Infinite Summer

Category: Eden M. Kennedy

  • The Floor Dodged His Foot And Rushed Up At Him

    Over the course of my reading I became aware that DFW liked Cormac McCarthy’s novels a lot, especially Blood Meridian and Suttree. As it happens, those are my two favorite Cormac McCarthy novels as well, and even though it’s been fifteen years since I read either of them, once I became aware of this bibliographical fact I began to pick up threads of McCarthy in Infinite Jest, and threads led to whole hand-loomed rugs bordered with Byzantine pornography.

    McCarthy’s and DFW’s writing share several things, including a keen attention to physical and emotional detail, but it’s the way they delve into violence that seems to both unite and separate them. McCarthy, for example, considers the whole scene but then gifts you with just a sketch of the worst details — reading him is like looking at one of Bacon’s howling Popes, it’s the details you have to fill in for yourself that make it ten times worse. But DFW doesn’t let you look away. Think about how the Antitois brothers died. It’s horrible. But their deaths were described with so much detail that by the end I had almost no emotion about them. The image of a man with a spike through his eye or a broomstick shoved all the way through him is, on its own, nearly unbearable. But in IJ these images ride a wave of words that’s already pounded us into submission, and we only come up for air when Lucien Antitois floats cleanly away from his body over the Convexity toward home to the ringing of bells.

    The scene where Gately takes the brunt of one Nuck’s aggression toward Lenz and the girls are on the lawn working over the other one echoes this scene from early on in Blood Meridian:

    . . . Toadvine seized him about the neck and rode him to the floor and held him by the hair and began to pry out an eyeball with his thumb. The man grabbed his wrist and bit it.

    Kick his mouth in, called Toadvine. Kick it.

    The kid stepped past them into the room and turned and kicked the man in the face. Toadvine held his head back by the hair.

    Kick him, he called. Aw, kick him, honey.

    He kicked.

    Toadvine pulled the bloody head around and looked at it and let it flop to the floor and he rose and kicked the man himself. Two spectators were standing in the hallway. The door was completely afire and part of the wall and ceiling. They went out and down the hall. The clerk was coming up the steps two at a time.

    And so on.

    Later on, the way the M.P. beats Gately’s mom in such a slow, considered fashion shows a little more of McCarthy’s restraint. Ultimately I find McCarthy pretty much riveting because he leaves so much out, but the world he creates is one I am heartily glad I don’t live in. Whereas the world of Infinite Jest, despite the horrible things that can happen in it (the family dog being dragged to death and reduced to a nubbin, my God), is one I feel I could navigate maybe just because the nape of the carpet is familiar and I have an accurate sense of how high the nets are strung.

    Or, as Gately learns in the midst of his agonizing stint in the hospital bed, focusing on the small things helps you to endure the larger ones.

    DFW also alludes to A Clockwork Orange a couple of times, which is well known for its own particular brand of joyous degradation. I think Gately has the self-awareness not to get off on beating the shit out of people the way Alex and his Droogs do — he doesn’t have the heart of a rapist —  and the spoiler line limits what I can say about Sorkin’s crew, but I do know that for me, Gately’s redemption and Hal’s trying to Come In and Mario’s sweet nature and a thousand other moments of true humanity balance out the psychic impact of all the brutality in this novel, described in numbing detail though it may be.

  • Often He Reckons, in the Dawn, Them Up. Nobody is Ever Missing.

    I recall going to see The Sheltering Sky, which was based on the novel by Paul Bowles, at a theater on 34th Street in New York. I found the film a little dull, frankly — like the book itself, I wanted to like it more than I actually did. But there’s a scene at the end where Debra Winger’s in a bar and Paul Bowles himself appears before her and asks her, “Are you lost?” And somehow the fact of the author himself showing up in the film, the presence of the man through whom the story had actually flowed, reduced me to tears. And not just a little wet-eyed sniffle, but true and gut-wrenching bawling. My embarrassed boyfriend supported me for the entire walk to Paddy Reilley’s, a bar on 2nd Avenue which held a variety of liquids he hoped one of which would calm me down. I did eventually, reluctantly, still unable to explain what had hit me. I’d had a similar weeping fit sitting crumpled in a chair outside Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. I don’t know what it was, exactly, that got to me — all those writers! who mean so much! right here! — but I know it hit me hard. I once told someone it felt like God was pressing his thumb right down on my skull.

    It’s true that while I’ve enjoyed Infinite Jest very much, this summer has been rough going for me in ways that have tested my focus and resolve on several fronts, and it’s confirmed for me that I’m not really cut out for this Guide business. I’m fascinated by other people’s analysis but I’m not much of an analyzer myself, and I’m sorry if you’ve rolled your eyes more than once reading what I’ve had to offer. I’m a fan of this book, but sometimes fans can’t always summon the kind of commentary that the object of their, uh, fandom (that’s a word, right?) . . . oh, you know what I mean.

    The last and maybe only big book I had trouble shutting up about in a way that compares to how many people feel about IJ — the book I bought for friends who I’m sure never read it, and which I have no doubt would have spawned a hideous number of mailing lists had the Internet existed when it was published in 1982 — was James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover. A 560-page long poem, is what it is, and it changed my life.

    I don’t think there are a lot of parallels between Sandover and IJ, though like many IJ fans, I’ve read Sandover multiple times, and soon as I’ve finished the last page I loop right back to page one and let the momentum carry me through the beginning all over again. Like IJ, Sandover has actual literary critics who appreciate its many levels of intricate discourse (I just made that up! “Levels of intricate discourse”! Jesus, I’m tired), but in Sandover‘s case, the more literary readers view the “fans” as uncritical knuckle-draggers who believe in astrology and collect commemorative shot glasses. IJ‘s community doesn’t seem to fall apart along those lines, and for that I’m grateful. Either that or Matthew’s done a hell of a job of deleting the withering comments before I’ve ever seen them.

    See, this is another mark of a terrible critic — I’m making this whole thing about me.

    As we lead up to the first anniversary of DFW’s death (this Saturday), just the thought of that event starts to choke me up. I get a tinge of that God-thumb-skull feeling, frankly, which is no good in public. I try to let it ride. Breathe and keep reading. These last 200 pages are turning into exactly the kind of steep-grade toboggan ride I’ve been hoping for, and I’m so grateful I stuck it out. Thanks, you guys. Thanks Matthew, thanks Kevin and Avery, thanks and thanks again to Michael Pietsch, and to all the guest commenters. Almost done. Almost ready to start again.

  • It Didn’t Make Me Happy but I Couldn’t Stop Watching

    As your least insightful and hands-down laziest guide, I fully admit that I’m 100 pages behind this week and I’m not even going to try to fake it. But I did spend a fruitful hour this morning browsing DFW reviews and interviews.

    This from Newsweek:

    NEWSWEEK: What’s your history with tennis?

    WALLACE: I played serious Juniors, but I burned out. I play twice a week with friends.

    And with 12-step groups?

    I went with friends to an open AA meeting and got addicted to them. It was completely riveting. I was never a member — I was a voyeur. When I ended up really liking it was when I let people there know this and they didn’t care.

    Was it therapeutic?

    At that point, I was paralyzed about writing, and I was watching too much TV. Here were these guys in leather and tattoos sounding like Norman Vincent Peale, but week after week they were getting better. And I’d go home and work. Going to coffee houses and talking about literary theory certainly hadn’t helped any. Have you read the book?

    I haven’t had the chance, but our reviewer just finished.

    My hat’s off to him. Tell him Excedrin works best for eyestrain.

    From The Chicago Tribune, a surprising claim about DFW’s familiarity with the Internet:

    The research reaped personal as well as professional dividends. “If I hadn’t gone to a bunch of AA meetings, I wouldn’t have gotten rid of my TV, because I started to realize the TV didn’t make me happy, but I couldn’t stop watching it,” he said.

    Still, he’s been fascinated by some reader reactions so far, including some who liken its jump-cut style and information bombardment to cruising the Internet. “I’ve never been on the Internet,” he said. “This is sort of what it’s like to be alive. You don’t have to be on the Internet for life to feel this way. . . .

    “The image in my mind — and I actually had dreams about it all the time — was that this book was really a very pretty pane of glass that had been dropped off the 20th story of a building.”

    Here Wallace and the director Gus Van Sant have a delightful phone conversation about Good Will Hunting and it makes me think about the similarities between Will and Hal Incandenza:

    DFW: …The thing that interested me about Will — and of course this is like a stroke movie for me — is you’ve got like a total nerd who is incredibly good looking, can beat people up and has Minnie Driver in love with him, so I’m, like I saw it twice voluntarily. Most of the serious math weenies who I’ve met, and I’ve met a few, like who’ve graduated from college at 12 and stuff, they’re not all that smart in other areas. I’ve like never met any who’ve had photographic memories with respect to stuff like agrarian social histories of the American South or legal precedent in the American judicial system and stuff, and so he seemed as if he could almost have done anything that he wanted to do and that math was almost a kind of accident.

    GVS: That’s the way we thought of him. But I always felt that his memory was something that was kind of like a bonus. And that mathematics was something that he had done when say he was alone as a child.

    DFW: Uh-huh.

    GVS: And he had learned and he had become very advanced but that his memory was maybe separate — the memory was like the trick part. So he remembered certain things that he had read in different books his retention was so phenomenal but it was almost like a trick so when he is defeating the guy in the Harvard bar by quoting from text books this sort of capitalist versus socialist…

    DFW: Which trust me is every bonehead kid’s fantasy of being able to do that. (Gus laughs) Fuckwad with a pony tail in a Harvard bar, I’ve met that guy. The girl I went and saw the movie with first thought that the guy was like too icky and villainous to be realistic and I hastened to disagree with her.

    And this is just funny, from an online chat Wallace participated in with a random sampling of users who had a lot of trouble staying on topic:

    dfw: A carbuncle’s fucking HUGE, esse. Like an eggplant or something. Actually life-threatening — it can apparently explode like an appendix and spread toxins throughout your bloodstream. A small but riveting history of cases on death-by-carbuncle is avail

    Marisa: I could beat Keats up if I wanted to.

    dfw: able in back issues of “Mortality and Morbidity” magazine.

    Keats: Oh well, in that case, dfw, I should not have made the comparison.

    Keats: Since what I have doesn’t approach the gravity of a carbuncle.

    Keats: I think I’m just going to ignore Marisa. She’s one of those live-chat troublemakers.

  • Thanks, but I Don’t Particularly Like to Hug

    I’m a little behind in my reading, I’m smack in the middle of the whole Lenz thing and it’s kind of making me sick, so I’m going to backtrack a little.

    Last week I accused Infinite Jest of having kind of a Kubrickian sterility about it at times, but as I continue reading and the novel continues to blossom for me, I realize how much life is flowing under that apparently detached, often affectless surface.

    The scene where James’ father asks for his help to move the mattress, of course, is a classic example of the sort of achingly slow emotional reveal that takes place in small ways throughout the entire novel — and is starting to encompass my experience of the entire book. In the bed scene you’re directed to focus on the physical detail, at first seemingly for its own sake, until it all adds up to reveal a horror recollected with not only the detachment of time but the precision of someone either so removed from or else so overwhelmed by the emotional impact of the sudden, strange death of his father that the physical details of the morning take on a ravishing Technicolor quality. They say time slows down for some people when they’re in car accidents or disasters, they remember the strangest details later — the song on the radio when the phone rang, the dust on the windshield before your head crashed through it. And once you have the whole picture, no matter how blandly or sharply or affectlessly it’s described, a boy running from his parents’ bedroom to his own and jumping on the bed, the slumped mattress in the hallway and the ring of the glass pushed into the carpet all bear the emotional weight of a man watching himself cope with tremendous loss from a distance. A man with a supremely focused scientific mind that can compartmentalize information and zoom in on a detail — a slowly rolling doorknob — that changes the course of his life.

    The mirror cracks in the most delightful way, of course, in the very next scene, when Erdedy tries to refuse a hug. All the hemming and hawing and sweaty palms of someone who doesn’t have Himself’s muscular mind to use as a shield, or “Joe L.’s” veil, who uses drugs to keep the world at arm’s length because the fragile infrastructure of his addiction can only remain intact if no one gets close enough to breathe on it, it all gets crushed so shockingly and wonderfully by Roy Tony.

    ‘You think I fucking like to go around hug on folks? You think any of us like this shit? We fucking do what they tell us. They tell us Hugs Not Drugs in here. We done motherfucking surrendered our wills in here,’ Roy said. ‘You little faggot,’ Roy added. He wedged his hand between them to point at himself, which meant he was now holding Erdedy off the ground with just one hand, which fact was not lost on Erdedy’s nervous system. ‘I done had to give four hugs my first night here and then I gone ran in the fucking can and fucking puked. Puked,’ he said. ‘Not comfortable? Who the fuck are you? Don’t even try and tell me I’m coming over feeling comfortable about trying to hug on your James-River-Traders-wearing-Calvin-Klein-aftershave-smelling-goofy-ass motherfucking ass.’

    Erdedy observed one of the Afro-American women who was looking on clap her hands and shout ‘Talk about it!’

    ‘And now you go and disrespect me in front of my whole clean and sober set just when I gone risk sharing my vulnerability and discomfort with you?’. . .

    ‘Now,’ Roy said, extracting his free hand and pointing to the vestry floor with a stabbing gesture, ‘now,’ he said, ‘you gone risk vulnerability and discomfort and hug my ass or do I gone fucking rip your head off and shit down your neck?’

    If Erdedy were a different man, a man whose mind was so strong it could shield his heart from both its own needs and the needs of others, he wouldn’t have climbed up on Roy Tony’s neck and not let go, I suppose. But I love that he had enough strength and trust to desperation to give himself over and let Roy Tony destroy his pathetic facade. And we get to see that Roy Tony, as he clears his addiction away, has the heart of a lion.

    This is getting long so I’ll just add that I’m also very interested to see if Joelle can continue to justify her own draped existence.

  • 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.

  • Something Smells Delicious

    I went out to our community swimming pool the other day festooned in sunscreen, reading glasses, and a hat with a large brim, lugging my Giant Book. I put out my towel on a chair near one of my neighbors.

    Neighbor: “Gosh, that’s a big book. What is it?”

    Me: (Assembling a winch to hoist it high enough for her to see the cover) “Infinite Jest ? I’m reading it for an online book . . . club, sort of thing.

    Neighbor: “Wow, and I’m having trouble finishing my thin little book!” (She holds up Paulo Coehlo’s The Alchemist.)

    Me: “Want to trade?”

    Neighbor: “Ha, ha. So, have you met any of the people who are reading along with you?”

    Me: “No, actually. I’m not even sure they really exist.”

    Neighbor: (Polite confusion)

    Me: “I’ve actually been Internet-friends with the guy who organized the group for a long time.”

    Neighbor: (Clearly she now suspects I troll “Married But Looking” AOL chat rooms after my family goes to sleep at night)

    SOME FAVORITE LINES SO FAR

    That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack.

    Well come again I said? Come again? I mean my God. I’m sitting there attached to the table by tines. I know bashing, Pat, and this was unabashed bashing at its most fascist.

    Here’s how to read the monthly E.T.A. and U.S.T.A. and O.N.A.N.T.A. rankings the way Himself read scholars’ reviews of his multiple-exposure melodramas. Learn to care and not to care. They mean the rankings to help you determine where you are, not who you are. Memorize your monthly rankings, and forget them. Here is how: never tell anyone where you are.

    This is also how not to fear sleep or dreams. Never tell anyone where you are. Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.

    Pemulis’s mark-up isn’t anything beyond accepted norms, and there’s always room in Hal’s budget for spirited inquiry.

    Or there’s always quietly sucking off the exhaust pipe of your repossessable car in the bank-owned garage of your familyless home.

    The host White flaggers pay this burnt public husk of a newcomer the ultimate Boston AA compliment: they have to consciously try to remember even to blink as they watch her, listening. I.D.ing without effort. There’s no judgment. It’s clear she’s been punished enough. And it was basically the same all over, after all, Out There. And the fact that it was so good to hear her, so good that even Tiny Ewell and Kate Gompert and the rest of the worst of them all sat still and listened without blinking, looking not just at the speaker’s face but into it, helps force Gately to remember all over again what a tragic adventure this is, that none of them signed up for.

    There is something creepy about a very fit older man, to say nothing of jackboots w/ Fila warm-ups of claret-colored silk.