The backdrop of bereavement is the perfect storm for an already-abrasive man to become even more mysterious and toxic. oooo I'm so stoic and smart and angry and my life is so hard.

deniable because subjective

I like this aphorism.

At first, I found myself worryingly relating to Ivan, finding his sperginess more charming than the narrator seemed to want to portray, but in hindsight this is due to the narrator of those indications being Peter who is disposed to think less of his brother for disingenuous reasons.

In Chapter 3 Peter projects his own emotional vacancy upon his "retarded" brother who, at this point in the novel, seems far more capable than anyone seems to give him credit for, barring Margaret. Ivan has all the trappings of savant, Peter reads them as incel-coded, later explained that those tendencies could be more aptly characterized by a grief response and lack of a father figure. His grasp of economics is surprisingly bad for a chess savant – "profit as a market inefficiency" and his/corporate labor not having any value because it exists outside his scope of comprehension are those sorts of edgy Good Will Hunting inflammations that don't really hold up to scrutiny. But it's clear via Rooney's reliance upon Wittgenstein that this is not a stand-in opinion, or really even a point to be taken more seriously than a piece of dialogue to reinforce the anecdote that in his earlier years, he was maybe in the JBP/Tate/SJW destroyer pipeline. Kind of a tankie position for him to hold now, but the pendulum swings and it makes perfect sense for his character.

This same sort of thing holds for all the characters I think – they make a lot of sense and have an appreciable depth that can be inferred from their convos (love a dialogue-driven book like this) with their respective supporters/opponents.

Peter becomes less-and-less likable as the novel unfolds, and Ivan is revealed to be far more affable than Rooney is willing to let on to us through Peter. He (Peter) is a dick to everyone. He only treats Ivan like an equal once he (Ivan) appears to be getting laid himself, and even then Peter immediately has to find fault in Ivan's situation in order to regain superiority. He is simultaneously likable despite himself in the way that he has Peter's back against their mom though.

I appreciated that the fallout b/w Ivan and Peter was then laid to bare through the lens of all the other characters highlighting his hypocrisy, gradually pushing Peter to the brink of insanity (appreciable SoC, was giving Quintin Compson and felt like a nasty indulgence of watching a trainwreck – truly didn't know if Peter was gonna off himself).

I could lie and say I was trying to protect him ... How could anyone have a good time with him.

Peter's need to not be some sort of a deviant exposed by Naomi's je ne sais quoi depravity and his desire to have a wife and make her pregnant not out of the warm and fuzzies of aspiring to be a family man like, oh idk, his own father but just to be able to flaunt an artifact of his sexual conquest is gross (atp we're cheering for him to jump into the quay). In this sense, Peter is an interesting character to contrast against e.g. Tomasz from The Unbearable Lightness of Being who seems to lack any shame for similar attitudes towards women. Peter at least seems capable of love.

Seeing Ivan get gud at chess again (withdrawing within himself and hitting the proverbial weights) as a result of the fallout, and the cross pollination of sexual partners producing the dénouement is sweet. I can see the family pulling together after friction just as readily as I can see Peter swan diving off the courthouse and Ivan becoming the version of himself which Peter believes him to be – and I think Rooney wants this (obviously), I like the pacing in this sense.

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