Joelle cleans and remembers the Incandenza Thanksgiving (p. 746)
Mario, reaching for the salad, fell out of his chair, and was helped up by one of the tennis players amid much hilarity. Mario’s deformities seemed wide-ranging and hard to name. Joelle decided he looked like a cross between a puppet and one of the big-headed carnivores from Spielberg’s old special-effects orgies about reptiles. […] Deformed Mario’s broad smile was so constant you could have hung things from the corners of it.
Context
Same dinner, later and winier. "[W]ide-ranging and hard to name" is the outsider's honest counterpoint to 071's exhaustive clinical catalogue — even a sharp observer can't itemize Mario — and Joelle's puppet-plus-dinosaur reading lands independently on the reptilian/saurian diction of his birth scene. The constant hangable smile, amid a family smiling so hard their cheeks ache, is the scene's one unperformed face.