The professional conversationalist — "I’m ten for Pete’s sake. I…"
‘I’m ten for Pete’s sake. I think maybe your appointment calendar’s squares got juggled. I’m the potentially gifted ten-year-old tennis and lexical prodigy whose mom’s a continental mover and shaker in the prescriptive-grammar academic world and whose dad’s a towering figure in optical and avant-garde film circles […] I’m not even up to J yet, in the condensed O.E.D., much less Québec or malevolent Lurias.’
Context
Hal punctures his father's espionage rant with a deadpan family dossier that is also the theme's org chart: lexical prodigy son, prescriptive-grammar mover-and-shaker mother, optics-and-film father. The closer files the novel's entire Québec plot under unreached alphabet — he can't be implicated in anything past J because he hasn't read that far yet. The O.E.D. as the measure of what exists.