Pages 692–698
No place, no date, nobody on stage: for six pages the narrator steps out and writes an essay on depression, using two people you know — Kate Gompert (the psych-ward interview of pp. 68–78, now at Ennet House) and Hal — as its cases. The encyclopedic, almost clinical register is the form the material demands, and it's deliberate. Fair warning, folded in plainly: this is the book's most direct writing on suicidal depression, including why people kill themselves; it is unsparing but not graphic. Read it slowly. Much of the vocabulary the rest of the book uses for pain is coined here.
Terms, in order of appearance
- anhedonia (p. 692) — clinical term for lost capacity for pleasure; endnote 280 credits the real coiner, Ribot — worth the flip.
- Unable To Identify (p. 693) — Boston AA lingo: to Identify is to recognize yourself in another's story (the pp. 345ff meetings); the anhedonic can't.
- 'Caius Is Mortal' (p. 693) — the textbook syllogism from Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich: mortality as an abstraction until it's yours.
- fictile (p. 694) — moldable, like wet clay; here, young faces taking the shape of the masks they wear.
- The American Century as Seen Through a Brick (p. 694) — the JOI film on Hal's viewing list at p. 686; its piano-string key-image gets fully described here.
- anaclitically (p. 695) — psychoanalytic: leaning on another for emotional support the way an infant does.
- remora (p. 695) — real suckerfish that rides attached to sharks.
- Burton / Yevtuschenko (p. 695) — two cited authorities for names of It: Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621) supplies the older "melancholia"; "Yevtuschenko" supplies the "more authoritative" modern "psychotic depression." In the novel Yevtuschenko is the author of the Field Guide to Clinical States seen in Kate's ward intake (p. 68) — the book is invented, and the text never says he is the real poet Yevtushenko (it even spells the name differently).
- Tricyclics, M.A.O.I.s, S.S.R.I.s, E.C.T. (p. 697) — real antidepressant classes and electroconvulsive therapy; endnote 283 dates the S.S.R.I.s ("Zoloft and the ill-fated Prozac").
After you read: three things
1. The essay's whole shape is a ranking. It spends three patient pages defining anhedonia — "a kind of emotional novocaine," where "the world becomes a map of the world" (pp. 692–693) — precisely so one sentence can dwarf it: anhedonia "is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain" (p. 695). Two different depressions. Kate's It is the shark; keep the two separate and the rest of the essay organizes itself.
2. Hal is diagnosed in declarative sentences. The book has implied things about Hal for 600 pages; here it states them: no bona fide interior emotion since he was tiny, "far more robotic than John Wayne," and "His Moms Avril hears her own echoes inside him and thinks what she hears is him" (p. 694). Note also what the narrator does with his father: the E.T.A. kids' theory of the suicide is flatly corrected — "In fact this is in fact not what killed Incandenza at all" (p. 693) — and no replacement is offered. The correction itself is the information.
3. The last case closes a loop. The burning-high-rise passage (p. 696) gives suicide as physics — "It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames" — and then Ernest Feaster, seventeen years inside It, appears as the limit case: a man whose "fondest dream was anhedonia... I.e. death in life" (p. 698). The condition the essay opened by calling the mild kind is, from inside the shark, the carrot. Kate's pp. 68–78 interview reads differently after this.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.