the odd couple of libations: JOI's domestic alcoholism
They’d been the odd couple of libations, the muscled fitness-guru and the tall slope-shouldered optician/director, often down there in the weight room til all hours, sitting on the towel dispenser, drinking, Lyle with his Caffeine Free Diet Coke, Incandenza with his Wild Turkey.
Context
The inherited-disease thread's portrait of the father's alcoholism in its habitual domestic register, upstream of everything the sons become. The Wild Turkey is an institution — nightly, all-hours, ritualized against Lyle's Diet Coke — and its function is stated precisely: intoxication is JOI's only channel of feeling, the affectless sober man swinging "way out to one side or the other of the human emotional spectrum" only when drunk. The theme's stake is that the family's disease is legible here as a communication system: Himself can only open up "injudiciously" through the bottle, which is exactly the deformation his sons inherit. (The C– marriage grade and the family system are family-hamlet's; Mario-as-attendant is fathers-sons' — routed.)