Take a story's temperature by studying its tone. Is it hopeful? Cynical? Snarky? Playful?
Conversational and Detached
We don't know much about the narrator of Other Voices, Other Rooms, but their tone toward Joel's plight is pretty matter-of-fact and distant. We call it detached because when really awful things happen the narrator just reports it without any comment. For example, after Randolph tells Joel the backstory on Mr. Sansom, this is how the narrator puts it:
He was confused because the story had been like a movie with neither plot nor motive: had Randolph really shot his father? And, most important of all, where was the ending? What had happened to Dolores and old awful Pepe Alvarez? That is what he wanted to know, and that is what he asked. (2.8.32)
We can see Joel's frantic feelings in the repeated questions, but the narrator is as cool as a cucumber: "That is what he wanted to know, and that is what he asked." That straightforward, detached tone sounds like the way you'd tell someone that you'd been to the grocery store, not about some little kid just learning that his Daddy-o had been shot by his new guardian.