Strangeness of situation, environment, and relationship prevents them from taking refuge in worn-out pieties and false values. There are no easy solutions. But in others, direct interaction with strangers offers enlightenment to the characters, who are often strangers to themselves. Images drawn from the visual arts suggest the inevitable attempt to fix upon some unchanging essence beneath or within the flux of time, a point of solidity upon which the characters seek to secure their identities. It appears that those who can re-create themselves through the imagination in the process of meeting strangeness have the best chance to evolve.
Memory also figures heavily in the characters' responses to transitory situations.
Swan communicates a tenuousness about everything that happens between and among her characters. There's a mix of promise and decay, of ennui and the desire for amazement, as they reexamine their lives, reconcile their pasts, or attempt to reinvent themselves.