50 pages • 1 hour read
Anita ShreveThe Pilot's Wife
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1998A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Kathryn Lyons is woken out of sleep in the early morning by someone knocking at her door. Mattie, her daughter, is in bed, and her husband, an airline pilot, is not due back until that afternoon. The man at the door tells her that Jack, her husband, is dead. Kathryn nearly faints, and the man helps her inside, telling her that he, Robert Hart, is from the pilot’s union. The plane that Jack was flying exploded off the coast of Ireland, killing everyone on board. Her phone rings immediately, and Robert answers it. He says “no comment” and hangs up. The phone immediately rings again, and he takes charge of answering. He and Kathryn turn the television on to watch the news, but Kathryn is preoccupied with her need to tell her daughter, Mattie, about Jack’s death. After imagining the scene, she puts it off, choosing instead to watch the media coverage of the tragedy.
They watch an interview with a witness of the plane’s explosion, and Kathryn questions Robert about his job. She realizes that he had gotten to her house in under an hour from the time of the explosion. He is there to help her, but she knows that he is also there on behalf of the union’s interests. He is open with Kathryn, answering her questions, even those about his personal life and job. When the phone rings again, they hear Jack’s voice through the answering machine. Kathryn decides to tell Mattie the news, and asks Robert to leave the house. He agrees to wait in his car, but before he can leave, two more people arrive.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
This chapter provides a look into the past: Kathryn and Jack first meet when he comes into her grandmother’s antique store, where she works. He is looking for antique checkerboards, but finds a painting by Claude Legny, a fictional artist, which he buys. After he makes the purchase, they talk, and she discovers that he is a pilot. There is a connection between them, even though he is 33 and she only 18, which surprises him. Jack tells her all about himself, then asks her to go for a drive. They go to the beach and swim, and Kathryn feels that their life together is beginning.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Back in the present, Kathryn goes upstairs to wake up Mattie, but her daughter has already woken up and is getting into the shower. When Kathryn tells her about Jack’s death, Mattie loses control and runs out of the house in her robe. After Kathryn and Robert get Mattie inside and calm her down, Kathryn calls her grandmother, Julia. The two people that arrived earlier are still at Kathryn’s house on behalf of the airline. They are talking quietly with Robert when Mattie and Kathryn see on the news that it is suspected that there was a bomb on the plane.
Julia arrives and takes control of Mattie and Kathryn, taking care of them both. The two Vision Airline representatives leave, but Robert remains, working from Jack’s office. Kathryn and Julia talk about grief, and Julia has advice on how to deal with it. She has the experience of losing Kathryn’s parents, her son and daughter-in-law, to draw upon, as well as having helped Kathryn through the deaths of her parents.
Kathryn finally has a moment alone in a hot shower. She thinks about all the implications of the accident and the fallout that is going to result. When she gets out of the shower, she realizes that the only clean clothes in the bathroom are Jack’s jeans. In the pocket, she finds money, lottery tickets, notes, and receipts, as well as a poem, in Jack’s handwriting, that she does not recognize. She puzzles over the notes but is too tired to follow up on them.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
In the past, Jack and Kathryn are in the car after Christmas dinner at Julia’s house. Julia is watching Mattie, who is four, while Jack takes Kathryn to her Christmas present, a surprise. They park at an abandoned house in Fortune’s Rocks, one that they have been to before. Jack has put an offer on the house, as long as Kathryn agrees. He and Julia have arranged the entire thing, which makes her wonder about their capacity for keeping secrets. Jack tells her that he has gotten a new job with Vision Airlines and has done all the research about their new life, including timing out his commute. Kathryn is uncertain, but agrees.
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
In the present, Robert has made chili, but Kathryn is unable to eat. She feels wrung out after her shower and all the crying. Robert tells her more about why he does his job and what he witnesses in the aftermath of tragedy, understanding grief from this different perspective. Kathryn suddenly has a memory of the only time that Jack ever spanked Mattie, revealing a side of him she had never seen before.
Kathryn asks why Robert is really there and why he needs to control her interaction with the press. He reminds her that people say things at times of heightened emotion that they may regret later. He redirects their conversation to the house and its history. Kathryn knows that there was, at one time, a chapel on the grounds, but she has never been able to find its remains. Kathryn grew up in nearby Ely, a working-class town, and when she first moved to Fortune’s Rocks, she was afraid people would resent her for moving to the more affluent area. Instead, the family had been accepted; over the years, she and Jack had both worked to become a part of the community.
Robert tells her that the investigators are now speculating that the accident was pilot error. Robert questions Kathryn about Jack’s mental state, and Kathryn thinks about the distance that had grown between them. This causes her to think about her own parents’ marriage, in which her mother’s need for her father and her father’s withholding led to a toxic relationship that resulted in both their deaths. Kathryn, determined to be different from her mother, had resisted the impulse to confront Jack when she felt the distance between them. She chose instead to see it as normal, holding onto the idea that she had a good marriage.
She tells Robert that, about five years ago, Jack had been bored with his job, but upon getting a new route, flying from Boston to Heathrow, he had seemed to let it go. After Robert leaves, she tries to sleep, but ends up in Jack’s office. She pokes through the drawers, finding forgotten and broken items. She also finds an old to-do list, one of Jack’s habits, which looks to be about four years old. On it, she finds an unfamiliar name, Muire, but is too tired to pursue it.
Kathryn is woken up in the middle of the night by Mattie shouting in the living room, where she was trying to wrap Christmas presents. She and Julia soothe Mattie, and Kathryn quickly returns to sleep. When she wakes again, early in the morning, Robert has already arrived at the house. He tells her that they have found the cockpit recording device, the CVR, and the investigators now suspect that Jack had died by suicide with the explosion.
Part 1, Chapters 1-5 Analysis
Shreve starts the novel in media res, or in the middle of the action. Kathryn is completely unprepared for what she is thrust into. Shreve conveys the disorientation of waking to a knock on the door in the middle of the night. She evokes harsh sounds, such as a barking dog, and uses words like “skittering” that mirror the disorientation of the moment. Kathryn’s living room looks like a hospital ER, heightening the sense of dread.
Shreve does not give the reader any context through which to read the conversation between Kathryn and Robert. Tension and interest are generated by the gradual reveal of information—that Jack is a pilot, and that his plane exploded. Tension will continue to ratchet up as the details of the crash are pieced together and revealed.
Robert Nash immediately becomes someone Kathryn places her trust in. A variety of officials and investigators arrive at her house, but he is there first and, as often happens in the face of tragedy, they become intimate very quickly. She questions him relentlessly about his job and personal life, and he is open and direct, answering her questions. Julia is also introduced in Chapter 3. She will be the other person Kathryn will depend on and trust with Mattie’s well-being while dealing with the aftermath of Jack’s death.
Kathryn insists to Robert that she and Jack had “a good marriage” (64). Kathryn thinks about the distance that had grown between herself and Jack, and asserts that it was normal. Her belief is informed by her parents’ marriage, which is explored in Chapter 5. By providing information about Kathryn’s parents’ dysfunctional relationship and dramatic death, Shreve emphasizes how far Kathryn might go to avoid being like her mother, to the point of accepting Jack’s withdrawal and rationalizing it as normal.
These early chapters, both those that deal directly with Kathryn and Jack’s past and moments when Kathryn confides in Robert, offer insight into Kathryn and Jack’s relationship. Shreve immediately builds a sense of history in these chapters: Even though the action is unfolding at a rapid pace, she introduces all of the major characters, including Jack. In Chapter 4, Shreve shows Jack’s facility for Keeping Secrets, which foreshadows Jack’s big secret of having another family.
Kathryn’s probing nature is on display with her questioning of Robert, as well as her search of Jack’s pockets. Although Kathryn is not conscious of it yet, this is when she begins investigating Jack’s life; the contents of his pockets are her first clues. In Chapter 5, her investigation continues with her exploration of his desk drawers. Her search is aimless, not focused or probing, and yet she finds another clue—Muire’s name—that will make sense later as pieces begin to fall into place. In these chapters, Shreve lays the foundation for future discoveries, making it clear that there is more to Jack’s story than Kathryn knows.
Kathryn remembers an incident when Jack spanked Mattie, the only time he ever did and which they never talked about. Kathryn assumes that he acted in an uncalculated, instinctive way, indicating that the same was done to him as a child. His reluctance to talk about it lends some credence to her theory, but again, instead of pushing him for information, Kathryn leaves it alone. Shreve once again shows the reader that Jack is Keeping Secrets, and while Kathryn knows this, there may be more urgency to their distance than she realizes.
Another clue to Jack’s secret life is dropped when Kathryn mentions a time “about five years ago. He became bored with the airline. Nearly, for a short time, terribly bored. He began to fantasize about quitting, giving it up for another job—aerobatics, he said” (65). His discontent, she says, stopped after he started a new route, from Boston to Heathrow. The timing will make sense upon the revelation that his boredom resolves when he begins his relationship with Muire and becomes involved with the IRA.
Through Kathryn, Shreve explores the theme of Navigating Grief. Within the first chapter, Kathryn “moved from shock to grief the way she might enter a room” (15). Shreve begins to trace her path through mourning. The advice Kathryn receives from Robert and Julia, that there is no avoiding it and that no one can help her through, seems unhelpful. However, they both offer their support and understanding, which will be essential to her process. Shreve also explores how Mattie navigates grief, and the different ways she and her mother handle the process. Maddie lacks control, partly due to her age and lack of responsibility. This may engender her willingness to follow the grieving process wherever it takes her, and contrasts sharply with Kathryn’s efforts to maintain control.
In this section, Shreve also provides links to the larger threads of the Fortune’s Rock quartet of books, connecting The Pilot’s Wife with the longer continuum and context of the house’s history. Jack buys a painting by Claude Legny, who is mentioned in the other books, when he first meets Kathryn. In addition, Kathryn touches on class issues intertwined in the relationship between the working-class town of Ely and their richer summer neighbors at Fortune’s Rocks, a theme which winds through the entire series. The most significant link is Kathryn’s house itself, abandoned for years until she and Jack bought it. The house is the setting for every book in the Quartet, and functions as a character at times. Kathryn mentions her search for signs of the chapel that used to exist on the property, a structure that plays an important role in all the books.
At the end of Chapter 5, just as Kathryn is beginning to adjust to the news of Jack’s death, her emotions are once again thrown into upheaval when learning that the investigators are theorizing that Jack died by suicide. Although Kathryn will remain adamant that it is not true, this foreshadows the continuing discoveries that will test what she thought she knew about her husband. In addition, it moves the mystery of Jack’s death into a much more personal realm for Kathryn.
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