Joelle on the family’s secrets
The whole family was lousy with secrets, she’d decided, was part of the nonturkey dinner’s sadness. From each other, themselves, itself. A big one being this pretense that overt eccentricity was the same as openness. I.e. that they were all ‘exactly as crazy as they seem’—the punter’s phrase.
Context
The thesis statement 150 was building toward, delivered flat. The Incandenzas are "lousy with secrets" — kept from each other, from themselves, from the family-as-organism — and the master trick is the pretense that being floridly, displayably eccentric is the same as being open. Orin's own phrase, "exactly as crazy as they seem," is the con: perform enough visible strangeness (the UV plants, the no-turkey in-joke, the candela recitations) and everyone stops looking for what's underneath, because surely people this openly odd have nothing left to hide. Displayed eccentricity as camouflage for the real secrets — it's the exact mechanism of the doggie-dish table, now named.