Pages 79–85

Y.D.A.U. — Kate Gompert · first-time reader guide · all scenes

When you've finished these pages: three things worth a second look, at the bottom.

Enfield Tennis Academy on warm Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment evenings, sliding into one particular walk down Comm. Ave. into Allston for gourmet ice cream. Gerhardt Schtitt — E.T.A.'s Head Coach and Athletic Director, nearly seventy, black boots and epaulets, a name you've glimpsed in passing since p. 10 — gets his first real scene, paired with Mario Incandenza, eighteen, Hal's older brother, the small hunched figure from pp. 32 and 39–42, whose body is too damaged to play the game the place exists for. Schtitt talks, in German-bent English; Mario listens. That's the whole event, and it carries six pages.

Terms, in order of appearance

Lebensgefährtin (p. 79) — German: life-companion. Endnote 31 explains Schtitt's decidedly odd use of it.
leptosomatic (p. 79) — clinical: slight, narrow-bodied.
bradykinetic (p. 80) — medical: slow-moving.
TE OCCIDERE POSSUNT... (p. 81) — the founder's Latin locker-room motto; endnote 32's translation is worth the flip.
B.S. 1989 (p. 81) — a year dated the old way; endnote 33 decodes the abbreviation.
Extra-Linear Dynamics (p. 82) — coinage for a math of limit and breakdown; endnote 34 glosses it, plus the founder's taste for failure.
Cantorian (p. 82) — Georg Cantor, real mathematician of infinities; endnote 35 sketches the proof that there are infinities inside infinities.
O.N.A.N.ite (p. 82) — of O.N.A.N., an acronym dropped once before (p. 65) and still unexpanded; evidently a continental body the U.S. belongs to.
experialist (p. 83) — coinage on "imperialist": a nation that pushes out rather than takes in; the text pairs it with "waste-exporting."
Verstiegenheit (p. 83) — German; endnote 36 defines it — roughly, lost wandering beyond all charted limits. Mario blesses it as a sneeze.

After you read: three things

1. The coach's whole philosophy lands in one paragraph — p. 84. "The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself"; the boy across the net "is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance." Tennis comes out "an essentially tragic enterprise," and life "endless war against the self you cannot live without." Everything before it — flat children, Euclid, WE ARE WHAT WE WALK BETWEEN, the Cantorian infinities — is staircase up to this. Read it at walking pace.

2. Mario's questions never get asked — and get answered anyway. Twice he's shown "trying to think how to articulate" something, and the last unaskable version is: "what's the difference between tennis and suicide, life and death, the game and its own end?" (p. 84). You heard nearly those words two scenes back — Kate Gompert's "I just wanted out. I didn't want to play anymore" (p. 72). Over ice cream, Schtitt answers the question Mario never voiced: "Not different... except the chance to play" (p. 85) — then roars with laughter.

3. The scene explains its own machinery, twice. Why Schtitt confides in Mario: "people can sometimes forget you're there," and "bullshit often tends to drop away around damaged listeners" (p. 80). Why it reads as essay instead of dialogue: "This should not be rendered in exposition like this, but Mario Incandenza has a severely limited range of verbatim recall" (p. 82) — the narrator apologizing mid-scene for his own method. Both asides are the book being frank about how it's built; take them at face value.

Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.