Orin and Hal on the phone (p. 1007)

The reply to Avril's letters is the cruelest possible engineering of non-acknowledgment: Orin has "the most retardate PR staffer he can make hold the crayon" send his own mother a form fan-response, signed "Jethro Bodine, Assistant Mailroom Technician," complete with an autographed action photo, as though her letters were fan mail from a stranger. The illiterate solecisms ("how important you're letter has been") are the point — a private joke "She'd never get it." The mother's intimate correspondence answered as if she were an anonymous member of the public, by a fictional flunky: the disowning made into a bureaucratic ritual, so that the son never has to acknowledge the mother even to refuse her.