Molly Notkin’s interrogation (pp. 792–793)

Here the book hands you its own key term — system — through the Duquette family, built as the Incandenzas' mirror-control. Molly Notkin narrates Joelle's family as a pressure vessel: the low-pH Daddy's incestuous regression, the mother's parallel childhood molestation and her decades of denial, everyone wordlessly canning and chewing while the secret compresses — and then, at a Thanksgiving dinner, over a daughter's pre-mashed turkey and under the visiting Incandenza son's raised eyebrow, "the system finally blows" in a full-scale eruption that ends with acid and a garbage disposal. It's the deliberate structural rhyme: two families lousy with secrets, two Thanksgivings, both "exactly as crazy as they seem" as camouflage — except the Duquette system detonates where the Incandenza one holds its serene, heliotropic composure. Joelle's family is the control that shows you what the Incandenza pressure would look like if it ever, once, escaped.