Struck plagiarizes the A.F.R. train-cult (pp. 1058–1059)
Struck’s own historical dad, during Jim’s own childhood in Rancho Mirage, was an inveterate red-wine-with-heavy-tranqs-on-the-side drinker, who used to make late-night phone calls to people he didn’t know very well and make statements he later had to retract at great length, until finally one autumn night the Dad had staggered out and attempted a one-and-a-half tuck into the Struck family’s backyard pool that he hadn’t recalled had been drained, resulting in a neck brace for life that ended his career as a low-80s golfer, resulting in incredible bitterness and family trauma, before little J.A.L.S. Jr. was shipped off to the Rolling Hills Academy.
Context
Buried mid-plagiarism, in a single runaway clause, the raw drops the whole shape of Struck's childhood: a red-wine-and-tranqs father whose drunk late-night phone calls he'd spend days retracting, who finally dove a one-and-a-half tuck into a pool he'd forgotten was drained, wrecked his neck for life, and blew up the family — after which the kid got "shipped off" to an academy. It's the book's central wrecked-father pattern in miniature and it rhymes hard: the drinking, the pratfall catastrophe delivered by the father's own misjudging body, the son exported to tennis. What lands is the placement — Struck's father-disaster surfaces as a throwaway aside inside a term paper he's too hungover and bored to write honestly, the son unconsciously reproducing the father's own grandiose-then-retracting relation to language even while pretending the wound isn't his subject.