Green loves Mildred Bonk
Shy, iridescent, coltish, pelvically anfractuous, amply busted, given to diffident movements of hand brushing flaxen hair from front of dear creamy forehead, movements which drove Bruce Green up a private tree.
Context
The book's signature register in its earliest pure demonstration. The diction is mock-heroic to the point of absurdity — "pelvically anfractuous," "the fickle angel of puberty," a name so unlikely the narrator stops to remark on it — and it is simultaneously, without contradiction, a true rendering of an eighth-grader's total worship. The parody of overwrought romantic prose does not cancel the feeling; it carries it. Wallace's whole irony-sincerity problem is here in miniature, three hundred pages before it gets argued out loud: the sentence laughs at Bruce Green's swoon and means the swoon at the same instant, and you cannot pry the two registers apart.