You know what I didn’t expect to find in the Pellmore-Jason compound? Tenderness. Little moments of genuine kindness. But there are lots of them! We’ve already seen Fondajane being friendly to Belt and trying to put him at ease, and later instantly recognizing that seeing himself in A Fistful of Fists would be hurtful because of what he was going through at the time he was recorded.
Then in this week’s chunk we get a number of displays of empathy and caring from male characters, which to be honest I don’t think I was expecting. Outside of Belt (who’s clearly an outlier from his own society), the men in the novel have tended to be “masculine” in that way that means feelings are for other people to worry about. Whenever we’ve seen people actually trying to treat each other well, it’s been female characters (again, excepting Belt): Belt’s mom. Stevie Strumm. Ms. Clybourn. Maybe Janie Sez and Maggie Mae.
(Please let me know if I’m shortchanging any of the guys. I left the Yachts and their Charity Parties off the list because those are both performative and random, rather than “genuine,” and because I find them ghoulish, even though I know the Yachts themselves don’t.)
For instance, I was genuinely touched during the little exchange between Belt and Jonboat about the box of cereal. Jonboat’s efforts to make Belt feel unstigmatized about whatever meds he may or may not be on was a really sweet effort, but even better was just before that:
“I was saying about your gift,” I said, pointing at the Crunch box. “I brought you a gift.”
“A box of cereal?”
“They really didn’t tell you?”
“They who, Belt?” he said.
“That’s not—never mind. The gift’s under the cereal. Under the bag inside the box, I mean.”
That “they who”/”that’s not—never mind” caught me. What‘s not what? And I thought I realized what it meant, but now as I’m typing another possibility occurs to me. Both are about inans, but the difference is in whether Jonboat knows that Belt converses with them, which I don’t know whether we have evidence about one way or the other! (Belt’s inference that Denise didn’t read the “about the author” blurb on No Please Don’t because it would have raised some questions she would definitely have felt she had to ask suggests that it’s possible Jonboat could know, especially with the fabulous capabilities that come with obscene wealth.)
- Possible meaning #1: Jonboat knows Belt has conversations with inanimate objects. When Belt asks if “they” told Jonboat about the present Belt brought, Jonboat asks conspicuously neutrally, “They who?” Doesn’t want to upset Belt by sounding judgmental or disparaging, but obviously needs to clarify whether Belt’s operating in a shared reality with him or not. Belt gets the implication and waves it off, starting to say “That’s not what I meant, I was talking about the tribe of he-men you employ whom I had to tell one by one why I brought a partial box of cereal to brunch,” then decides instead to skip the explanation and go right to the giving.
- Possible meaning #2: Jonboat is actually genuinely just like “wut who? There have been so many people in this compound today, and I just got off the phone with Dubai and then slipped out, I don’t know which ‘they’ you even mean. Why would I be talking to someone about cereal.” Which Belt self-consciously misinterprets as an oblique reference to his condition, and waves it off, starting to say, etc. etc.
I mentioned this moment in the first place because my interpretation on reading it was #1, and I was touched by what I read as Jonboat’s delicacy. But we know Belt’s personalizing really hard in this section, so I may be wrong.
Paul mentioned that Burroughs shot up his list of favorite characters in this section, and I similarly appreciated his quiet, sly solidity. (I’m always a sucker for an invincibly capable body man, even more when he has a fierce, deadpan wit.) His job is security, but he doesn’t take a brute approach to it when he doesn’t have to—he could have just told Belt if he gets a Quill out one more time, he’s on the street, but instead he empathizes over the nicotine craving and gives some down-to-earth advice about riding it out. (Not too far off from how he advises Belt on how to recover from the concussion he was unfortunately forced to administer to Belt.) And Burroughs and Trip double-team Chad-Kyle when he takes Belt to task for not saying hi. Paul called it “jump[ing] to Belt’s defense,” and that’s exactly how it feels. They’re defending him, and they certainly don’t have to.
For that matter, from the moment Trip arrives in the office, it feels like he’s already adopted Belt as one of his crew, down to mouthing his opinion of Chad-Kyle at Belt and serendipitously choosing the same insult Belt came up with back when he had whorehouse pizza with Lotta. (One of the less instantly obvious pleasures of this book: the truly outlandish and totally accurate things you can say in summarizing episodes from it.) Obviously he’s already committed 100,000 of his dad’s dollars to Belt, but it doesn’t feel like a business-relationship kind of closeness, not even a teenager’s idea of a business relationship. It feels like he’s treating Belt as a pal.
There’s more kindness in this week’s chunk of reading—the lengths Herb goes to to make Belt feel better about Stevie’s being married, and then his frank vulnerability to Jill about fearing “the chickens of his own irregular flossing habit one day coming home to roost,” are especially sweet. But I really wanted to highlight the welcome Belt received at the Compound. It took me totally by surprise.
Of course he repaid it by trying to beat someone to death with a souvenir of his host’s and former best friend’s space travels… But still.
Infinite Zombies 
Jeff, you very perfectly put into words the feeling of this section that I was conscious of but wasn’t explicitly conscious of (if that makes sense).
The whole book lives in varying degrees of hostility–violence to cures, violence to swingsets, jail, nazis, sarcasm at the bank.
Aside from Gus, the one guy who treats Belt without any hostility–even if his ultimate goal is selling handkerchiefs), most of Belt’s encounters have some degree of tension in them.
But the compound is like a sanctuary–great food, stimulating conversation, everyone putting Belt at ease. It’s a damn shame he is pretty explicitly never allowed to go back there.
I took the “they who” bit more at face value, figuring Belt assumed that Jonboat had been briefed about the cereal and was simply surprised to find otherwise. It didn’t occur to me to think about inans, though I think it’s an interesting reading.
I too liked a lot of what happened at the compound, though I’ll confess that Fondajane was a little much at times, and in fact in a couple of places, it was hard for me not to think of her as a sort of Avril Incandenza.
The sweetness of Clyde frying bacon like a maniac to help Belt weather the shirt was really a high point of the book for me, along with their little camaraderie in the moments following. I was really down on Clyde early in the book, but I sure began to warm to him here.
A couple more guys for consideration for your list would be Manx and — I’ve forgotten his name but the research assistant who speaks so soothingly to Belt when his mom falls ill. They are of course pretty minor characters (though I suppose Manx has about as much to say within the text of the book as Jonboat, which is sort of weird to think about, as Jonboat is so much more a part of Belt’s story and feels present by proxy throughout).