Infinite Summer

The names are also so frickin hard to pronounce.

I suppose it is a bit more true to life to have a mixture of strange names instead of everyone named Smith or Brock or some such easy name. I often imagine that first day of school when the teacher is struggling through roll call. A real collection of people have varied and sometimes difficult names. I know mine gets mispronounced about 70% of the time. How about your name?

These tough names are like textual speed bumps! I invariably have to slow down and figure out at least how to deal with it in my head in order to breeze over the name the next time I see it.

I swear I'm gonna end up dropping my mental transmission by hitting one too fast.

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First read.
Reading on Kindle and iPhone.

Hadn't considered Helen and Hugh being one and the same, but it really makes sense, considering the drag. Makes Orin's description of her hilarious, too (p. 246): "Not all that tough or hard, but physically imposing. Large but not unerotic. A girl and a half in all directions..." and "She's more imposing than like most of our starting backfield. But weirdly sexy. The linemen are gaga. The tackles keep making all these cracks about does she maybe want to see their hard profile." (Which last, by the way, made me crack up.)

The CV says that Helen Steeply is close to two meters tall, and ( I forget) somethign like 140kgs, that suggests it is Hugh in drag. maybe taking his cover disguise too seriously by having an affair with a man?

One thing I find interesting is that Orin and the football players find Helen attractive, while the narrator had, during the first Steeply/Marathe scene, said something rather different. "But he appeared huge and bloated as a woman, not merely unattractive but inducing something like sexual despair." (p. 90)

Although that Steeply/Marathe scene seems to be narrated mostly from something like Marathe's perspective, so maybe it's just Marathe's appraisal of Helen.

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"Because so that was let's see."

Also, Marathe knows its Hugh in drag, so he sees "Helen" not as a woman but as a man. Orins description comes off as all the right details of masculinity, only, somehow weirdly sexy =P.

With the stuff about the affair included, I think this is not an actual resume-like CV that one would give out; it seems more like this is the kind information that Steeply would memorize for his cover. The element of the affair is like a little added detail, something Steeply could throw into a discussion on his career, to lend it some faux legitimacy--and subtly aid in the other lie, that Steeply is a woman and not a man.

The 'heartless' article on p 142 is listed as the "ONLY PUTATIVE PUBLISHED ARTICLE", which isn't consistent with the CV. Also (to repeat something I mentioned a while back), the publication titles are all units of time listed in longest-to-shortest order, which would be too coincidental to be real.

Also, the timing of the CV inserted in the middle of Joelle's walk (her having just passed the film-cartridge display) would seem to indicate that Steeply is there with Joelle, perhaps following her, or monitoring the display (in kind of a cinematic way, as if the camera is diverted toward something else it catches in the frame). I'm not sure if the overall timing of the novel supports that, though.