Talons, beaks & claws (vestiges of the primitive)

A "vestiges of the primitive" thread runs through the book, in which human hands and faces keep sprouting the equipment of predators. Greg Carlisle notes at the thread's first, comic appearance that "[i]mages of beaks and claws, ludicrous here, will recur throughout the novel in images more primitive and ominous," and the promise pays off in Hal's "nails-as-vestigial-talons swerve" — "vestiges" traced to the Latin vestigium, footprint. On court the players take on a "reptilian tinge," Hal having "grown a beak" through "probing and pecking," while Mario's fingers become talons in a "reptilian/dinosaurian" register. The primitive surfaces most viciously in the dental-predatory image — "the teeth of a creature that carelessly tears at meat" — and in van Cleve's "talons," culminating in "real beaks and claws." The motif keeps insisting that beneath the mannered surface of tennis and manners lies something older and hungrier.