Orin and Hal: Brothers on the Phone
A relationship conducted entirely by telephone
Of all the bonds in the Incandenza family, the one between the oldest and youngest brothers is the only one the novel stages almost exclusively through a machine. Orin and Hal never appear in the same room in the book's present; their entire adult relationship is a handful of YDAU phone calls — a hang-up in May, a cluster in early November, an answering-machine message about Emily Dickinson — conducted on a transparent telephone that "had been Orin's and its plastic case was transparent and you could see the phone's guts" (scene 041, p. 135). The instrument is a hand-me-down from the brother who left; the see-through case is the novel's joke about what the calls themselves never manage to be.
The first call of the sequence arrives at dawn on 9 May, framed by one of the book's flattest statements of its patrimony theme: "Another way fathers impact sons is that sons, once their voices have changed in puberty, invariably answer the telephone with the same locutions and intonations as their fathers. This holds true regardless of whether the fathers are still alive" (scene 006, p. 32). What follows is four lines long. "'I want to tell you,' the voice on the phone said. 'My head is filled with things to say.'" Hal, softly: "'I don't mind,' Hal said softly. 'I could wait forever.'" And then: "'That's what you think,' the voice said. The connection was cut. It had been Orin" (scene 006, p. 33). The exchange is a Beatles lyric ("I Want to Tell You") passed between brothers as if it were speech — communication conducted entirely in borrowed words, and hung up on. When Mario — Orin's own brother — asks who it was, Hal answers, "'No one you know, I don't think'" (scene 006, p. 33). As a statement of fact it is a casual lie, the first of the phone-record's many; as a statement about Orin it is the essay's whole subject in one line: nobody in the family can claim to know him, and Hal may be telling more truth than he intends — the family trait Hal elsewhere pins on Orin exactly ("Except Orin used to end up telling the truth even when he didn't think he was," scene 155, p. 773). (For the father-to-son transmission the phone passage states outright, see fathers and sons; for the novel's larger case that mediation is what makes intimacy bearable, see communication and solipsism.)
The estrangement the calls interrupt is quantified with actuarial precision. On 5 November, Hal asks: "may I ask why this sudden interest after four years 216 days, and with two years of that not even once even calling?" (scene 064, p. 249) — the count runs from their father's suicide, which Orin's silence is therefore explicitly indexed to. Orin skipped the funeral and then did not call his family at all for roughly two years; the calls resumed only "this spring" (scene 041, p. 136), i.e. with the May hang-up. Whatever restarted them, the record is explicit that it was not simple homesickness.
Mutual mendacity, and the toenail duet
The calls run on a shared currency of lying, stated in the narration without apology: "Hal estimated over 60% of what he told Orin on the phone since Orin had abruptly started calling again this spring was a lie" (scene 041, p. 136). He lies "about meaningless details," enjoys it, doesn't know why — and the narration catches him in a rarer moment: "it had never occurred to him to consider whether Orin was ever doing the same thing" (scene 041, p. 136). The outside witnesses corroborate the family trait from Orin's side. Hal, to Mario, elsewhere: "Orin lied with a really pathological intensity, growing up, is what I've been remembering" (scene 155, p. 770) — with the truth-telling exception already noted above. Marlon Bain's letter to Steeply gives the adult diagnosis: "It is not that Orin Incandenza is a liar, but that I think he has come to regard the truth as constructed instead of reported"; his fail-safe pick-up line is "a pose of poselessness"; "Orin Incandenza is the least open man I know"; "there can be such a thing as sincerity with a motive" (endnote 269, p. 1048). Two brothers who regard truth as a performance genre are, of course, ideally matched conversationalists — and structurally incapable of the thing the calls keep almost being.
The great 5 November call opens with Orin in persona ("this is the Enfield Raw Sewage Commission, and quite frankly we've had enough shit out of you," scene 064, p. 242) and Hal mid-performance: he spends the entire call clipping his toenails into a wastebasket "several meters away," narrating his shooting percentage, the fragile "can't-miss" magic, the switch of feet. The bit reads at first as filler and is actually the call's architecture: the toenail patter is Hal's deflection-machine, ratcheted up precisely when Orin's questions get real ("Two for three on the right foot, with one carom. Jury's still out" arrives directly over "I think I'm being followed"). And midway through, Hal quietly converts it into the call's one moment of confessed feeling: "Orin I lied. I haven't even started on the right foot yet... Talking about it's broken the spell. Now I'm self-conscious and afraid" — an admission of lying inside the lie-game, which under the brothers' rules is as close to sincerity as the channel allows. Meanwhile Hal runs his own interrogation in the opposite direction, cataloguing the contents of a trailer he has never seen ("Its carpet was wall-to-wall and extremely thin, a kind of burnt yellow or orange") until Orin protests: "This isn't especially funny, Hallie. The Moms comes out in you in these odd little ways sometimes" (scene 064, p. 245) — the mother surfacing in the younger brother exactly at his most knowing-without-contact, which is her mode too.
Research, in both directions
What Orin wants from the calls is stated, by him, with unusual candor: he has "somebody from Moment fucking magazine out here doing a quote soft profile" (scene 064, p. 245) — "Helen" Steeply, in print actually Hugh Steeply of the Office of Unspecified Services in field-drag, cultivating the filmmaker's relatives for access to the Entertainment — and the profile is turning into a "memorial to the Stork as patriarch." Orin has "zero intent of forthrightly answering any stained-family-linen-type questions from anybody, much less somebody who takes shorthand" (scene 064, p. 247). But: "I don't feel safe not answering Helen's questions if I haven't got a handle on what I'm not saying" (scene 064, p. 249). This is the dyad's signature inversion. Orin phones his brother to research his own family — not to learn the family history but to inventory it, so he can withhold it accurately. Family intimacy as opposition research on oneself.
Hal names the linen in a single deadpan list: "You and tennis, you and the Saints, Himself and tennis, the Moms and Québec and Royal Victoria, the Moms and immigration, Himself and annulation, Himself and Lyle, Himself and distilled spirits, Himself killing himself, you and Joelle, Himself and Joelle, the Moms and C.T., you v. the Moms, E.T.A., nonexistent films, et cetera" (scene 064, p. 247) — the whole novel's plot, recited by its seventeen-year-old as a family's unaskable questions. And Orin's stated method — "How to avoid being forthright about the Stork material unless I know what the really forthright answers would be" (scene 064, p. 247) — is Bain's "sincerity with a motive" applied to grief.
The pattern was old before Steeply. It was Orin who introduced Joelle to JOI's work in the first place because, in Joelle's read, "he thought he could somehow get to his father through her" (scene 150, p. 740) — Orin's approaches to his own family have always been routed through intermediaries: a girlfriend, a journalist's questions, a little brother on a transparent phone. The one time Hal explodes, he says exactly this: "Whom are you trying to kid? Whom do you think this is really about? Can you be that sick that you can't even admit it over the fucking phone?" (endnote 110, p. 1016) — and then, in one of the record's few unguarded brotherly beats, apologizes ("I'm sorry, O. I apologize... I hate losing the temper"), and Orin absorbs it ("Think nothing of it. I know you didn't mean it") and comes back with genuine, unstrategized worry: "You don't sound good, Hallie. You sound ground down," followed by an earnest big-brother lecture about Hal's tobacco habit ("It's a vicious vice. I'm urging in all earnest," endnote 110, p. 1016). The care is real; it is just never load-bearing.
The suicide, split down the middle
The 5 November call is the book's fullest account of what JOI's suicide did to the family, and it distributes the damage with terrible symmetry: Hal got all of the event, Orin got none of it. Hal, at thirteen, found the body — "Found by one Harold James Incandenza, thirteen going on really old" (scene 064, p. 249). Orin, four and a half years later, does not know the basic facts. He asks whether "Dad… the Mad Stork put his head in the oven?" and has to be corrected: "The microwave, O." — "Nobody ever said microwave." — "I think it came out generally at the funeral" (scene 064, p. 248). That last line is the quiet brutality of the exchange: the information was available at the event Orin chose to miss. Hal's aside stands as the dyad's epitaph on the whole period: "Everybody said you'd regret not coming to the funeral. But I don't think this is what they meant" (scene 064, p. 247).
What Hal then gives Orin — unprompted, at length, in the persona of a man telling an anecdote — is the grief-counselor story: the "concentrated grief- and trauma-therapy" he was shunted into "within hours," the professional he could not satisfy, the library research (first as "a student of grief," then, on Lyle's advice, from "the grief-pro's own perspective"), and the manufactured breakdown that finally "delivered the goods": '"That something smelled delicious!" I screamed' (scene 064, p. 256) — the confession that his first reaction to the smell of his father's exploded skull was appetite, performed with textbook-perfect affect he had researched the night before. The story is told as comedy, and it is the most intimate thing either brother says to the other anywhere in the novel. Note what the frame does: Orin asks for a "thumbnail-sketch" of grief so he can fake it for a journalist; Hal responds with a full account of faking grief for a professional. It is the one subject on which the brothers are genuinely fluent with each other — how to simulate feeling for an authority figure who demands it — and Hal marks the occasion's rarity himself: "why don't you go ahead and ask me whatever standard ghoulish questions you want not to answer. This may be your only shot. Usually I seem not to talk about it" (scene 064, p. 249). Orin's response is the closest his register comes to tenderness: "I'm sorry I couldn't be there" (scene 064, p. 254); Hal's — "Your concern is much appreciated, believe me" (scene 064, p. 252) — is its exact irony-armored counterpart.
Two details show how deep the exchange runs under its packaging. Orin's "You were our designated deliverer, Hallie, no question about it" (scene 064, p. 253) names the family role — the son who supplies whatever the audience requires — that the grief-therapy story is about, and that Hal's whole collapse-arc (see Hal's collapse) can be read as the delayed bill for. And the story never leaves Hal: in the Year of Glad frame, strapped to a stretcher a year past the novel's last page, he still thinks "I think of the hypophalangial Grief-Therapist" (scene 003, p. 16). The suicide split the brothers into the one who performed grief until it was certified and the one who performed its absence until an interviewer made absence untenable; the call is where the two performances finally face each other. The dispute they cannot resolve inside it — Orin insisting, via Joelle, "He quit drinking in January, Hal. It was something Joelle was real specific about" (scene 064, p. 250) against Hal's Wild-Turkey-with-a-bow crime-scene inventory — is the sobriety question the archive carries as unreconciled testimony, each account as written.
The Moms, triangulated
Every Orin–Hal call is secretly a three-body problem, and the third body is Avril. The brothers' positions could not be more opposed on the surface. Orin's estrangement from the Moms is total and theatrical: her chirpy, funny, loving letters — "THE SORT OF CHIRPILY QUOTIDIAN MAIL THAT—HERE'S THE MOVING PART—SEEMS TO IMPLY A CONTEXT OF REGULAR INTER-PARTY COMMUNICATION, STILL," as the endnote's own header puts it — receive an invariant form-reply from a fictional mailroom flunky: "we regrettably say ORIN INCANDENZA #71 can not answer your letter in person," signed Jethro Bodine (endnote 110, p. 1006). To Steeply he is explicit: "I'm not going to talk about why I don't talk to the Moms anymore" (endnote 234, p. 1038). Hal, meanwhile, lives on the grounds, speaks of "the advantage of occasional contact with the Moms" (endnote 110, p. 1014), and performs the family politeness.
But the call record complicates both postures. It is Hal — the polite son — who delivers the novel's single most direct indictment of Orin's mother-hatred as hatred, in the 7 November call: "… Wants to blame her, won't admit it, needs to, won't admit it, sweepingly blames the whole affair of Himself on her, won't interface with her or worse even acknowledge her... pretends he gets the most retardate PR staffer he can make hold the crayon to send grotesque solecistic pseudo-impersonal replies to her pathetic letters. Jethro Bodine, O.? Jethro Bodine?... tells himself he's convinced himself she doesn't even exist, as if she never existed, but by some coincidence has this rapacious fetish for young married mothers... and has this apparently even more rapacious compulsive need to call the blood-relative he hasn't even seen in four years and tell him all about every Subject and Strategy, blow-by-blow, long distance, in nanomicroscopic detail" (endnote 110, pp. 1014–15). The speech connects the dots the novel elsewhere leaves as pattern: the Moms-hatred, the young-married-mother Subjects, and the calls to Hal are one system. And Hal's own account of Avril's side is delivered in the same breath, with a precision that betrays how closely he watches her: "'d you know she's never once asked me whether Booboo and I hear from you? Not once. A sort of appalled pride. She's ashamed of even hurting over it" (endnote 110, p. 1013). When Orin's Separatism questions need a Canadian, Hal's deflection is barbed on both ends: "We have a blood-relative who's got dual citizenship, if you recall... Once her jaw recovered from being unhinged by joy that you actually called" (endnote 110, p. 1013).
Yet Hal's complicity-adjacent politeness is not exoneration, and the novel is careful to keep the brothers symmetrical here too: Orin rages at a mother he never contacts; Hal accommodates a mother he never confides in (the professional-conversationalist frame, the Pump-Room secrecy, the "occasional contact" formula). The archive's read of Avril's smothering as the developmental wound in both sons — the devouring-mother pattern, favored precisely as a thematic diagnosis and not a plot verdict — is walked through in Wayne, the AFR & Avril, along with the graded verdicts on everything Orin alleges about her.
That last point matters for this essay because so much of the case against Avril is Orin-sourced — the Volvo-window signs, the nude footprints on the windshield, the sweeping "affair of Himself" — and Orin is the family's least reliable narrator by the family's own testimony. On the specific question the fan record keeps circling, whether something incestuous passed between Avril and Orin, the archive's verdicts are deliberately modest: yes-something — an incestuous-shaped enmeshment — is open (pattern-rich: the crib confession, the Wayne/cheerleader tableau restaging Orin's own twirler romance), while the specific abuse claim is strained, because the only channel asserting an act is Molly Notkin's hedged "possibly," triple hearsay under interrogation. Nothing in the phone calls settles any of this, and the essay asserts nothing beyond those tiers. What the calls do carry is the question's earliest external witness: reading the December 1994 manuscript, Wallace's editor Michael Pietsch marked the Notkin interview with "Orin's among those who slept with Avril?" — evidence the question was legible on the page a year before publication, to a reader with no access to fan exegesis — and read the Orin–Hal calls themselves as approach behavior: "Orin is calling because he's beginning to try to deal with it" (pietsch-letter-dec-1994). The editor's reading is an interpretation, not text; but it is the same interpretation the calls' own shape keeps suggesting — that the Separatism questions, the profile alibi, and the Strategy monologues are concentric rings around the one subject Orin cannot dial directly.
The samizdat question on the family phone
The 7 November call (endnote 110 — the novel buries its longest brother-scene in the apparatus, ten-plus pages of small type) is where the family channel gets conscripted by the continental plot. Orin's questions are fed to him by Steeply, and Hal answers them better than Orin can use: the schoolboy-history lecture on Separatism, the Concavity as Québec's "gooey end of the Canadian dipstick," and — the tell — a definition: "Samizdat. Russian compound noun" (endnote 110, p. 1011). Orin follows with the question that makes Hal go silent: "So you'd have no idea why The Mad Stork's name would come up in connection with somebody saying samizdat" (endnote 110, p. 1011). Neither brother knows what the reader knows — that their father's last film is the lethal Entertainment, that the "handicapped people" Orin jokes about being followed by (scene 064) are the A.F.R., that Steeply's soft profile is a federal operation — so the call is dramatic irony conducted at transcontinental rates: two sons comparing notes on a catastrophe whose name they are both pronouncing for the first time. The call's end is the book's bleakest phone joke: Pemulis, fiddling with the console's power toggle, cuts the line in the middle of the word — "when she raised this samizdat-word in connec—" (endnote 110, p. 1021) — the family's one live conversation about the family's actual crisis, unplugged mid-syllable by a prank.
The mailer question hangs over all of it. Weighed page by page (the mailer adjudication), Orin-the-mailer is favored — held inside an undecidable-by-design flag scoped to sender-identity, since the mailing act is structurally off-page — and one seat of the postal evidence sits inside this very dyad: it is Hal, on the 5 November call, who catches the anomaly ("What are you doing going to the post office? You hate snail-mail," scene 064, p. 244). The brothers' phone record is thus itself an exhibit: whatever Orin was or wasn't mailing, his little brother noticed the post office and thought nothing of it, and the reader is invited to. Orin's fate ran through the same adjudication: the A.F.R. trap closes on him in the novel's last Orin scene, under a giant inverted tumbler — his own private roach-ritual (scene 012: "For Orin Incandenza, #71, morning is the soul's night") turned against him — with an amplified voice "demanding to know Where Is The Master Buried" until the roaches pour in and he shrieks "Do it to her! Do it to her!" (scene 184, p. 972), the novel's naked 1984 Room-101 echo. The break itself is favored; what he divulged, and what became of him, stay open under the ending cluster's design flag (see the ending). A further registered reading — that the endnote-110 call is Orin's coded warning to Hal, delivered under assumed line-surveillance — is a single-cohort theory the archive holds open with a live in-cohort dissent (the counter-read: ordinary Orin paranoia); this essay only notes that the call's texture supports both.
Wallace's own spec for Orin's ending is on record, in his reply to Pietsch's worry that readers would demand resolution: "We know exactly what's happening to Gately by end, about 50% of what's happened to Hal, and little but hints about Orin. I can give you 5000 words of theoretico-structural argument for this, but let's spare one another, shall we?" (dtmax-2009-the-unfinished). The calibrated asymmetry is the dyad's design: the brother who tells stories about himself compulsively is the one the book resolves least. Even Hal's Year of Glad frame keeps the ration exact — the interview chapter never mentions Orin at all, and Hal's stretcher-memory grants him one sentence, in quotation as always: "Not for nothing did Orin say that people outdoors down here just scuttle in vectors from air conditioning to air conditioning" (scene 003, pp. 15–16). A year past the tumbler, Orin survives in Hal as a quotable voice — which is, on the record, all he ever was to him.
What each brother shows about the other
Read as a pair, the brothers are the novel's controlled experiment in escape. Orin's solution to the family was flight made literal — the punt, the trade to the desert, the two years of silence, the form-letter that denies his mother exists; Hal's was flight in place — the Pump Room, the lexical performances, the 60% lie-rate on a phone he never fails to answer. Orin constructs truth outward, for Subjects; Hal conceals it inward, for himself. Each brother's method is legible only against the other's, and the calls are where the novel holds them side by side: Orin asking real questions in a fake voice, Hal giving real answers disguised as bits.
There is also an author-side warrant for reading them as split halves, now on the record at author tier: Wallace, asked by David Lipsky in 1996 which character carried his own citywide-football history, answered "It's Orin," having quit football himself because "I discovered that I didn't really love to hit people"; pressed on writers as romantic operators, he allowed "if you're thinking of Orin in the book a little bit, that's fine" — while granting in the same interviews that "marijuana was a huge deal for me when I was about the age of Hal in the book" (lipsky-becoming-yourself, with the denial carried alongside: the book is not "some sort of coded story" of his own experience). The autobiography, such as it is, was itself split between the brothers — the athlete's body and the seducer's charm to Orin, the addiction and the interiority to Hal — which may be the cleanest gloss on why their phone calls read like a man arguing with himself on a transparent phone.
The last word belongs to the estrangement's one moment of accidental truth. Orin, needled about his sudden geopolitical vocabulary, protests that the questions are for Helen; Hal answers with the line that names what every call in the record is actually about: "The person this stuff is about is the person you say you've erased from all RAM. Why not tell the damn truth for once?" (endnote 110, p. 1016). Orin never does, on the page — the book gives us "little but hints" — and Hal, who by the Year of Glad can no longer make himself understood at all, is left as his brother's archivist: the keeper of the microwave facts, the funeral report, the grief that both of them could only ever deliver as a performance to authority. Sons answer the phone with their father's locutions whether or not the father is alive; these two spent the novel answering each other that way, and the line got cut mid-word.
Sources
- dtmax-2009-the-unfinished — the Pietsch correspondence; "little but hints about Orin" as the authorial resolution-ration for this dyad's elder brother.
- pietsch-letter-dec-1994 — the editor's December 1994 manuscript notes: the Orin/Avril question read off the Notkin interview pre-publication, and the Orin–Hal calls read as approach-to-the-family-secret.
- lipsky-becoming-yourself — the author-tier autobiography grants: football history to Orin ("It's Orin."), marijuana-at-Hal's-age to Hal; the coded-story denial carried with them.
- swartz-ij-ending — the canonical reconstruction in which Orin-as-mailer and the A.F.R. interrogation anchor the missing year; weighed in the mailer adjudication.
- The adjudication ledgers behind the tiers stated above: orin-mailer (mailer, Joelle/Marathe fates), ending-cluster (Orin's break and the design flag), wayne-avril-afr (the Avril–Orin question, the devouring-mother pattern).