Blue (the color)

Blue is the book's most saturating color-thread, running through sky, bodies, death, and — from its very first appearance — "on the cover." It arrives innocuously as "blue sky," "blue jaw," and "blue-collar" (pp. 11-16), then darkens: DuPlessis "passed 'bluely' from this life," a new girl found "bluely" dead, "blue shoeless limbs" prefiguring Joelle's imagined "blue" death. It pools thickest at the overdose party, a whole catalog of sailor top, blue-lacquered tub, pale blue smoke, and "fat fingers of blue light from one sky, searching" (pp. 233-240), and in the meticulously blue 1963 bedroom Hal later re-sees in Tavis's waiting room. Braided through the color is a phrase-chain of arrival and loss — danger coming "Out of the blue" (pp. 87-93), Marathe colonized by Steeply's idiom "from somewhere blue" — so that the color carries both the atmospheric and the fatal at once. Blue is where the novel's sky, its corpses, and its own physical object all meet.