Infinite Summer

Poor Tony, indeed. When I finished reading the seizure scene, I was shaking. And I forced myself to read further, knowing I could not go to sleep with Poor Tony's pain and terror in my head.

But as I read on, the page number seemed to scurry off the bottom of the page like a spider, and the hand holding the book---my hand---looked suddenly like a wax cast. A cadaver.

So my question to you is, what part of IJ thus far has moved you physically? Beyond the point other writing has? Or has it failed to do so yet? Joelle's Too Much scene? Hal narrating how he broke down about Himself's death? What has wound you up so tight you feel part of Wallace's pages?

I'm with you on this scene. There have been several moving episodes so far but I had to put the book down for a while after reading about Poor Tony's withdrawal and seizure. It was as if it were happening to me; it shook me to the core.

There are a lot of parts of the novel I'm incredibly moved by--the personal situations of Joelle and Poor Tony, Mario's selflessness--but I find that what hits me on a more immediate gut level is where DFW hints or obliquely refers to or tells only parts of some of the horrific stuff that happens to people.

p 291 the description of punter's injury;

p 259 "An even more embarrassing transaction is supposed to take place in private between the two schools' Headmasters, but nobody knows quite what. Last year Enfield lost 57-51 and Charles Tavis didn't say one word on the bus-ride home and used the lavatory several times."

and then also pretty much anything the AFR does...

I find those horrors he only refers to way more chilling than those he describes more explicitly (e.g., JOI and the microwave)

I think I was most drawn in by the section with Joelle, not just the Too Much Fun part but really that whole section. Just unbelievable.

To be honest though, I'm kind of cold-hearted and as much as I may sympathize with characters I never seem to be moved physically by their tragedies. I get chills occasionally, but it's more often because I've just read an incredibly well-written passage and I'm a nerd.

I laugh out loud ridiculously often, though. It's not uncommon for it to happen multiple times per page, really. I have to make sure I'm by myself while reading to make sure I can freely laugh out loud without people thinking I'm out of my mind.

As a whole I can say that IJ has pulled me into its world way more than any other book ever has. Imagery is usually the most tedious part of any book for me (unless it's Nabokovian imagery, because then it's just too poetic not to love), but here I find myself wanting to absorb every detail, imagery and otherwise. I love the alternate near future DFW's created, and I love every character and every detail of their pasts. It's hard to stop myself from wanting to take notes on everything just out of the fear that I'll forget any small bit. I have problems, I think.

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First-Time Reader
Started: 26 June 2009 | Finished: 25 July 2009

What you guys are saying about needing to stop for a while after the Poor Tony section is, I realize, something that is kind of happening to me with most of the long sections now that the book is really up and running: You reach these really affecting climaxes of being either emotionally or aesthetically blown away, and it feels appropriate to set the book down and just live with the experience for a while -- almost feels wrong not to. And this is precisely the opposite of what a successful (from both the writer's and the reader's perspective) novel usually is expected to acheive, which would be the page-turning "I can't put this down" "what happens next?" experience.

And I think it is quite likely a reaction that DFW would consider a succesful trick to have pulled off. For one thing, his coyness with revealing key plot elements contributes to this: you get trained by the first few (hundred) pages NOT to expect that turning to the next chapter will give you the answer to any burning mystery that might have been raised about what happened in the past between two characters like Orin and Joelle or who is behind the apparant plot to distribute the "Entertainment," so you lose the instinct to turn the next page simply to keep up the momentum or find out the next immediate answer "after the commercial break" as it were. Of course, generations of "serious" -- and, especially, "literary" writers and/or the teachers and critics who introduced them to us, have hailed the need for and rewards of slow, careful reading and re-reading. What Wallace seems to have pulled off is a strategy that oddly encourages something like this, not as a chore, as something we "should" be doing, but as a pleasure, something we learn to enjoy doing with his writing. I'll bet that some people (and some of you?) have a much easier time finding this sort of pleasure naturally in some highly "literary" texts, and I've certainly had (albeit much more rarely and accidentally) this experience on occassion in other books I've read.

Another way of approaching this: If, as I did, you came to IJ via his short fiction or his non-fiction, you are probably familiar with his flair for these marvelous sort of apotheoses that rise out of sort of mundane starting points.* But it is a whole other thing entirely to figure out how to embed this experience in a longer narrative in a way that makes you both want to stop for a while and also come back to the book again.

* "derivative sport in tornado alley," which is his nonfiction piece about growing up playing tennis in the midwest is both a perfect example and a nicely relevant one. It was in Harper's originally, and is collected in "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again."**

** ...and shouldn't a posting board for IJ involve an easy way to format endnotes in your post? just sayin'...

"Then at some point he realized: time had become the shit itself: Poor Tony had become an hourglass: time moved through him now; he ceased to exist apart from its jagged-edged flow."

I think this sentence (p. 303) is so elegant but I may have trouble figuring out what I want to say about it. The colons imply strong causal relationships (time becomes shit->PT becomes an hourglass) that then break down (illustrated by the semicolon) as Poor Tony breaks away from the linear flow of time. It's like the punctuation is performing the action.

Also Zuckung - the best definition I've been able to find on the internet is "the burst of energy that separates two trajectories" from the German word for twitch. So perfect.