Comments on: Sincerely Yours, David Foster Wallace

By: Tom P.

Tom P. — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:38:59 +0000

Finished today and I can’t believe it’s over.

By: days

days — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:35:40 +0000

Get a buddy with whom you can read this book and you WILL do it. I had someone I could check in w/ through the slog. If she kept it up so could I. It was like trudging up a mountain you had no intention of really climbing but there you are coz you thought it was going to be “fun” to give it a go. Once you get to like page 300 — it’s like reaching the summit where the vista opens up and you have a view of a surprising magnificence. When you reach that point in your reading you’ll be calling anyone you know to beg, “Can I just read this passage to you???” You will not be able to contain yourself — the genius of the book, the loving presence of the author and the heartbreaking beauty of it…and you will at times just have to put the book down coz you need the private time to just laugh and laugh and laugh. And shake your head, marveling that you are alive and how lucky you are: because you can be touched so deeply on levels. So don’t wait. Just pick it up and read it.

By: Karin K

Karin K — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 02:46:48 +0000

Great thoughts Matthew! I think it was his interview with Michael Silverblatt, back when the book first came out, when he said he thought of writing as an attempt to connect with others. I always got the feeling both from this novel and his comments that he was genuinely worried for humanity, and he was trying to offer advice before we ground ourselves into obscurity with commercialism, addiction, celebrity, and vanity. Maybe he didn’t want to be preachy, so he pleaded with us through the telling of a powerful story, a parable of sorts.

By: Robert Sharp » Blog Archive » Two Americas – Infinite Jest and The Wire

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 23:33:24 +0000

[...] success is a triumph of sincerity over cynicism, which is, as Matthew Baldwin has been arguing this week, a major theme in Infinite Jest. In the book, of course, the sincerity is for the most part [...]

By: Repat

Repat — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:47:01 +0000

Thanks for this link, DG. I hadn’t read it.

He writes: “For those of us who came of age in the 1990s, his fiction was a relief and a gift.” Indeed.

After reading Matthew’s post (above) I was thinking it again–what a relief!–that others read the novel this way. Sincerely, that is. Which is right on.

I also like how he (Jon Baskin) addresses a common misunderstanding of Wallace: “But this said more about the wariness and suspicion with which some segments of American culture viewed what they (mistakenly) believed to be Wallace’s postmodern pedigree than it did about Wallace himself.”

By: naptimewriting

naptimewriting — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:28:54 +0000

Thanks for this post. It feels like sincerity, or moving past irony (not ignoring it or dismissing it but acknowledging its usefulness and simultaneous uselessness)and settling into painful, beautiful, honest emotion is the point of this book. And that we can’t start there. We have to see pain and beauty and honesty and *then* be led into the emotion.
The fact that we can get to a point where some people think the point of the book is sincerity is why I am an official IJ pusher and Keep Coming Back.

By: Doubtful Geste

Doubtful Geste — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:21:42 +0000

Apologies to others who may have already found this article, but just found a long sorta-scholarly article on the web that seems to do a pretty good and detailed job of addressing this same issue of how DFW approaches sincerity and irony. Struck me as nicely down to earth and readable:

http://thepointmag.com/death1.html

By: joshua

joshua — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 17:03:09 +0000

yes. that is why i keep coming back.

By: Prolixian

Prolixian — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 16:14:51 +0000

Like everyone else, I’ve struggled mightily to tell answer the question, “What is IJ about?” All along, I’ve gotten the feeling that book is not so much a story as a process. Reading it, I could almost feel my brain being forced through a series of maneuvers that were noticeably changing my outlook on many things. From the very first chapters, every aspect (e.g., the changing narrators, the swings from humor to horror, plausible to surreal) moved me away from looking for a unifying plot line, and more to the conviction that the way to read this book was to let it take me where it would, without resistance.

While there is some semblance of a story line, blathering to others about 12-step programs, tennis, and wheelchair assassins did no more to convey the totality of IJ as a book than blathering about a black and white checkerboard and the shapes of the pieces conveys the totality of a chess game. I have pointed people to This Is Water as a way of trying to convey some of the emotional direction of the work.

I think Matthew has gotten a handle on at least part of it – the process is a detox process, a process of bringing one in touch with the really real.

The success of the book in this fashion is absolutely astonishing. It’s hard to imagine the mind that could conceive of such a literary device.

By: Mark Reid

Mark Reid — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 10:10:44 +0000

When I was a little less than halfway through IJ my wife asked me what made it different to the other books by other famous contemporary authors I'd read: Underworld, The New York Trilogy, The Corrections, The Sportswriter, and so on. I struggled for a while to come up with an answer, mumbling about incredible attention to detail, rich world-building, a beautifully confounding plot before answering confidently, "there's real sincerity in what he writes about his characters and the people they represent." Reading this post and all the people ID'ing with you in these comments is heartening. I feel like I'm being purged of Cynicism - a Substance I have abused heavily in the past – and it feels good. I'll Keep Coming Back in the hope of staying off the stuff indefinitely.