Joelle cleaning; the Incandenza Thanksgiving — "The man’s Work was amateurish, she’d…"
The man’s Work was amateurish, she’d seen, when Orin had had his brother—the unretarded one—lend them some of The Mad Stork’s Read-Only copies. Was amateurish the right word? More like the work of a brilliant optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication. Technically gorgeous, the Work, with lighting and angles planned out to the frame. But oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness—no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience. Like conversing with a prisoner through that plastic screen using phones, the upperclassman Molly Notkin had said of Incandenza’s early oeuvre. Joelle thought them more like a very smart person conversing with himself.
Context
Arguably the book's central review of JOI: "a brilliant optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication." Technique total, towardness zero; Notkin's prisoner-phone simile against Joelle's sharper one (self-conversation, cf. 132's Hal declining to watch Himself talk). Also note the household word for circulating prints: "Read-Only copies" — the same generational vocabulary 098's spooks use for the samizdat census; the family lending library and the insurgent cell ecology run on the same format tiers (cross-ref, not inference).