JOI’s life and the founding of E.T.A. — "ceded control over most of the…"

The succession machinery, stated as dry institutional fact, and it is the Claudius structure exactly. In "the last five years of his life" the founder-king James Incandenza liquidates his assets and hands "control over most of the Enfield Tennis Academy's operations" to "his wife's half-brother" — the uncle installed at the head of the dead man's house before the man is even dead. The Academy runs "first under the direction of Dr. James Incandenza and then under the administration of his half-brother-in-law Charles Tavis, Ed.D.," the two reigns named in one clause, the handover pre-arranged. What the book will dramatize as usurpation is here just a line in an institutional history: the king abdicates into obsessive filmmaking and the wife's brother, a former sports administrator from a Canadian provincial college, takes the throne. The Hamlet frame is built into the school's own founding record.