the O.J. Incandenza profile transcript
Insane is just like a catch-term, it doesn’t describe anything, it isn’t a reason for anything. The Stork was a full-blown demented alcoholic for the last three years of his life, and he put his head in the microwave, and I think just in terms of unpleasantness you’d have to be sort of insane to kill yourself in such a painful way.
Context
Orin's forensic capsule of his father — the best single précis of Himself's last years, delivered to a magazine profiler he's trying to impress. He refuses "insane" as meaningless and instead itemizes: the demented daily drinking, the microwave, and against it the tennis academy built, the non-fog window glass invented and sold to Mitsubishi, the dozen art-films people still write theses on, the health-care-professional impersonations. It's a son doing the one kind of mourning available to him, an audit — measuring the father by whether he "functioned," unable to say plainly that he loved him or lost him, only that the Stork was, monstrously, both demented and productive to the end.