I don’t see where I called her stupid, either. I think she’s wrong, but that’s allowed, right?

“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.

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.