the conversationalist: DuPlessis and Luria seeded under the dental fantasy

The novel's earliest plant of the whole Québec-intrigue cluster, buried at p. 29 inside the professional-conversationalist's fantastical interrogation of ten-year-old Hal: "the whole current intra-Provincial crisis in southern Québec," and "your family's sordid liaison with the pan-Canadian Resistance's notorious M. DuPlessis and his malevolent but allegedly irresistible amanuensis-cum-operative, Luria P———." Four hundred pages before the Marathe/Steeply serial explains any of it, the Incandenza-family-to-Québec-Resistance tie and Luria P—— are already named — the anthology's plot laid out as a paranoid dental-chair delusion. (The conversationalist-as-disguised-JOI and the whole Avril-cavorting litany are surveillance-disguise's / family-hamlet's; landed here is the political-intrigue seed.)