the soup debate: the ones you might call corny

The novel's boldest sincerity-move, and it is staged as a dare. Steeply defends the plainest American ideals — freedom from tyranny, to love who you love, "Frozen yogurt. A tall lemonade on a squeak-free porch swing" — "with seriousness, even in this wig," lipstick smeared onto one incisor, a grotesque cross-dressed operative on a mountainside. The book piles every possible ground for a sneer onto the moment (the ugly disguise, the frozen-yogurt banality, the fact that this is a manipulative spook talking) and then stakes the ideals' truth precisely on their surviving all of it. "The ones you might call corny" is the tell: Steeply pre-names the ironic objection and speaks the corn anyway. Sincerity's viability tested at simultaneous maximum corniness and maximum absurdity of speaker — and the scene's refusal to let us off the hook with a wink is the whole point.