Pemulis scores the DMZ

The Hamlet frame made literal furniture. As Pemulis rides his elaborate anti-tail route home with the DMZ, Hal waits in his chair with the "Riverside Hamlet" open in his lap — reading the play for one of Mario's film projects — while directly overhead hangs "an old print of a detail from the minor and soft-core Alexandrian mosaic Consummation of the Levirates." The stacking is the whole joke and the whole thesis: a levirate marriage is a man taking his dead brother's widow to wife, which is precisely the Claudius-Gertrude offense that sets Hamlet in motion, and here the image of that consummation hangs over the family's own Hamlet-figure as he reads the play itself. The book doesn't argue the parallel; it decorates the room with it. Hal sits inside the frame — the text in his hands, the levirate scene above his head — waiting, characteristically, for the drugs, the prince of the house reading his own plot without appearing to notice he's under it.