the one place that's very real — "Mario’s felt good both times in…"
Mario’s felt good both times in Ennet’s House because it’s very real; people are crying and making noise and getting less unhappy, and once he heard somebody say God with a straight face and nobody looked at them or looked down or smiled in any sort of way where you could tell they were worried inside.
Context
The recovery house rendered from the one perspective in the novel incapable of irony: to Mario, Ennet House is precious precisely for what the E.T.A. world can't bear — people crying in front of each other, saying God with a straight face, getting less unhappy out loud, nobody rolling their eyes. The passage quietly states the whole positive value of the Program against the book's ambient cool: the House is where realness is not embarrassing, where a wrecked person can be openly wrecked and openly mending, and that permission is itself the treatment.