Joelle cleaning; Incandenza Thanksgiving
Orin had no idea what his father thought or felt about anything. He thought Jim wore the opaque blank facial expression his mother in French sometimes jokingly called Le Masque. The man was so blankly and irretrievably hidden that Orin said he’d come to see him as like autistic, almost catatonic. Jim opened himself only to the mother.
Context
JOI's flat-affect register from the outside: a man so sealed off he reads as "autistic, almost catatonic" to his own son — the withdrawn, unreachable interior of the book's most consequential suicide, years before the microwave. (Carlisle flags the inheritance: "any room's fifth wall" is the formula Jim used for HIS father's face, p. 31.)