James O. Incandenza: a filmography (p. 991)
The headmaster of a newly constructed high-altitude sports academy (Watt) becomes neurotically obsessed with litigation over the construction’s ancillary damage to a V.A. hospital far below, as a way of diverting himself from his wife’s (Heath’s) poorly hidden affair with the academically renowned mathematical topologist who is acting as the project’s architect (‘Rection’).
Context
(At Least) Three Cheers for Cause and Effect is Himself filming his own marriage almost undisguised: a headmaster who builds a hilltop sports academy over a V.A. hospital — E.T.A. exactly, down to the litigation the '98-blizzard flashback in 179 also names — and who buries himself in that litigation to avoid noticing his wife's "poorly hidden affair" with the mathematician-architect. The Gertrude frame authored by the cuckold himself, the family's central open secret set on its own grounds. And it is not the only one: Various Small Flames shows a man "drinking bourbon while his wife and an Amway representative have acrobatic coitus in the background's lit hallway," and Fun with Teeth a dentist doing sixteen unanesthetized root-canals on an academic "he suspects of involvement with his wife." Across the catalog the same triangle recurs — the drinking husband, the unfaithful wife, the rival — until the marriage's worst secret looks less like biography leaking than like the father's compulsory subject.