Teeth & the dental

Teeth carry Hal's paternal inheritance, the dream-currency of rot, and a running class-marker of addiction. Hal's dental issues are flagged early — "The caries are Himself's legacy" — and the theme runs from the A.D.A.'s wife's tooth-cleaning compulsion to Hal's recurring nightmare of teeth "like shale," splintering to grit, "a symptom of something way more dire... that no one wanted to confront him about." The dreams keep converting inheritance into guilt: a second dream of "bills... for somebody else's teeth, not my teeth," and Joelle's own nightmare of red-tipped canines, "teeth that have been up to things she hasn't known about." Around these, dentition sorts people — recovery's "roundabout Denial shit as persons without teeth," incisorless Johnette counting Hal's perfect teeth — and Carlisle even builds a dental-genetics paternity case from the "homodont argument." Teeth are where lineage, decay, and denial all show at once.