Pages 736–747

E.T.A., Ennet House, and the A.F.R., cross-cut · first-time reader guide · all scenes

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

Ennet House, same night, minutes after the dental nightmare of pp. 723–724 tears Joelle awake: she cleans the 5-Woman room with Kleenex and stale water — "Joelle used to like to get really high and then clean. Now she was finding she just liked to clean" — while the intake-night crowd rumbles below ("She could feel their voices in the floor"; you know from pp. 729–736 who is sitting down there in a veil). The cleaning frames eleven pages of memory: Orin, the Back Bay co-op, her way into James Incandenza's films, and one Thanksgiving at the Headmaster's House. It's the fullest outside look at the Incandenzas the book has given you.

Terms, in order of appearance

YYY tapes (p. 736) — recordings of her old M.I.T. radio station (pp. 181ff); not played tonight, out of consideration.
Le Masque (p. 737) — French, "the mask": Avril's joking name for JOI's blank facial expression.
Everclear (p. 741) — real near-pure grain alcohol; the lineman's punch.
'Ecstasy of St. Teresa' (p. 742) — real Bernini sculpture in Rome's Santa Maria della Vittoria: a nun in mystical rapture; the film parks on it for 240 seconds.
P.G.O.A.T. (p. 743) — Orin's private acronym for her, from the pp. 289ff material; endnote 307, on who approached whom, is worth the flip.
F&C (p. 743) — endnote 310: Film-and-Cartridge Studies, her B.U. major.
Bazin / Personalistes (p. 745) — André Bazin, real French film theorist; the dinner-table small talk runs graduate-seminar deep.
candela (p. 745) — real SI unit of luminous intensity; ten-year-old Hal's party trick.
haplology (p. 745) — real linguistics term: dropping one of two identical syllables; Hal requests examples.

After you read: three things

1. The scene audits Orin's version of his family. His midnight seminars — the Moms as "emotional sun," Himself a black hole, "his father's face any room's fifth wall" (p. 737) — get filed under Joelle's hard-won maxim: "Never trust a man on the subject of his own parents" (p. 739). Watch her corrections accumulate: the Quaker-Oats-box confession, her A− in Developmental Psych. as deadpan gloss, her suspicion that Orin wanted her as a conduit to his father — "A three-way bond" (p. 740).

2. Her film criticism finds what Hal's couldn't. She reads the Work as "a brilliant optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication" — but catches the flashes: three almost-subliminal cuts of facial torment, sped up "as if they compromised him somehow" (p. 741), and the Bernini shot's buried thesis, "self-forgetting as the Grail" — freedom from "one's inescapable P.O.V." (pp. 742–743). Set this against Hal at p. 704 deciding the point was "to have nothing really felt going on." Two children of the Work, opposite verdicts.

3. The Thanksgiving is gracious and terrifying at once, and nothing at it is fake. Avril puts everyone at ease; the whole table inclines toward her "like heliotropes" — Joelle catches herself doing it; her flute's level never goes down; JOI rises to freshen his shimmering tumbler "and never returned" (p. 746). Count what's never mentioned: turkey, tennis, the drink, the dog behind the spotless doggie-dish. The dinner "ended in a kind of explosion of goodwill"; that night she does her first intentional lines of cocaine, to stay awake cleaning.

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