the Clipperton funeral aftermath

The family's information compartments, mapped in one sentence. After the Clipperton suicide, "Mario probably told Lyle all about everything, back down in the weight room, but he sure never told Hal or the Moms; and Himself was already in and out of rehabs and hardly a credible source on much of anything by this point." The routing is the point: even Mario — the family's least secretive member — confides the horror to the guru Lyle but not to his own brother or mother, and the father is by now too far gone to be told anything true. The household is a set of sealed compartments through which hard information does not pass: what one member knows, the others don't, and the father has dropped out of the circuit of the knowable entirely. The family that runs on managed appearances manages, above all, who gets to know what.