Molly Bonamici announces its debt to the literary tradition before its first chapter begins. The novel’s epigraphs pair Shakespeare’s Hamlet (“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”) with Dante’s Paradiso (“Open your mind to what I shall disclose, and hold it fast within you; / he who hears, but does not hold what he has heard, learns nothing”). Together they frame the novel’s method: a narrator who insists, like Hamlet, that official explanations are inadequate to experience, and a text that, like Dante’s, demands to be held and reread rather than consumed once.
The novel’s most explicit act of literary pastiche is its running argument with The Great Gatsby, assigned reading in Molly’s own adolescence. Molly rejects the book on first encounter — “Daisy was a pain in the ass, and Gatsby was anything but great” — even as she unknowingly adopts its central figure for her own longing: “unlike the dog’s lure, my lure, my green light, would be real — to be as authentic as possible, regardless of what people thought.” The borrowed image of Fitzgerald’s green light, transplanted from Gatsby’s romantic self-delusion to Molly’s demand for authenticity, converts homage into correction: where Gatsby’s light represents a fantasy that destroys him, Molly’s version of the same image is offered as its opposite, a lure toward selfhood rather than away from it. The allusion is not incidental decoration; it is argued with, on the page, by a narrator who has read the book she is quietly rewriting.
The novel returns to Gatsby a second time through Molly’s partner, Gabe, discovered rereading it years later, alongside Hamlet, as part of a private project of revisiting the classics — a quiet formal echo of the epigraphs that opened the book, suggesting that the novel’s characters, like the novel itself, remain in ongoing conversation with the literary canon rather than settling their relationship to it once in youth.
Working beneath these explicit allusions is a subtext built from Molly’s extended Italian-American Catholic family — her grandmother Nonna, her aunts Helena and Bianca — whose domestic authority and inherited religious vocabulary (feast days, saints, the language of sacrifice and guilt) recall the same inherited Catholic grammar that structures Mulhern’s poetry and his story “Assumptions.” Molly’s running critique of “the cult of domesticity” and her fear of “ending up like my mother in a horrible relationship” position her as a first-person heir to that inheritance who nonetheless resists it, converting family piety into personal argument rather than accepting it as given.
Read together, the Shakespeare and Dante epigraphs, the argument with Fitzgerald, and the inherited Catholic domestic world form a layered pastiche: a novel that names its literary debts openly, disputes at least one of them on the page, and locates its emotional undertow in the same family material — a difficult mother, a watchful grandmother, an inherited faith — that recurs across Mulhern’s other fiction and poetry. The result is a text that reads simultaneously as bildungsroman and as literary argument, its narrator growing up in direct, quotable conversation with the books she was assigned to despise.