JOI's obituary / E.T.A. founding

The family enters the novel already under state watch. Avril's grad-school involvement — "however demonstrably nonviolent" — with the Québecois-Separatist Left put her name on the R.C.M.P.'s "Personnes à Qui On Doit Surveiller Attentivement" List (Persons Who Must Be Attentively Watched), and the visa ordeal that followed was so obstructive that "[t]he birth of the Incandenzas' first child, Orin, had been at least partly a legal maneuver." The clan that will become the espionage plot's gravitational center — the auteur's estate the A.F.R. infiltrates, the Orin the honeytrap works — is watched from before E.T.A. exists, its matriarch a name on a Canadian surveillance list and its firstborn conceived partly as border-craft. Surveillance is in the family's founding documents.