Joelle cleans; the Thanksgiving audit

Joelle is the anthology's ideal instrument: an outsider who married into the family through Orin, got closer to Jim than Orin ever did, then walked away and spent four years not thinking about any of them — until Gately keeps bubbling them back up. From that clean distance she delivers the verdict the family can never deliver on itself, ranked and clinical: the second-saddest family she's ever seen. And she immediately supplies her own epistemology for why the Incandenzas' self-report can't be trusted — you're far more intuitive about a lover's family than your own, and a man narrating his parents does it "from the perspective of a tiny child, still, and will always." The whole scene is built to license her audit: the one witness positioned to see the system from outside and old enough to name what she sees.