the admissions interview

C.T.'s signature tell, planted on page one: cornered, the uncle's voice acquires the quality of a man shouting from a growing distance, present and receding at once. It is the acoustic of the whole administrative-family style — maximum audible output, minimum actual approach — and the book will replay it (the two Tavises of the waiting room, the talking "around and around") as the mark of a man whose entire being is a moving-away disguised as engagement. Here it is the uncle-administrator's involuntary signature under pressure, the family's public face caught fleeing inside its own fluency.