Pages 242–258

Enfield — the town, the hill · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

5 November, per the dateline — the book has stepped back two days from Joelle's Saturday. A sixteen-page phone call, rendered almost entirely as unattributed dialogue: Hal in his room, mid-streak at clipping toenails into a wastebasket across the room; Orin calling from Arizona — the latest in the spate of calls he abruptly resumed this spring (p. 135). The brothers communicate in shtick, and the call's ostensible occasions — a magazine profile, a paranoid suspicion — slide gradually into the real one: their father's suicide, discussed in forensic detail, including who found him. That discovery lands on Hal, and the scene's last third is what the family did with him afterward. It is the fullest account of the death the book has given.

Terms, in order of appearance

Superstition Mountains (p. 242) — real Arizona range above Mesa; Orin phones from a therapist's bathroom there.
The Zone (p. 243) — real sports idiom for effortless streaks; trainer Loach's term, anatomized via toenails.
the Ahts of Vancouver (p. 243) — real people of Vancouver Island; the burial rites are Hal's encyclopedism at work.
Papineau region (p. 244) — Québec area named for the real 1837 rebel; cf. p. 144's Fils de Papineau.
the Stork (p. 246) — the brothers' household name for their father.
Wild Turkey (p. 248) — real Kentucky bourbon; the bottle at the scene wore a gift bow.
McLean's (p. 250) — real: McLean Hospital, the storied psychiatric facility outside Boston.
Kübler-Ross (p. 253) — real: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the five-stages-of-grief author; part of Hal's cram list.
Leaves of Grass (p. 254) — real Whitman; what Lyle is reading, for his own grief.

After you read: three things

1. The ghost-lore arrives before the ghost (pp. 243–244). Hal deflects with burial customs: the Aht pour blood into embalmed ancestors because "The sated ghost cannot see secret things"; rural Québecers drill a hole down through the coffin lid "to let out the soul, if it wants out." One page later the brothers take up their unmourned father — whose rig, you'll learn, involved a drilled hole. Notice what the digressions are doing for Hal, and what they're doing for the book.

2. You know more than Orin about both his problems (pp. 244–247). The "Helen" Steeply profile shaping up as "some sort of memorial to the Stork" — you've read her planted article (p. 142) and her fake CV (p. 227). And "I'm being followed… by handicapped people" — three burly wheelchaired men in an hour. You've been on a mountainside with wheelchaired Québécois assassins since p. 89. Also mark Hal's one-sentence list of what Orin mustn't discuss ("Himself and annulation… Himself killing himself, you and Joelle, Himself and Joelle, the Moms and C.T.…") — it reads like the novel's own index.

3. Grief, performed to specification (pp. 252–257). Thirteen-year-old Hal, unable to produce what the grief-therapist needs, takes Lyle's advice — "empathize with the grief-therapist" — studies the professional literature, and delivers a textbook breakdown containing his one true confession: that at the kitchen door his first reaction had been "That something smelled delicious!" He passes. Then laughs himself sick in a men's room. Set this machinery — perfect performance where feeling should be — next to the boy in Tucson on p. 3.

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