the odd couple of libations: JOI's domestic alcoholism — "James Incandenza was one of those…"
James Incandenza was one of those profound-personality-change drinkers who seemed quiet and centered and almost affectless when he was sober but would move way out to one side or the other of the human emotional spectrum, when drunk, and seem to open up in a way that was almost injudicious.
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.)