JOI's life, death, and the founding of E.T.A.
the father, a dipsomaniacal tragedian progressively crippled by obsessions with death by spider-bite and by stage fright […] a father who somewhere around the nadir of his professional fortunes apparently decided to go down to his Raid-sprayed basement workshop and build a promising junior athlete the way other fathers might restore vintage autos or build ships inside bottles, or like refinish chairs, etc.
Context
The transmission belt starts one generation further back than the book usually shows. JOI's own father — a failed Tucson actor, a drunk, phobic of spider-bite and of the stage — decides at the bottom of his career to "build" his son into a tennis player the way a defeated man might restore a car or finish a chair. The verb is build: the boy is a project, a compensation for the father's ruin, assembled in a Raid-sprayed basement (the spray already gesturing at the spider-horror the son grows up watching). Everything the book does with James Incandenza and his own three sons is prefigured here in the grandfather's workshop — the child as engineering problem, love routed through a discipline, the father's failure converted into the son's regimen.