The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is important for many reasons: first, as a tremendously popular book, it is one of the few things that unites almost all of the novel’s characters. Second, as an art object, it allows the characters to access other perspectives. And finally, as yet one more alternative history—Rex Tugwell was never president, and Pearl Harbor was not evacuated in time—it further suggests that random chance has a heavy hand in historical events, and that these other outcomes could have easily happened.