Infinite Summer

Category: Avery Edison

  • Mission Improbable

    Yes, I know — the term “mission improbable” brings up around forty-five thousand results in Google. I am, very decidedly, not the first person to think of it. Last week I went with the title “Grapes of Wraith”, which was somewhat poorly received in the comments section. One commenter improved it, though, changing the title to “Gripes of Wraith.” I think we can all agree that that’s a much better choice. So. Let’s try again this week. I’ll need someone to play the part of “person who cares a little too much about the title of Avery’s post” and someone else to play “person who does the extra two seconds of thinking that Avery could have done and comes up with a pun that actually makes sense.”

    Your reward will be fruit punch and pie, and international fame.

    A consistent response to my last post was the assertion that the inclusion of a ghost in Infinite Jest broke no established rules, since entirely impossible concepts had been appearing since the very start of the book. One could guess from the title of this post that I’m going to argue that some of those concepts are not impossible, just highly improbable. One would guess correctly.

    Giant (and skull-less) babies are mentioned as being a result of the concavity, or rather the result of the annularized fusion waste that is dumped into the concavity. I was hopeful (in the kindest way) that I would find, through Googling, some evidence of elephantitis as a result of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, but came short (much like the non-giant babies of Japa– heck, I’m not even gonna finish that sentence. I already feel bad just thinking it.) However, studies in the use of x-radiation on gestating mice have produced creatures with hydrocephalus — the scientific term for “dude, check out that huge head.”

    One could extrapolate that the radioactive waste produced by annular fusion could have exponentially greater results, creating the giant babies and feral hamsters of IJ. One could extrapolate that, and I’m going to. So there. Totally probable.

    Dymphna, the blind tennis player who uses sonic balls (page 17), would seem to present a problem to those trying to convince themselves of the plausability of this book. But anyone doubting the chances of a vision-less tennis pro needs only to read this entirely scholarly People magazine article about “The Boy Who Sees with Sound” to become convinced that in the land of the blind, the kid who can echolocate using mouth clicks is King. Dymphna? Probable-phna.113

    Anyone with their finger on the pulse of the conspiracy-theory world should need not explanation for the plausibility of O.N.A.N — IJ‘s unholy union of America, Canada and Mexico. The Amero has been a cause for concern for wingnuts and kooks patriotic Americans since 1999. Arguably a “natural extension of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP)”, the Amero is a theoretical currency that links the three countries together.

    The idea of a pan-Americas currency is based on the Euro, the coin of the realm for all of Europe. Except England, because the fears of racists concerns of nationalists have kept it from invading our shores. If it can work (kind of) in Europe, it can work in America.114 O.N.A.N? Seems like it could happen.

    Do you have a problem with the idea of wheelchair assassins powerful enough to strike terror into the hearts of all sensible humankind? If you think dudes in chairs can’t be hardcore, then you’ve never seen the awesomeness that is Murderball (boring name: wheelchair rugby.) The terrifying blending of man and machine that creates muscle-bound wheelchair athletes is all too plausible, friends.

    Lastly, I’ve heard tell that Infinite Jest is about an entertainment that is too enthralling, too enticing, and cannot be escaped once encountered. Whilst anyone with a child and access to Dora the Explorer knows that human beings are more than capable of becoming almost pathologically addicted to television, the idea of a film so powerful that you spent the rest of your life craving continual exposure to it seems silly.

    But. We know enough of Himself’s work that we can figure out that the effectiveness of Infinite Jest(the film) relies on the distortion and/or manipulation of light. Of course, we hopefully all know of the dangerous effect light can have on the human brain. If there’s part of the noggin that sees light and decides to throw a fit, who is to say that there may not be another band, or wavelenth, or kind of light that can trigger pleasure centres in the brain to such an extent that all thought from then on is based around the desire for more of that stimulation?

    Sure, we haven’t come across that kind of light yet, but David Foster Wallace predicted Skype, human beings who were born to play tennis, and Alcoholics Anonymous.115 Maybe he predicted the discovery of addictive light, too.

    I mean, he probably didn’t. But how else am I meant to conclude this post? With a frickin’ emoticon?

    🙂

  • Grapes of Wraith

    Yes, I’ll start off by apologizing for that post title. It’s an awful pun, rendered more awful when viewed in light of the fact that it doesn’t even make sense. Still — we’ve just spent the summer reading Infinite Jest, so hopefully we’re used to things not making sense.

    I, for one, thought I was used to it. Wheelchair assassins, massive concavities, an institute full of jocks who somehow posses higher brain function — these were all concepts that astounded and befuddled me, but they were at least possible according to physics, if a little unlikely. Or a lot unlikely, in the case of the clever athletes.

    However.

    To me — an avowed atheist who has occasionally been referred to as “too rational” — the wraith that visits Don Gately in the hospital room doesn’t so much test my suspension of disbelief as it does rip it apart and stomp on the broken remains whilst screaming “You’re damn right there’s ghosts now, Avery. How you like me now!?”

    Of course, this book is far from didactic and should not be taken literally. So it it’s okay with you guys104, I’d like to explore some possibilites that could explain the presence of unusual words in Gately’s head and the rather personal details of Himself’s life that have also found their way into Don’s indestructible noggin’ without having to resort to The Haunting Of ICU Ward 7.

    The most boring answer105 is Joelle. Pages 856-7 show her recounting — with no consideration of the “anonymous” part of Alcoholics Anonymous — the partial life story of the hatchet-dented Little Wayne chap. It’s not beyond the realm of rationality to conclude that she might also tell Don about the Incandenzas, and that the bizarre and sudden appearance of the ‘wraith’ can be put down simply to the delusions that accompany massive physical trauma.

    We’ve already witnessed Don claiming that he doesn’t understand Joelle’s speech at times (during their first few conversations at Ennet House), and it’s quite possible that this is another of those times — hence the words appearing in Don’s head.

    Alternatively, Joelle could have left behind some tapes of Sixty Minutes More or Less to keep him company whilst she is gone, hoping that her voice is something that would comfort him. The show often consists of nothing but words that Don wouldn’t understand, often without context and daunting even to those who haven’t just had their shoulder blown off.

    Another explanation is that Gately, in his capacity as one of the Ennet House Staff, may have watched some of J. O. Incandenza’s works and been subjected to some kind of info-dump. We already know that Ennet House — care-of Clenette — has recently received some cartridges from E.T.A, and has apparently been a beneficiary of the tennis academy’s generosity before. Perhaps Himself’s experiments into the technical capabilities of film enabled him to create a Work that taught you things on a strictly subconscious basis.

    One can assume that, towards the end of his life, the Mad Stork was sufficiently mad enough to encode his biography into the annular pulses of his movies. Perhaps Gately, reviewing cartridges donated before his hospitalization, viewed just the right combination of entertainments to unlock this knowledge. Perhaps the aforementioned trauma has done so instead.

    My third theory106 is far more outlandish, while still fitting in to a world that doesn’t include supernatural beings (yes, I’m still annoyed about the ghost. Okay?) Perhaps Don Gately has been unfortunate enough, after assaulting the three Canadians, to fall into the hands of the Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents.

    Perhaps the A.F.R. are under the impression that Gately’s murder of Guillaume DuPleiss (infamous anti-O.N.A.N. organizer) coupled with his association with Joelle, mean that Gately is some kind of government operative or otherwise shady person with knowledge of the location of the master copy of Infinite Jest. Perhaps the A.F.R. are — with their demonstrated ability to play the long game — attempting to fool Gately into thinking he is in hospital, and are providing actors or masked decoys or people he knows to try and coax this highly sought information from him. Perhaps the Wraith is Gately’s mind’s reaction to such a terrible and insane situation.

    Perhaps if you think such a plan is too outlandish or nonsensical for the AFR to enact, you have a wonderful seventy-five pages ahead of you.

  • The Biblical Experience of Reading Infinite Jest

    Avery Edison is in transit today, so Nick Douglas is subbing in. Nick Douglas is the editor of Twitter Wit: Brilliance in 140 Characters or Less, a collection of witty tweets, which was released earlier this week.

    I’m an atheist – if I were in AA, I’d get on my knees with far less openness than Don Gately. But until I “deconverted” in the summer after my sophomore year of college, I was a Christian. A Creationist, even. (That made it easier to switch all the way at once, actually.)

    At least twice, I tried to read the entire Bible. I failed both times. I hear that once you get through the grueling books of law, it gets a lot more interesting and things start clicking.

    So first let’s tick off the obvious similarities: Infinite Jest is big. It’s hard to read. There are many characters. It has a cult of followers, and it’s best read with bookmarks in several spots so you can go back and piece everything together.

    But that’s trivia. What matters is, the story of IJ is deeply Biblical. Kind of. So far. (I’m on page 533.)

    An evil threatens to destroy the world, and an insignificant person is called to become a hero to protect it. This is the most pervasive theme in the Bible: The smallest, weakest hero must face the mightiest forces of evil, because God has called him to. Joseph Campbell organized this archetype into the Hero’s Journey, a prototype for western hero stories. It’s the story of nearly every memorable Biblical hero.

    When God calls Moses, the exiled Israelite asks, “Who am I, that I should go unto Pharaoh, and that I should bring forth the children of Israel out of Egypt? They will not believe me, nor hearken unto my voice: for they will say, The Lord hath not appeared unto thee.” Judeo-christian scholars think Moses was a stutterer. Imagine that, a hero who can’t communicate.

    The “judges” who repeatedly rescued the ungrateful nation of Israel from its military enemies were all similarly unimpressive. Gideon, whom God told to lead Israel’s army against the Midianites (spoiler alert: he does; they win), was the weakest man in the weakest family in the smallest tribe of Israe. He also made God prove his identity by performing little miracles with a sheepskin before he’d even listen to the plan. Samson’s enemies didn’t know where he got his strength – so the man couldn’t have been visibly muscle-bound; he was just a normal-looking guy who could overpower a lion and topple a building. The warrior/judge Deborah was a woman, which in ancient Mesopotamia usually relegated you to making babies, taking showers on the roof, and having poetry written at you.

    Okay, here’s where things get complicated. Because while plenty of the Boston AA members are heroes in their own personal stories, there’s one character who really strikes me as a weakened hero like the above: Marathe.

    Like Moses (or the opening-scene Hal Incandenza) he has trouble communicating, since his English is still shaky. He comes from the most pathetic province (the one stuck downwind of the Great Convexity) of a conquered nation (though the Israelites, who at one point complained that things were so bad under Moses they’d rather go back to being slaves, seem a lot like IJ’s America). He faces temptation and speaks with his counterpart on a mountaintop (like, you know, Jesus). I don’t know what to make of his rejection of his holy mission. But he’s certainly the disadvantaged hero, what with having popped his legs off in a game of beat-the-train-just-barely, and he’s the character most likely to change the whole game here while musing about the nature of choice and freedom.

    The book is Biblical in structure too. Marathe’s conversations with the devil Steeply are an example of the meditative dialogs, monologues, and thought experiments with which David Foster Wallace chops up the “story” part of the story, mimicking the Bible’s tendency to hop from history to lawbook to poetry. (The Bible can also seem terribly self-indulgent, especially around the descriptions of temples and bloodlines. But hey, what editor is going to call up God and ask for him to tone it down? He’s got a fucking verse in there condemning anyone who changes a word of it to hell. Must be a real headache for the copy editors at Zondervan.) As in the Bible, there are letters printed verbatim, oral histories being codified – like the rules of Eschaton.

    The Eschaton breakdown is another great Biblical section: The end of the world foretold. That happens in more than the book of Revelation. The prophets Ezekiel and Isaiah make end-of-times prophecies in their books. An assistant at my youth group once convinced a group of us to go around the table reading the entire book of Daniel (a talented Israelite academic serving with his three friends in the Persian king’s court) in one sitting. I don’t think he knew that this book included a big-ass prophetic passage about the end of days. Well it does, and it’s really boring to read aloud. A lot less fun than Eschaton’s breakdown.

    But so the last similarity really is a stylistic trivium, but it’s my favorite: I know of one other author who begins this many paragraphs with conjunctions, and that’s the Apostle Paul. Most of the Bible verses that sound so profound because they begin with “For,” “So,” and “Therefore, brothers,” are from Paul (a lawyer, kinda) in the middle of a letter to some church or another, in which the whole thing is one long train of thought and every paragraph builds on the conclusions of the last. A structure like that probably helps the author justify to the editor that he keep absolutely everything in, even as it glosses over all the goddamn digressions.

    So I think the lesson from all of this is that the author is God, the author can do no wrong, and anyone – is Pemulis listening? – who tries to edit God while he’s on the job ends up in deep shit.

    Amen.

  • Everybody Hurts (Except Mario Incandenza)

    I am coming to believe that there is not one normal character in this book.77 We see characters with physical deformities (the wheelchair assassins, Mario); mental problems (Himself, Kate Gompert, others); substance addictions (the Ennet house gang, a vast number of students at E.T.A); sociopathic tendencies (Lenz, Lenz, Lenz); obsessive compulsions (Avril Incandenza, Lateral Alice Moore); and gender dysphoria (Hugh Steeply, Poor Tony). But no one ‘normal’.

    This has been distracting to me in the past. The world of Infinite Jest already requires such a suspension of disbelief — what with the concavity, and the subsidization, and the idea that people are scared by a group of assassins that could be thwarted by a set of stairs78 that adding in a cast of characters all so uniquely deviant stretches that disbelief just a mite too far. Of course, this can be a problem with fiction in general, and is preferable to a set of perfect players. After all, “perfect characters are boring, and sometimes even annoying … character flaws = sources of conflict.”

    But these flaws are such an integral part of IJ that I’m beginning to think that David Foster Wallace is trying to achieve some goal other than making sure no character is too idealized to be interesting. Because it’s one thing to make a character too arrogant to achieve their own goals, or blinded by greed, or any other of a number of common tropes. But Infinite Jest takes things to extremes, with Orin engaging in ritualistic seductions to fulfill some Oedipal desire, with Joelle feeling the need to cover her face due to severe deformity79 and with Lenz killing small animals at night.

    These are all extremely negative deviancies. That’s what I keep getting caught up on. No one seems to be particularly happy with how different they are, except Mario. And we really can’t trust his opinion on such matters, because he has “a neurological deficit whereby he can’t feel physical pain very well” (p. 589). Mario’s experiences with feeling — at a very base level — are so wildly different to every other human that he cannot be counted on for a reliable comparison of relative happiness.

    I feel like this theme of difference is meant to be a lesson — stray too far from the norm, and you will be deeply, deeply unhappy. Do drugs, and you will be unhappy (like the majority of the Ennet House residents). Be too much of a winner, and you will be unhappy (as demonstrated by Clipperton). Be too smart, and you might well erase your own map (perhaps with Himself’s microwave method).

    This unhappiness will be permanent, too. No one in the book so far has managed to deviate from a societal norm and come back from the other side unscathed. The addicts are eternal addicts, doomed to become the old men of Boston AA — forever believing that they must Keep Coming Back, lest they fall back into addiction. And even doing that may not be able to save them from true, visceral hideousness; Lenz is hitting meetings like a champ, but they’re not stopping him from killing small creatures on the way home.

    The tennis players are incessantly protected from hype, lest they come to see themselves as exceptional — as beyond the average, the normal — and lose their on-court edge. The novel’s many geniuses fall victim to punishments for their difference, too. If we’re not watching Himself kill himself, we’re seeing the hyper-smart and closed-off Avril having sex with under-age boys (p. 553 if you don’t believe me), or listening to Hal assure us the he is “in there”, as the world around him sees nothing but a seizing, “sub-animalistic” boy.

    Which brings me to my real concern in all this: Hal. I’ve mentioned before that I’m curious as to how Hal comes by the disability that serves as this book’s very first ‘shocker’. I’ve been hoping that it will be something temporary — perhaps a drug dose that I can hope he one day recovers from, or a stray tennis ball to the head that may cause brain damage that science or time may one day fix. But you see, Hal is committing a number of ‘crimes of difference’ throughout this novel. He’s exceptionally smart. He’s a superb athlete. And he’s using drugs.

    Going by the established pattern, that’s a trifecta of deviancy that Infinite Jest can only punish. And I’m worrying that — like Himself’s death, Marathe’s disability, and Don Gately’s addiction — it will be a very permanent punishment indeed.

  • Midsummer Roundtable, Part V

    This is the fifth of a five-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.

    Infinite Summer: Any predictions as to what will happen in the second half of the novel?

    Matthew Baldwin: I’ll tell you what I’m not expecting: anything resembling a standard climax or dénouement. In nearly all of Wallace’s non- and short-fiction I’ve read, the pieces just sort of end, often abruptly, with no surprise twist or delivered moral, frequently without even a deft turn of phrase. I always feel like there was an editor somewhere in the process who said, “Hey , David? This is a little too long, so we’re going to just lop off the last third. Does that work?”

    Eden M, Kennedy: I am waiting for some class conflict to bubble up. So far the book seems to gloss over the fact that some Ennet House people work, almost invisibly, at ETA (kitchen; the towel girl), but that leaves me thinking that something’s slowly brewing there, theme-wise. Because what about Pat M., a rich woman who seems to be sort of class-blind — yet finding common ground with all kinds of fucked up people who simply share the will to conquer an addiction? She’s going to end up the Mother Theresa of this novel, you watch.

    Avery Edison: It seems like we’re drawing to the end of Marathe and Steeply’s conversation on the mountainside, and I’d like to see some sort of confrontation between the two before they leave. We’ve been constantly reminded of the gun lurking just under Marathe’s blanket, always in his hand, and so I think it’d be nifty to see some action by Steeply to justify Marathe’s caution. At the moment it seems too much like Marathe has the upper hand.

    Kevin Guilfoile: I just realized that I’m not spending much time trying to figure out what’s going to happen next. This book really is unfolding sort of like a dream for me, where I don’t have much vision of it beyond the present. I think Wallace set up some early seeds of anticipation—we know Hal and Gately are going to get together, for instance—but beyond that I’m not really trying to figure it out much.

    Avery Edison: I’m similar to Kevin in that I’ve not given much thought to the future. So many odd events have happened already, I feel like I have next to no shot at making any kind of accurate prediction.

    KG: I’m sort of letting it happen, and I’m enjoying it. I wish I could live my life that way more.

    EMK: This was fun; can we do it again next week?

  • Midsummer Roundtable, Part IV

    This is the fourth of a five-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.

    Infinite Summer: Kevin, do you find Wallace’s style influencing your own? Will the title of your next novel (The Thousand) refer to the number of endnotes you went back and inserted?

    Kevin Guilfoile: I’m pretty easily influenced by anything that I like, but usually within the parameters of my own style. For instance, it’s not unusual for me to write long, run-on sentences when I’m trying to change the pace of a passage (or when I’m deep inside someone’s train of thought) and I probably am doing more of that right now, just because Wallace is so effective with it. The novel I’m currently working on (the one after The Thousand) even has a character that’s rather Gately-like (big guy, ex-con, not an alcoholic but a teetotaler) although I created him before I read IJ. Looking specifically at the stuff I’ve written over the last month or so I can right away identify a lengthy passage in which a pickpocket is rhapsodizing at some length about cargo shorts that seems pretty obviously influenced by IJ.

    Matthew Baldwin: I actually used the word “demap” as a synonym for “kill” in a casual conversation the other day. The person to whom I was speaking had no idea what I was saying.

    Eden M. Kennedy: And I quoted Schtitt to my son on the tennis court. He was complaining how he wanted to switch sides because the sun was in his eyes, and I totally paraphrased that whole section about it always being too hot or too cold or too something on the court, you have to look inside, blah blah. And then I switched and took the sunny side.

    Avery Edison: The only thing I’ve taken away from the book is a pretty heavy ‘drine dependency. That, and a fear of Canadians in wheelchairs.

    And of course, as I typed that joke in I suddenly realize that I’m sitting at my computer in a bandanna. Curse you David Foster Wallace!

    IS: Are you enjoying some sections better than others (E.T.A. vs. Ennet v. Steeply & Marathe)?

    MB: They say that a world class director could film someone reading the phonebook and make it interesting. That’s how I feel about Wallace. In an interview, he talked about the challenge of “tak[ing] something almost narcotizingly banal … and try[ing] to reconfigure it in a way that reveals what a tense, strange, convoluted set of human interactions the final banal product is.” Given that Infinite Jest is a novel about a tennis academy, a bunch of AA meetings, and two guys chatting on a cliff, it’s clearly a challenge that Wallace both relished and consistently met.

    So I don’t find any of the storylines to be more engrossing than others. In fact, I don’t find the narrative to be particularly engrossing at all. It’s Wallace’s style that I enjoy, and I am largely indifferent as to what subject matter he is writing about at any given moment.

    AE: I’m a big fan of banter, so I look forward to any section (usually an endnote) featuring Hal and Orin on the phone to each other. A lot of information tends to get divulged during those pages, and there’s some nice verbal sparring in the mean time.

    The Marathe and Steeply sections have also grown on me, probably for much the same reason. It’s also nice to see — in a novel that has almost avoided any discussion of its namesake – characters having honest-to-God conversations about The Entertainment.

    EMK: Something shifts in Marathe and Steeply’s conversations as we get deeper into the book; I can’t put my finger on it but it’s definitely becoming easier to read and enjoy their passages.

    AE: I think it’s that as we’re learning more about the world around them, the vague allusions to things such as the Concavity or subsidised time are clearer. I’m sure that the conversation Marathe and Steeply have regarding free will would’ve been impenetrable had we not learned more about the Entertainment’s effects on its viewers. I may go back to the earlier Marathe and Steeply sections and see if they make for easier reading now.

    KG: It changes for me. I found the description of Mario’s puppet show movie to be a lot like being trapped on an airplane listening to someone taking two-and-a-half hours to describe the plot of a two hour movie, and so I wanted to got to Ennet House every minute of that section.

    AE: I really enjoyed Mario’s movie, especially since it gave us a look into the wider community at ETA. Up until then I feel like we’d just been focused on a small group of students (Hal, Pemulis, Troeltsch, etc.) and it was nice to get everyone in that big hall and get little character moments with odd people. The tradition of gathering around for the viewing and the rule that students can eat whatever they want on Interdepence Day was a nice humanizing touch that made the ETA feel more like a school where actual humans would go. Before I saw it as more of a tennis-robot factory, now I’m seeing it as more of a family. Which would make C.T. proud, I’m sure.

    KG: I love tennis and find the ETA stuff really enjoyable overall. On top of that there are set pieces, of course, that are just stunning but I don’t think they are tied to any particular place or character, at least not for me.

    EMK: I love the ETA kids best when they’re giving each other shit, no doubt about it, but the AA stuff is still fascinating to me. Sometimes this book feels sort of sterile, in a Stanley Kubrick way, just very cerebral and cool, so I do tend to feel grateful for the warmer, more human stuff, I guess.

    AE: An exception to that appreciation of the human stuff — at least for me — is anything dealing with Himself’s childhood. Right now if feels like we’re getting background on a character we know is dead, and whose legacy (the Entertainment) we already knew the motivations for. I understand that the scene featuring Himself and The Man From Glad culminated in the origin of Himself’s fascination annulation, but there were a lot of pages to get through for such a small detail. We couldn’t have learned that via. one of Hal and Orin’s earlier conversations, or done without the knowledge entirely?

    MB:: Probably. But those two passages are among my favorite, no doubt because they showcase Wallace’s skill in teasing the interesting from the banal.

  • Midsummer Roundtable, Part III

    This is the third of a five-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.

    Infinite Summer: Does anyone have a favorite character?

    Avery Edison: I’ve written before about liking Hal the most, whilst suspecting that he may be a dick. That’s still holding true. I tend to like the smarter characters, and in a book full of drug addicts and athletes, Hal is standing out a fair bit.

    Eden M. Kennedy: I like Hal, too.

    Matthew Baldwin: Hal?! I thought you and I shared a crush on Pemulis in common. You’ve changed so much since this project started Eden, it’s like I don’t even know you any more.

    Two of my favorite sections–“Erdedy Waits for Pot” and “Erdedy Gets a Hug”–star the same person, so I guess Ken is at the top of my list as well. I hope the second half of the book is peppered with more of his comic misadventures. Oh Ken Erdedy, will you ever win?

    EMK: I’m also gaining some affection for Steeply, surprisingly. I want to hear more from Avril. In a novel that’s mainly focused on male characters, it’s hard to find a woman to relate to. Apart from Air Marshal Kittenplan, of course.

    Avery, you raised some gender issues in your first post. What are your thoughts on them now?

    AE: After learning more about the Office of Unspecified Services, and its strange M.O. of outfitting operatives with highly inappropriate disguises, I feel a little better about Steeply. I have to believe that DFW is going for something a little higher than “ha, ha, look at the man in the dress!” because he’s obviously a smart guy and that would be an easy joke to make.

    I hope Wallace ends up treating the infatuation Orin has for Steeply with respect and kindness, although the fact that he’s drawn it out for so long worries me. I’m beginning to wonder if the point of Orin’s crush is for us to laugh at him, as many other works of entertainment wish us to when they feature an un-suspecting protagonist becoming romantically involved with a trans-person and having intimacy with, even using things like awesome male masturbators and others. It seems like an innocuous trope, but it reinforces the concept that trans-women “trick” everyone they don’t explicitly divulge their status to. The idea that people are entitled to such information leads to the “trans panic” defense, which is used to justify violence against transgender people on a sadly routine basis.

    Aaaaaand I’ve talked for far too long about this.

    Speaking or Orin and Steeply, how do you feel about the mix of drama and comedy in the novel?

    MB: I have no objection to the absurdity when it is “Out There” (subsidized years, the rise of Johnny Gentle, the history of O.N.A.N., and so on), but find it jarring when it’s in close proximity to the more realistic portions of the novel. I kind of consider Orin to be “Out There” so he’s exempt, but I was truly annoyed at the Clipperton passages. How are we supposed to take the real characters seriously when they are intermingling with cartoons?

    EMK: The Clipperton stuff really felt like a parable or a philosophical exercise to me. “Let’s take this premise and draw it out until it collapses.” It seems like it could have been the outgrowth of some philosophical dilemma that Hal might have invented, just to toy with Orin late at night on the phone.

    MB: And had it had been presented as such I would have no objection.

    EMK: I keep asking myself, “How much disbelief are you willing to suspend in reading this novel? ” Because so much of it is so emotionally real. But then what do we do with the fact that the woman journalist Orin’s so intrigued by is actually a badly disguised man? I find it just so delightful and ridiculous that I honestly don’t care how just plain impossible that would be, I just can’t wait to see how it all shakes out. But still.

    AE: To touch lightly (lest I type out another “trans-issues” screed) on the Steeply thing, I tend to assume that Steeply is actually pretty well disguised, and it’s only the fact that Marathe is such an intelligent man that he notices all the costume’s flaws. We also have to bear in mind that every description of Steeply so far has been after he fell down a muddy slope on his way to meet with Marathe. For all we know, his usual appearance is quite passable.

    EMK: That’s good, I hadn’t thought about it that way at all, I was assuming that eventually someone like Hal would see through Steeply’s terrible disguise and set Orin straight, so to speak (ahem). I certainly hadn’t foreseen something tragic happening with Orin and Steeply. Now I’m a little worried.

    AE: With regard to the mix of drama and comedy, I must say that I’m not finding the book at all laugh-out-loud funny. Every now and then I’ll chuckle at a concept (I think the head-through-monitor part of Eschaton got a giggle) but every attempt at humor by Wallace seems a little self-conscious. When I got to the section with Lateral Alice Moore the other day, I threw up my hands and asked aloud “is there anyone in this book that doesn’t have some ‘comical’ deformity?”

    Kevin Guilfoile: It’s an old assumption that no one would recognize a perfect novel even if it were possible for somebody to write one. If I had one major complaint about IJ it would be this inconsistency of tone Eden and Matthew talk about, but that’s also inevitable given the scope of what Wallace is trying to accomplish. When you write a novel of huge ambition you are, by definition, stretching beyond your known abilities and so there are going to be occasional swings and misses along with the tape measure home runs (and obviously readers will disagree about what works and what doesn’t). During the Tournament of Books I said about Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 that in order for a novel to be a masterpiece it probably also has to be at least a little bit terrible. I said that with some tongue in my cheek, although compared to Infinite Jest I found 2666 to be a lot less ambitious and a lot more terrible.

  • Midsummer Roundtable, Part II

    This is the second of a five-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.

    Infinite Summer: Have you been sticking to the schedule?

    Avery Edison: For the first time since the project started I’m sticking to the schedule. I had been catching up in 75-page burst the day before my posts were due to be written. It’s not a great way to read the book – the feeling that IJ was a homework assignment was only intensified and the fact that I didn’t have time to take breaks from the harder-to-read sections was stressful.

    Last week I was getting through about thirty pages a day, and now I’ve decreased to around 15. I’m a little ahead of the schedule, which has added a nice, relaxed tone to my reading.

    I mean, as relaxed as you can feel reading about something like the Eschaton game.

    Matthew Baldwin: My trajectory has been the inverse. I was consistently ahead of schedule, by as much as 150 pages a few weeks ago. Then I stalled out for a spell.

    The main thing that stymied me was the passage about Lucien and Bertraud, before the arrival of the Wheelchair Assassins. Every night I picked up the novel, read one or two paragraphs of that section, and gave up. It took me a literal week to get through four pages, 480-484.

    Instead, I occupied my evenings reading everything else by David Foster Wallace I could furtively send to my workplace printer: the David Lynch profile and E Unibus Plurum and Host and The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing and two (count ’em: one, two) long essays about tennis.

    Also, at some point during that period I came down with a cold, and discovered that it is nearly impossible to read Infinite Jest (at least for me) when fatigued, even in the slightest.

    AE: I’ve found totally the opposite – I make the most progress reading the book when I’m sleepy. Usually I read for half an hour to forty-five minutes just after I wake up and just before I go to bed. I think maybe my brain is still relaxed enough to let the words just wash over me, rather than allow me to interrupt myself by over-analyzing the book.

    Kevin Guilfoile: I have actually never been behind, although a couple times the days have caught up to my bookmark. I’m enjoying the book so much, and especially now, that I’ve never not wanted to read it. Right now I’m about a week ahead, I think, which is probably average.

    AE: Kevin, reading ahead doesn’t get you any extra credit. I checked.

    IS: None of you addressed the Wardine / yrstruly sections. Care to do so now?

    AE: I was upset by the Wardine section, but more by its content than style. It’s tough to get through, but both of those sections cropped up during my “read it all in one go” sessions, and so I just kept reading and tried to ignore the language.

    Eden M. Kennedy: I guess the Wardine writing style didn’t worry me too much. Certainly DFW’s not the first white author to write in blackface, so to speak, and I think that whatever you as a reader bring to those sections will determine whether or how much you cringe when you read them. I got into the rhythm of the yrstruly section pretty quickly and just began to follow the action, rather than getting too hung up on the style. I’m just going to trust that there’s a reason for the radical style change that sets those sections apart, and that something will happen to bring everything together in a meaningful way later on.

    MB: The Wardine section didn’t bother me a whit. For one thing, I never made the assumption that Wallace was trying to emulate an entire race’s locution, only that of a specific person. I mean, if he had every black character speaking in that style then there might be cause for alarm, but this section fell 30 pages into a 1000 pages novel–a little early to go all torch-and-pitchfork on the guy.

    And I loved the yrstruly chapter. Very A Clockwork Orangeian.

    AE: Yeah, the yrstruly stuff really pulled me in — the text felt more frenetic than cumbersome. I felt like I really was in the mind of an addict, although — as a middle-class white girl who tried pot just once and felt sick for two days after — that could say more about my perception of drugs users than it does about Wallace’s writing.

    Have any of you been to Boston? Can you visualize the city as you read?

    MB: I think this is the first fiction I’ve read about Boston and its environs that wasn’t written by H. P. Lovecraft, of whom I am a huge fan. So, while reading Infinite Jest, I keep waiting for E.T.A. to play Akham University, or a cult to be discovered holding rituals in the Ennet House basement, or Johnny Gentle to be unmasked as Nyarlathotep. I am pretty sure that Mario’s conception is going to involve the town of Innsmouth.

    EMK: I lived on the east coast from the early eighties to the early nineties and had a few Boston boyfriends, so I feel like I can peg several of the locations he uses in the book, as well as the look of some of the people he describes, especially the Crocodiles and the ETA kids. And now that I think of it, I wonder if some of my ETA associations are tinged by other east coast prep novels, like Donna Tartt’s “A Secret History,” and the dozen others I’ve read over the years. I’m sure that’s a topic for a term paper, somewhere.

    AE: My only exposure to Boston has been via. the film “Good Will Hunting”. I don’t think this affects my reading of the book too much, other than the obvious downside that – in my head – every character looks like Ben Affleck.

    I’m still not sure how I feel about that.

    KG: I grew up in the Northeast and my brother has lived in Boston for 20 years, so I’ve been there dozens of times and so I have a pretty solid picture of the city as I read. If the characters would just ride that little tourist trolley around a bunch, I’d be right there in my head with them.

  • Midsummer Roundtable, Part I

    This is the first of a five-part roundtable discussion with the Infinite Summer Guides.

    Infinite Summer: Congratulations on reaching the halfway point.

    Eden M. Kennedy: Thanks.

    Matthew Baldwin: Huzzah!

    Avery Edison: Thank you. Although I think that once you factor in the endnotes, we technically haven’t even started.

    Kevin Guilfoile: I turned 40 last year, which is pretty much halfway to dead. This feels like that in a “I’ve been reading this same novel for so long I’m not sure what I’m going to do after I finish it” way.

    IS: What do you think of the novel so far?

    KG: I really love this book, and not in a way I can remember ever loving a book before. Last summer I read Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, which is also in the 1,000-page range and is about as beautiful a traditional novel as I can imagine. On some sort of linear scale I would tell you I liked both of these books about equally, but if you were charting my feelings about these novels in three dimensions the plots marking my feelings would be pretty distant from one another. Man, so different.

    MB: I am also enjoying it immensely. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t also find it taxing. I once likened reading Infinite Jest to exercising, and that opinion hasn’t changed: I’m happy while I’m doing it, I’m happy having done it, but getting myself to do it everyday is something of a challenge. I also find myself eager to be done reading the novel the first time so I can start reading it the allegedly more rewarding second.

    AE: I’ve very recently started enjoying the book, although I’m having trouble articulating just what about it that I’m so enjoying. I had a lot of frustrations related to the lack of information we’d received in the first few hundred pages, and now that we’ve learned a little more about the ‘world’ of the book I’m happier to plow through it.

    EMK: I feel as though it really took getting past page 400 for the book to open up for me, and I don’t know if it’s because I’m a crummy reader or because patterns are beginning to take shape or because the characters are familiar enough to me now, or what. But despite some rocky weeks, I know I’ll finish it now, and I’m looking forward to finding out what it is that happens at the end that makes some people turn right back to page one and immediately start over again.

    IS: And the endnotes?

    MB: I have gone back and forth on the issue about two dozen times in the last month, and right now I’m learning away from “essential literary device” and toward “gratuitous pain in the ass”. Plus I just don’t buy any of the rationales I’ve heard for them: that they simulate the game of tennis, that they simulate the fractured way we’d be receiving information in Wallace’s imagined future, that they are there to constantly remind you that you are reading a book, etc. I’d be more inclined to believe these theories Infinite Jest was the only thing Wallace had written that included them. But the more you read his other works, the more it becomes obvious that Wallace couldn’t even sign a credit card slip without bolting on an addendum. The dude loved endnotes–I’m pretty sure that’s the only real reason they are there.

    KG: Everything DFW writes is in some way about this difficulty we have communicating. I mean I don’t think it’s as contrived as that—I think he finds endnotes practical as a way of imparting information without interrupting the primary narrative—but I think they are useful in the context of these themes that he’s always returning to.

    MB: Why do you always take David’s side?

    EMK: I’ve completely gotten used to the endnotes and I actually look forward to them, as they often turn into little punchlines for jokes you had no idea you were being set up for.

    AE: I’m not really that bothered by the them. I can definitely see where they could have been included in the text (either as parenthetical asides, or as footnotes on the page), but it is nice to have a break from the main text now and then. I think I also like that, whilst everything else about DFW’s style is so subtle and cultured, there’s something rather in-your-face about his use of endnotes. I like that it’s a very clear “eff you” to the reader.

  • Humble Pie

    Alright. You got me — I’m kind of enjoying this book now. And when I say “kind of”, I mean “a lot”. I’m writing this post extremely late because I’ve been staying up at night to read Infinite Jest. I’ve skipped out on plans with my family to stay in and read it. Heck — for the first time since starting, I’m ahead of the Spoiler Line. Wow.

    For what it’s worth, I feel like I should tell you that you guys would be terrible at AA. A lot of you told me last week, in the comments, that I should just quit. Stop. Read no further. Some of you even had the temerity to suggest that I suffered from some substantial lack of grey matter. An accusation I shall not waste time repudiating, because I’ve already spent so much time leafing through the dictionary to make sure I’m spelling “repudiate” right.

    Thank you to all the people who told me to stick with the book. You guys galvanized me to come up with a plan of action. I looked up how much I had to read, counted how many days I had until I had to write this post, and then used the calculator on a phone smarter than myself to do math that a child could manage. And then I sat down every day and read 30.667 pages.66

    It’s quite something to be learning a little self-discipline by committing to working on a task every day, and during the course of that task read a summation of the same disciplinary tactics applied to alcoholism. Many times I felt like not picking up IJ, either because I was slogging through Marathe and Steeply, or because I wanted to play Mario Bros., but read the book anyway because I recalled the words “for god’s sake Keep Coming Back”. It was a great insight into the power of committing to a goal and actively working for it in spite of oneself.67

    So. I’m reading the book every day, and enjoying the crap out of it. Even the Marathe and Steeply sections that I mentioned just a few scant sentences ago. I’m also not counting page numbers anymore, desperate to just meet my quota for the week. And the “portraits” of characters I mentioned last week have stopped seeming superfluous, and instead started making everything that much more real, just like they are intended to.

    Long story short — I Kept Coming Back, Trusted in a Higher Power (DFW), and, well… It Just Worked.

    Now, if only I could quit the booze.