Pages 95–97

30 April Y.D.A.U. — Marathe and Steeply · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

Tuesday 3 November, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, 1640h.: the males' locker room at Enfield Tennis Academy, after P.M. challenge matches. The scene opens with the whole day compressed into one schedule-sentence, then settles on the floor with the towel-wrapped upperclassmen: Hal, Pemulis (the p. 66 tutorial-giver), Troeltsch (the sickbed of pp. 60–61), plus a half-dozen teammates — Wayne, Stice, Struck, Rader, Freer, Shaw, Schacht — some new, none introduced beyond a name. It's ensemble banter: a study-quiz for tomorrow's History of Entertainment midterm, run on dead legs.

Terms, in order of appearance

Tolstoy's sentence (p. 95) — the famous unhappy-families opener of Anna Karenina; the day's grammar exam parsed its syntax.
Barbicide (p. 95) — real product: the blue disinfectant combs sit in at barbershops.
John Wayne (p. 95) — an E.T.A. player, Canadian; yes, the movie star's name, and nobody remarks on it.
TP (p. 95) — teleputer, the cartridge-playing successor to broadcast TV — which succession is exactly what the midterm covers.
Cathodeluminescent Panel (p. 96) — quiz-answer coinage: the TP's flat digital screen; no cathode gun, no analog snow or ghosting.
qua (p. 96) — Latin: as, in the capacity of ("entertainment qua entertainment").
InterLace de-digitizer (p. 96) — the TP's replacement for an antenna; InterLace is the entertainment network first seen around p. 33.
acutance (p. 97) — real optics term: a measure of edge-sharpness, of resolution.

After you read: three things

1. Hal's one quiet correction is worth the whole quiz. Troeltsch wonders whether unhappy families even feel their unhappiness; Hal, eyes closed: "The exam was talking about the syntax of Tolstoy's sentence, not about real unhappy families." Words about the thing, instead of the thing — delivered by the boy who, in the book's opening pages, had answers he could only think. The question about real unhappy families goes unanswered, in a room full of them.

2. The nickname chorus turns out to be optics. "The Halster." "Halorama." "Halation." — and Rader, deadpan, supplies the true definition: "A halo-shaped exposure-pattern around light sources seen on chemical film at low speed," capped by someone's "That most angelic of distortions." Hal's late father was an optical-science man (pp. 63–64); his son's locker-room handle is a lens flaw — a distortion that looks like a halo. The scene plays it as pure teasing; the aptness is left for you.

3. Feel the fatigue the banter floats on. The day-schedule sentence up top is the explanation: drills, classes, exam, run, drills, two matches, weights, sauna. Everyone is "stunned with fatigue"; the two best players, Stice and Wayne, go somewhere else entirely — "removed, for a moment, from the connectedness of all events." The teasing is "all only half-nasty," littler kids hang around the edges listening, and Hal ends the scene "just thinking it's nice finally to breathe and get enough air."

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