Milestone Reached: Page 295 (30%). A third of the way there, people.
Chapters Read:
Page 219: Joelle Van Dyne (a.k.a, Madam Psychosis, who dated Orin and starred in many of James Incandenza’s films (in addition to whatever other relationship they may have had), attends a party and attempts suicide by overdose in the bathroom.
Page 223: The chronology (cue voices from on high):
Year of the Whopper
Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad
Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar
Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken
Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster
Year of the Yushityu 2007 Mimetic-Resolution-Cartridge-View-Motherboard-Easy-To-Install-Upgrade For Infernatron/InterLace TP Systems For Home, Office, Or Mobile (sic)
Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland
Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment
Year of Glad
Page 227: Helen P. Steeply’s (Putative) Curriculum Vitae.
Page 240: A description of Enfield.
Page 242: Hal and Orin speak on the phone. Hal describes the bizarre mechanics by which their father committed suicide, and his horror upon discovering the body.
Page 256: ETA plays Port Washington in a tennis match.
Page 270: Don Gately, now on staff at the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, councils the newest resident Geoffrey Day.
Page 281: Having defeated Port Washington, the ETA gang returns home on a bus.
Page 283: All about Orin: how he made the transition from tennis to football, and his relationship with the PGOAT, Joelle Van Dyne.
Page 299: Poor Tony undergoes a week of withdraw (most of which is spent in a library restroom), culminating in a seizure while riding the train.
Characters: We get the sense that almost all of the major characters have been introduced by this point (fingers crossed!). We’ll do a complete rundown next week.
Sources consulted during the compilation of this summation: the Infinite Jest Character Profiles (author unknown), JS’s Infinite Jest synopses, Dr. Keith O’Neil’s Infinite Jest Reader’s Guide, and Steve Russillo’s Chapter Thumbnails.
I wrote about this a little bit in my own synopsis, but what I find absolutely fascinating is that even the section that’s supposedly “all about Orin” has a lot of other character voices in it–especially Charles Tavis’s whining, and Avril’s mothering. The irony is that with Charles and Avril, both are passive people (the sort who shuffle awkwardly out of a room to avoid confrontation), and yet both are so totally ACTIVE in Orin’s narrative–whereas by the end, Orin himself is rendered passive, reduced to watching himself on cartridges, holding back even his masturbatory impulses, waiting instead for his P.G.O.A.T. to get home.
Isn’t this, incidentally, what Infinite Jest(V?) does?
That is because – as IJ proclaims – an individual person has basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in life, i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Maybe O is just a White Flagger.
I’m not militant grammarian, yet I am troubled that I’m not sure if it’s the “-View-” or something else in the Subsidized Year of Yushito… that compels a “(sic)”.