Author: kevin

NOTE: I realize some Infsumerians didn’t like the (fully disclosed) spoilers in my last post. There’s a big one (a nuclear one) in this post, too, but I’m wrapping up the novel this week and it would be difficult for me to do that without making this point, so here’s my apology in advance. If you haven’t yet finished, I would think twice before venturing past the spoiler tag.

I’m sure it never even occurred to Harper Lee that she could end To Kill a Mockingbird right before the trial starts.

That’s because probably the most basic axiom of storytelling, so obvious it’s rarely said out loud, is that you have to tell the best part. And another obvious thing you should especially never do is tell the reader that there is this really cool part coming up, a part that’s going to tie everything together, finally and at last, a climax if you will, and then as the reader’s bookmark rapidly approaches the end, allow him or her to slowly, crushingly, come to the realization that said scene will never appear.

So there are people who are rightly frustrated with the end of Infinite Jest. And what they don’t want to hear is that their frustration is the point, that the author has manipulated their emotions in the service of his literary agenda. So I won’t say that.

To be honest, my problem with a lot of so-called post-modern literature¹¹⁰ is that many of these books and stories and plays monkey with the conventions of storytelling just to point out the conventions of storytelling. Which sounds really good in an MFA workshop, but the people who actually buy and read books generally care about the scaffolding of a story as much as people who ride buses care about the assembly of diesel engines.

The good news is the scaffolding of the story is not Wallace’s point. Or if it is, it’s a small point among much, much larger ones.

Wallace probably would have enjoyed writing the scene where Hal and Gately finally meet. I kind of like to think he couldn’t resist doing it, secretly. But would it have been at all honest to write a massive book about the futility of the pursuit of happiness and then pay it off at the end in such a spectacularly satisfying fashion?

We are hardwired to believe in the existence of bliss, that the pursuit of it is even a fundamental human right, but that pursuit is, ironically, responsible for much of the crushing unhappiness we experience. Infinite Jest is loaded with examples of this. There is the Entertainment, of course, so pleasurable it turns the viewer into a vegetable. And every character at Ennet House is there because they chased bliss to the point of life-altering misery.

Lyle lays it all out pretty explicitly in his discussion¹¹¹ with 11-year-old LaMont Chu, who still might be young enough to have never questioned his own personal right to happiness ever-after:

‘You burn to have your photograph in a magazine.’ ‘I’m afraid so.’ ‘Why again exactly, now?’ ‘I guess to be felt about as I feel about those players with their pictures in magazines.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Why? I guess to give my life some sort of kind of meaning, Lyle.’ ‘And how would this do this again?’ ‘Lyle, I don’t know. I do not know. It just does. Would. Why else would I burn like this, clip secret pictures, not take risks, not sleep or pee?’ ‘You feel these men with their photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning.’ ‘I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?’ ‘The meaning they feel, you mean. From the fame.’ ‘Lyle, don’t they ?’ Lyle sucks his cheeks. It’s not like he’s condescending or stringing you along. He’s thinking as hard as you. It’s like he’s you in the top of a clean pond. It’s part of the attention. One side of his cheeks almost caves in, thinking. ‘LaMont, perhaps they did at first. The first photograph, the first magazine, the gratified surge, the seeing themselves as others see them, the hagiography of image, perhaps. Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After the first surge, they care only that their photographs seem awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing you burn to escape, what they call their privacy is being violated. Something changes. After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.’ ‘Is this supposed to be good news? This is awful news.’ ‘LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true?’ ‘Okey-dokey.’ ‘The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.’ ‘Maybe I ought to be getting back.’ ‘LaMont, the world is very old. You have been snared by something untrue. You are deluded. But this is good news. You have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal. You assume that there is a flip-side to your painful envy of Michael Chang: namely Michael Chang’s enjoyable feeling of being-envied-by-LaMont-Chu. No such animal.’ ‘Animal?’ ‘You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.’ ‘This is good news?’ ‘It is the truth. To be envied, admired, is not a feeling. Nor is fame a feeling. There are feelings associated with fame, but few of them are any more enjoyable than the feelings associated with envy of fame.’ ‘The burning doesn’t go away?’ ‘What fire dies when you feed it? It is not fame itself they wish to deny you here. Trust them. There is much fear in fame. Terrible and heavy fear to be pulled and held, carried. Perhaps they want only to keep it off you until you weigh enough to pull it toward yourself.’ ‘Would I sound ungrateful if I said this doesn’t make me feel very much better at all?’ ‘La-Mont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.’ ‘So I’m stuck in the cage from either side. Fame or tortured envy of fame. There’s no way out.’ ‘You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage. And I believe I see a drop on your temple, right…there….’ Etc.

By depriving us of the promised, surely awesome scene in which Gately and Hal and John N.R. Wayne dig up JOI’s skull presumably looking for the Entertainment (only to find, according to Gately’s premonition, that they were too late) but to never tell us exactly what happens to Hal between the end of this book and its opening chapter (or what happens to John Wayne, who would have won this year’s Whataburger¹¹² if not for what we never find out) Wallace is making us painfully aware of the fact of the cage. Like that missing scene with Hal and Gately, perpetual happiness exists as an idea, but we can’t have it. And deluding ourselves that we can will only make us perpetually miserable.

Naturally a lot of us get to the end and, like LaMont, are scratching our heads and asking, Is this supposed to be good news?

I think it is, kinda. And I believe I see a drop on your temple right…there….

(Note: I’m going to bend the spoiler line in minor ways with this post, but we’re on the steep downhill to the end and I think most of us are either ahead of the calendar or so far behind it the spoiler line is almost meaningless.)

When I was young–at whatever age it was when I first had an awareness of sex, albeit one poorly informed by nascent hormones and edited-for-TV James Bond films–I can remember being very concerned that when I became old enough to have sex I wouldn’t want to do anything else. I was years and years from having the means, motive, and opportunity to have sex with anyone, but I had this idea of sex as being pleasurable to the exclusion of everything else. And it scared me a little bit because I wanted to be a professional baseball player, which presumably involved a lot of practice time.

Kids are incredibly efficient pleasure seekers who spend every minute of the day trying to evade boredom, so it’s probably not surprising or unusual that a child could conceive of a concept that so mirrors The Entertainment. It’s far more surprising that Wallace had the empathy to conceive of it as an adult.¹⁰³

As ETA custodian Kenkle says to custodian Brandt on p. 874:

‘And then the Yuletide season, Brandt my friend Brandt — Christmas — Christmas morning — What is the essence of Christmas morning but the childish co-eval of venereal interface, for a child? — A present, Brandt — Something you have not earned and which formerly was out of your possession is now in your po-ssession — Can you sit there and try to say there is no symbolic rela-tion between unwrapping a Christmas present and undressing a young lady?’

Kids have this incredible capacity for happiness. They can give themselves an endorphin rush the likes of which you and I haven’t experienced in decades from just the sight of a new stuffed animal or the mention of chicken nuggets. And although they get sad, for most kids sadness is fleeting. When one of my kids cries because he doesn’t want to go to bed, all I have to do is remind him of some small thing that makes him happy to start him trembling with joy. (“Guess what? We’re going to the dry cleaners tomorrow and you know what they have at the dry cleaners? Lollipops!”) Most kids can choose to be glad almost whenever they want.

To adults this ability to choose happiness seems like a superpower, as enviable as the ability to fly.

Because when you become an adult, the whole happy-sad axis gets inverted. Adults have a limited capacity for happiness and that happiness is always fleeting. On the other hand, it seems like our capacity for sadness is almost bottomless, and that’s why we feel depressed and anxious and that’s why the use of products like Exhale Wellness THC cartridge can help adult feel better in these situations. If you need cannabis for medical purposes, you may find a local dispensary by searching “weed near me” online.

This (a little bit spoilery) is from a discussion on page 880 between White House advisors and marketing and television execs concerning a PSA they are producing to warn Americans about the deadly TP cartridges coming over the border. Their plan is to direct the spot at children with an animated character called “Fully Functional Phil:

‘Tom’s rather ingeniously played up the functionality angle. The energy and verve versus passivity angle. He’s never just Phil. He’s Fully Functional Phil. He’s a blur of kid-type activity — school, playing, teleputer-interfacing, prancing. Tom’s got him storyboarded for a number of thirty-second activity-packed little adventures. He’s a goof, an iconic child, but he’s active. He stands for the attraction of capacity, agency, choice. As versus the spot’s animated adult who we see in a recliner ostensibly watching the Canadian cartridge, little spirals going around and around in his eyes as his body sort of melts and his head starts growing and distending until the passive watching adult’s image is just a huge five-o’clock-shadowed head in the recliner, his eyeballs huge and whirling.’

 

References to adult longing for the childhood capacity for happiness are everywhere in this book. Mute in his hospital bed, in terrible pain, Gately alternates between feverish adult dreams conflating pleasure and death, and persistent memories of childhood, where he watches TV and trades small kindnesses with a neighbor who, feared by all the grown-ups, eventually hangs herself; Hal stumbles into what he hopes is an NA meeting only to find a group of burly, hairy, sobbing men holding teddy bears and trying to coax out their “inner infant”; Mario, who has managed to prolong childhood into adulthood is worshipped by his mother (who is having sex with a student 40 years her junior) and envied by his brother (who gave up his childhood to pursue greatness in tennis, a profession where you retire when you’re still in your twenties), wonders how you can even confirm when someone is sad.

And of course there is Joelle:

(T)hings had gotten first strange and then creepy as Madame Psychosis entered puberty, apparently; specifically the low-pH father had gotten creepy, seeming to behave as if Madame Psychosis were getting younger instead of older: taking her to increasingly child-rated films at the local Cineplex, refusing to acknowledge issues of menses or breasts, strongly discouraging dating, etc. Apparently issues were complicated by the fact that Madame Psychosis emerged from puberty as an almost freakishly beautiful young woman, especially in a part of the United States where poor nutrition and indifference to dentition and hygiene made physical beauty an extremely rare and sort of discomfiting condition, one in no way shared by Madame Psychosis’s toothless and fireplug-shaped mother, who said not a word as Madame Psychosis’s father interdicted everything from brassieres to Pap smears, addressing the nubile Madame Psychosis in progressively puerile baby-talk and continuing to use her childhood diminutive like Pookie or Putti as he attempted to dissuade her from accepting a scholarship to a Boston University whose Film and Film-Cartridge Studies Program was, he apparently maintained, full of quote Nasty Pootem Wooky Barn-Bams, unquote, whatever family-code pejorative this signified.

Of course, it was her father’s attempts to regress her to childhood that eventually led to her disfiguring.

I don’t have anything to add on the subject that Wallace doesn’t say more eloquently. But one of the real wonders of Infinite Jest is that DFW provides the reader with so many prisms through which to read it–I won’t even pretend to believe I’ve discovered them all–and while the core themes of happiness and sadness remain constant throughout, the experience of the book changes depending on the glass you pick up.

Someone recently sent me an unpublished manuscript to read and while the book itself had many things to recommend it, there was one sentence that made me laugh. I won’t use the same context because I don’t want to embarrass the author, but the gist of it was something like, “It’s so ironic that you brought garlic bread because I made marinara sauce!”

In other words the writer used the word “ironic” to mean “entirely congruous,” the exact opposite of ironic.

Of course, people have been misusing the word irony for a lot longer than Alanis Morrissette has been writing songs, but this one tickled me in particular, creating as it did something of a set theory paradox–a use of the word irony that did not mean irony but was nevertheless an unintended example of it. Wallace would be pleased by the circular nature of that, I suspect.

Several of these posts have pointed to Wallace’s expressed distaste for irony, but you never cease to find examples of people calling him an ironist. I’m sure this is related to his use of satire and especially metafictional techniques, which have long been associated with irony. But it’s hard to imagine anyone would read Infinite Jest with anything like a careful eye and not feel the earnestness with which it is written. Even when Wallace uses the word irony, it’s usually in a pejorative sense, either from the POV of the White Flaggers and their “irony free zone” or by a Canadian sneering at ironic Americans.

The introduction to my edition of IJ was written by Dave Eggers, who is often compared to Wallace. That connection is usually made through Eggers’ use of footnotes in the front matter to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which is a memoir not a novel. And like Wallace, Eggers is often used as the critical poster boy for irony, despite the fact that Eggers might just be the most earnest writer we have.⁸⁴

The truth is my generation, which is also the generation of Wallace and Eggers, has had irony imprinted on it. We grew up with Letterman and came of age with the Simpsons. In fact, with the 40th anniversary of Woodstock this month, it’s been amusing for me and others my age to watch the seriousness with which the boomers take their nostalgia. The popular music of our own youth was terrible and we know it, but we have this arch fondness for Men at Work⁸⁵ or whatever because it still triggers these sense memories of being young and worry-free and gloriously hormonal. What you have in Wallace and Eggers are writers who have instinctively appropriated this ironic reflex and put it in the service of sincerity–the techniques other writers have used to distance the author from the text they use instead to engage the reader with it.

On page 694, Wallace has a much more sophisticated take on the same idea:

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip–and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naiveté.

The mask is stuck there even on Wallace, but he has found a way to put it to nobler use.

I’ve seen people refer to this as post-irony, but that does nothing to clarify the issue (is a post-modernist not also modern?) and the issue needs clarification. Most people who have read neither writer (and some who have) still think they are leading contemporary examples of ironists.⁸⁶ And the problem with that assumption is that everything they say then becomes suspect. Every time Eggers speaks, media-types and bloggers parse his words for the real meaning when the real meaning couldn’t be clearer.⁸⁷ Wallace answers a simple question–What are ten books you like?⁸⁸–and half the people don’t believe him.

I don’t think anybody hereabouts needs one, but here’s an irony palette cleanser: Roger Ebert’s terrific essay this week in which he talks for the first time about his 30 years sober with AA. If you have time, I encourage you to read the comments, especially the varied reactions from other AA members (some are angry that Ebert has violated Tradition 11 by shedding his anonymity and talking publicly about the meetings). It’s an excellent companion piece to IJ.

In the underrated Mike Judge film Idiocracy, Luke Wilson is unfrozen centuries in the future where people have become so stupid that a two-hour video of a man’s naked, farting ass wins four Oscars, and Wilson has to run around desperately trying to convince everyone on the planet that humans will go extinct unless they stop irrigating their dying crops with Gatorade.⁷⁰

Which got me thinking: Will anybody still be reading Infinite Jest 100 years from now?

One of the enduring appeals of writing a book has always been that it doesn’t seem so ephemeral. Especially in an age of new media, a book feels like a lasting creation, a thing of permanence. We still have Bibles that rolled off Gutenberg’s press lying around our climate-controlled archives, and so there’s no reason someone couldn’t be curled up with that romance novel of yours late at night in the year 2525.

This is a self-delusion of authors, of course. Very few books outlive the people who wrote them. Looking back at the publishing year 1896 (100 years before IJ) the only novels I can see that anyone’s still reading with any regularity were both written by HG Wells.⁷¹

In 2005, the Guardian polled 500 British book clubs book club readers and asked them which novels written in the 20th Century (and the first few years of the 21st Century) would be considered classics a century hence. Perhaps unsurprisingly given the sample, the list is about half-filled with recent book club faves–The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Star of the Sea, The Time Traveler’s Wife, Atonement, The Handmaid’s Tale.⁷² The Guardian kind of sneers at this result,⁷³⁸ but it might not be so far off. These are works of popular fiction with a lot of copies in print and a large group of individuals evangelizing for them. There are reasons to think some might have a chance at enduring

Infinite Jest, at least in 2009, certainly has plenty of rabid evangelizers. It has some apparent obstacles to its longevity, however. Infinite Summer started with thousands of enthusiastic and determined readers. Based on activity in the comments and the forums and on Twitter, I’d guess that through attrition we are already less than half what we were. That kind of drop-out rate could be punishing to the book over the years. The amount of time and effort it takes to read, digest, and discuss makes it an unlikely candidate to be taught widely in undergraduate classrooms (although obviously it can be done). Wallace’s persistent, casual use of brand names and pop-culture references⁷⁴ would make this novel considerably more difficult to read down the road–imagine what adding a full complement of footnotes on top of the original endnotes would do the level of difficulty.⁷⁵ IJ is also distinctly American, which cuts a couple of ways, I suspect.

As deliberately tempting as Wallace makes it to quit reading this book, you have to figure, in the long run, that everyone might take him up on it eventually.

On the other hand.

I’ve had a lot of people over the years try to pass Infinite Jest into my hands, and there was always a kind of urgency to their plea that was frankly kind of off-putting. I think now that urgency might be related to this sense, perhaps unconscious, that this book by its very nature might be in jeopardy of deleting its own map. I don’t think I’d ever say that any single book is necessary, but anyone who connects with a novel the way so many have with Infinite Jest is clearly going to be distressed by the possibility that it might be on the endangered list, even a few years down the road. I suspect the intensity with which people try to push this novel on other readers is related to the sense that it might be endangered, somehow. That as epic and important and groundbreaking as it is, its future might not be ensured. If there has been a level of desperation in the pleas to me by IJ lovers over the years, I now understand it.

In Idiocracy, Luke Wilson eventually convinces the morons of the future that water isn’t poisonous. Addressing them he says, “There was a time when reading wasn’t just for fags.⁷⁶ And neither was writing. People wrote books and movies–movies with stories that made you care about whose ass it was and why it was farting. And I believe that time can come again!”

I might even work on a version of that speech when it’s time for me to start pushing Infinite Jest on my friends.

Years ago when I was a creative director at an ad agency/design firm, I wrote a campaign for a wood-fire Chicago steakhouse that included print ads and billboards featuring an illustration of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow and the headline: “IT’S PAYBACK TIME.” Based on assorted letters to the editor there was virtually no one who liked the ad itself. Vegans were outraged. Local historians raced to the defense of the unfairly maligned cow. Even committed carnivores didn’t particularly like the idea of eating an animal in an act of revenge, joke or no.

None of that hostility transferred to the restaurant, however. The campaign worked. Diner traffic to the restaurant increased.⁶²

In Infinite Jest, Wallace describes a series of television commercials so appalling they virtually destroy broadcast television, even as sales of the products advertised in the spots soar.

(E)ven though the critics and P.T.A.s and eating-disorder-oriented distaff PACs were denouncing the LipoVac spots’ shots of rippling cellulite and explicit clips of procedures that resembled crosses between hyperbolic Hoover Upright demonstrations and filmed autopsies and cholesterol conscious cooking shows that involved a great deal of chicken-fat drainage, and even though audiences’ flights from the LipoVac spots themselves were absolutely gutting ratings for the other ads and the shows around them…the LipoVac string’s revenues were so obscenely enhanced by the ads that LipoVac Unltd. could soon afford to pay obscene sums for 30-second Network spots, truly obscene, sums the besieged Four now needed in the very worst way. And so the LipoVac ads ran and ran, and much currency changed hands, and overall Network ratings began to slump as if punctured with something blunt.

It’s a very funny and smart observation, and there are plenty of examples of this phenomenon throughout advertising history. Currently there’s a series of spots for the Palm Pre that is pretty much reviled by everybody, even as the early returns show a spike in the product’s profile. And I probably don’t have to say anything more than “Head On! Apply directly to the forehead!” to cause a cringing face to appear as a reflection in your laptop screen.⁶³

Wallace anticipated the success of a number of technologies–time shifting and DVRs and On Demand video, for instance–that have changed our relationship with television and more specifically with advertising. But perhaps most relevant to Infinite Jest is a recent study published in the Journal of Consumer Research suggesting that viewers enjoy television programs when commercial breaks are included more than the same programs shown without commercials “by a decisive margin.” This is true even though “at every given moment watching the sitcom will be more enjoyable than watching a television commercial.” I’m not sure the authors of that study have a handle on exactly why that this is.⁶⁴

There would seem to be an interesting take on the subject within the pages of Infinite Jest, however.

The Steeply and Marathe sections explicitly establish the idea that freedom in the form of “choosing” is supposed to make us happy, but is really a cage in itself. The Ennet House and ETA chapters are concerned with the related paradox that, while “fascism” by its nature is clearly an immoral incursion on the dignity of the individual, we must surrender to a kind of “personal fascism” (here in the form of AA or sadistic conditioning drills) if we are serious about pursuing happiness.⁶⁵ “We are children, bullies but still children inside, and will kill ourselves…if you put the candy within the arms’ reach,” Steeply says. Without some authority looking after our better interests, and left to our own choosing, we will surely follow the path of short-term gratification over long-term satisfaction–we will choose to watch The Entertainment even knowing the dire consequences of that decision.

So isn’t it interesting that while very few of us would choose to watch commercials if given an opportunity to skip them, almost all of us find the program with commercial interruptions forced upon us more pleasurable than the program without them?

And isn’t it also interesting that, some 13 years before the surprising results of this study, Wallace published a novel (a novel specifically about the inevitably fatal pursuit of uninterrupted pleasure) with the interruptions mercifully built in?

When I started writing my second novel,⁵⁴ I imagined it would be structured like a teraktys, an ancient Pythagorean symbol that plays a role in the story. Specifically, the second section would be twice as long as the first, the third three times as long as the first, and the final section four times as long as the first. Fiction has a way of defying mathematical precepts, however, and the final version doesn’t really resemble a tetraktys at all, except that the fourth part is still at least somewhat longer than the first one.

I think most writers start out with a Platonic ideal in their head of what their novel might look like when it’s done. For some it might be a mathematical model. For others it might be a quote from some future, hypothetical critic, wrapping the relevant themes in praise. For others it might be the physical thing itself. I think writers do a lot of visualizing in general.⁵⁵ The craft of writing is forming and massaging words into a whole that hopefully approaches, but never actually becomes, something like the thing you had imagined.

Anyway, I was struck by this Bookworm discussion with Wallace (different, BTW, from the last Bookworm interview I quoted). Michael Silverblatt started the interview by saying that reading Infinite Jest he was reminded of fractals. Wallace responded by saying:

I’ve heard you were an acute reader. That’s one of the things, structurally, that’s going on. It’s actually structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal, although what was structured as a Sierpinski Gasket was the first- was the draft that I delivered to Michael in ’94, and it went through some I think ‘mercy cuts’, so it’s probably kind of a lopsided Sierpinski Gasket now. But it’s interesting, that’s one of the structural ways that it’s supposed to kind of come together.

It’s illustrative of the gap between our intellects that my ideal novel looked like this and Wallace’s looked like this. Still I understood what he meant. The concept of the Sierpinski Gasket was this organizing metaphor, the avatar of the novel in his head he was trying to make real. And despite DFW’s suggestion that he never expected any reader to notice this, or that the final version of the book doesn’t much resemble a Sierpinski Gasket, there are plenty of surface similarities (and this is what Silverblatt was referring to) in that the main themes and storylines reoccur and replicate in non-linear ways large and small throughout the novel.

Novelists often talk about seducing the reader into following the story all the way to the end. Structure is one of the tools of that seduction. At its most basic level, structure is the way the author reveals and withholds information–much like the way you reveal and withhold information about yourself on a date in order to create some level of personal intrigue.

One of the things that makes other writers go nuts up with envy when they read Infinite Jest is that the structure of it is aggressively anti-seductive. I know there are people who are going to say that Wallace had them at I am in here but obviously this novel is very intriguing at the outset and then kind of veers off into insanity for awhile, with constant interruptions and tangents. For a good portion of the first 200 pages, you’re really not sure what the hell he’s talking about, and frankly you’re getting kind of exhausted and frustrated, maybe even offended. Certainly there are many many sections in that period that are brilliant and funny and sexy, but if you think of Infinite Jest as a first date, there are ample opportunities during the appetizers for the reader to excuse herself, head for the Ladies but then veer toward the exit, never to return.

And certainly a lot of readers over the years have done just that.

Wallace uses the structure of this novel to a very different purpose. It isn’t designed to lead you, with one hand in your ass pocket, from the beginning to the end. He structured the novel specifically to control the experience of reading it. To disrupt you. To disorient you. To rudely interrupt you. Wallace didn’t want this book to just be about these themes of miscommunication and the impermanence of pleasure, he wanted the book itself to a simulacrum of the characters’ experience. Read this section from the most recent week’s pages and think of it simultaneously as a description of AA speakers and their audience, as a metaphor for writers and readers, and also a humble apologia for the kind of hoops Wallace has so far put the reader through:

Speakers who are accustomed to figuring out what an audience wants to hear and then supplying it find out quickly that this particular audience does not want to be supplied with what someone else thinks it wants….Close to two hundred people all punishing somebody by getting embarrassed for him, killing him by empathetically dying right there with him, for him, up there at the podium. The applause when this guy’s done has the relieved feel of a fist unclenching, and their cries of ‘Keep Coming!’ are so sincere it’s almost painful.

But then in equally paradoxical contrast have a look at the next Advanced Basics speaker–this tall baggy sack of a man, also painfully new, but this poor bastard here completely and openly nerve-racked, wobbling his way up to the front, his face shiny with sweat and his talk full of blank cunctations and disassociated leaps….(and) the White Flaggers all fell about, they were totally pleased and amused, the Crocodiles removed their cigars and roared and wheezed and stomped both feet on the floor and showed scary teeth, everyone roaring with Identification and pleasure.⁵⁶

Most people come to this novel sincerely wanting to have read it. And the journey itself is extremely rewarding. But Wallace makes it very easy to quit this book. In fact, by abdicating the traditional authorial role as seducer, he allows the idea of quitting to become seductive instead.

Wallace clearly wanted the reader not just to understand, but to feel some simulacrum of the emotions felt by the characters sitting in those AA meetings.⁵⁷ In just the first half of the novel, the characters enjoin each other (and the reader) to “Keep Coming,” or to “Keep Coming Back” 17 times.

I am truly enjoying this novel. I am finding it completely immersive, entertaining, and eye-opening. It’s a marvel to read. But if it weren’t for this project, I’m not sure I would have gotten this far. The stack of other, unread books in my pile is so high and appealing that I might have just decided, Murtaugh-style, that I’m too old for this shit. And I was thinking this morning how grateful I am that this is happening because I want to read this book, and I want to have read it but I don’t think I would have finished it on my own.

Obviously Matthew wasn’t thinking about any of this when he organized Infinite Summer. How could he when he didn’t know much what the book was about? And no author could imagine that his book would be read exactly this way⁵⁸ Strictly by accident Matthew kind of stumbled on a method of approaching this novel–a structure for reading it–that actually magnifies and complements the very experience Wallace tried to manipulate within his structure for the novel. For me at least, as it does for Gately, the pressure of the group on the individual (not to mention that one-day-at-a-time schedule of responsibilities) serves as a counter to the seductiveness of Out There, where all those shorter unread books are waiting for me.

Keep Coming Back because It Works.

Crazy.

1. On one of the early pages of Infinite Jest, Wallace uses the old-fashioned word “twitter”.³² This of course triggered a number of jokes in the forums (and on Twitter, of course) that DFW had even predicted social networking. Ha ha.

Except today I’m not so sure he didn’t.

2. There is an almost unbearable (for the author) amount of time between the day the manuscript is “finished” and the day it is published. I’m not sure when Wallace handed in the complete manuscript to Little Brown, but with a book as big as Infinite Jest–both in terms of heft and hype–you could easily expect a couple of birthdays to pass through the edits and the copyedits and the sales efforts and the marketing push. This period can be pretty anxious for writers, and one of the fears that can obsess a novelist during this time is that some part of his book he thinks particularly clever or original is going to be preempted by a similar plot or character or conceit in another book, film, or TV show. Or real life, even. When you spend years working on the same project everything about it, no matter how innovative, begins to feel obvious and banal to you. If you hear an author pull out that old cliché about worrying he’ll be “exposed as a fraud” it’s a good bet somebody interviewed him after he could no longer make changes to a manuscript but before his novel had actually been published.

3. I was reading the Madame Psychosis section and this bit caused me to stop for a sec:

There’s no telling what’ll be up on a given night. If there’s one even remotely consistent theme it’s maybe film and film-cartridges. Early and (mostly Italian) neorealist and (mostly German) expressionist celluloid film. Never New Wave. Thumbs-up on Peterson/Broughton and Dali/ Buñuel and -down on Deren/Hammid. Passionate about Antonioni’s slower stuff and some Russian guy named Tarkovsky. Sometimes Ozu and Bresson. Odd affection for the hoary dramaturgy of one Sir Herbert Tree. Bizarre Kaelesque admiration for goremeisters Peckinpah, De Palma, Tarantino. Positively poisonous on the subject of Fellini’s 8 1/2. Exceptionally conversant w/r/t avant-garde celluloid and avant- and apres-garde digital cartridges, anti-confluential cinema, Brutalism, Found Drama, etc.

I thought, rather casually, “How did Tarantino get in there?”

Not because he doesn’t belong. In 2009 (or in the Y.D.A.U.) you would nod at that reference without giving it a thought. But when Pulp Fiction came out in the fall of 1994, Infinite Jest was less than 18 months away from publication, and the manuscript had to have been more or less complete. Before the sensation of that film, Tarantino was certainly on many lists of young directors to watch, but he wasn’t on anybody’s auteur radar yet.

So I’m assuming Tarantino’s name was probably a late addition to the manuscript. Probably no more meaningful than Wallace wanting his references to be as updated as possible. ³³

4. I’m not exactly sure what Wallace thought of Tarantino, but shortly after the publication of Infinite Jest, Wallace wrote a profile of film director David Lynch. ³⁴ I remember reading it at the time (and especially DFW’s hilarious rant about his personal dislike for the actor Balthazar Getty) because I’m a big Lynch fan. In it Wallace talks about the unacknowledged debt Tarantino owes to Lynch.

Tarantino has made as much of a career out of ripping off Lynch as he has out of converting French New Wave film into commercially palatable U.S. paste….In a way, what Tarantino has done with the French New Wave and with Lynch is what Pat Boone did with rhythm and blues: He’s found (ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive and menacing about their work and homogenize it, churn it until it’s smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption. Reservoir Dogs, for example, with its comically banal lunch chatter, creepily otiose code names, and intrusive soundtrack of campy pop from decades past, is a Lynch movie made commercial, i.e., fast, linear, and with what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably (i.e., “hiply”) surreal….Or consider the granddaddy of in-your-ribs Blue Velvet references: the scene in Reservoir Dogs in which Michael Madsen, dancing to a cheesy ’70s Top 40 tune, cuts off a hostage’s ear-I mean, think about it.]

So maybe he didn’t like him much. Actually, beyond these comments I don’t know what DFW thought of Tarantino, but the general critical rap against QT–that the excessive violence in his films celebrates nihilism and that the infinitely reflexive references to other movies, while fun, tend to elevate the trivial–would seem to be right in the crosshairs of Infinite Jest. The following is Wallace speaking about IJ in an interview with Bookworm’s Michael Silverblatt, also from 1996:

“So far it seems as if people think it really is sort of a book about drug addiction and recovery and, you know, intentional fallacies notwithstanding, what was really going on in my head was something more general like what you were talking about before, that there is a kind — that some of the sadness that it seems to me kind of infuses the culture right now has to do with this loss of purpose or organizing principles, something you’re willing to give yourself away to, basically. And that the addictive impulse, which is very much kind of in the cultural air right now, is interesting and powerful only because it’s a kind of obvious distortion of kind of a religious impulse or an impulse to be part of something bigger. And, you know, the stuff at the academy is kind of weird because, yeah, it’s very high-tech and it’s very “become technically better so you can achieve x, y, and z,” but also the guy who essentially runs the academy now is a fascist, and, whether it comes out or not, he’s really the only one there who to me is saying anything that’s even remotely non-horrifying, except it is horrifying because he’s a fascist. And part of the whole — part of the stuff that was rattling around in my head when I was doing this is that it seems to me that one of the scary things about sort of the nihilism of contemporary culture is that we’re really setting ourselves up for fascism. Because as we empty more and more kind of values, motivating principles, spiritual principles, almost, out of the culture, we’re creating a hunger that eventually is going to drive us to the sort of state where we may accept fascism just because — you know, the nice thing about fascists is they’ll tell you what to think, they’ll tell you what to do–they’ll tell you what’s important.”

I happen to love Tarantino, so I could be part of the problem. Which brings me to

5. The front page of this morning’s³⁵ Chicago Trib business section is almost entirely dedicated to the story of Dave Carroll, who wrote a song about how a United Airlines baggage handler broke the neck of his guitar. Carroll posted a video on YouTube and thanks to Twitter and Facebook almost 3 million people have watched it in just a couple weeks and now United is donating a few grand in his name to charity. Certainly I’m happy for the dude. The song is pretty catchy and yay for the little guy striking a blow to humongous indifferent corporations. But airlines break shit all the time.³⁶ One of them lost my kid’s car seat over the Fourth. This can’t be the most important business story of the day. And it’s not just this story because if I were writing this next Tuesday it would be some other online obsession of the week sprawled all over Page One and I would have already forgotten about this guy’s guitar. More and more news reporting seems to be increasingly Twitter- and Facebook-based. I’m not talking about protesters Tweeting from Iran, which is actually newsworthy, but it’s Ashton vs. CNNBRK, and an Australian TV network says Jeff Goldblum is dead because somebody tweeted it and oh my Demi got fooled by that rumor too, and look this homely British person is a surprisingly good singer, and in yet another section of today’s actual paper–the actual newsy news section even–there’s a story about lifestreamers (or lifecasters) as well as a woman who spends seven hours a day on social networking sites, a woman so addicted to social networking that she wants to Twitter as she walks down the aisle at her wedding and the more we Twitter the more the actual news is about how much we’re all Twittering, and when I think about how much time we (me too) spend on this stuff and how much of the shared experience of our culture is just completely disposable and pointless it really does make me sad and at just that moment I’m reading this book and I also come across that interview and what he says strikes me as just so true it makes my stomach hurt.

6. I don’t mean this to be an anti social networking rant. It’s not these particular tools that are to blame. If anything they are newfangled thermometers that are helping to measure our fever. I’m grateful that Facebook allows me to stay in touch with people who were once very important in my life and who would otherwise be completely absent. And I find Twitter to be incredibly useful. I was captivated with it during the Iranian protests and had great fun a few months ago using Twitter to follow the Edgar Awards³⁷ in real time. Even this project would not be anything like what it is without Facebook and Twitter especially, and if I understand the success of Infinite Summer correctly it is about the desire of a group of people to have a shared, cultural experience that is actually kind of meaningful. There really is a void there and because we fill it too often with shit that is just disposable and endlessly self-referential and auto-deleting the maw constantly needs feeding.

The problem is not the seductive addiction of social networks or the laziness of the news media but the deepening cultural void Wallace identified 13 years ago. And right now I’m grateful that this particular book feels big enough to temporarily fill the hole.

At least until August 21 when Inglorious Basterds comes out.

So, the bricklayer story.

On page 139, Wallace gives us a very funny memo sent from one State Farm employee to another. The memo quotes from an insurance claim. Because I know there are folks who aren’t quite caught up yet, and because this discussion is specifically about Wallace’s choices in telling it, here is the passage as it appears in the novel:

Dear Sir:

I am writing in response to your request for additional information. In block #3 of the accident reporting form, I put “trying to do the job alone”, as the cause of my accident. You said in your letter that I should explain more fully and I trust that the following details will be sufficient.

I am a bricklayer by trade. On the day of the accident, March 27, I was working alone on the roof of a new six story building. When I completed my work, I discovered that I had about 900 kg. of brick left over. Rather than laboriously carry the bricks down by hand, I decided to lower them in a barrel by using a pulley which fortunately was attached to the side of the building at the sixth floor. Securing the rope at ground level, I went up to the roof, swung the barrel out and loaded the brick into it. Then I went back to the ground and untied the rope, holding it tightly to insure a slow descent of the 900 kg of bricks. You will note in block #11 of the accident reporting form that I weigh 75 kg.

Due to my surprise at being jerked off the ground so suddenly, I lost my presence of mind and forgot to let go of the rope. Needless to say, I proceeded at a rapid rate up the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor I met the barrel coming down. This explains the fractured skull and the broken collar bone.

Slowed only slightly, I continued my rapid ascent not stopping until the fingers of my right hand were two knuckles deep into the pulleys. Fortunately, by this time, I had regained my presence of mind, and was able to hold tightly to the rope in spite of considerable pain. At approximately the same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the ground and the bottom fell out of the barrel from the force of hitting the ground.

Devoid of the weight of the bricks, the barrel now weighed approximately 30 kg. I refer you again to my weight of 75 kg in block #11. As you could imagine, still holding the rope, I began a rather rapid descent from the pulley down the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel coming up. This accounts for the two fractured ankles and the laceration of my legs and lower body.

The encounter with the barrel slowed me enough to lessen my impact with the brick-strewn ground below. I am sorry to report, however, that as I lay there on the bricks in considerable pain, unable to stand or move and watching the empty barrel six stories above me, I again lost my presence of mind and unfortunately let go of the rope, causing the barrel to begin a… endtranslNTCOM626

Like a lot of folks I’m sure, I read that piece with an acute sense of deja vu. I not only knew the story, I knew specific phrases were coming even before I read them.

My uncle was in the insurance business and he often sent me and my dad and my brothers funny things he encountered (this was in the actual mail, before the days of the casual email forward). I not only remembered getting this story, an alleged insurance claim from somewhere, but I remembered it being identical to Wallace’s text, almost word-for-word.

My first inclination was that Wallace could not have possibly just cut-and-pasted this whole episode from somewhere else. I considered that maybe my memory was faulty–that Wallace had rewritten an old urban legend with such skill that his version had since become the definitive one. And that my Uncle Tom had sent this to me, not in the late 80s when I was in college, but in the late 90s after Infinite Jest had been released.

Except.

You can find this story in all corners of the Internet with just minor variations. The following appeared on a University of Vermont ListServ dated February of 1996, the same month Infinite Jest was published. The words in bold also appear in the IJ version:

Dear Sir:

I am writing in response to your request for additional information in Block #3 of the accident reporting form. I put “Poor Planning” as the cause of my accident. You asked for a fuller explanation and I trust the following details will be sufficient.

I am a bricklayer by trade. On the day of the accident, I was working alone on the roof of a new six-story building. When I completed my work, I found I had some bricks left over which when weighed later were found to weigh 240 lbs. Rather than carry the bricks down by hand, I decided to lower them in a barrel by using a pulley which was attached to the side of the building at the sixth floor. Securing the rope at ground level, I went up to the roof, swung the barrel out and loaded the bricks into it. Then I went down and untied the rope, holding it tightly to insure a slow descent of the 240 lbs of bricks. You will note on the accident reporting form that my weight is 135 lbs.

Due to my surprise at being jerked off the ground so suddenly, I lost my presence of mind and forgot to let go of the rope. Needless to say, I proceeded at a rapid rate up the side of the building.

In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel which was now proceeding downward at an equally impressive speed. This explains the fractured skull, minor abrasions and the broken collarbone, as listed in Section 3 of the accident reporting form.

Slowed only slightly, I continued my rapid ascent, not stopping until the fingers of my right hand were two knuckles deep into the pulley which I mentioned in Paragraph 2 of this correspondence. Fortunately by this time I had regained my presence of mind and was able to hold tightly to the rope, in spite of the excruciating pain I was now beginning to experience. At approximately the same time, however, the barrel of bricks hit the ground, and the bottom fell out of the barrel.

Now devoid of the weight of the bricks, the barrel weighed approximately 50 lbs. I refer you again to my weight. As you might imagine, I began a rapid descent down the side of the building. In the vicinity of the third floor, I met the barrel coming up. This accounts for the two fractured ankles, broken tooth and severe lacerations of my legs and lower body.

Here my luck began to change slightly. The encounter with the barrel seemed to slow me enough to lessen my injuries when I fell into the pile of bricks and fortunately only three vertebrae were cracked. I am sorry to report, however, as I lay there on the pile of bricks, in pain, unable to move and watching the empty barrel six stories above me, I again lost my composure and presence of mind and let go of the rope.

This is a very old story, one apparently even better known in the British Isles, where it’s said that most comedians of the mid-century had some version of it in their repertoire.²⁰ The insurance claim conceit seems to be a more recent development. It appears in Mike Metcalfe’s 1996 textbook Reading Critically in a form almost identical to the one in Infinite Jest. This version also appeared in a 1982 Louisville Courier-Journal column by Byron Crawford. It’s not available on the internet, but except for a few minor details the text of that article is virtually identical to the text in Infinite Jest. ²¹

All of that was to confirm what many of you already know–David Foster Wallace lifted the text of the entire episode from a pass-around joke. And I was surprised to realize that I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. It surprised me because if a writer had copied someone else’s words so blatantly and without acknowledgment into any other novel I would have been indignant. I wouldn’t have seen any grey area at all. I would have said it was wrong.

But in this particular context, Wallace’s use of this old story is awfully effective. It’s just one of a series of references to urban legends throughout the book, including one to a famous story about toothbrush mischief that Wallace appropriates with more originality. I suppose he’s trying to point out the unreliable nature of any narrative, that our faith in them is something of an illusion. There is also a recurring theme about control that is explicitly described in an earlier scene,²² which takes place in the ETA weight room. It’s one of my favorite lines in the book so far: “Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down.”

I dig all of that.

Still I’m not entirely convinced the ends justify the means. Borrowing and sampling might be done casually by other artists, but words are still sacred to writers. There were a lot ways Wallace might have rewritten this story to make it his own. Whatever your aim, you simply don’t swipe another writer’s words and phrases without acknowledging you’re doing it. ²³

Of course Wallace knew all that, and so we have to conclude that he didn’t do it to deceive and had some other purpose in mind. I suppose he was hoping that readers who knew the story would recognize it, but readers who didn’t know it (which was probably most of them in the nascent days of the Internet when this novel was published) would just assume it was original. We’re back now to the discussion of what the reader brings to the novel. The reader who is familiar with that story will probably react to its appearance differently than one who thinks it’s the product of Wallace’s original wit. I suspect Wallace would have anticipated that, too.

Arrgh.

So I’m curious what all y’all think. Those who are reading IJ for the third time and those who are reading it for the first. Those who recognized the bricklayer story when they read it and those who didn’t. Where do you come down on this? Is this appropriation of another (unknown) person’s material valid? Or not? Is it okay because it’s a piece of narrative flotsam, the cultural equivalent of abandoned property? If we could attribute authorship to someone, would claiming it be less acceptable? ²⁴ Is it because Infinite Jest seems to be so singular an accomplishment that it frustrates our desire to apply these kinds of standards to it? ²⁵

Maybe no one cares about this stuff except me, in which case you can just enjoy a recreation of the accident on Mythbusters.

There is this thing they do on the first day of medical school orientation to help the students understand what to expect. They gather all the first-years into an auditorium and the dean or whoever comes out and he says to them, “Turn and look at the person on your left. Now turn and look at the person on your right. Because in just a few years, both of those dudes are going to be doctors.” Then everyone high-fives and they all make out with each other.

Don’t let your girlfriend go to med school, is all I’m saying. She will totally dump you for one of those guys.

On an unrelated note, I wonder how many of our fellow infsumalians have dropped out already. I was thinking about them as I read my friend Marcus Sakey’s guest essay on Friday.

Like Matt Bucher and Jason Kottke, Marcus stressed the importance of trusting David Foster Wallace as you read Infinite Jest, and this touches on the most important important connections between writer and reader. When I teach writing workshops I tell students that one of the biggest mistakes I think writers make, even some experienced writers, is not doing enough from the start to build the trust of the reader. Many writers seem to expect people will read their novel just because they wrote it, which is insane. Reading a novel of any kind requires a commitment and in a marketplace of infinite choices a novelist needs to convince the reader that he not only has a great story to tell but that he can be relied on to tell it well. And he has to do that immediately. He has to promise.

Having written a book like Infinite Jest Wallace is something like a science fair partner who says to you, “Forget about that corn still you were planning to make with some other writer on your shelf. Let’s build a cold-fusion reactor.” And you’re suspicious because you’ve been burned by ambitious partners before, ones who tell you they want to build a cold-fusion reactor, thus requiring that you do more work than you really wanted to do, but halfway through they’ve blown you off to get high with the Spanish club and left you with a lot of indecipherable notes and not a clue how they’re supposed to go together.

How do you know Wallace can deliver before you’ve already blown the whole summer?

We have a number of reasons to trust Wallace. We have the word of smart people who have read the book, like Marcus, Jason, and Matt. We have almost 15 years of people reading and rereading, mining the book for its pleasures. We have the place to which this book has rapidly ascended in my generation’s unconscious.

But best of all we have the first ten pages.

The first ten pages of this book are remarkable. The first 100 pages are very good (if sometimes frustrating) but the first ten are amazing, and he deliberately put them there, right at the front, in order to make you a promise.

‘I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting. I could, if you’d let me, talk and talk. Let’s talk about anything. I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption. I could interface you guys right under the table,’ I say. ‘I’m not just a creatus, manufactured, conditioned, bred for a function.’

I open my eyes. ‘Please don’t think I don’t care.’

I look out. Directed my way is horror. I rise from the chair. I see jowls sagging, eyebrows high on trembling foreheads, cheeks bright-white. The chair recedes below me.

‘Sweet mother of Christ,’ the Director says.

He could have just said this: Listen up. I have a freaking great story to tell you.

If you feel yourself getting frustrated in parts, or lost. If you feel Wallace has lost your trust, stop, go back and read the first ten pages. You’ll find a promise.

The Guides have begun reading, but won’t begin commentary until the 29th. This week they will use this space to introduce themselves. Feel free to do likewise, in the comments or in the forums.

When I was in college a novelist I admired made an appearance at my school and I was asked to introduce him. I walked to the podium in front of a large student crowd and gave a brief summary of the author’s recurring themes. Then I sat down and the author came out and told everyone I was an idiot. Not in those words, exactly, but he claimed, with more than a little disdain, that all the things I had said were in his books were products of my limited imagination, and he got a few good laughs at my expense. Of course I was mortified, not only because there were any number of totally crushable English majors in the audience who now had reason to doubt my critical acumen, but also because I was right. Everything I said about his work was absolutely true. I couldn’t figure out why he would deny it.⁹

Fifteen years later I was on tour promoting my own novel and sat for an interview with Janet Taylor, an extremely intelligent and thoughtful host for Oregon Public Radio. For the first ten minutes she asked interesting questions and I gave more or less coherent answers. And then Janet said something like this:

“In your novel, the character of Justin Finn, the child Davis Moore clones from his daughter’s unknown killer so that Moore may one day see what the fiend looks like, is an obvious Christ figure. And as such I find it interesting that you chose to give Justin’s mother the name Martha. Of course it would have been very obvious and over-the-top if you named her Mary. But in the Bible—as you are obviously aware, Kevin, but I’ll explain for our listeners—Martha of Bethany was a frequent host to Jesus and the disciples. And while Martha rushed around cleaning the house and preparing food and washing feet and so forth, her sister Mary of Bethany sat at Jesus’s feet and listened to him teach. Finally Jesus had to call out, ‘Martha, stop what you are doing and come sit next to your sister. These other things you are doing are not important. The only important thing is what I have to say.’ And in Cast of Shadows, Martha Finn, like Martha of Bethany, is so worried about being a good mother to Justin, about caring for him and watching out for him, that she never sees who he really is or understands what he is trying to tell her.”

It was brilliant. It was sophisticated. It was meaningful. And I wish I had known what she was talking about.¹⁰

But here’s the important thing: Janet was right! Her analysis was terrific. And if we had never met she would always believe that the name Martha Finn was a deliberate and clever allusion to the biblical Martha of Bethany and not the result of that character having been named on the day Martha Stewart was indicted for securities fraud. I’m not a radical relativist when it comes to critical theory but that observation made the book better for Janet, and a writer has to recognize that each person who reads his novel reads a different book. Readers bring their intellect to the page just as the author does and each reader brings different knowledge and experience and history and bias. Each reader understands the book a bit differently. Each reader asks the novel different questions, and as a result each reader gets different answers, which explains why you are crazy for Confederacy of Dunces and your otherwise extremely intelligent attorney wife thinks you’re an idiot for laughing at it.

Earlier this week Jason Kottke made this important point about Infinite Jest: You’re never going to get half of what Wallace intended the first time you read it, so don’t sweat it. I’ll add a corollary to that: A lot of what you do get, isn’t anything that even occurred to Wallace in the first place. Don’t sweat that either.

We have a tendency to think of novels, especially novels we admire, as being like timepieces with every moving part dropped in its place with expert precision. I suppose writers would like people to think that sometimes, but even the most brilliant novels are far messier than that. Writing a novel is less like watchmaking and more like baking a cake without a recipe. Or an oven. Or a pan.

I’ll have more to say about this in the weeks to come because even after only 100 pages Infinite Jest is almost the perfect novel for this discussion, but think of the reader and author as partners. Wallace has constructed this novel with a lot of care and left pieces of the puzzle in ingenious (and unexpected) places and there is great conspiratorial pleasure in finding those clues where others might miss them. But the reader brings his own ingenuity to the project as well and in the many places where Wallace has left gaps, the reader will fill them in herself. Often brilliantly.

In fact (and I say this in a whisper because it’s the dirty secret of writing fiction) the author is counting on you for it.