the theme in one sentence · S1
I have been coached for this like a Don before a RICO hearing. A neutral and affectless silence. The sort of all-defensive game Schtitt used to have me play: the best defense: let everything bounce off you; do nothing. I'd tell you all you want and more, if the sounds I made could be what you hear.
Context
The whole book's wound stated flat, at the moment the silence policy collapses into speech: a mind overflowing with what it would say, walled off from a room by the one fact that the sounds it can produce are not the sounds anyone receives. "If the sounds I made could be what you hear" is the conditional the entire novel lives under, and the tennis defense (let everything bounce off you, do nothing) turns out to be a communication doctrine that costs Hal the one time he needs to be understood. Moments later he closes with "I cannot make myself understood, now… Call it something I ate."