Who he is: the eyebrowless, caustic, unloved-for-no-reason Little Buddy

texture · STANDING

• When: STANDING (background identity, true throughout the book; portrait assembled from 3 Nov and 8 Nov scenes; the plagiarist assessment is Hal's running take, voiced in an endnote whose own occasion is dated 11 Nov).
• What: Evan Ingersoll is eleven, of Binghamton NNY, "all of 1.3 m. tall, warmed by baby-fat and high-calorie cerebral endeavor." His face "is completely devoid of eyebrows and is round and dustily freckled, not unlike a Mrs. Clarke pancake." His parents "founded the Rhode Island version of the service where you order groceries by TP" with teenagers in station wagons bringing them out. Hal's considered portrait, embedded in Lyle's diagnosis: a "smart soft caustic kid" with "the runty, cuddled look of a Mama's boy from way back" and "a quick intelligence he squanders on an insatiable need to advance some impression of himself." And in Hal's private file he belongs, with Struck and sometimes Pemulis, to E.T.A.'s congenital plagiarists — who "put so much more work into camouflaging their plagiarism than it would take just to write up an assignment from conceptual scratch," and who "aren't lazy so much as kind of navigationally insecure," needing "a detailed map's assurance that somebody has been this way before them."