Mimi Smartypants is a Chicago writer and editor, as well as the eponymous author of a long-running weblog. A portion of her early online writing is collected in The World According to Mimi Smartypants. She has read Infinite Jest thrice.
Yeah, it’s big.
No reviewer, blogger, or bookstore chitchatter can resist remarking on Infinite Jest’s size, so let’s just get that out of the way first. It’s also in the top ten of the best books I have ever read in my life. It would be my desert island book and the book I would take to prison with me. (For some reason I like to imagine scenarios in which I am mistakenly sent to prison.) In 1996, despite being chronically short of funds and living in a graduate student hovel with my graduate student husband, I splurged on a hardcover copy and a few weeks later accidentally left it on a bus. And I went out later that day and bought ANOTHER hardcover copy with that month’s beer money.
My extreme love for this novel, the way that I tend to corner people who mention it and exclaim about its wonderfulness with a Russian-mystic gleam in my eye, might sound a little fetishistic and alarming, and in fact might be a deterrent rather than an endorsement. Let me try another approach.
I have always been something of a literary wanker, interested in metafiction and fancy ways of writing and reading. I was a Vonnegut and Pynchon dork in high school, spent time in college inhaling marijuana smoke and Nabokov simultaneously (quite an effective “alternative reading strategy,” actually), and still dip into Finnegan’s Wake every time I need a respite from narrative. So when IJ hype began appearing in various book-review rags I was naturally all over it. A giant thousand-page novel set in the vague near-future? With frequent text-disruptions in the form of endnotes and digressions? Yes! Hand it over!
Of course, by this point I know what to expect of my postmodern fiction, right? Lots of little literary in-jokes and poking playful fun at the search for meaning, a big textual circle jerk that allows me to admire the author’s chops while also smirking proudly about how smart I am for getting it.
That’s not at all how reading Infinite Jest is. Not even close. The book is not one long “mess,” as New York Times book critic and my personal enemy Michiko Kakutani so wrongly put it, or an “excuse to show off.” I hope that at the end of the summer you will see how wrong that is. Infinite Jest feels very real, with the underlying premise that we MUST read, write, or talk ourselves out of the metafictional spiral; that it is actually urgent that we connect with the world, not hide from it with drink or drugs or television or literary skill; that paying attention to nothing but the movie inside one’s head will ultimately kill you.* A novel about the absolute necessity of conveying our subjective consciousness to each other, that in fact IS an attempt to convey subjective consciousness to you, the reader—this feels like such a relief after decades of novels that laughingly deny the possibility.
*(It feels unseemly here, after the above, to insert a comment about the sad loss of DFW himself. I have been looking at the cursor-blink for ages but nothing is right. Consider this parenthetical my moment of silence, a fumbling acknowledgment of the Big Bad Thing that I hope will not totally inform the Infinite Summer project, which doesn’t deserve such emotional freight.)
All in all, I find Infinite Jest enjoyable in a way that Barth and Pynchon are not. (Here come the Pynchon fans to kick my ass.) There’s so much fun and humanity in it. There are so many great overlapping stories, and so many laugh-out-loud moments. If characters like Hal and Gately and Joelle don’t stay with you long after the book is over I will eat my hat, and it is not a particularly tasty hat. Also, don’t be surprised if you read the last word and want to start over again at the beginning—that’s what I did, and that’s why I would want this book in prison, and weirdly now I am starting to fantasize (again) about going to prison just so I would have lots of uninterrupted time with Infinite Jest.
I too fantasize about jail time and Infinite Jest. It would almost be worth it… Everything is different after IJ…
Looking forward to my 2nd go around as a part of the summer. Just ordered a new copy, don’t think my old one can survive another reading…
Thanks for the post.
I’m such a Mimi fan, if I wasn’t signed up to do this already, I would because she said so. 🙂
IJ is a big long mess and an excuse to show off, but those are some of its many strengths.
As much as I *love* IJ I have to admit that I find the hagiographic tone of this post a bit much.
“..the underlying premise that we MUST read, write, or talk ourselves out of the metafictional spiral; that it is actually urgent that we connect with the world, not hide from it with drink or drugs or television or literary skill..”
Thank You Mimi for stating this with such immediacy! I’ve taken this theme to heart as I re-tool to become the most relational teacher I can be in a society desperately searching for meaning in the most madly ill-relevant of times!
Michiko Kakutani’s review.
I tend to agree with Jonathan Franzen that she is “the stupidest person in New York City.”
I re-read that review, and I have to agree with your [and Franzen’s] analysis.
LIFE is a big long mess and an excuse to show off.
Enjoyed this post.
Friends and I are looking forward to reading IJ for the first time ever and getting together to discuss it on a bi-monthly basis. Thank you for your commentary.
I started this book earlier this year and got around 300 pages in and then BY MISTAKE picked something else up and haven’t returned since!!
Should I be waterboarded?
Thank heavens, a chance to try again. In 2008 I tried to read Proust. Earlier in 2009, I started IJ only to read in the Into. a comparison to *%$^%& Proust – this was after slogging through 85+ pages and all the footnotes! I was in total dispair and loaned the book to my son. Now, I’ll try to get it back and start over again.
I can commiserate. I picked both authors up at the same time earlier this year. I’ve made it through 120 pages of Swann’s Way, and 620 of IJ. Hopefully I can finish it before the 21st to truly participate! (It’s times like these when I wish I could italicize words like “truly.”)
well, i guess i’ll get in. i’ve heard so much about this book forever. so, i’ll at least give it a whirl.
Thanks for the review… I’ll be picking it up soon… I hadn’t read any DFW before he died, but after reading Rolling Stone’s obituary piece on him, I found a remaindered copy of Consider The Lobster… now I am hooked.
Well, I’m going to give it a shot, but reading this post leads me to believe that reading the book is going to make me feel stupid. If it does, I’m quitting. Life is too short for that crap.
[…] heard of Infinite Jest before or don’t know why you would want to read it, I recommend Mimi Smartypants’ impassioned essay on her experience with the book. I have been looking for something like this for a long time, and […]
Consider your ass kicked by a devoted Pynchon fan! If we ever meet in prison I’ll be the guy in the corner reading Gravity’s Rainbow, which is anything but cute pomo hi-jinks; in fact, it’s as deadly serious and as deeply elegiac as anything I’ve read.
Having kicked your ass, though, I’ll second your opinions on IJ. I’ve just begun reading it for the fourth time, and it grows with each reread (which is pretty alarming, I guess, considering its already considerable size…).
And so but when we meet up in the slammer, at least consider letting me lend you my copy of Gravity’s Rainbow.
The author of the blog piece writes:
“The book is not one long ‘mess,’ as New York Times book critic and my personal enemy Michiko Kakutani so wrongly put it, or an ‘excuse to show off.’ I hope that at the end of the summer you will see how wrong that is.”
Sorry, but but I’m not interested in your prejudices toward Michiko Kakutani, who, by the way, did not pan the book in her review. On the contrary she calls him “one of the big talents of his generation, a writer of virtuosic skills who can seemingly do anything,” etc., while adding that “perfect, however, ‘Infinite Jest’ is not.”
She recognized his brilliance and she didn’t dismiss the book as others apparently had. And I think he appreciated her review; isn’t he on the record (in “Salon” or somewhere?) referring to her (with an unintentionally backhanded compliment) as the “very charming Japanese lady from the New York Times”? He wasn’t being facetious.
Another thing, she doesn’t use your phrase, “one long mess,” she uses the word in an analogy to a figure in an unfinished Michelangelo sculpture struggling to break free, hardly the pejorative that you’re trying to portray it as.
And finally, here’s your other misleading quote in context:
“…the subplots involving Gately, Hal and the Canadian terrorists also provide a flimsy armature on which Wallace can drape his ever-proliferating observations and musings. Indeed, the whole novel often seems like an excuse for Wallace to simply show off his remarkable skills as a writer and empty the contents of his restless mind.”
I think that’s correct. One could say the same about Melville’s meditations on cetology and other aspects of whaling in Moby-Dick.
It’s neither an unfair review nor harshly critical and she certainly is not anti-Wallace (or anti-Eggers, for that matter). I often disagree with her reviews she’s written, but she is not a “stupid” person and I’m not lining up behind Franzen or anyone else who had their ego bruised.
I know she doesn’t use the phrase “one long mess.” That’s why “mess” is the only word in quotation marks in my sentence. That’s how quotations work.
I don’t see where I called her stupid, either. I think she’s wrong, but that’s allowed, right?
I love Mimi!! I was really sad when I read Mrs. Kennedy’s post saying that you had declined the honor of being an Infinite Summer guide, so yay! I’m glad you at least consented to be a guest poster. Thanks for the insight and the encouragement to get on board with this project. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some marathon reading to do to catch up to where I’m supposed to be!
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