anhedonia

The clinical word for the inability to feel: the numb interior flatness — "an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul" — that the novel's essay-section on depression treats as millennial America's signature affliction and as Hal Incandenza's own secret state ("the hip empty mask, anhedonia," p. 695; Hal is nonetheless sure his father's suicide "wasn't because of standard U.S. anhedonia," p. 694). The same section is careful to rank it: "dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain" — Kate Gompert's predator-grade depression, which unlike anhedonia "is itself a feeling" (p. 695). Among the recovering, the word is nearly unsayable: at one Substance-recovery group meeting nobody "came right out and used the terms melancholy or anhedonia or depression" (p. 504).