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Chapter 22
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Anxious People, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Parenting and Fear
Marriage, Conflict, and Communication
Mental Health and Connection
The Modern World
Assumptions
Summary
Analysis
That afternoon, Jim interviews Zara at the police station. She refuses coffee and says it’s “stupid” to ask why she was at the apartment viewing. It was an apartment viewing, after all. Jim notes that Zara looks too wealthy to be interested in the apartment, and she accuses him of believing in the middle-class fiction that people can ever be too rich. Then, she says she’ll simplify: a “lunatic with a gun” held her and other people hostage, and the police still managed to lose the robber. Trying to make friends, Jim jokes that it never really seems like a buyer’s marker or a seller’s market; it seems like it’s always the bank’s market. Everyone hates banks, and bankers make way too much money while normal people struggle. Zara asks why Jim thinks the rich should be punished and reveals that she runs a bank.
Zara comes off as so wealthy as to be blind to how most people who aren’t as well off live—the idea that people can have too much money seems like a fairy tale to her. Jim’s bumbling demeanor doesn’t help, though, as he unwittingly insults Zara by not considering that she herself might work in finance, the very industry he insults as he tries to make friends. She also insinuates that the police are far less competent than the police would like to believe, since they’ve now lost the robber by later in the afternoon.
Themes
