In addition, Marco's genealogy stresses the insanity, absence, and
abortiveness of its maternal side as much as the alienated, unstable, and obsessive (yet equally successful) features of his recuperated paternal side: its putative beginning, in the nineteenth-century wealth of Effing's robber-baron father, "old man" Barber (146); then the successive degradation of that wealth through three generations, until Marco loses the last of it to unknown highway thieves somewhere in southern Utah in 1971; and the logic of this, indeed its progression from the lunacy traced on Marco's maternal side, to the rationality of his father, Sol.