55 pages • 1 hour read
The Invisible Heart: An Economic Romance
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Chapters 13-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Rules of the Game”
At the beginning of May, Laura hasn’t spoken to Sam substantively since the disastrous dinner party. To get grading done, she sets up in an unused classroom in the basement, which is separated with a partition from an in-use classroom. She overhears Sam’s elective senior class, in which he is having the class play a game. They each get to be a dictator and make one and only one law. The rule is that the law must function within both the laws of nature and the laws of economics. The students start proposing laws. For each one, Sam pushes the students to consider the drawbacks of that law.
Laura is rapt. Eventually the students demand that Sam give his law. He tells them that he does have a law that he believes would unquestionably improve society. However, even if he were a dictator and could pass whatever law he wished, he wouldn’t pass this law. He challenges the students to understand why. The law would be to ban television. He explains how detrimental he believes television is and what immense societal and individual benefits would come from banning television. He reminds them, however, that he still wouldn’t pass the law.
Laura has lost all interest in her grading and is fascinated by Sam’s talent as a teacher. He probes the minds of his students with many questions and generally avoids taking any obvious political stance. Before the class ends, Sam introduces another game. The game focuses on philosopher Robert Nozick’s Dream Machine. The Dream Machine is perfect virtual reality, and while hooked up to it, the subject can do and/or be anything. The catch is that the Dream Machine is permanent. The subject dies when unhooked from the machine. The students initially think they’d want to use it, but on discovering it would be all their lives, they say they wouldn’t. Sam asks why. They think it’s because the Dream Machine is fake, but Sam pushes that further and suggests, quoting the Tennyson poem Laura read him, that the core of human happiness lies in struggle and failure just as much as in success. He gives two more examples illustrating the concept, and then ends class.
Laura decides she wants to apologize for ignoring the flowers and notes he’s sent in the past month. She looks at the crowd of students gathered around him after class, and especially looks at Amy, the senator’s daughter, who is 17 and very attractive, waiting off to the side for Sam’s attention. It occurs to Laura that Amy could cause problems for Sam and may already have caused those problems, given the potential for Sam’s dismissal rumored around school.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Serious Numbers”
In the secondary plotline, Erica leads a staff meeting at which she informs the OCR staff that the documents delivered to them from an employee of HealthNet have started to come clear. Dr. Levine at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) identified the numbers as clinical trial data. The documents are incomplete, but the fact that they were being destroyed is enough to suggest there’s something worth hiding. Erica has begun to figure out what HealthNet is hiding.
Cantrell goes to see Charles at Charles’s orders. After their previous meeting he is numb and nervous to discuss clinical trials with Charles. Charles is pleased with the latest numbers and tells Cantrell he’s taken care of the previous poor results related to the prostate drug.
Erica returns home from the office. She clears a space on her dining room table, takes out her laptop, puts on a Paul Simon album and begins entering the data from the HealthNet documents into a spreadsheet.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Sweet Charity”
Late in May, Sam goes to Laura’s house for dinner. He gives her a Sinatra CD. She cooks, and he tries to apologize for the dinner party, but she cuts him off to apologize for not responding to him. They agree to a fresh start. As she expertly prepares dinner, she asks about his family, and he tells her about his sister, who is an engineer for Exxon-Mobile. He also tells her he’s been reading 19th-century poetry following a student question about the Wordsworth quote that opened the school year.
Laura tells him about her experience listening to his class the other day. They joke about Sam’s political views and Laura’s cooking prowess. They eat dinner, talking about daily life, until Laura asks Sam to explain what’s wrong with welfare programs. As he looks at her, he realizes he really cares what she thinks of him and tries to figure out how to answer honestly without appearing monstrous. He turns the question back to her, asking her to describe her thoughts and feelings on welfare.
She says she’s against suffering and wants to help people who need help. Sam says he’s opposed to government aiding the needy. Instead, he believes a system of private charity is better. He argues that if the government is already providing food, housing, and medical assistance to the poor in a one-size-fits-all manner that individuals are less likely to donate to charities catering to the poor and therefore the government is a de facto monopoly on charity to the poor. As a result, there is no competition between poverty-focused charities. With no competition, the system stagnates. Fundamentally, then, Sam argues, government welfare deprives the poor of the most genuinely effective help.
Laura argues that in a system of purely private charity, there likely wouldn’t be enough money raised to genuinely help the poor. She argues that taxation is the only way to ensure sufficient funds to provide for those less fortunate. Sam concedes that it’s entirely possible that eliminating government tax-funded assistance for the poor could result in less money being available to the poor. However, he argues that private charity likely would encourage more independence overall, leading to an eventual universal decrease in poverty. Or, he says, he could be wrong, but he’d like to see the effect of trying it. Laura argues that capitalism is what caused the Great Depression and poverty as it is now known. Sam returns to the argument he ended his class with, that there is a dignity in struggle, and that to deprive the poor of struggle equally deprives the poor of possibility. He says that the question must be considered in a big picture manner rather than individual circumstances. Fundamentally, he says “I believe in softening misery but not while creating a cocoon of dependency” (172).
Sam takes his leave after doing the dishes. He asks if he can take Laura to dinner, but she has plans, and invites him to a gathering of her friends. She asks if he’s been fired. He says that he has, that there’s an appeal process but he’s still considering whether to go through it. He tells her she’ll likely be on his side, and he’ll explain everything when it’s over. Before he leaves, he takes her in his arms and kisses her.
Chapter 16 Summary: “The Numbers Are Heard”
In the secondary plotline, Erica works on her spreadsheet while eating her take-out dinner. She puts in various formulae, frustrated that she keeps getting the same answers. After a moment she has a realization, laughs, and is excited to tell Marshall Jackson what she’s discovered.
Erica tells the staff at the morning meeting that she’s discovered something important about the data they received anonymously. It seems to reveal that a drug in testing at HealthNet increases the size of a tumor rather than having no effect or shrinking the tumor. More notably, this information has reportedly been destroyed, suggesting that HealthNet knows the drug is dangerous and is destroying the evidence of that danger.
She calls David Levine at the FDA and asks him to testify about the data she showed him. He refuses, saying he can’t be sure of the reliability of the source which provided the data. Erica is shocked and believes that his tone on the call indicates he’s being silenced. Erica is immediately concerned for the safety of her source; however, she doesn’t know who sent the documents. She realizes that if someone is silencing Levine, which means that someone either at the FDA or in her own office is informing HealthNet of the investigation’s finer points. She even suspects her own protégé, Marshall, of possibly being the mole. She decides to keep her concerns to herself for the safety of her source and the investigation.
Heather Hathaway rides her bike along a canal path in Georgetown. She is happy and thinking about her next step having left HealthNet. As she rides along, she doesn’t notice the car that deliberately swerves off the road onto the bike path, running her over.
Chapters 13-16 Analysis
Laura’s experience overhearing Sam’s class demonstrates the difference between debates between equals and teaching from a position of authority. Laura’s position as listener, rather than interlocutor, is parallel to Sam’s position when he listened to her recitation of the poem. This time, Laura has an opportunity to observe and experience Sam absent the pressure or emotion of a debate. As a result, their dinner allows for new developments in their relationship as the connection they have grows beyond that of debate partners. After months of silence, her experience of how he treats students and his demonstration of his understanding of alternate perspectives endears him to her. Her new understanding of Sam absent the debate format demonstrates a fundamental difference between Sam and Charles: where Charles abuses his authority, Sam uses his to challenge his students to expand rather than contract, even if that means arguing for positions with which he personally disagrees.
Sam’s lesson on the unseen consequences of laws enhances the depth of The Ethics of Free Markets Versus Government Regulation. The game he plays allows the students to try to design a law that genuinely solves a problem they see in the world. However, for every solution the law might offer, there is a consequence which could undermine the benefit. Even Sam’s law robs individuals of their choice to watch TV or to follow Sam’s example and intentionally reduce or stop using it. Even though Sam is convinced that TV is bad for society, he is equally convinced that preserving the dignity of choice is the overriding moral good.
Laura and Sam’s pre-dinner discussion highlights Art’s Ability to Forge Connections. When he arrives, he gives Laura a Sinatra album to play. Sinatra’s music then is the backdrop for their first real date. In sharing Sinatra with her, he introduces music in addition to poetry and film as art that helps cement their connection. He has a deep appreciation for Sinatra, and his emotions are tied to the music, so sharing the music with her is sharing an intimacy from him which he had seen from her in the Tennyson poem. He also tells her he’s been reading an anthology of British poetry, which demonstrates that he respects her passions just as she respects his. Although the discussion on charity and welfare goes well, it is Sam’s willingness to engage in the world of art that creates a space for shared emotion in their relationship.
The dinner debate on welfare versus private charity complicates and deepens the theme of Self-Interest Versus Altruism. Self-interest has been, at this point in the novel, established as morally neutral and even a force within the market that can create better circumstances for all; it might even create compassion in an otherwise callous, self-interested individual. Directly addressing charity, however, provides a possibility of a self-interested charity whose goal is to create compassion. The self-interested charity which competes in the marketplace when government force is removed looks for new and innovative ways to solve social problems.
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