Infinite Summer

Year: 2009

  • Roundup

    As Infinite Summer draws to a close, many have penned their “final thoughts” post:

    • Sarah’s Books: “But and so and but so I finished IJ.”

    • I Just Read About That: “So, obviously, the first reaction is WHAT?!“

    • Infinite Zombies: “I’ve probably tended to race down the hill of those last 200 pages and just lost the end amid the swirling thoughts of how ambitious and crazy and good the whole book is, and I’ve never given the actual end — the stuff about Gately specifically — very much thought.” (Daryl Houston).

    • Of Books and Bikes: “Wow, people. Infinite Jest is a great book, and it’s going on my list of favorite novels ever.”

    • Magnificent Octopus: “At some point, about a week ago, I was ready to say this is an awesome book, this Infinite Jest, and while I spent much of the first couple hundred pages admiring it, I was also somewhat confused and not really relating to it … So but, right, I’m done now, and yup, awesome book.”

    • Shelf Life: “This brings me to my primary problem with Infinite Jest. The excess. Wallace’s writing is amazing. It’s funny and insightful and rich with amusing references and even intentional, revealing mistakes. I loved his narrative voice, but it’s just too much. Too much story, too many characters, too many walls of text.”

    • A Supposedly Fun Blog: “AAAAAARRRRRGGGHHHH. I was expecting that. But not that.” (Erza Klein) and “I enjoyed it to the end, although I started to resent it about three weeks ago, not because the quality flagged (it didn’t) but because my stack of unread books began to reach truly frightening heights.” (Kevin Carey)

    • Catching Days: “I am shocked at how much I loved Infinite Jest.”

    • Aaron Swartz: “The whole book is laced through with mocking cracks at this disconnected style, like a preemptive apology. And the ending really doesn’t help matters. But in the middle it is truly grand, some of the best fiction ever.”

    • Thinking Without a Box: “A brilliant, earnest, and an enriching piece of fiction. Every time I read pages in the book, I was always amazed by the sheer genius of David Foster Wallace. He was truly a great one.”

    • Verbatim: “I did not want it to end, because now I will never again get to read about Don Gately, Joelle Van Dyne, Hal Incandenza, and all the rest—until I reread, that is.”

    • Jazz … In Strange Places: “when i realized i had only 50 pages left i knew i was screwed in the resolution department.”

    • A Hyperanaphylaxis Universal Mean: “I read Jest in about 10-25 page increments over the past three months; sometimes a little faster, sometimes a little slower, but always just like a mule. Plodding along through the hills and the dark down there caverns of this tumultuous, twisting book.”

    • Ongoing: “I’m glad I read it. I would never dream of recommending it to anyone.”

    • Prozac: “Each character, though all seemingly reflective of the author, was so painfully individual and human that I felt I knew them better than I know my own friends and family.”

    • Tape Noise Diary: “Wallace’s inside joke and wink is that what’s entertaining about the story it’s is non-entertainment and unsatisfying story arc. It’s like a very long thesis about addiction and entertainment that uses plot and characters as props.”

    And in case you missed it, much of our blogroll finished the book early (infinitedetox, Gerry Canavan, members of Infinite Zombies, and so forth). We listed their final reactions in the previous Roundup post.

    Also in the last fortnight, a lot of rumination about Infinite Summer and the future of reading. Matthew Battles, of the Hermenautic Circle Blog, writes:

    When I think of Infinite Summer, I remember that the liberal arts are at their heart not a profession or a civic medicine but a disposition.

    The institutions of the life of the mind are in a bad way—and they always have been! I wouldn’t have given you two cents for the institutions at any point in the history of civilization. But the life of the mind isn’t really about institutions, is it?

    I know I’m simplifying things; it could be argued that without institutional exposure to the liberal arts, Infinite Summer’s far-flung participants would never have undertaken conversation.

    Kathleen Fitzpatrick, associate professor of media studies at Pomona College (and I.S. guest) discussed the “death of literature with Humanities Magazine. The Missouri Review ponders Book Clubs in the World of Tomorrow!.

    If you have recently written something about Infinite Jest, pelase let us know in the comments.

  • Greg Carlisle: Reading Infinite Jest Changed My Life (and Now It Will Change Yours)

    Greg Carlisle is the author of Elegant Complexity: A Study of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and an instructor of theater at Morehead State University.

    When my friend Brian handed me A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again and told me I had to read it, I immediately recognized the name of the author whose story “The Depressed Person” was featured in Harper’s magazine: David Foster Wallace. “Oh yeah, I want to read more of this guy.” When I returned the book, Brian then told me I had to read Infinite Jest. Not wanting to deprive him of his unread copy (NB: Brian has still never read Infinite Jest), I went to my local library in downtown Lexington KY and checked out the book. Fortunately, no one was on a waiting list, so I got more than the standard number of renewals.

    I remember reading a lot of the book lying in my bed (like Gately in the home stretch of the book), flipping back to try and keep all the plot threads and chronologies straight, and then giving up on that about page 200 or so and just enjoying it. I remember being thankful that I was sick in January 2001 so I could read large chunks of the book instead of going to work. I remember sitting and reading at this very table that my wife hates (transferred to Morehead KY solely as a frugal gesture) and being utterly blown away by the Eschaton section. After Gately got shot, I would only put the book down to go to work or to the bathroom or to sleep. With two days to go, if you are still sticking to a pages-per-day schedule, I just don’t see how you’re doing that.

    Reading Infinite Jest was the most extraordinary reading experience of my life. I find the depth of the last sentence to be unparalleled in literature. Only the endings of Ulysses and Beloved come close to affecting me so profoundly. Thankfully in that sentence, Wallace leads Gately and us out of the hell of that last sequence into a transcendent moment of peace, cold and fleeting but also unbearably beautiful, striking a chord of sadness that still rings deep inside me.

    After I finished the book, I could not stop thinking about it. I knew that Infinite Jest was immaculately structured and cohesive, and I wanted to figure out how to articulate Wallace’s achievement. Finally for Christmas 2001 I ordered a remaindered copy of the hardcover from Hamilton Books for about $4 and had it delivered to my in-laws’ house. I wrote numbers 1-28 (and an N) in the shadowed circles of that copy and numbered all the sections. I was given a scrap of paper (in the home of my mother-in-law’s late parents, whose inheritance has just helped us purchase our first home, a home that this hated table will never see) and sketched out a diagram with notes that would become, over the next six years, the 512-page book, Elegant Complexity. Without the daily inspiration of Wallace-l and The Howling Fantods, I might not have finished the task.

    Four days before my glorious daughter was born, Matt Bucher said he and his brother John wanted to publish Elegant Complexity (and for the record, that perfect title is actually Matt’s). Because they published that book, I got invited to submit an article to the Sonora Review and to attend a tribute event for Wallace in Arizona, where I met people Wallace knew and loved. I got invited to speak on talk radio in Ireland. I was invited to be the keynote speaker for the Consider David Foster Wallace conference in Liverpool and got to take my first trip to Europe. Matthew Baldwin invited me to contribute the very thing you are reading right now. Reading Infinite Jest changed my life.

    Since finishing Infinite Jest, I have read just about everything Wallace has ever written and have also been motivated to read Barth and Pynchon and an author I’d never heard of, William Gaddis. It is a crime that Gaddis is not as revered an American author as Faulkner or Hemingway or anybody you want to name. I have been motivated to read a 600-page anthology of Modern and Postmodern philosophy (although it took me 14 months). I ordered a Vollmann anthology after reading a Wallace interview. As my wife reminded me when I read this to her, I don’t get nauseous anymore, only nauseated. I own and frequently consult Garner’s Modern American Usage, a treasured gift from my mother-in-law. I tell my students (and everyone else, too) that not using that final serial comma before the conjunction is just insane and irresponsible. I think This Is Water is one of the most amazing, beautiful things I’ve ever read and am considering just taking entire class periods at the end of the semester to read it to students. When I want to be a jerk in public, the phrase “this is water” runs through my head and I get calm. Reading Infinite Jest changed my life, and now it’s going to change yours. I promise you. Congratulations to everyone who has participated in Infinite Summer.

  • Mission Improbable

    Yes, I know — the term “mission improbable” brings up around forty-five thousand results in Google. I am, very decidedly, not the first person to think of it. Last week I went with the title “Grapes of Wraith”, which was somewhat poorly received in the comments section. One commenter improved it, though, changing the title to “Gripes of Wraith.” I think we can all agree that that’s a much better choice. So. Let’s try again this week. I’ll need someone to play the part of “person who cares a little too much about the title of Avery’s post” and someone else to play “person who does the extra two seconds of thinking that Avery could have done and comes up with a pun that actually makes sense.”

    Your reward will be fruit punch and pie, and international fame.

    A consistent response to my last post was the assertion that the inclusion of a ghost in Infinite Jest broke no established rules, since entirely impossible concepts had been appearing since the very start of the book. One could guess from the title of this post that I’m going to argue that some of those concepts are not impossible, just highly improbable. One would guess correctly.

    Giant (and skull-less) babies are mentioned as being a result of the concavity, or rather the result of the annularized fusion waste that is dumped into the concavity. I was hopeful (in the kindest way) that I would find, through Googling, some evidence of elephantitis as a result of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, but came short (much like the non-giant babies of Japa– heck, I’m not even gonna finish that sentence. I already feel bad just thinking it.) However, studies in the use of x-radiation on gestating mice have produced creatures with hydrocephalus — the scientific term for “dude, check out that huge head.”

    One could extrapolate that the radioactive waste produced by annular fusion could have exponentially greater results, creating the giant babies and feral hamsters of IJ. One could extrapolate that, and I’m going to. So there. Totally probable.

    Dymphna, the blind tennis player who uses sonic balls (page 17), would seem to present a problem to those trying to convince themselves of the plausability of this book. But anyone doubting the chances of a vision-less tennis pro needs only to read this entirely scholarly People magazine article about “The Boy Who Sees with Sound” to become convinced that in the land of the blind, the kid who can echolocate using mouth clicks is King. Dymphna? Probable-phna.113

    Anyone with their finger on the pulse of the conspiracy-theory world should need not explanation for the plausibility of O.N.A.N — IJ‘s unholy union of America, Canada and Mexico. The Amero has been a cause for concern for wingnuts and kooks patriotic Americans since 1999. Arguably a “natural extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP)”, the Amero is a theoretical currency that links the three countries together.

    The idea of a pan-Americas currency is based on the Euro, the coin of the realm for all of Europe. Except England, because the fears of racists concerns of nationalists have kept it from invading our shores. If it can work (kind of) in Europe, it can work in America.114 O.N.A.N? Seems like it could happen.

    Do you have a problem with the idea of wheelchair assassins powerful enough to strike terror into the hearts of all sensible humankind? If you think dudes in chairs can’t be hardcore, then you’ve never seen the awesomeness that is Murderball (boring name: wheelchair rugby.) The terrifying blending of man and machine that creates muscle-bound wheelchair athletes is all too plausible, friends.

    Lastly, I’ve heard tell that Infinite Jest is about an entertainment that is too enthralling, too enticing, and cannot be escaped once encountered. Whilst anyone with a child and access to Dora the Explorer knows that human beings are more than capable of becoming almost pathologically addicted to television, the idea of a film so powerful that you spent the rest of your life craving continual exposure to it seems silly.

    But. We know enough of Himself’s work that we can figure out that the effectiveness of Infinite Jest(the film) relies on the distortion and/or manipulation of light. Of course, we hopefully all know of the dangerous effect light can have on the human brain. If there’s part of the noggin that sees light and decides to throw a fit, who is to say that there may not be another band, or wavelenth, or kind of light that can trigger pleasure centres in the brain to such an extent that all thought from then on is based around the desire for more of that stimulation?

    Sure, we haven’t come across that kind of light yet, but David Foster Wallace predicted Skype, human beings who were born to play tennis, and Alcoholics Anonymous.115 Maybe he predicted the discovery of addictive light, too.

    I mean, he probably didn’t. But how else am I meant to conclude this post? With a frickin’ emoticon?

    🙂

  • I Got This Fire In My Heart, Won’t Let Me Sleep, Can’t Concentrate…

    NOTE: I realize some Infsumerians didn’t like the (fully disclosed) spoilers in my last post. There’s a big one (a nuclear one) in this post, too, but I’m wrapping up the novel this week and it would be difficult for me to do that without making this point, so here’s my apology in advance. If you haven’t yet finished, I would think twice before venturing past the spoiler tag.

    I’m sure it never even occurred to Harper Lee that she could end To Kill a Mockingbird right before the trial starts.

    That’s because probably the most basic axiom of storytelling, so obvious it’s rarely said out loud, is that you have to tell the best part. And another obvious thing you should especially never do is tell the reader that there is this really cool part coming up, a part that’s going to tie everything together, finally and at last, a climax if you will, and then as the reader’s bookmark rapidly approaches the end, allow him or her to slowly, crushingly, come to the realization that said scene will never appear.

    So there are people who are rightly frustrated with the end of Infinite Jest. And what they don’t want to hear is that their frustration is the point, that the author has manipulated their emotions in the service of his literary agenda. So I won’t say that.

    To be honest, my problem with a lot of so-called post-modern literature110 is that many of these books and stories and plays monkey with the conventions of storytelling just to point out the conventions of storytelling. Which sounds really good in an MFA workshop, but the people who actually buy and read books generally care about the scaffolding of a story as much as people who ride buses care about the assembly of diesel engines.

    The good news is the scaffolding of the story is not Wallace’s point. Or if it is, it’s a small point among much, much larger ones.

    Wallace probably would have enjoyed writing the scene where Hal and Gately finally meet. I kind of like to think he couldn’t resist doing it, secretly. But would it have been at all honest to write a massive book about the futility of the pursuit of happiness and then pay it off at the end in such a spectacularly satisfying fashion?

    We are hardwired to believe in the existence of bliss, that the pursuit of it is even a fundamental human right, but that pursuit is, ironically, responsible for much of the crushing unhappiness we experience. Infinite Jest is loaded with examples of this. There is the Entertainment, of course, so pleasurable it turns the viewer into a vegetable. And every character at Ennet House is there because they chased bliss to the point of life-altering misery.

    Lyle lays it all out pretty explicitly in his discussion111 with 11-year-old LaMont Chu, who still might be young enough to have never questioned his own personal right to happiness ever-after:

    ‘You burn to have your photograph in a magazine.’ ‘I’m afraid so.’ ‘Why again exactly, now?’ ‘I guess to be felt about as I feel about those players with their pictures in magazines.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Why? I guess to give my life some sort of kind of meaning, Lyle.’ ‘And how would this do this again?’ ‘Lyle, I don’t know. I do not know. It just does. Would. Why else would I burn like this, clip secret pictures, not take risks, not sleep or pee?’ ‘You feel these men with their photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning.’ ‘I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?’ ‘The meaning they feel, you mean. From the fame.’ ‘Lyle, don’t they ?’ Lyle sucks his cheeks. It’s not like he’s condescending or stringing you along. He’s thinking as hard as you. It’s like he’s you in the top of a clean pond. It’s part of the attention. One side of his cheeks almost caves in, thinking. ‘LaMont, perhaps they did at first. The first photograph, the first magazine, the gratified surge, the seeing themselves as others see them, the hagiography of image, perhaps. Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After the first surge, they care only that their photographs seem awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing you burn to escape, what they call their privacy is being violated. Something changes. After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.’ ‘Is this supposed to be good news? This is awful news.’ ‘LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true?’ ‘Okey-dokey.’ ‘The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.’ ‘Maybe I ought to be getting back.’ ‘LaMont, the world is very old. You have been snared by something untrue. You are deluded. But this is good news. You have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal. You assume that there is a flip-side to your painful envy of Michael Chang: namely Michael Chang’s enjoyable feeling of being-envied-by-LaMont-Chu. No such animal.’ ‘Animal?’ ‘You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.’ ‘This is good news?’ ‘It is the truth. To be envied, admired, is not a feeling. Nor is fame a feeling. There are feelings associated with fame, but few of them are any more enjoyable than the feelings associated with envy of fame.’ ‘The burning doesn’t go away?’ ‘What fire dies when you feed it? It is not fame itself they wish to deny you here. Trust them. There is much fear in fame. Terrible and heavy fear to be pulled and held, carried. Perhaps they want only to keep it off you until you weigh enough to pull it toward yourself.’ ‘Would I sound ungrateful if I said this doesn’t make me feel very much better at all?’ ‘La-Mont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.’ ‘So I’m stuck in the cage from either side. Fame or tortured envy of fame. There’s no way out.’ ‘You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage. And I believe I see a drop on your temple, right…there….’ Etc.

    By depriving us of the promised, surely awesome scene in which Gately and Hal and John N.R. Wayne dig up JOI’s skull presumably looking for the Entertainment (only to find, according to Gately’s premonition, that they were too late) but to never tell us exactly what happens to Hal between the end of this book and its opening chapter (or what happens to John Wayne, who would have won this year’s Whataburger112 if not for what we never find out) Wallace is making us painfully aware of the fact of the cage. Like that missing scene with Hal and Gately, perpetual happiness exists as an idea, but we can’t have it. And deluding ourselves that we can will only make us perpetually miserable.

    Naturally a lot of us get to the end and, like LaMont, are scratching our heads and asking, Is this supposed to be good news?

    I think it is, kinda. And I believe I see a drop on your temple right…there….

  • The Floor Dodged His Foot And Rushed Up At Him

    Over the course of my reading I became aware that DFW liked Cormac McCarthy’s novels a lot, especially Blood Meridian and Suttree. As it happens, those are my two favorite Cormac McCarthy novels as well, and even though it’s been fifteen years since I read either of them, once I became aware of this bibliographical fact I began to pick up threads of McCarthy in Infinite Jest, and threads led to whole hand-loomed rugs bordered with Byzantine pornography.

    McCarthy’s and DFW’s writing share several things, including a keen attention to physical and emotional detail, but it’s the way they delve into violence that seems to both unite and separate them. McCarthy, for example, considers the whole scene but then gifts you with just a sketch of the worst details — reading him is like looking at one of Bacon’s howling Popes, it’s the details you have to fill in for yourself that make it ten times worse. But DFW doesn’t let you look away. Think about how the Antitois brothers died. It’s horrible. But their deaths were described with so much detail that by the end I had almost no emotion about them. The image of a man with a spike through his eye or a broomstick shoved all the way through him is, on its own, nearly unbearable. But in IJ these images ride a wave of words that’s already pounded us into submission, and we only come up for air when Lucien Antitois floats cleanly away from his body over the Convexity toward home to the ringing of bells.

    The scene where Gately takes the brunt of one Nuck’s aggression toward Lenz and the girls are on the lawn working over the other one echoes this scene from early on in Blood Meridian:

    . . . Toadvine seized him about the neck and rode him to the floor and held him by the hair and began to pry out an eyeball with his thumb. The man grabbed his wrist and bit it.

    Kick his mouth in, called Toadvine. Kick it.

    The kid stepped past them into the room and turned and kicked the man in the face. Toadvine held his head back by the hair.

    Kick him, he called. Aw, kick him, honey.

    He kicked.

    Toadvine pulled the bloody head around and looked at it and let it flop to the floor and he rose and kicked the man himself. Two spectators were standing in the hallway. The door was completely afire and part of the wall and ceiling. They went out and down the hall. The clerk was coming up the steps two at a time.

    And so on.

    Later on, the way the M.P. beats Gately’s mom in such a slow, considered fashion shows a little more of McCarthy’s restraint. Ultimately I find McCarthy pretty much riveting because he leaves so much out, but the world he creates is one I am heartily glad I don’t live in. Whereas the world of Infinite Jest, despite the horrible things that can happen in it (the family dog being dragged to death and reduced to a nubbin, my God), is one I feel I could navigate maybe just because the nape of the carpet is familiar and I have an accurate sense of how high the nets are strung.

    Or, as Gately learns in the midst of his agonizing stint in the hospital bed, focusing on the small things helps you to endure the larger ones.

    DFW also alludes to A Clockwork Orange a couple of times, which is well known for its own particular brand of joyous degradation. I think Gately has the self-awareness not to get off on beating the shit out of people the way Alex and his Droogs do — he doesn’t have the heart of a rapist —  and the spoiler line limits what I can say about Sorkin’s crew, but I do know that for me, Gately’s redemption and Hal’s trying to Come In and Mario’s sweet nature and a thousand other moments of true humanity balance out the psychic impact of all the brutality in this novel, described in numbing detail though it may be.

  • Sincerely Yours, David Foster Wallace

    Until recently I had no idea what this book was about. I don’t mean to say that I couldn’t follow the plot (although that happened on more than one occasion), but rather that it was unclear to me whether this was a book about tennis or addiction or entertainment or families or friendships or pet-murdering psychos or what. It seemed to be about all of the above, each in turn, but none for very long.

    But from where I now stand–9/10ths of the way through and surveying the path I have trod thus far–it now seems obvious to me what the book is “about”. Infinite Jest is a novel about sincerity.107

    The question now becomes: why does it take so long to realize this? Surely this does not reflect well on Wallace, that he so thoroughly buried the lede that someone could abandon the tome 800 pages in and still not know the point. In fact, it seems as though those with only a superficial knowledge of the book–having read only the first 50 pages before giving up, say, or basing their opinion solely on synopses of the plot and setting–describe the book as the very opposite of sincere, as ironic and cynical and dark.

    My theory is that Wallace has pulled a reverse Mary Poppins, here. Rather than using a spoonful of sugar to disguise the medicine, he set his novel in a borderline dystopia, full of depression and suicide and malcontents, effectively disguising the simple and (dare I say it?) sweet message at it’s core. And he spreads it out over a solid k of pages so that, at no given moment, are you aware of what you’re imbibing.

    No moment except perhaps this one:

    The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that’s really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy. The worst-feeling thing that happened today was at lunch when Michael Pemulis told Mario he had an idea for setting up a Dial-a-Prayer telephone service for atheists in which the atheist dials the number and the line just rings and rings and no one answers. It was a joke and a good one, and Mario got it; what was unpleasant was that Mario was the only one at the big table whose laugh was a happy laugh; everybody else sort of looked down like they were laughing at somebody with a disability. The whole issue was far above Mario’s head… And Hal was for once no help, because Hal seemed even more uncomfortable and embarrassed than the fellows at lunch, and when Mario brought up real stuff Hal called him Booboo and acted like he’d wet himself and Hal was going to be very patient about helping him change.

    That passage is found just shy of 600 pages in. And I can’t help but wonder what my reaction would have been if it had appeared on page 13. Would I have rolled my eyes, or laughed in a way that isn’t happy, or chalked this novel up as just a bunch of glurge best suited for the Oprah bookclub?108 Would my Sincerity Deflector Shields been reflexively raised, and remained in battle position for the remaining 950 pages?

    As Kevin noted earlier, my generation has been steeped in irony since the get-go, and plunging into a novel that argued against such modes of thinking would have been the literary equivalent of Cold Turkey, the Bird, white-knuckling. Instead, what Infinite Jest provides is a 13 week irony detox program,109 designed to reduce the cynicism in your system at a slow enough rate that you don’t go all P.T.-Kraus-on-a-subway.

    And then at some point you realize that Wallace has been performing something like a spiritual transfusion, that he hasn’t simply been leeching you of cynicism but also craftily impressing upon you the usefulness, the importance, the utter necessity of sincerity. The dude is like a giant ATHSCME fan, keeping the miasma of toxicity at bay.

    As we reach the end of Infinite Jest the question becomes: can we retain the message that DFW struggled so mightily to impart, or is a relapse inevitable? It’s too bad there isn’t something like an Ennet House for IJ veterans, designed to keep us from drifting to our old ways of thinking, our “default settings” as it were. I can see now why people feel the need to reread the novel on a regular basis: “Keep coming back”.

    Living a life of sincerity is a challenge, but Wallace is going to be very patient about helping us change.