Jake Wexler Character Analysis

Jake Wexler is a podiatrist, Angela and Turtle’s father, and Grace’s husband. He’s one of Sam Westing’s 16 potential heirs. Jake is also secretly a bookie—dissatisfied with his own profession yet so offended by his wife’s belief that he is not a “real” doctor that he refuses to change his situation, Jake turns to gambling and betting to feel alive. Though Jake, who misses the initial reading of Westing’s will, is mostly a tangential player in the Westing game, he is a sardonic and humorous presence throughout the novel. The put-upon Jake sees himself as an underdog, and, as such, allies himself with the other underdogs around him. He strikes up a friendship with Madame Hoo—his partner in the Westing game, even though neither of them is as involved as the other heirs after missing the initial reading of the will. Jake is the only person who takes Madame Hoo seriously as an individual, and he is successful in helping to teach her some English by simply talking to her as if she’s anyone else. Jake is cool, level-headed, and slightly self-deprecating—he uses humor as a way of disguising the discrimination he himself has faced as a Jewish man, and the ways in which his Jewishness has created a chasm in Grace’s family. By the end of the novel, he has used his skills as a bookie to parlay his way into a seat on the state gambling commission.