“Because he had enjoyed almost every advantage since birth, one of the few privileges denied to Benjamin Rask was that of a heroic rise: his was not a story of resilience and perseverance or the tale of an unbreakable will forging a golden destiny for itself out of little more than dross.”

The privilege denied Rask is the classic American narrative of the self-made man. This informs his deep insecurity; he takes great pains to project an image of innate genius and constant, earned upward mobility, pretending to have forged for himself what he was in fact only handed by his forefathers and his wife. His oft-noted dispassion may be a product of this as well; having never wanted for anything, he has no appetites.

“He viewed capital as an antiseptically living thing. It moves, eats, grows, breeds, falls ill, and may die. But it is clean.”

The language in this passage characterizes capital as a sterile, inhuman entity. Rask’s fascination with capital and with its cleanliness reflects on his personality: He, too, is somewhat inhuman, somewhat sterile. Rask’s only interest is the world of finance: everything else is dirty. The irony is that the superficial cleanliness of conducting financial transactions from a remove conceals the real-world ramifications of those transactions, such as the Great Depression. Capital may be clean, but Rask’s hands are dirty with the plight of the nation.

“She knew, then, that this solemn form of joy, so pure because it had no content, so reliable because it relied on nobody else, was the state for which she would henceforth strive.”

In Italy, as an adolescent, Helen Rask experiences for the first time the joy of being unsupervised, free from her parents’ wills. Her walk through Lucca is a formative moment in her character, solidifying her belief in the supremacy of self-reliance.