In his 1967 postmodernist primer The Literature of Exhaustion, John Barth says: “A labyrinth . . . is a place in which, ideally, all the possibilities of choice are embodied and . . . must be exhausted before one reaches the heart.”

Thirty years later, as postmodernism twitches through its death throes, DFW publishes the labyrinthine Infinite Jest, where all possibilities are exhausted while shattering the heart. The novel is structured around a Sierpinski Gasket, a complex series of triangles multiplied through variable fractals and superfractals. (DFW was a maths whiz before being a lit whiz). This means the book is long because of rigid mathematical constraints set by Mr. Wallace, and complaints about the size will be countered with like diagrams and equations. So there.

Plot? Well. There are like a few.

James O. Incandenza is responsible for producing an entertainment so lethal the viewer is vegetated with pleasure. (Not unlike the Japanese Ringu series but with a no shrieking schoolgirls). His presence comes to dominate the inner lives of Hal and Avril and Mario and Orin who discuss and deride and avoid and confront this “après-garde” filmmaker—sort of a Bostonian Richard Kern, with Joelle Van Dyne as his Lung Leg. Hal is the protagonist (of sorts) in the book: a precocious tennis wizard with a bulging brain.

The most compelling narrative for me takes place at the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, revolving around the life of former small-time muscle Don Gately, who I can’t help but picture as Jared Leto but with like narrower eyebrows. There are too many scenes to remember across this ten-book-sized book but coming straight from reading I can assert that Gately is rendered with explosive pain and cruelty during a pivotal fight scene, the incendiary flashbacks, and the drudgery-of-recovery scenes.

The paraplegic assassins (Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents) are a wackier detour—like a cross between The Simpsons and like Ingmar Bergman—and for me, comprise the boring boggy bits where DFW wields banality as part of his grand stratagem for reinventing the novel. The sheer volume of acronyms across these chapters becomes unbearably tedious after a while and most readers will want to wheel these people off the mountain before long. (Except towards the end when DFW redeems the lead wheelman in a frightening and touching exchange).

Good things: the writing is unbelievable. There are pages of exhilarating aliveness and genius and speed and strength and sentences that build to crescendos of tension and tragedy. The lexicon is stellar and sublime, brimming with wordplay and revelling in the sheer delight of language. The book basically meets every criteria. It is good and bad and happy and sad and silly and serious and entertaining and tedious. It’s not short, though.

Bad things: there’s nothing other than the structural choice DFW made to defend this book’s outrageous length. It really is far loo long. I also feel sometimes the narrative voice could use a little variety. Each narrative uses the same DFW register, with only a few forays into first-person or (once) dialect experiment. I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone—no one apart from like lit-geeks will read novels this long.

DFW wanted to write something sad. I think he achieved this, though Infinite Jest is more about what Will Self called the slapstick of addiction. Although we’re made to like feel deeply for these people when it counts—spiralling in and out of addictions, their lives falling from them—the breathless energy and imagination of this book reaches a pitch of relentless satirical cleverness that enslaves the narrative. When DFW read in public he hurled words from his throat like a bullet train and this book has the endless splurge of a storyteller letting loose the confines of his remarkable mind to an exhaustive extent. So this isn’t a ‘moving’ book as such, though it is the size of ten books so it does move occasionally. It's not the literature of exhaustion, but it is bloody exhausting.

Indulgence, genius, madness, a worrying addiction to language: this has like the lot.

I say only what you of the U.S.A. pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.

2.21.25 reading/review

I suppose this is my third reading but one removed by almost 20 years since the last. I attempted recently with friends, and it didn't work, largely because they hadn't invited literature inside their heads, their very lives. A possible reading of IJ leads one to imagine Hamlet envisioned as through certain technological political developments that I think Wallace understood even without experiencing them. It has given us our current president, with a mandate. Perhaps that's the equivalent of taking DMZ before an admissions interview? It means that there are never enough reels or likes. Only shock treatment can reset us--or collapse of the Gulf Stream. That last bit is coming while we argue about the skin color of people on TV (Thanks Onion for that last headline). I didn't feel as enraptured about Eschaton during this reading as I had previously, but I felt floored by the testimony of Gately and Madame Psychosis. My reverence achieved by kenosis. The canyon dialogue between Marathe and Steeply had me mesmerized like never before. I suppose I will now link the hospital (graveyard) scene with the Nixon postscript in Gravity’s Rainbow


Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of 'psst' that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer.

I inadvertently deleted my review months ago. Decided I didn't care, although I now do, if only to stitch something together about anxiety and fatigue. How my late capitalist soul is suffering. I have found a pair of balms for my affliction: the prose of Umberto Eco and the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. I am not sure what that suggests about either my soul or my means of treatment?

Infinite Jest is important. I don't believe it matters when one reads it?

5.0 Stars – Where does one begin with this classic brute of a novel? The sheer scope of this work is intimidating to cover let alone review. What DFW does do so very well, throughout this visceral, fun, blaring masterworks is find the perfect balance and strike using said balance at the heart of what it means to have a reading experience that feels alive, that feels as though it has a multitude of layers and ultimately takes you to places you’re not even sure you ever knew existed as a reader!

The words to even commence this monstrously epic & learned journey elude me, but for now suffice to say the hype is lived up to, surpassed & now lives somewhere in the dusty particles that now lay smothered & frozen-in-place underneath the tar of the newly paved highway to the sky this epic piece of modern literature accelerated down en-route to where it now sits out there in the ether, floating about somewhere in the year of the Depend adult undergarment!

Wow. Infinite Jest could equally have been called Beautiful Disaster. I will not even rate this book. It’s unrateable. There are so many different measures upon which it could be rated that it deserves its own category. The book runs off in too many directions and but has so many brilliant aspects to it. And but yet Wallace’s disinterest in being “entertaining” or, (who can say?) his inability to actually take this story to a satisfactory conclusion leaves the book as a whole distressing and chaotic. Life is chaotic, one can say. Life has no ending (well…it might…it will eventually…). Life makes no clear sense. Sure. But do I want to read life? I live life; I want to read about life. Do I want incompleteness as a theme when we all feel it in our daily lives? Do I want to bump into a new character near the end of a 1000 page book that only gets one scene? Incompleteness is anxiety and the incompleteness of Infinite Jest, the hanging comma of so many storylines—as a “Jest” on the reader—is a rather cruel one. Perhaps it’s deserved. Most of us certainly are stuck in our mundane ways while civilization crumbles. Global warming assaults the planet. Our repulsive President endorses hatred, racism and dehumanization of non-Americans and immigrants and tears children from their parents. Remember Gordon Gecko? Greed is Good. Today he could equally say racism is good. Let them hate each other while the rich pillage the world. But I digress. As does David Foster Wallace. The ending was another cruelty. Just brutal. Brutal brutal brutal. Horrible emotional and physical cruelty is where the story ends. So there, the jest is on the reader. Jokes on you! Fine, we don’t get anything satisfying because that’s life. But then, you also get a book that leaves one unsatisfied. AND NOT LIKING IT. IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT DAVID FOSTER WALLACE? He was conflicted. Or perhaps just incapable. Because there is also much to enjoy in Infinite Jest. There, I said it. There are many entertaining aspects to it! Oh the irony! There are several scenes in the book that are just laugh-out-loud hilarious. Epic set pieces. Written like theater, one can just see the utter absurdity of these moments that Wallace sets up. Like human versions of Rube Goldberg machines or the gun fight with the baby carriage rolling down the stairs in The Untouchables. There are many clashes in style throughout. The book is at war with itself. Jesting itself. Jousting itself. The characters are realistic. They are unrealistic. They are believable, unbelievable. Which brings me to another point…can you guess what Wallace’s favorite phrase in the entire book is? I’ll tell you. “And but” (and but did you notice that I worked it into my sixth and seventh sentences?) He also threw in a lot of “And yet(s)” and “But yet(s)” but overall “And but” was the most used phrase repeated ad nauseum. Like a verbal tic. Did he know this? Probably, one can perhaps hypothesize it was intentional. But either way, it embodied the schizophrenic nature of the book. Entertaining/not entertaining, absurd/realistic, intertwining plot lines/dead ends, narrator/no-narrator, life/death, comedy/tragedy, text/footnotes, novel/rambling inner monologue. Life is a contradiction, meaningful and meaningless. And but. As far as subjects of the book go, addiction and loneliness are the two central topics, and their teleological trajectory toward suicide. What a painful (yet actually worthwhile) dive into the nature of addiction. The deeper irony of course humming in the background of all those scenes about drug addiction, suicide and depression is knowing how Wallace ended and feeling like it was a horribly painful window into his mind. This was one of the great and tragic aspects of this book that counteracts many of the negative qualities. He bared his soul here, if you will, given his atheism; he shared his own contradictions. And like Ian Curtis, he meant it. Chilling. As my final note on this text, I will say another disappointing aspect to the book was Wallace’s treatment of non-white characters. The casual racism of many of the white character coupled with the stereotypical black and Asian characters…left a degree of dissatisfaction that can’t be explained away thematically but rather stand for a blind-spot Wallace clearly could not address and thus ends my Infinite Run-on Review. Good day to you.

“Darkling I listen; and, for many a timet
I have been half in love with easeful Death,t
Call'd him soft names in many a musèd rhyme,t
To take into the air my quiet breath;t
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroadt
In such an ecstasy!” (John Keats)

Early in the book, the Kate Gompert section about the psych ward and her interview with the doctor I believe comes from DFW's own life. Depression is described as being on a cellular level, like a form of chronic emotional flu. Kate talks about a "controlled coma," at least for a month, to escape feeling this way. Of course, the book shows various characters trying to do this through drugs. Kate is looking for this in the form of "Bob Hope," weed.

In addition to what I say below about DFW's prescience about the future our of society, which is now, the reread also gave me the sense that DFW was always 'half in love with easeful death." And he sought a form of coma, through his addictive practices, until that didn't work for him any more. He then resorted to the only way to remove the pain for good.

====================

So I went into a re-read of IJ thinking it might have some elements of Dostoevsky in it. It does, but obviously does not measure up in quality to the Russian master. In an essay on Dostoevsky, DFW writes....

“The thrust here is that Dostoevsky wrote fiction about the stuff that's really important. He wrote fiction about identity, moral value, death, will, sexual vs. spiritual love, greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith, suicide. And he did it without ever reducing his characters to mouthpieces or his books to tracts. His concern was always what it is to be a human being-that is, how to be an actual person, someone whose life is informed by values and principles, instead of just an especially shrewd kind of self-preserving animal.”

and....

“Dostoevsky is also fun. His novels almost always have ripping good plots, lurid and intricate and thoroughly dramatic. There are murders and attempted murders and police and dysfunctional-family feuding and spies, tough guys and beautiful fallen women and unctuous con men and wasting illnesses and sudden inheritances and silky villains and scheming and whores.”

What stood out to me more this second time around was his prescience about how addiction extends to any form of electronic media. For him, it was largely in the form of TV, to which he was admittedly addicted, even bad TV. It's obvious how this presents itself in the form of the Internet and social media today. I consider the release of the iPhone, in 1997, as a milestone in wholesale Internet addiction because it became portable. You could take Facebook and everything else with you wherever you go.

=========

I have to agree with Zadie Smith....

"the newspaper review was never going to be an easy fit for Wallace. He can’t be read and understood and enjoyed at that speed any more than I can get the hang of the Goldberg Variations over a weekend. His reader needs to think of herself as a musician, spreading the sheet music— the gift of the work— over the music stand, electing to play. First there is practice, then competency at the instrument, then spending time with the sheet music, then playing it over and over....To appreciate Wallace, you need to really read him— and then you need to reread him."

================

Let's be clear, one thing DFW was not was a cynic. He said....

“Postmodern irony and cynicism has become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving.”

===============

What was going on with DFW while he was working on Pale King? His wife, Karen Green, explains in this interview with The Guardian....

https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...

Here are two more books that explore the electronic addiction theme, one specifically through the writings of DFW.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3...

and I would be remiss in not mentioning a non-fiction book about TV addiction, "Amusing Ourselves to Death," by Neil Postman, that came out 11 years before IJ and containing this now famous foreword....

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/7942...

----------------------

This may be helpful for first-time readers....

https://www.sunydutchess.edu/faculty/...

and for advanced readers, the best background piece on DFW and his writing. He collaborated at length with the interviewer to make this into a definitive piece.

http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conver...

=============

video depiction of Eschaton by the Decembrists.....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJpfK...

===========

"now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of “low” art— which just means art whose primary aim is to make money— is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas “serious” art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort.

So it’s hard for an art audience, especially a young one that’s been raised to expect art to be 100 percent pleasurable and to make that pleasure effortless, to read and appreciate serious fiction. That’s not good. The problem isn’t that today’s readership is “dumb,” I don’t think. Just that TV and the commercial-art culture’s trained it to be sort of lazy and childish in its expectations. But it makes trying to engage today’s readers both imaginatively and intellectually unprecedentedly hard." (DFW)

---------

Infinite Jest – the kind of book that, when it is mentioned, creates a hushed silence of mingled awe and fear in the room. A brick of a tome of a journey of a boy and his harried growth in spurts of tennis-fueled tragedy. An obsessive, compulsively readable, unreadable contradiction. A hyperbolic time chamber of thrilling literary filibusters. Read it, sink into the groove of D. F. Wallace’s intricately patterned brain. The most addictive textbook you will ever encounter, and a world unto itself. Slide into conundrums of gorgeous prose, wander insensate through grungy halls of psychological torment. Love and hate it, and be healed.

Truly, Wallace performs heroic feats of coddling, pampering our desensitized temperaments, spoon-feeding our barely discernible IQs with his intellectual manna. A challenging, riotous, quietly menacing book, this is, and haunted as I am by its immense fortitude and undying spirit, I crack open the covers again and again, because no semblance of life, scrawled on paper, nudging aside other swan songs, has ever etched its penumbra on my psyche so deeply. What is the cherished meaning at its heart? What does it say, with a voice so loud, that our blasted ears frequently must mishear?

Discoveries abound within the wall-to-wall text prison of this book, hemming you in like the dripping bathroom stall. A search for sanity always starts beneath layers of hypocrisy, doubt and denial. It is a carnival of tortured souls inside a kaleidoscope of condensed American dreams. Are we, in fact, peering inside the unquestionably troubled author’s mentality, perceiving untrammeled vistas of psychological sewage, or is the vision skewed by infinite strata of posture, mimesis, synecdoche, and [insert 438 literary devices here]?

It is the hopeless descent into oblivion of a perpetual motion automaton, excavating the amorphous entertainments, unhallowed relationships, and self-deceptions which proliferate in every id.

The desiderata of our questing bodies, unmoored from familial bulwarks, magnetize us toward the nightmares we dread. Jest with me, you hideous Gargantua, infect me with your awful questions, delve out with speculative pick my slumbering and half-hidden dementia. Keep on commenting on the commentary of the narrative of the dream of the tennis match, which is simply a symbol, a corrupt government, an impotent conspiracy of avant-garde slackers, and a recursive, molten war memorial against the interior civil unrest we were all born with.

Read it, form an opinion, and if it still calls you, read it again, because it is worth your time, your patience and your money. For me, it is one of the endpoints of literature. For, what more do you need?

One of the most audacious, exasperating, stunning and disquieting works of fiction I've ever encountered. The novel seems to have been marketed as a "comedy" (notice how the critical blurbs attached to the book stress its humorous or absurd aspects), and while it contains a fair amount of zany wit, it is, as a whole, a brutally honest and occasionally horrifying portrait of several dozen people from nearly all socio-economic strata struggling to find some form of lasting happiness or overarching purpose in life by obsessively indulging in everything from drugs to sex to tennis to filmmaking, &c. It's not a pretty picture.

I won't waste space with some sort of plot synopsis (if such a thing is possible with this sprawling monster of a book), but its setting is a slightly futuristic U.S.A. and its focus is on the interrelated natures of "entertainment" and "addiction," and their effects across political, educational, and psychological landscapes. A network of superscript numerals interspersed with the text leads to a dense series of endnotes that elaborate on everything from character histories to pharmacological information to an experimental filmmaker's complete movie catalogue. This filmmaker and his family form the crux of the novel, and their complex, dysfunctional relationships are explored to an unnerving degree. The book's Shakespearean title refers to this filmmaker's final work, which has been discovered to drive its viewers into a catatonic state (and, eventually, death) due to its immense, addictive entertainment value. From here the book spirals into a hundred different directions and digressions, many sabre-sharp and others a bit less incisive. Not everything works, but Wallace somehow manages to keep everything interesting and convincing, while leaving plenty of intriguing subtleties and ellipses open for readers to bend their brains around long afterward.

Overall, the book is a must-read because the writing is, at many points, totally electrifying: writing that leaves you in a stupefied daze, and your mind in an exhausted frenzy. Wallace's extreme linguistic cleverness is also a source of great pleasure (by the way, you'll definitely need a dictionary), and he creates and develops quite a few unforgettable characters. Despite the alleged difficulty of this work, his writing often remains disarmingly colloquial, radiating facets of his own personality and leaving you upon finishing the novel with the sense that you've had a very lengthy and very meaningful encounter with a remarkably observant and empathetic (not to mention savagely funny) human being. If you've read some of Wallace's better short stories or non-fiction you may know what I mean, though Infinite Jest takes this to an entirely new level.

Despite all the offbeat satire and hyper-intelligent prose, there is genuine heart and humanity laced throughout every bit of this colossal work. You get the sense that Wallace truly yearned for a deep connection with other people, and wanted his generation, and those afterward especially, to avoid the soul-eroding trap of postmodern ennui by finding someone, or something, to devote one's spirit toward, to keep the sheer love of living ignited and free of paralyzing irony.

Wallace's subsequent suicide casts an unavoidable shadow over the novel, as one realizes that the inner turmoil and corrosive depression that many of the characters battle was surely a genuine reflection of his own existential crises (I'm thinking mainly of the characters Kate Gompert and Hal Incandenza). It's disturbing and eye-opening, to say the least, mainly because the book forced me to confront my own obsessions, and why I feel compelled to give so much of myself to these interests and activities. Is there an inner void I'm trying subconsciously to combat? Should there be more to life than the pursuit of personal happiness? Is art and the aim for perfection the key to transcendent satisfaction, or just another pointless labyrinth in which we lose ourselves? Who knows, but I must thank DFW for making the effort to create such a painful and ingenious work.

So, so far....


I know what I weigh. I brush my teeth, paint my toes, wash my hair. I dress up my tote of skin as best I can. I do all this, spend all this time on my outside because I care about what other people think and see and smell and hear about me. But the real me, the unique substance that resides inside my skin and bones and fluids, that many call a soul, doesn’t get the same treatment. And it should. It really should.
It is so much more important than my freckled flesh. But I don’t know what my soul weighs. I’m not as attentive to its image. But if it covered me, if it was the first thing someone saw when they met me, perhaps I would pay more attention to it and less to my physical being. And a part of me trembles to think of what would happen if, instead of placing a best foot forward, it was requirement that a side of your soul took a promenade. What would the watermark of myself look like? It worries me what would be on display. I have rotten spots, neglected areas. Dark desires. Places where I’ve stuffed bad memories, hoping that no one, not even myself, would ever remember them.

And maybe I’m wrong, maybe not everyone is scared of living in their soul’s shadow. Perhaps this
isn’t an everyman type of problem; it’s a me-because-I’m-fucked-up-problem, and it is an indicator
of how bad off I am that I imagine that everyone feels this way.

And then in walks David Foster Wallace and I start to think that maybe if not everyone worries
“Am I fucked up, and if so, how bad?” certainly he or his characters by extension do. And now,
Thanks to DFW, I have also started theorizing instead that if people don’t ask themselves how fucked up they
are then they are really and truly fucked.

There don’t appear to be enough reviews of Infinite Jest on Goodreads so I thought I’d go ahead and write another one.

Anyway, I kind of hated this book. I hated that its characters are essentially parodies of themselves which limited my ability to connect with them on any meaningful level. I hated the lack of linguistic nuance with which most of the characters speak, particularly given that the predominant speech pattern here is rife with superfluous clauses and multiple possessives, a pattern not normally attributable to prepubescent teens, especially. I hated the long, meandering passages that go nowhere and refuse to be ostensibly related to anything or be placed in any sort of clear context, much like this review. In fact, often times reading this book was like trying to follow a conversation wherein all the participants have attention deficit disorder. Infinite Jest is a book that needs like some major dose of Ritalin® stat.

But except so in spite of all that, Infinite Jest was still able to pretty much blow me away. Set in the over-commercialized, not-too-distant future, Infinite Jest is primarily about anhedonia and the psychological pathway that leads from it to its secondary effects: loneliness, depression, social detachment, obsession with whatever’s available to fill the void, and finally to addiction and dependency. There’s a passage in IJ about a M*A*S*H addict (yeah, you heard that right) who becomes slowly but increasingly reliant on his M*A*S*H episodes to displace the anhedonia from which he suffers until the point at which the M*A*S*H episodes actually become the sole focal point of his day rather than its mere highlight, and eventually his need to see M*A*S*H supplants all his other basic needs to the extent that his entire survival practically hinges upon his capacity to sit down and watch M*A*S*H. Along with the rest of the narrative, this passage is written with an underlying sense of humor that rounds off its depressing edge and makes the whole thing almost life-affirming.

What I loved about the M*A*S*H story is twofold. First, it serves as a junction box for the theme of addiction and its relation, not just to drug and alcohol dependency in Infinite Jest, but also to the characters’ reactions to James Incandeza’s lethal Entertainment. And second, it provides some understanding into my own addictive nature, specifically with this fucking website. Goodreads is like crack for an Extrovert, and while I’m not equating that type of addiction to one with drugs or alcohol, the reason I want to hug David Foster Wallace as much as I do is that he is generous with his inclusion criteria. He doesn’t say, “No, you’re not as bad off as the rest of us because you only chug NyQuil® occasionally when you’re in a rut.” He says, instead, “Yes, you can somewhat relate to where we’re coming from because you can identify with this one minor trait of dependency, so please come and join us!” And so but in the interest of avoiding the inevitable fate to which that M*A*S*H guy ultimately succumbs, I’m going to just log off Goodreads for a couple of weeks.

ESFJ out!

Goodness, this is a polarizing piece of work.

I started IJ with much anticipation and high expectations, fueled by the praises of many, many, people I know and respect. I’m thrilled that so many enjoy IJ – what’s better than a book that makes you squeal with joy? Not much.

Obviously I didn’t click with IJ. Or with Wallace’s writing style. Or both.

It just was not for me.

For the first 100-200 pages or so I believed I was going to enjoy this much more than I did. The set up was intriguing. The topics really spoke to me and the characters were promising. But as I read on and the pages wore on, I began to lose interest and worse, every time a character or scene would capture me it was either too fleeting or it talked itself out of being interesting by dragging on for three or four times longer than it should have been.

It became a chore to read.

I am a character over plot person any day of the week. Easily. And my biggest frustration (yes, even more than the footnotes. Yes, even more than the overwriting), was the lack of character development. Wallace had some very creative character bios but they never blossomed into anything more than sterile, soulless beings. None of them felt real and none of them got into my gut like those unforgettable characters inevitably do. And as such I was not granted entry into their heads, which is one of my favorite things about a really great book. The ability to not be merely a fly on the wall, but to be inside the anxiety and the hurt and the uncertainty of the people I’m reading about.

Perhaps this was Wallace’s intention. I hope it was and if so he succeeded.

Another point of contention was that every now and then a character would emerge that would strike a chord with me only to disappear without a trace. One example was Kate Gompert who appears at around p.100 with a beautifully pained portrait of debilitating depression. I spent the rest of the book wanting more of her and others like her and when I finally got them back their stories never materialized to very much. I didn’t feel as endeared with Hal or Orin or Steeply, for instance, as I did with these background extras.

Again, maybe this was the point. Have you ever had a single conversation with somebody, never seen them again, yet can remember them vividly years later? Have you ever met someone who struck you on some level but was unattainable? People come, people go.

But I wanted more.

It wasn’t all bad. No, no. Buried deep within the prose there were some pretty funny scenes. Not hilarious. Not clutch your belly ‘cause it hurts. Not remember ‘til the day I die. But amusing, sure. And Wallace’s wisdom about the human condition and how much it hurts was captivating and true.

IJ has some interesting ideas and compelling themes. Alas, I felt they were almost always overshadowed by sloppy writing. Scenes that could’ve been extremely poignant lost their impact when stretched to 20-30 pages. Characters that started out with promise either didn’t evolve or disappeared altogether.

Over the past few years I've noticed that Pomo is very hit or miss with me. You win some, you lose some.

Tennis, anyone?

Hmm. I'm not sorry that I took the time to read this - parts of it were terrific. But other parts - huge, seemingly interminable, turgid undisciplined chunks - were frankly unforgivable. It's unfortunate that DFW's brilliance obviously intimidated his editor to a degree that did neither of them any favors.

There is a sort of arc that describes my reaction to the book - for about the first 150 pages or so, it was touch and go. Then things improved dramatically, and for the next 500 pages, DFW had me riveted. The writing was more focused, there was something approximating a decent story arc. Only to have things peter out again over the final 200 pages. A major part of my difficulty (see the notes I made below as I was reading it) was with the whole Quebec liberation subplot, which seemed both ludicrous and pointless.

In the end, it's like the rest of DFW's work - when he's on form, there's nobody else you'd rather be reading. Sadly, the lack of discipline that mars his other work is evident here - in spades.

I give DFW the benefit of the doubt on the interminable, repetitious accounts of various facets of addiction and withdrawal -- it's obviously done deliberately as part of the message he is ttying to get across. That doesn't make the relevant sections any less mind-numbingly tedious to get through, however. I do think that having the most balanced (probably the only balanced) person in the book be the ever-chipper mentally retarded cripple Mario amounts to an unforgivable cliche. Though when I look back on it, Don Gately is the only character in the entire book that is more than a caricature.

I think I'd feel differently if I'd stopped at page 700, because I thought the whole central part was working terrifically. And don't get me wrong - the book is studded with these absolutely awesome setpieces which leave you slackmouthed at DFW's brilliance, passion, erudition, and way with language. So maybe that's the way to read it - as a collection of riffs, some of which are transcendent. As a novel, however, I think it's a hugely ambitious, entertaining, sporadically brilliant failure.




****************************************************************************

I'm going to hazard a guess that the highly variable degree of reader-friendliness over the first third of the book is completely deliberate. DFW is a writer who is almost preternaturally attuned to the (register? tone? level? murkiness? accessibility?) of his own prose and with the skills to control it. So he presumably has a purpose in mind with the placement of those sporadic chunks of amazing tedium (the fetishistic recitation of whole subsections of the pharmacopoiea, bludgeoning the reader into submission with tennis arcana, ....). I hope there is more to it than just trying to have me, the reader, undergo some kind of vicarious experience of the intrinsic tedium of rehab programs.

There is, of course, the whole tension between my prior admiration and awe of DFW before starting IJ and the ability to review it in any objective fashion. But I have to say that the "wit" of the whole "Year of the Depends Undergarment" gag doesn't even sustain the first 300 pages, and may cause ocular damage from repeated eyeball-rolling before I finish this sucker. But I wouldn't be the first reader to comment on the sheer physical discomfort associated with reading IJ.

There are some very funny passages so far. But the book is far more depressing than I had anticipated.

Page 500 - the half-way mark!

After page 200 or so, things improved considerably and reading IJ no longer feels like a chore. The writing is more focused and, as the characters become more familiar, the earlier sense that the story was sprawling beyond the author's control is dispelled.

But there is a definite 'kitchen-sink' quality to the book. It's obviously not really plot-driven, though it's not turning out to be as infuriatingly plotless as the first couple of hundred pages suggest. Maybe, as DFW continues to pull the various strands together, things will make more sense. But some parts just seem indulgent - not that they aren't intermittently funny and smart - but DFW's riff on the rise and fall of videophones, the whole 'crooning president'/sponsored calendar year stuff, the Eschaton episode (I suppose it's no worse than Quidditch, though I've always thought Quidditch was the most dispensable aspect of the HP series) - these do little to advance the story, which kind of lurches from one set piece to the next. Wallace already assumes much forbearance on the reader's part by inclusion of the endlessly repetitive descriptions of the assorted facets of addiction and competition, but that at least has an obvious point to it. Though it is starting to feel a little preachy, if not actually condescending.

So far, the plot strand that makes least sense, and is most poorly executed is the ongoing encounter between Marathe and Steeply, which is just eye-rollingly irritating.

With only 100 pages to go, I have to say that the entire Quebec liberation subplot seems like nothing more than an unmitigated waste of space, and a major irritant to (this) reader - a bizarre collection of weirdness and unfunny gags that interfere with the remainder of the text, which is tautly written and much of which manages to be surprisingly moving. But the whole AFR/FLQ plot strand is DFW at his worst - prolix, way too clever for his own good, and severely in need of major editorial discipline. Maybe the final 100 pages will convince me that this part of the book is more than superfluous verbiage, but I doubt it.

this book...

i think it is time to write a proper review for this book, as it is one of my all-time favorites and deserves way more than two words. back when i was a junior in college, i was at the nyu bookstore, trying to sell back some textbooks before going away for winter break. the person in line in front of me was trying to sell back infinite jest (where was i when this class was being offered?? ) and of course, they weren't taking it back because nyu is a stingy fucking school. she turned around to me and said "you want this??" and i said "yes,"cuz i don't say no to free, and she said "merry christmas,"and kinda just thrust it at me. and it was the best present i ever got. a true christmas miracle. i was on my way to see my then-boyfriend in italy for the start of a european jaunt, and i missed out on a lot of european cities because i could not put this book down. i read it on planes and trains and a gondola, in restaurants and bars, by canals and in a cafe on top of the alps. fuck cathedrals, i had this book. i am a truly bad traveler, but i am a committed reader. as soon as i finished the book, i started right over. and since then i have read it a total of seven times. it is the most glorious collection of words that has ever been published. it is everything - it is funny and sad and creepy and disturbing and completely absorbing and brilliant. and he was just a gem of a man. the first time i got to meet him, i dropped this book in front of him - by now all tattered and smooshed, and he seem surprised that "someone has actually read their copy." and then i gave him a card that had been a thank you card, but i crossed out "thank" and wrote "fuck" in its place and said "fuck you for writing the great american novel before i got the chance to." this is the kind of thing i think is charming because i am deeply flawed. but it worked, and he called me and it was really nice - he was a great man who was truly kind and courteous to his fans. i ended up getting a proper thank you card from him because he is more traditionally charming. and now i am sad just thinking about this. so the review ends here because it has served its cathartic purpose for me and i guess if anyone is reading this you just got a free glimpse into the softer side of karen. it happens.

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