Hal's Battle of the Books
for a proudly nonchalant mother or even a by-this-time-as-far-as-he-was-concerned-pretty-much-out-there father, at these times of public performance and pleasure
Context
The catalogued referent, verified in situ: the "out-there father" is Himself, by this point so withdrawn into alcohol and delusion that little Hal's feats of memorized recitation land on a parent already gone. Hal performs his precocity for approval and gets, from the father, nothing — the man is "pretty-much-out- there," present in body only. The son's whole gifted-child machinery is aimed partly at a father too far into his own vanishing to register it, which is why the "milky corona" of approval Hal chases comes only from the Moms's two hands.