This Is Where I Leave You

The faulty wiring in the Foxman home reflects the tenuous nature of the connections between the family members. Judd says his father, an electrician, took pride in writing the house himself:

He was always fishing lines through the walls, splicing and rewiring, creating a dense maze of circuitry behind our walls to the point where even he lost track of where everything went. The house gradually became something of an electrical puzzle, with too many lines on overburdened fuses and patchwork wiring that doesn’t always hold up (89-90).

The notion of wiring is used elsewhere as a metaphor for shock and emotional distress. When Judd witnesses Horry having a seizure, he sees it as an electrical current going through him, and Horry describes his brain as going “haywire” at those times. When Judd is electrocuted and thrown to the basement floor, he thinks, “I’m still vibrating” (190), as his mother approaches and Judd is vulnerable enough to share a memory of his father that has surfaced.

While electricity can represent life and connection, Judd also uses it to typify the habitual psychological defenses his family adopts. Even near the end of the novel, when much has surfaced, Judd, in talking to Wendy, reflects that the Foxman mechanism of deflecting emotion won’t change: “The hardwiring simply runs too deep, like behind the walls of this house; circuit breakers on hair triggers” (320). As they do with the wiring on the house, the Foxman family, Judd anticipates, will continue to blow up and then try to reset the switch without ever addressing the fundamental problem or redoing the wiring.

Judd wears a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona wristwatch that Jen bought for him on his 30th birthday. He’d liked and preferred the Citizen he wore and felt the showy Rolex was her way of trying to fit into life in the suburbs. Giving up the watch he preferred to please his wife is indicative of the compromises Judd has made to try to keep Jen interested in him, though he does resent that his salary paid for this gift he never wanted. At the end of the book, instead of returning to his old watch, Judd instead takes his father’s watch, which is engraved with a message of love from Judd’s mother. Judd hopes that the watch will help him feel close to his father and perhaps prove a charm that will help him find the kind of faithful, joyous love that his parents shared. He is replacing the wristwatch he didn’t want, that he wore out of obligation to someone he now feels didn’t really love him, with an heirloom that needs fixing but represents complete devotion and mutual love. As a device that tracks time, the wristwatch also symbolizes Judd’s awareness of the passage of time and the effects of aging, which he dreads.