Lenz and Green’s night walk
Lenz’s mother Mrs. Lenz, a thrice-divorcée and Data Processor, was so unspeakably obese […] Mrs. L. lost all will to Data Process or cook or clean, or nurture, or finally even move, simply reclining in a custom-designed 1.5-meter-wide recliner […] until four months after the huge settlement she ruptured and died
Context
Another mirror mother-system on the book's margins, this one the maternal grotesque as pure engulfing appetite. Lenz narrates his Family-Of-Origin as catastrophe: a mother too vast to fit a Parents'-Day desk (which she shattered, and never came back), who died wedged in a Greyhound lavatory window and then, post-settlement, "lost all will to… nurture, or finally even move," reclining until she ruptured with her mouth crammed full of peach cobbler. It's the inverse of Avril's exact, controlling, high-posture maternity — the mother as ungovernable mass, all consumption and no care, "basic disinterest" in the son papered over with thin excuses — and it produces, in Lenz, a monster of a different make. The novel keeps stocking its edges with these ruined mothers so the Incandenza matriarch reads as one point on a wide field of maternal damage.