Michael Chabon, who I’m sure is a careful reader, loved this book. In “Maps & Legends”, he essentially whinges (Love that word) for 200 pages about our need to dump books into buckets … claiming that once you put the little rocket ship on the spine of the book in the library or bookstore, no one will read it … sometimes out of embarrassment, sometimes because they assume the category is full of cruft. Chabon said the only reason The Road wasn’t science fiction was because it won the Pulitzer. This is sci-fi the same way zombie films are … using a debatably plausible premise to pass commentary on society today, as we know it.

I consider this book a warning (and DFW’s terminal unhappiness with this world the “!!!!!” at the end of the warning). In that sense, this book HAS to be set in the near future, where you can extrapolate enough to see that the water you’re sitting is indeed getting closer to a boil, but not so far in the future that the outcome is inevitable.

I also think the book is one big ink-blot test. Everyone is unhappy with some aspect of the book, but the number of camps of unhappiness exceeds the number of pages in the tome. The fact that this is so many different books to so many different people just makes me love it that much more.

There are undoubtedly other weird things going on with the narrative’s chronology but for this case, DFW is hitting us over the head with it.

I’ve been reading these posts thinking about Farenheit 451 and his reference to the earpiece telephones (”seashells” I believe? Someone correct me what he called them . . . but Bluetooth anyone?). He also talked about folks installing TVs on every wall in their home? That’s not Sci Fi, that’s insight/foresight, esp since that was written a half a century ago.

DFW, et al, are simply commenting on the future of American society. Farenheit 451 to me was not science fiction, but rather a clever commentary on where we are heading. 1984 spoke of cameras everywhere and that war is peace. Hmm. Sound familiar anyone?

If you want to listen to DFW on Bookworm re IJ and other books, you can access the podcasts on http://www.kcrw.com/etc/david-foster-wallace

With respect to other posts supra, as far as DFW being sloppy with the text, losing control of the timeline, and so much more in IJ, DFW says the following in a comment starting at 9:38 into the Bookworm interview:

…I worked harder on this than anything I’ve ever done in my life and there’s nothing in there by accident and there have already been some readers and reviewers that see it as kind of a mess, and as kind of random, and I just have to sort of shrug my shoulders.

My last post on this as well …

Please note that these are binding verbal contracts.