J.O.I.'s father's garage monologue (p. 164)
This gleaming hapless lox of a kid was some client of my father’s son… son of one of his clients. So he came for the client, to put on some sham show of fatherly concern. He wore a hat and coat and tie at 95° plus. The client. Can’t recall the name. There was something canine about his face, I remember, that his kid across the net had inherited. My father wasn’t even sweating. I grew up with the man in this town and never once saw him sweat, Jim. I remember he wore a boater and the sort of gregariously plaid uniform professional men had to wear on the weekends then.
Context
Memory's selectivity dramatized inside the retelling: twenty-seven years on, the client's name is gone while the canine face, the boater, and the unsweating father survive in photographic detail — the faculty keeping exactly what wounded and dumping the labels. (The unbracketed ellipsis after "my father's son…" is DFW's own mid-sentence correction, not our trim.)