Molly Notkin's party
Joelle’s never liked the fact that Notkin’s father’s photograph is nailed at iconic height to the wall above the headboard, a systems planner out of Knoxville TN, his smile the smile of a man who wears white loafers and a squirting carnation.
Context
A minor, mordant father-sighting: Molly Notkin keeps her father's photo "nailed at iconic height" over the bed, a Knoxville systems-planner with a squirting-carnation smile, and it gives Joelle the creeps. A father enshrined — literally hung at icon height, like a saint's image — by a daughter, the image standing in for the man. Faint texture, but it rhymes with the theme's recurring reduction of fathers to hung images and photographs (Notkin's father here; the chicken-farmer Daddy's iconic photo elsewhere), the father as a picture on a wall you can't quite live under.