abortive

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.