Pages 157–169

Winter, B.S. 1960 — a father's monologue · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

One voice, unbroken, for thirteen pages. Winter 1960, Tucson, Arizona — a real, pre-Subsidized year, per the dateline — and a failed actor who was once a nearly-great junior tennis player talks at his silent ten-year-old son, Jim, on what was supposed to be the boy's first tennis lesson. They never reach a court. The boy will grow up to be James O. Incandenza, E.T.A.'s founder; the speaker is the father from the p. 63 dossier — the "dipsomaniacal tragedian" who set out to build a junior athlete. He empties a flask as he talks, and the monologue's weather tracks it: lucid, then maudlin, then cruel to a crying child, then desolate.

Terms, in order of appearance

Marlon Brando (p. 157) — real actor, the era's slouching physical-rebel archetype; the mother's bit part with roaring motorbikes is a Brando picture.
the Beats (p. 158) — real: the Beat Generation writers, 1950s byword for studied unstriving.
Mercury Montclair (p. 159) — real car: a flashy mid-1950s Mercury sedan; the father's is a '56.
Latrodectus mactans (p. 159) — real Latin binomial: the black widow spider, an actual Tucson garage hazard.
"A machine in the ghost" (p. 160) — inverts a real philosophy tag, "the ghost in the machine," coined to mock mind-body dualism.
Columbia Guide to Refractive Indices (p. 160) — a technical optics reference the ten-year-old lugs everywhere; refractive index measures how glass bends light.
James Dean (p. 167) — real actor, Brando's fellow icon, dead in a car crash in 1955.
Frankie Avalon (p. 168) — real teen-idol singer of beach movies, minting money as the father plans his comeback.
Bisbee (p. 167) — real Arizona mining town; the "Great Bisbee Palm-Rot epidemic" of 1933 is the father's own lore.

After you read: three things

1. The lesson is a doctrine, not a stroke. Treat every object as a body and every body as a machine: "Head is body." Brando, the apparent slob, secretly "felt himself as body so keenly he'd no need for manner"; the great player learns "to do nothing" and lets everything be done by what's around him. The torn-open tennis ball — "a kind of rubber hell. Empty" — pure potential — is the creed's exhibit A (pp. 157–159). Watch how a tennis lesson keeps swerving away from tennis into metaphysics.

2. The 1933 match is the wound under everything (pp. 163–169). The one match his own father — a golf man — ever attended: the boy plays out of his mind, hears the client say his son is good, and then, at the exact instant both his knees are destroyed in a slide for a drop-shot, hears his father answer: "Yes, But He'll Never Be Great." Notice how hard he insists the fall began before the sentence — the forensics (a spider? palm-rot pus?) matter less to him than that timing.

3. Listen for "in there." Near the end: "I'm so scared of dying without ever being really seen," and "Can you see I was giving it all I had? That I was in there…?" The novel's very first page had another Incandenza insisting "I am in here" (p. 3). The book doesn't connect them; the phrasing does.

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