JOI’s life and the founding of E.T.A.

The royal pairing, and its mismatch is the point. The "tall, ungainly, socially challenged and hard-drinking" Dr. Incandenza's "May–December" marriage to "the extremely tall and high-strung but also extremely pretty and gainly and teetotalling and classy Dr. Avril Mondragon" — the bombshell academic, the only woman ever to hold her McGill chair — reads as a union of unequals across every axis: age, poise, sobriety, ease. The prose lingers on her gainliness against his ungainliness, her teetotalling against his dipsomania, and quietly sets up the whole Gertrude question: why this radiant, composed woman is bound to this collapsing man, and how the family's future ease (her greater laughter with C.T.) will read against this founding asymmetry. The dead king and his too-bright queen, introduced as a study in mismatch.