Joelle cleaning; the Incandenza Thanksgiving (pp. 737–738)

Cleaning an Ennet House room by lamplight, Joelle turns over the thing Orin used to unload on her at night: the conviction that his father disliked him exactly to the degree Jim was even aware he existed, and that no amount of stadium-roared punting glory could ever wash out the "basic fatherly dislike." Joelle's own gloss is the scene's sharpest instrument — she has learned "never trust a man on the subject of his own parents," because however tall and basso he gets he still sees them from a tiny child's arrested vantage. So the entry holds two truths at once: the wound is real (Jim was genuinely a "black hole" to Orin, his face "any room's fifth wall") and Orin's reading of it is warped, "limited and arrested and maybe unreal," inflated into "some hideous exceptional thing" when it was, Joelle notes, banal and average. The theme's father-hunger seen from the one clear-eyed outside witness, who loves the son and does not believe his story.