the A.D.A.'s Ninth Step: the comedy played straight

The scene's method: it surrounds real anguish with pure absurdity and refuses to let the absurdity cancel the anguish. The A.D.A. shares in the "odd defecatory posture men used to try to communicate earnestness," his hat spinning between his calves, producing a high-pitched grief-noise that "gave Pat the howlers," while her epileptic dog has "a very small loud-noise seizure" at his rage. Every physical detail is comic; none of it makes his torment less genuine. This is the register the whole anthology operates in — sincerity and ridiculousness held together, the earnest man rendered faintly preposterous without being mocked. The book neither sneers at his recovery-speak nor sentimentalizes his pain; it plays the comedy dead straight and lets the reader feel both at once.