What is the importance of Joe's childhood home in the novel, Wheat That Springeth Green?

Joe’s childhood symbolizes two things: the wealth and comfort of Joe’s family and Joe’s need for places apart, places where he can be alone and think. Joe’s earliest memories are of his family’s roomy home. Not only does the family employ a household staff, but the rooms themselves are carefully appointed and designed to serve as a social center for the Hacketts’ circle of upper middle-class families. The home reflects the family’s comfortable income from a home coal delivery service (a nearly year-round lucrative business in Minnesota). But they also represent the ill-gotten gain from the father’s shadier dealings with Prohibition-era bootlegging. For Joe, the home offers as well an attic where he goes when he needs to think after run-ins with schoolmates or when he feels an inexplicable anxiety over ideas he has about right and wrong, sin and punishment. As a child he heads to the attic; as an adolescent he goes to the basement where he hides his stash of soft porn magazines in the idle furnace in the summer and where he drinks beer. If the attic symbolizes lofty thoughts of a promising priest, the basement suggests the baser instincts of a rebellious teen.