Matty Pemulis

Arc

Matty Pemulis gets one chapter, and the novel spends it doing something it almost never does elsewhere: it shows what total memory costs. Around him, Infinite Jest is a book of engineered forgetting — Substances, entertainment, the Pemulis family's own house rule of silence, little Micky face-to-the-wall pretending to sleep. Matty is the counter-case. He "remembered every inch and pimple of every single time," and the chapter is built as the proof: one birthday lunch, one bowl of soup, and the whole ledger surfacing unbidden between spoonfuls. Where his brother Michael's chapters run on wit, angles, and never once mentioning home, Matty's single scene is home, replayed with the lights on. He is the cost that the E.T.A. plot's funniest character never names — the opened version of the book Michael keeps shut.

What the text refuses is catharsis in either direction. Matty's "maturer perspective" is real — he has genuinely arrived at the survivor's hardest truths, that the thing "was laid out" before his Da ever entered the room and that no son could in any way ask for it — and it buys him almost nothing visible: at twenty-three he is a prostitute in the same district where his father's kind of poverty put him, opening every binge with a toast to the man who abused him. That toast is the arc's center of gravity. The novel could have made him hate cleanly; instead it records the unbearable doubleness of a son who holds his dying father's wrists through a fountain of blood, mourns him, drinks to him, and remembers everything. The one mercy Matty can find — the Vaseline — is the kind of gratitude that indicts the whole household more than any accusation could, and the chapter leaves the mother's whereabouts as an endnote's open question, a silence inside the silence.

And then the window. The chapter's present-tense action is nothing but looking: Matty, "the neat eater in the family," hands in his lap, watching the street — until the street sends him Poor Tony Krause, grave-ready, trailing two addicts toward a purse-snatch, and the recognition runs one way. Matty sits aghast at what his old crewmate has come to resemble; Poor Tony, who privately counts Matty "a sure source of compassion," never sees him. It is the novel's quietest statement of its discarded-people theme: two men from the same crew, one dying unrecognized, one keeping a compassion nobody comes to collect. Matty's arc is a single afternoon, and it is enough — the book's demonstration that behind every performing, coping, unforthcoming survivor in the main plot there is a sibling somewhere carrying the uncut version of the same story.