Lucky tells Steph that the house “feels like kismet” (105). This foreshadows the fact that Lucky’s luck is changing.
Lucky’s hopes of repaying the money she obtained while grifting come true when her birth mother helps her with a plea bargain. In exchange for testifying against Priscilla, Lucky will be able to claim her winnings and start a new life. Winning the lottery and reconnecting with her birth mother demonstrate how her luck changes at the end of the novel: that Lucky held on to hope and that her life changed as a result.
Familial and Romantic Influences
Lucky is heavily influenced by her family and boyfriend. Stapley suggests, through her construction of John and Cary, that patriarchal power dynamics can lead to men negatively influencing the women in their life. For example, John influences Lucky by teaching her to grift from a very young age. He is unable to give up a life of crime for Lucky, so he raises her as a criminal. John also manipulates her like one of his marks, playing on her emotions, such as guilt and empathy, to convince her to con people. At the same time, John believes that she can escape a life of crime and tries to help fund her schooling through a legal job as a waiter. Even in this passage of the text, however, John is in control, and Lucky has limited agency because of John’s influence.
When John returns to grifting with Priscilla, Lucky falls for the wrong man: Priscilla’s son. After John and Priscilla go to jail, Cary becomes the con man, and overall negative influence, in Lucky’s life. Cary convinces Lucky to take part in scamming Stanford students in exchange for housing. When Lucky completes her degree and gets a job that can support them, Cary claims to temporarily give up grifting, like John. Stapley hence represents a cycle and suggests that it is difficult to escape negative influences.
Stapley also represents the influential powers of motherhood. For example, Cary continues working for Priscilla, who has a huge amount of control over his life and control over Lucky’s life. They live in a house in Idaho that Cary got from Priscilla, but he doesn’t share that information with Lucky. Through Priscilla, Stapley represents another negative parental influence, suggesting that too much control over a child is unproductive.
Eventually, Lucky finds her biological mother, who ends up being a positive influence. When they meet for the first time, Valerie says apologizes for abandoning Lucky. Then, she is able to help Lucky, as a DA, with her legal troubles. Lucky helps Valerie with the case against Priscilla, and Valerie arranges for Lucky to be able to cash her winning lottery ticket. This ending suggests that some parental influences can be positive if they are well-meaning and not exploitative.
Performance and Lies
Lucky frequently considers the nature of grifting, which can be compared to acting. Both acting and grifting involve telling lies and pretending to be someone else. However, the former is done in a theater, with the audience’s understanding that they are witnessing a performance—not reality. Grifting is not a shared experience like theater. Marks do not know that they are witnessing a performance. The novel hence conveys the immorality of such a performance, even though it can offer hope to the performer.
Often, in the novel, grifting involves lying and selling a performance to oneself and not just to others. Lucky wonders if her lies will negatively impact her own mental and emotional state on an ongoing basis. She thinks, “What if lies wedged themselves inside you and turned into something ugly?” (81). The kind of performance that she engages in—performing for people who don’t know that they are being lied to—also impacts her. John taught her to believe in her own lies in order to convince other people that they are true. In other words, she believes in a false version of reality to sell her performance. This can be compared to method acting, whereby the actor tries to become a character by believing what the character believes and behaving as they would behave in all circumstances, not just during performances.
At the end of the novel, Lucky lies to the people whom she does trust—John and Reyes. When she claims that she will be right back while planning to turn herself into the police, “[t]he lie felt worse than any of the others she had told” (220). She feels guilty for lying to her father, even though he is the one who taught her how to lie. This sets her apart from the novel’s antagonist: Priscilla. Priscilla does not have doubts or guilt about her lies. This juxtaposition reinforces the novel’s perspectives on the immorality of lying.
On the other hand, Lucky is a mirror of Sister Margaret Jean, whose guilt about grifting inspired her to become a nun. Sister Margaret Jean also buys into the theory that a grifter needs to believe their lies in order to sell them. However, Margaret Jean’s lies turn into reality. For instance, she pretends to bless John and Lucky and eventually obtains the power to bless officially. It is when her role as a nun ceases to be a mere performance that she becomes a moral character.
