Pages 240–242
Two pages of geography, no date and no characters — just one strange first-person flicker. This is the book's master map: Enfield MA, the township E.T.A. and Ennet House share, anatomized from its tax rolls up to the Academy's hilltop and then around the compass of what the hilltop overlooks. Enfield itself is invented — no such township exists — but it's grafted seamlessly into real Boston geography: Brighton, Allston, Newton, Commonwealth Avenue, and the Green Line are all where the book says they are. Read it slowly once, and the novel's settings snap into a single picture.
Terms, in order of appearance
- brachiform (p. 241) — real word: arm-shaped; the township is an arm, "its fist sunk into Allston."
- Discalced (p. 241) — real word, "shoeless": the barefoot monastic orders; Enfield has a monastery of them.
- les trebuchets noirs (p. 241) — French, "the black trebuchets": the trebuchet is the real medieval counterweight catapult.
- Great Concavity (p. 241) — the northern territory the waste gets flung into; still only a name (pp. 59, 184).
- Har-Tru (p. 241) — real brand: the green crushed-stone "clay" court surface.
- calliopsis (p. 241) — real flower, a coreopsis; part of the hillside's artful planting.
- acclivated (p. 241) — from acclivity, an upward slope: Commonwealth Avenue's long climb out of Lower Brighton.
After you read: three things
1. The tax roll is a diagnosis (pp. 240–241). A township "composed almost entirely of medical, corporate, and spiritual facilities": hospitals for children, bones, feet, and cranio-facial pain; a nail company; a bleacher company; the makers of "really big fans"; monasteries and seminaries; a tennis academy; a waste-catapult yard. And the body language runs all through it — Enfield is an arm, elbow nudging Newton's ribs, with E.T.A.'s hill "a kind of raised cyst on the township's elbow." A municipality shaped like a limb, economically devoted to damaged bodies and their disposal.
2. The stamping foot gets a face (p. 241). The E.W.D. catapults, up close at last: block-long, slings "of alloy-belted elastic," receptacles "like catcher's mitts from hell," flinging twine-bundled waste-vehicles five-plus kilometers north into the Concavity, "a sound like a giant stamping foot." That's the thud you've been hearing since p. 17 — and the launch Joelle heard mid-cook on p. 237, one scene ago, from the other side of the sound.
3. The last sentence is the novel's floor plan. "From both the north and northeast tree-lines E.T.A. looks down its hill's steepest, best-planted decline into the complexly decaying grounds of Enfield Marine." Pages 193–198 looked up this same slope from the halfway house; now you've seen it from both ends. And catch the essay's single leak — "To I think it must be the southwest" — one I in an otherwise impersonal survey. Someone is doing this describing; the scene doesn't say who.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.