The other day I was reading The Duck Stuck in the Muck to my two-year-old granddaughter. The poor duck is helpless to save himself and gets unstuck only when all of the other animals pull together to get him out. This “needing/helping others” idea is rampant in children’s literature, and I wanted to think of adult novels where this is the main theme. In these books the characters, unlike the duck, may not be immediately aware that people are pulling, and certainly the muck is a lot deeper than the farmyard mud.

In Nick Hornsby’s A Long Way Down, four people are mired in their isolation, disappointment, or shame. Strangers, they meet on New Year’s Eve atop a 15-story apartment building in London. Each has come to jump, but encountering other people makes that mission a bit awkward. After trading a part of their stories, they make a pact: they will not kill themselves before Valentine’s Day. Hornsby treats this incredibly sad and complex topic with humor. The book is often funny throughout: full of sarcasm, self-deprecating wit, and physical slapstick. Yet we never for a minute forget the raw pain beneath this surface.

From four alternating voices, we hear the characters’ stories and watch their interactions. Martin, a TV celebrity, draws a comparison between his decision to commit suicide and contemplating a job change to Australia. “You might sit down with a bit of paper and draw up a list of pros and cons.”

In contrast to Martin’s clipped logic and unsentimental reasoning, middle-aged Maureen rambles on with pathetic defensiveness and self-pitying ironies. Caretaker of a disabled son, she has become isolated and out of touch. Her thoughts on homosexuality are telling: “Being gay was a bit like being in the Olympics: It disappeared in ancient times and then they [the Americans] brought it back in the 20th century.” When she arrives on the roof, Martin has already used a small ladder to climb over onto the ledge. After a respectful wait, she approaches and taps him on the shoulder. “I only wanted to ask if he was going to be long.”

Eighteen-year-old Jess, full of anger, profanity, and sarcasm to hide her vulnerability, announces herself by running full speed toward the roof’s edge, yelling, “Out of my way, losers!” Martin tackles her and says she is too young to die, despite her despair that she makes friends easily, but “then I piss them off.” Along with her flip disdain for the three strangers, Jess reflects, ”We had nothing in common except where we’d ended up on that square of concrete high up in the air, and that was the biggest thing you could possibly have in common with anyone.”

JJ, an American, arrives, still carrying the pizza he had been hired to deliver. Full of self-superiority, he had wanted to make it with his band; “Some American Idol jerk can be something, why can’t I?” JJ is well-read and is often quoting authors and digressing into philosophy. He muses that “Wanting to die seems like it might be part of being alive.” The four take time out from suicide to share the pizza and make a pact. As they spend increasing time together, they continue to extend the deadline and over time find that “The exact arrangement of stuff that made you think your life was unbearable... It’s got shifted around. So how about we give it another six months. See how we’re doing.”

In Stephanie Kallos’ debut novel, Broken for You, both 75-year-old Margaret Hughes and 20-something Wanda Schultz are stuck in the secrets of their past, living in self-imposed exile. When their paths intersect, they each chance the risks and rewards of human connection, and their lives are changed.

Margaret has been living alone in a Seattle mansion with a massive collection of valuable porcelain antiques. When she receives bad news from her doctor, she stops in at a café and asks her waitress, whom she disdainfully dubs “Nose Ring,” what she would do if she had not long to live. The reply, “I’d do the opposite of what I’ve always done,” spurs Margaret to rent out a room in her mansion. Wanda, a young woman who has come west, ostensibly to search for her boyfriend, shows up on the doorstep. Slowly, Margaret opens her heart, as well as her home, to Wanda. Soon they are interacting with a potpourri of eccentric characters, and it is with the help of this surrogate family that the two women finally confront the heartaches of the past. Margaret and Wanda verify their emerging selves by smashing all the china in the house.

Dave King has created an incredible protagonist in The Ha-Ha. Howard Kapostash is a man in his late 40s, who has not spoken an intelligible word in 30 years. After 16 days of active service in Vietnam, Howie is thrown on his head by an exploding mine and spends the next 10 years of his life in and out of hospitals. Giving up on rehab, haunted by memories of the explosion, and full of resentment toward people whose “burdens are lighter than mine,” Howie isolates himself in the big Victorian house he grew up in. To make money, he rents rooms in his house and works as a seasonal landscaper at a convent. Although he says he keeps “love and sex in a tightly closed box,” it is clear he is still in love with Sylvia, whom he has known since his childhood. She was his “life’s romance” and “she is the only one who remembers me as I was.” Sylvia is a cocaine addict and when her sister forces her into rehab, Sylvia asks Howie to take care of her son, Ryan, a lanky, dark-skinned, 9-year-old. Ryan is very much attached to his mom and doesn’t want to stay with Howie any more than Howie wants to have him. Before long, though, there is companionship and affection between them. During this period, when Howie feels “awakened to all that was denied me,” he reaches out to his other housemates—two burly house painters, whom he had formerly ignored, and the Vietnamese woman who volunteers as a sort of housekeeper. But there is still the impending return of Sylvia and her capacity for betrayal and for sending Howie back to “then.” It is impossible not to care deeply about this broken, vulnerable, courageous, hopeless, hopeful man whose thoughts we know so intensely first hand.

Just as the title The Duck Stuck in the Muck captures a moment of vulnerability for the duck and a situation that offers possible rescue from others, so the titles of these books symbolize both the moment of crisis for the characters and also the hope of human connection.