Tennis and the Feral Prodigy
Have Himself hunch down to put a long pale arm around your shoulders and tell you that his own father had told him that talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost. Have a father whose own father lost what was there. Have a father who lived up to his own promise and then found thing after thing to meet and surpass the expectations of his promise in, and didn’t seem just a whole hell of a lot happier or tighter wrapped than his own failed father, leaving you yourself in a kind of feral and flux-ridden state with respect to talent.
Context
The three-generation belt, stated as a belt. Himself hunches down to tell Hal what "his own father had told him" — the talent-as-dark-gift sermon, almost word for word the doctrine JOI's father delivered in the Tucson garage (scene 049: "Talent is its own expectation, Jim: you either live up to it or it waves a hankie"). The narration then lays the three men side by side in two flat imperatives: a grandfather who lost what he had, a father who lived up to his and found no more peace for it than the failed grandfather did, and Hal himself left "feral and flux-ridden," heir to a gift that has never once made anyone in the line happy. This is the whole theme's argument compressed to a paragraph: the inheritance is real, it is verbal (each father quoting his father), and it delivers expectation without ever delivering the contentment it promises.