the maternal line's frozen drinker — "He simply sat in his chair…"
He simply sat in his chair, drinking ale and reading the newspaper, for hours, until he fell out of the chair. And then one day he fell out of the chair and didn’t get up again, and that was how your maternal grandfather passed away.
Context
The disease running down Avril's side of the family too, told to Mario as ancestral fact: a great-grandfather who could feel only when drunk and threw his son through a window four times a year, and a grandfather who drank ale in his chair until he simply fell out of it for the last time. The inheritance the novel tracks through the Incandenza men has a maternal tributary — the alcohol as the only door to a frozen man's emotions, and the door that finally killed him.