Pages 701–706
E.T.A. Viewing Room 6, same 11 November evening as Hal's film-watching back at pp. 686–689. Hal, deep in tobacco-and-THC-withdrawal irritability, tries to "isolate" in a public room while it steadily fills: Bridget Boone with contraband frozen yogurt, Fran Unwin, Bernadette Longley and Jennie Bash, then three of the littler kids on the carpet. None of them needs remembering beyond their names; they're the academy's ambient teenagers. On screen: Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, one of his father's few commercial hits, which the scene summarizes at loving, brutal length. When Longley mentions "a totally huge lady cruising the halls looking for you, with a notebook," you can place her — the enormous Moment profiler has been on campus since pp. 651ff.
Terms, in order of appearance
- Kodiak (p. 701) — real brand of dipping tobacco; the lump in Hal's cheek and the spitting are its mechanics.
- hanuman-faced (p. 702) — Hanuman: the Hindu monkey god; Fran Unwin's build gets a whole simian sentence.
- TCBY (p. 703) — endnote 288 gives the post-Reconfiguration rebranding: "The Continent's Best Yogurt®." One line, worth the flip.
- Spontaneous Dissemination (p. 703) — InterLace's one-time free broadcast of a cartridge, the hype mechanism behind the film's success.
- Langesque (p. 703) — after Fritz Lang, the German expressionist director; Hal's tag for The Night Wears a Sombrero.
- stelliform (p. 705) — star-shaped; the punk girl's violet coiffure.
- 'Getting to Know You' (p. 706) — real show tune from The King and I, scoring the montage "no kidding."
- Lorimar tycoon-operas (p. 706) — real 1980s prime-time TV of the Dynasty/Dallas type; JOI's year of Wild Turkey viewing.
After you read: three things
1. Film criticism is how Hal touches his father — and endnote 289 says he's wrong. Hal reads the movie as aloof metaparody and tries to imagine Himself editing it: he "can't summon one shadowy idea of what Himself might have been feeling," and decides "Maybe that was the point... to have nothing really felt going on" (p. 704). The note keyed to that sentence quietly reports what the film actually was. Flip to n.289; the gap between son's reading and note is the scene's real event.
2. Last scene's diagnosis, staged. The essay said Hal manipulates feeling-terms "well enough to satisfy everyone but himself that he's in there" (p. 694). Now watch it live: a room of absorbed watchers, shoes off, at home — and Hal noting that people sense he's "there only in a very technical sense" (pp. 702–703), the only spectator not taken in, thinking about a different cartridge entirely. Even the essay's vocabulary recurs: his father's Wild Turkey year is dated to a "post-carrot anhedonic" patch (p. 706).
3. Boone's wisecrack has a body count, says the coda. Her take — the girl's salvation is just "the exchange of one will-obliterating 'habit' for another" (p. 706) — is witty and gets her shushed. The narrator's closing paragraph then tells you, over the heads of everyone in the room, that this exact clever reading is what not-yet-desperate newcomers use to quit Boston AA (pp. 343–374's world), and what coming back afterward looks like. The nun movie and the halfway house are one page apart.
Written only from this scene and earlier pages. Safe to read before you start.