Vomiting

"The novel is rife with vomiting characters," and the motif is flagged at the attaché's "sort of nauseous" duties before spreading through the book's population of the sick and the anxious. It runs from a projectile-vomiting anecdote and Jim and Joelle vomiting to the shit-storm's "puke-crusted T-shirts" and "puke-white complexions," and it attaches to specific bodies and states — Orin "vomiting with anxiety" before dinner, Marathe's broomstick/vomit confession, Tiny's secret vomiting, and Fackelmann vomiting through the binge. The image is one of the book's plainest registers of the body in revolt: dread, withdrawal, and disease all announce themselves the same way, from the mouth outward. It is a modest but insistent thread, a physical undertone beneath the novel's more elaborate systems of waste and appetite.