the Barry Loach saga: Mario's literalism saves a soul
Mario, being alone and only fourteen and largely clueless about anti-stem defensive strategies outside T-stations, had had no one worldly or adult along with him there to explain to him why the request of men with outstretched hands for a simple handshake or High Five shouldn’t automatically be honored and granted, and Mario had extended his clawlike hand and touched and heartily shaken Loach’s own fuliginous hand
Context
The parable's redemption, and it turns entirely on the book's one irony-free perceiver. Everyone worldly enough to have learned "anti-stem defensive strategies" is thereby disqualified from hearing the plea literally; it takes Mario — fourteen, alone, "largely clueless," constitutionally unable to decode a request for a handshake as anything but a request for a handshake — to grant it. His literalism, the same different-physics sincerity that reverses lies' spin in 155, is not a deficit here but the one faculty capable of answering a sincere appeal sincerely, and it saves a soul: Loach is pulled back from disappearing into the street and given the life that lands him at E.T.A. The book's claim is stark — that in a fully ironized world only someone incapable of irony can take the sincere at face value, and that this incapacity, so easily read as naïveté, is the thing that actually rescues people.