Mario’s birth and defects — "The tall and eye-poppingly curvaceous Avril…"

The second Incandenza son arrives out of a pregnancy nobody knew was happening — Avril carried Mario seven months without showing, without a single legible sign, "bled like clockwork" the whole way. The book installs concealment at the literal origin of a family member: a secret pregnancy in a household the rest of the novel will define by secrets kept and information managed. That the hiddenness is framed almost admiringly, as a feat of a body that gives nothing away, is the tell — the same opacity that will later look like agoraphobia and politeness-roulette is here a woman gestating a whole person undetected. The family's founding fact is a thing that didn't show.