Summer of Infinite Jest 15 -- the last 50 pages or so

I went today to the rooftop garden of the S.F. Museum of Modern Art, to which I am admitted free because we have a yearly membership, and sat with some coffee (which they sell there) and finished reading "Infinite Jest." 

The last 50 pages feature the last part of Hal's apparent breakdown in the video viewing room, a surreal scene showing what becomes of Orin, and finally an even more surreal scene, drawn out in pornographic detail, showing what becomes of Gately -- one of those endings which, because it is surreal (cf. Morrison's "Song of Solomon"), is annoying. Because it's surreal, and because it resembles the dreams Gately has been having for the last hundred and fifty pages, you don't know if it's another dream or not. I still don't know.

We never find out whether the competing spy agencies find the magically compelling videotape (or "cartridge"), and unless I missed something, we never find out exactly how Hal's tennis career ends, though what I gathered is that he manages to injure himself accidentally-on-purpose. So it seemed to me that the author ended by being more interested in the characters than the themes or the plot. Which is fine, but is inconsistent with the book as a whole.

As soon as I was done with the book, I found myself contrasting the way I felt with with the way I felt on finishing "2666," which is also a monumental novel that ends without the "story" being quite tied up. On finishing "2666" I wanted to go back to the beginning immediately and read it again now that I really knew who all the characters were and why various long episodes were even in the book. On finishing "Infinite Jest" I only had that annoyed feeling of "Did I miss something here?" and paged back through the last 50 pages a little -- but only for a minute. I didn't really care that much whether I had missed something. More than anything else I felt tired. Not even exhausted, just ready to be done with it.

My final conclusion is that it's a promisingly brilliant work by someone whose mental illness accounts for a certain amount -- perhaps most -- of the work's envelope-pushing. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but the same mental illness (and I wrote before about not being able to read without thinking about it) doomed the author, who never finished another novel. ("The Pale King" is notably unfinished, and not like "2666" is unfinished, but really only speculatively pulled together by an editor, according to reviews I've read.) By its length and complexity, it begs comparison with "2666," but it's unfair to put "I.J.," a second novel by a 30-year-old, up against the crowning achievement by a 53-year-old who had already written ten other novels and then "The Savage Detectives." Because if it begs comparison, it also pales in it.

I think "Infinite Jest" gained the aura of masterpiece because readers loved the way it captured, and thus validated, the voice of generation whatever-DFW-was-part-of ... X or Y, whatever. The slangy way of talking that accounts for most of the novel's length is the way that whole generation talks, and this novel perfectly captures it. Plus DFW's death has given rise to a kind of hagiography about him, similar to the aura around Kurt Cobain. One of the reasons I wanted to read "I.J." is to find out whether this attitude is justified. In my opinion, it isn't. There are probably fifty or a hundred novels from the last third of the 20th century that will endure longer.

Summer of Infinite Jest 14 -- Things come to a head

We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.

-- Hal's internal monologue in Infinite Jest, page 900

I reached the long stretch recounting Gately's sojourn in the hospital, where he suffers a dark night of the soul as he bravely/stupidly refuses all narcotic painkillers for fear they will get in the way of his recovery. (I almost capitalized recovery. Must be careful not to let DFW's tics infect my own writing, which is something I'm sure all writers experience.) These scenes, at once comic and heroic, alternate with incidents back at the tennis academy where one of the secondary characters gets his face stuck on a cold window, and then protagonist Hal has a nervous breakdown. I'll let the English majors determine how the character Stice more or less literally losing face contributes to the breakdown, and how this is thematically beautiful; no connection occurs to me right away, but I'm probably not reading carefully enough.

Hal's nervous breakdown is accompanied by enhanced perceptions and a rush of thoughts, as if he were high on something, though he isn't -- unless I missed something. And the quotation above, which more than any single sentence in the book could serve as its epigram, comes amidst a slew of disconnected thoughts:

It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me* that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately -- the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person. Something pathetic about it. A flight-from in the form of a plunging-into.

* None of the sections about Hal were in the first person until a few dozen pages ago, when suddenly first-person sections started to appear. So "I" is Hal himself.

Here's the author, using the first-person perspective to bring more immediacy to the words, stating the book's theme as clearly as it's ever stated. The book is all about this quest to care deeply, to commit oneself totally. The tennis players commit their young lives to the sport ("games"); the addicts commit their lives to addiction ("needles"), then to recovery; the terrorists commit their lives to their cause.

Simple, and very clear once you're this far into the book. It takes your own commitment, as a reader, to get this far, though. Again, that's payoff enough for me. I don't need the plot to all wrap up nicely which (I've heard) it won't.

It also occurred to me today: the tennis academy sections of Infinite Jest are a Y.A. novel. Maybe the publisher should extract them -- the way Don DeLillo's publisher extracted the first, unbelievably brilliant baseball section of Underworld -- and publish it separately. Titled, maybe, "Dawn Drills."

Summer of Infinite Jest 13 -- up to page 800

Well, after all the mystery, many facts are revealed in an interrogation of the previously unpromising Molly Notkin, the film grad student and friend (and roommate? I forget) of Joelle, by secret agents. Not the same secret agents who are, creepily and comically, in wheelchairs. Among Molly's revelations:

• The title of the magically compelling videotape;
• A confirmation of the previously suggested fact that Joelle stars in it;
• A description of its actual contents;
• A possible explanation for its magical qualities (to wit: lenses)
• Joelle's backstory, including how she came to be among the "deformed."

(There's a whole trope about how the deformed are a special class, and go around wearing veils. Yeah okay sure.)

And then after this, several climactic events at the tennis academy. In other words, the plot is suddenly rocketing forward, at least in comparison to its progress up to page 740. I guess this would cause some readers to expect there is candy at the end, or something. But there's already plenty of plot for me. Really I don't care if the secret agents of various vague nationalities catch up to the magically compelling video. Isn't the whole book a coming-of-age story, or rather multiple coming-of-age stories? Yes, they're coming to a climax, but that's the thing about coming-of-age stories -- they never end satisfactorily, because they're just the beginning of someone's story.

Maybe that analysis would get me a C in English class, but that's how the book strikes me now.

Summer of Infinite Jest 12.1 -- page 740

(The oeuvre of James Incandenza) was amateurish, she'd seen, when Orin had had his brother... lend them some of The Mad Stork's Read-Only copies. Was amateurish the right word? More like the work of a brillian optician and technician who was an amateur at any kind of real communication. Technically gorgeous, the Work, with lighting and angles planned out to the frame. But oddly hollow empty, no sense of dramatic towardness -- no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience.

Ha! I get it.

Of course DFW's work does not really meet that description at all. That's more a description of, say, Alain Robbe-Grillet. But this passage is the author saying "Yeah, I know all about your anxiety about narrative, and I can play with it, and I'll continue to do so." And also saying that he has this anxiety about his own work, that he's afraid his technical brilliance will keep people from enjoying it. And also that he knows something about alienation, the gulf between his mentally ill self and others, and anxiety about whether his novels can bridge that gulf where nothing else can.

Later on that page the expression narratively anticonfluential is coined with reference to Incandenza's work. Anticonfluential! I bow in admiration.

Summer of Infinite Jest 12 -- page 726

I'm not cheating. It's Indian Summer in San Francisco, temps in the 80s, a dry, calm and smoggy atmosphere. Street fairs abound.

Page 726 reveals what the reader has been suspecting for at least the last couple hundred pages, that Joelle Van Dyne, aka the Prettiest Girl Of All Time (PGOAT), aka Madame Psychosis of MIT's student radio station, is in fact the person who appears in the mysteriously compelling video. Aka The Entertainment.

We're in the middle of a long section in which the Wheelchair Assassins (whom I don't find nearly as compelling as I think the author did; in my opinion they're a minstrel show) zero in on a copy of the magically compelling videotape at a Boston-area video store. A bunch of bodies are piling up, it's not clear why, when their methodical search finally uncovers the McGuffin. And in a bit of indirect narration, the author explains the W.A.'s tactics of having various people under surveillance, including Hal the tennis prodigy.

In fact, several of the seemingly disparate plot threads are finally being drawn together. Joelle is in Ennet House, down the hill from the tennis academy; she appears in the videotape, which it is now clear is one of the works (perhaps the final work) of Hal's father James Incandenza; a menacing organization is on their trail. And she's in love with Don Gately, who just got royally beaten and shot in an extremely entertaining dust-up. ("Just" meaning a hundred pages ago.)

And I'm kind of sad that after 725 pages of free-ranging exposition a plot has started to raise its head. I was reading an essay on PopMatters, "The Collision of Roadside Picnic and Infinite Jest," where a critic says something I've read in other places, that there is no big payoff to the story in I.J., that the book just sort of stops, like the final episode of "The Sopranos."¹ And I've read that this failure to bring the book to a standard ending is regarded universally as simply one last joke on the part of the author.

Surely if you've read all the way to the end of "Infinite Jest," you're doing so for other reasons than wanting to know what happens at the end. That's why I find the somewhat obvious intrusion of narrative plot annoying. At this point I don't even care if there's a plot; it's like watching early seasons of "Big Brother" when all you're doing is watching the people in the house just being people in a house -- the quality of observation and language alone justify the time and expense of reading.

But I better get a move on, or I'll never finish before the end of Indian Summer.

1. See my comment on this sort of narrative frustration in a post I wrote on The Rumpus, The Limits of Narrative.

Summer of Infinite Jest 11 - Chow-22

Just finished the (comparatively short) twelve-page scene set in the tennis academy cafeteria -- and I almost said "mess hall," since more than any other scene in the book, this scene reminded me of "Catch-22." Heller did such an amazing job of handling two dozen characters and their individual foibles and issues and plot threads, nowhere as much as quotidian scenes like those in the mess hall or the briefing room -- say, Chapter 21, "General Dreedle." In the cafeteria scene in pages 627-638, DFW shows things we didn't know about ten or twelve major and minor E.T.A. characters -- hello, Mrs. Clarke, cafeteria manageress -- while very subtly, almost immeasurably, moving forward whatever it is we can still call the book's plot. Just another note to say how much I admire his mastery of this aspect of the novel.

I almost said that it was even more impressive given how little fiction DFW had published, but that's because I completely forgot about his first novel, "The Broom of the System," which no one talks about. I don't know why no one talks about it. I haven't read it, but I suppose it can only be because everything he achieved after that first novel dwarfs whatever he achieved with it.

Before the cafeteria scene was the weird farcical scene in Boston Commons in which the unnamed WYYY radio student engineer and fan of the vanished radio personality Madame Psychosis is literally scooped up and kidnapped by one of the Wheelchair Assassins, for no reason we can fathom. Didn't know what to make of that.

Summer of Infinite Jest 10 - the Randy Lenz episode

Pages 521-619 are almost wholly taken up by a series of events at and around Ennet House having to do with a particularly unctuous and recalcitrant resident named Randy Lenz, who in addition to having a seriously complicated past as a druggie/drug dealer is also personality-disordered. His foibles lead to a turning point in the Ennet House-related part of the book, as a street confrontation turns into a battle royale. In this tragicomic farce, the character who has emerged as the protagonist of the Ennet House-related parts, Don Gately, is injured.

In this sequence -- the whole 98 pages, not just the climactic battle -- the author once again demonstrates his mastery of the world of drug addiction and recovery. Not only the everyday doings of a halfway house and the endless AA meetings, but the mindset and behavior of an addict, and not just one addict but a whole range of mentalities and behaviors which various characters illustrate. It goes without saying that these 98 pages could have been -- would have been, by any other author -- compressed into 20 or 25 or at most 40. And if 40, then they would be the climax of an entire novel, not just one thread of a much larger novel where, in fact, they take place only 3/5 of the way through the book.

Think how many of the incidents in the book so far would have made up the ultimate climax of many lesser books: The conversation between the brothers in which Hal reveals to Orin the details of their father's suicide. The Eschaton match. Perhaps the sequence leading up to the suicide attempt of Joelle Van Dyne, although somehow it's not given as much weight as the others -- or maybe it is, because I had to skip several pages of that insufferable film grad student party. And finally the battle royale between Gately and three mysterious Canadian malefactors.

Of course, having so many momentous events and revelations so early in the book only raises the stakes for its ending. And I've heard that "Infinite Jest" doesn't necessarily pay off in the way readers expect a novel to, that like "The Sopranos" it just sort of ends. (See a post I wrote a couple years ago on theRumpus.net where I explored this phenomenon.) But I think just about anyone who has made it to this point in the book, except maybe the most narrow-minded, will be willing to grant the author his preference in doing whatever he wants, because that's how he's gotten us to this point.

I don't want to focus only on these technical aspects, except to say to those who will expect a neat ending: You know how hard this is? Not the neat ending, though that is hard in itself to pull off well, but the sheer aspect of juggling dozens of characters and at least three major plot lines over hundreds of pages?

In a perhaps unrelated note, I was thinking this morning about what books I would consider the best of the American 20th century's second half, and what immediately sprang to mind were "Revolutionary Road" and "Catch-22." Those are two books I would, if I had the time, read every year. Non-American books: "The Remains of the Day" and "The Savage Detectives," surely. But don't get me started.

Name of the day: Storm Ogle

From the website of the radio station KCDZ of Joshua Tree, CA, this news item:

YUCCA VALLEY MAN ARRESTED AGAIN FOR DRUGS

A Twentynine Palms man who was arrested a week ago for being under the influence of drugs, was arrested again Saturday for possession of methamphetamine. Quinton Umphress, 21, was arrested August 27 when his landlord reported him to the Sheriff's Department for doing drugs in his rental house in the 5400 block of Encelia Avenue in Twentynine Palms. Saturday, Umphress, along with a companion, Storm Ogle, 29, also of Twentynine Palms, was arrested again, this time in the 6800 block of Alpine Avenue in Twentynine Palms for investigation of possession of dangerous drugs. Quinton Umphress and Storm Ogle were booked into the Morongo Basin Jail with bail set at $25,000 each.

Actually both names are pretty good -- Quinton Umphress and Storm Ogle. Both sound like residents of Ennet House.

Summer of Infinite Jest 9 - Pleasure and addiction; my inability to separate the author from the work

One of the main themes of "Infinite Jest" becomes quite clear by the end (at least I hope it's the end) of the drawn-out conversation between the two secret agents, who have for no particular reason stayed up all night on a ridge overlooking Tucson discussing the philosophical reasons behind "the Entertainment." And that theme is simply the trade-offs between pleasure and addiction and the moral implications of choosing, or shall we say acceding to, an addiction.

"The Entertainment" is what they call the weaponized video "cartridge," prepared by an unknown agency, which is so compellingly pleasurable to watch that it puts all who view it into a spell they cannot break. Anyone who watches even one second of the video is instantly bewitched, such that they want only to keep their eyes glued to the video, forsaking everything else in life. They do not -- seemingly cannot -- break away even for a moment, not to eat or drink or (the author makes quite clear) to use the toilet; and they stay in that state, enraptured by the video, until they die. The mechanism by which this happens, whether it is magical or has some scientific basis, is not explained; neither do we have a clue as to what is on the video, at least not at this point around page 530. The mechanism is unimportant; what's important is that this literary conceit allows the characters to explore questions about pleasure, selfhood, addiction, free will, and other philosophical issues.

I can't pretend to be able to really understand, or even follow, the philosophical questions. I never took a philosophy course, and it's hard enough for me even to follow the discussions on the radio show "Philosophy Talk." If there's anything I'm going to understand about this important part of the book, it's by approaching it from a literary angle, as one of the book's themes. And understood that way, in the context of the rest of the book, it seems simple: If seeking pleasure leads swiftly to addiction, as it did for all the characters in the AA-related scenes, then is pleasure-seeking advisable at all? And if not, what does that imply about Western culture, given that so many people live their lives in pursuit of pleasure?

Worthwhile questions in a great book, but the author's own death makes it impossible to leave it there. My friend who is a literature scholar will object, but I'm going to say that no matter how convincingly the author explicates these themes, in this and other works (such as the tour de force essay on pleasure cruises, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" [pdf]), whatever he has to say about the pursuit of pleasure is, for me, undercut by his suicide. Whatever he had to say about pleasure, responsibility, caution, personal growth or duty is, for me, drowned out by that act of violence.

So while it's possible for me to suspend disbelief when I consider the literary conceit of the magically compelling "Entertainment" cartridge, and it's possible for me to put aside my knowledge of the author's ultimate statement while I'm reading this book, when I close the book I am thrown back on what I know about the author. It doesn't spoil the book for me, but it taints it.

A little later: I just found this passage in DFW's introduction, reprinted on the NYT's website, to the non-fiction collection "A Supposedly Fun Thing..." -- a passage which says, in 100 words, a great deal about the themes of his novel:

... we (tennis players in the middle of a long session of drills) were both in the fugue-state that exhaustion through repetition brings on, a fugue-state I've decided that my whole time playing tennis was spent chasing, a fugue-state I associated too with plowing and seeding and detasseling and spreading herbicides back and forth in sentry duty along perfect lines, up and back, or military marching on flat blacktop, hypnotic, a mental state at once flat and lush, numbing and yet exquisitely felt. We were young, we didn't know when to stop.

There it all is -- addiction, a hypnotic state with paradoxical effects, and the pursuit of it.

Summer of Infinite Jest 8 -- Waiting for the other shoe to drop

I'm about a hundred pages on in "Infinite Jest," page 526 exactly. Hal Incandenza has been sitting outside the office of the tennis academy's headmaster, or whatever title they use for him, along with a few other seniors, waiting to hear how much trouble they will get into for not stopping the Eschaton match, a holiday entertainment which ended in chaos, injuring several younger academicians. (At the end of it, it seemed as if one or two might have actually been killed, but since no one has mentioned it, I guess not.) Hal and the others wait, and we wait along with them, subjected to one of the author's now-familiar tactics of inflating a scene by describing the setting, the background noises and movements, the physical and mental state of various characters, one or two side trips into backstory, and so on. That's not counting the footnotes, which I have been pretty roundly ignoring, though I looked at a recent one to see what "Coatlicue Complex" (sic) meant, and was rewarded with this footnote: "No clue." Ha.

My friend who roped me into reading "Infinite Jest" with her has long since quit, a choice I respect, though I tend to stick with great big books to the end. Maybe there's a little bit of so-I-can-truly-say-I-read-it feeling behind this, and maybe a bit of Stockholm Syndrome as it applies to the reading of large novels. But mainly I stick with the long novels I've decided to start out of respect for the author's own tenacity and the author's own achievement. If it would be a sad world if we all felt condemned to finish everything we started, it would also be a sad world in which no one actually finishes reading "Infinite Jest," "2666," or "Europe Central."

On the other hand, last year I gave up on a book by an author I used to love, Peter Handke's "Crossing the Sierra de Gredos," after 300 of its 700 pages, not only because I was bored stiff by the language but because there was absolutely no indication that anything would ever happen. So it's not like I can't cut my losses.

Back to "Infinite Jest." Several times in the last 80 or so pages we were brought back to the ridge overlooking Tucson, where the two secret agents, one Quebecois and one American, discuss the moral philosophy behind what I have referred to as the magically compelling videotape, or as they call it, The Entertainment. This sequence -- the scene is drawn out in ten- and fifteen-page episodes interspersed through much of the book so far -- shows how the author draws out a single scene to great lengths, gradually exposing meaning through events and -- in this case, exclusively -- through dialogue. The two operatives have a long disputatious conversation that acts at times as a chorus, bringing (gradually!) to light the main theme of the book, which is the tension between freedom and choice on the one hand and enslavement and addiction on the other.

More about that in next entry.

Meanwhile I also read, and finished, Manuel Puig's "The Buenos Aires Affair."

Summer of Infinite Jest: DFW's bandana

Pretty much just what you'd think:

I started wearing bandannas in Tucson because it was a hundred degrees all the time. When it's really hot, I would perspire so much that I would drip on the page. Actually, I started wearing it that year, and then it became a big help in Yaddo in '87 because I would drip into the typewriter, and I was worried that I would get a shock. And then I discovered that I felt better with them on. And then I dated a woman who ... said there were these various chakras, and one of the big ones was what she called the spout hole, at the very top of your cranium. And in a lot of cultures, it was considered better to keep your head covered. And then I began thinking about the phrase, Keeping your head together, you know? .... It's a security blanket for me.... It makes me... feel kind of creepy that people view it as an affectation or trademark or something. It's more just a foible, it's the recognition of a weakness, which is that I'm just kind of worried my head's going to explode.

-- Quoted on Flavorwire from a book of interviews with David Foster Wallace

He's covering his spout hole so his head doesn't explode. Perfectly clear. Any more questions?

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 7: the Eschaton match

Now well into the 300s (of pages), I read today the Eschaton scene. Eschaton is a war game played by the tennis academy kids on a world map stretched out over 4 tennis courts in which you bomb other teams' territory by lobbing tennis balls onto it, the tennis balls representing thermonuclear weapons. And this scene, all twenty pages of it or so, is really the first utter masterpiece of the book. The author begins with the origin of the game, its rules, its motley equipment, long footnotes about theory, etc. -- and then depicts the match itself. Somewhere along the line, the scene switches from symbolic violence to real violence, from farce to what might be tragedy (we don't know by the end of the scene, but it's conceivable that one or two of the players has actually been killed). I was really impressed by the way the author manages this transition, while stage-managing the actions of at least 25 characters, some of them participating, some only "spectating," and at the same time crafting what is, at least, a remarkable allegory of how games are war, especially war games. Other themes: how combatants are essentially adolescent, no matter how adult and grave they try to be; how one generation passes its traditions on to the next, partially in hopes that precise transmittal of this tradition will ensure nothing changes, and how these hopes are inevitably dashed; and how people constantly disappoint themselves and each other.

Preceding this scene we're finally back on the outskirts of Tucson with the two secret agents who are discussing the magically compelling videotape. In this scene we find out that the content of the tape is pleasing, and that its origin is American (i.e. United Statesian, which in this book is part of a North American union, although the protagonists [antagonists?] of this scene speak as if Canada and the U.S. are still separate countries), but nothing else. They have a conversation about who is responsible for the deaths caused by the compelling videotape -- which victims find themselves unable to stop or turn away from, and thus die from thirst in their seats after several days -- the producer or the consumer, if a product is so addictive it kills. I liked this scene much better than the preceding ones that showed this pair. They seemed less menacing and more like a tragic chorus.

And before that was the scene about the drag queen addict going pretty much insane as he goes through heroin withdrawl in the worst way possible. Grisly, but clearly inseparable from the author's purposes.

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 6

I read two long scenes: the phone conversation between Orin and Hal on just what happened when their father committed suicide by putting his head in a microwave oven, and the following section, almost as long, about the Port Washington tennis match. Or at least the lead-up to it; I don't know if we get more of a it later.

I actually skipped the first five or six pages of the brothers' phone conversation, which simply looked like banter, and got to the meat of it: the part about their father's death, a section which answers the question of how anyone could actually commit suicide by putting their head in a microwave oven. I won't spoil it for you if you haven't read it. What impressed me about this whole scene is the mastery of black comedy. The whole idea of committing suicide by microwave is so absurd that it's impossible to believe, but when the author clearly describes how it might actually be accomplished, and its results, you the reader are forced to deal with this event along with the characters.

That said, I am just not finding anything about the dad figure all that interesting. Oh, I forgot about the whole scene that precedes this -- the scene of Joelle Van Dyne at a party of film grad students. Somewhere else in this blog I have expressed my revulsion at film grad students, a revulsion born of close exposure to them when I was a film criticism undergraduate. And they don't seem any more likable through DFW's eyes. As for the positively baroque and obsessive drug preparations which Joelle goes through, that was hard to read too. Clearly the author is both 1) comparing the anticipatory pleasure experienced by an addict before getting high with the anticipation of a suicide, and 2) himself taking a definitely weird obsessive pleasure in depicting it. Of course most of the over-detailed parts of this book, which are so many as to actually take up most of the book, share in this delight in obsessive detail, so that it comes to seem as if it's one of the author's main themes. If it's true that this is a book about the seductive nature of consumption, then I find this strategy on the part of the author to be wrong-headed. The joy he takes in depicting obsession is itself obsessive: there's not enough irony between them. It's like reading erotica that you know the author was turned on by when he or she wrote it.

I pretty much enjoyed the tennis match. I want to make it clear that I don't care about tennis one bit, but the pleasure I take in reading about it in this book is like that of any reader who learns about a subject by reading a novel about it. (Cf. my I.J. entry no. 4 in which I remarked on this effect as well.)

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 5

Last night I read the section from page 193 to 210 which introduces Ennet House and its surroundings and denizens. Yes, we've seen some of them before, but in this section the author does a very head-on description of the place -- its surroundings, including with respect to the tennis academy which has dominated the first two hundred pages, plus a long section on the things "you learn" in rehab there. After several pages of this (for example, you learn "that no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that," and "that the metro Boston street term for not having any money is sporting lint"), the narration shifts to several pages about the various tattoos of Ennet House denizens.

The information on tattoos is presented as the fruit of an obsessive interest by one of the residents, Ewell, but the passage struck me as the first part of the book which is truly dated. When the author wrote the book in the early 1990s, tattoos were still largely limited to the kinds of people described here -- prisoners, gang members, and the more outre members of the drug or queer community. Tattoos are depicted as disfiguring, as one of the stupid and "permanent" consequences of the poor judgement that results from doing drugs. As large as the author's imagination clearly is, he obviously never imagined that tattooing would become so mainstream that it's now unusual for a youth in his or her 20s or 30s not to have one.

Before tattoos, piercing was in vogue. In the 1990s, I got pierced. I never got tattooed. Now age 55, all my piercings are gone except one. Still don't have a tattoo.

I haven't mentioned, by the way, the section which precedes this, about Madame Psychosis' radio show. I enjoyed the section, and not because I expect or hope this radio show or its mysterious host to appear anywhere in the rest of the book except maybe in passing reference, but because I love weird radio that's on late at night and that almost no one listens to.

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 4

My internet reading habits have become governed by an RSS feed, which collects a wide range of stuff from various authors or publications, or on various topics, and which I try to skim through every day. When I find something I want to read at length, I use a widget from readability.com to save it to read later. Then every couple of days I copy all the latest articles from my readability.com collection into a single MS Word document and then print that out. Then I finally read it all over the next day or two, away from the computer. It becomes a sort of self-edited magazine.

Last night in Infinite Jest I reached the chapter which opens with the fairly inane telephone conversation between Hal and Orin Incandenza and then goes on to include four "documents" such as an insurance company email about a wacky construction site accident and an essay of sorts about the introduction, wide adoption, adjustments to, and sudden consumer rejection of videophone technology. These documents are all on different subjects, written in a different style, and it struck me that reading them in succession is not unlike reading my printed-out articles from the RSS feed.

Here we see the author's playfulness, and that's the main thing I took away. The second thing was his willingness to go to exhaustive length about a subject, such as the essay about the adoption and subsequent rejection of "videophony." Its author explains at great length, employing the level of detail that only a geek, such as a "Lord of the Rings" geek, could muster about his chosen subject, while recounting something which is fairly obvious on its face (no one who is not a narcissist or an attractive teenager feels very comfortable using a webcam). Because of this, the essay could probably be cut to a third its length and lose almost nothing. So I conclude that the level of detail is the whole point. It's an exhibition of what it's like to know everything about one little corner of the universe, and happily explain it all to everyone.

That, of course, is why Wikipedia is such a success. There is someone like that for almost every subject in the world -- not just the obvious fan-focused topics such as LOTR or Star Trek. With a little study, I myself might be able to rustle up a pretty good critical essay on the early films of Wim Wenders.

But before Wikipedia, we had novels. Moby Dick, with its exhaustive description of 19th century whaling, is the obvious comparison. But the best novels always give readers a sense that they're learning a lot of important and -- this is very important -- authentic things about something. Readers of Shogun are, by the time they finish the tome, convinced they could get along pretty well in 17th century Japan. Even my mother's 85-year-old husband said to me last month: "I know some Japanese: kimasu. Because I read Shogun." I thought to myself, Hmm, to go? Probably not... Then, remembering the book and the Japanese word which is repeated over and over, I said "You mean wakarimasu -- to understand." And he agreed, yes, that was it.

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 3

Yesterday and the day before I read the passage from pages 95-125 which alternates between scenes at the tennis academy and a scene on a ridge outside Tucson and a dialogue between two secret agents. I liked the kid scenes enormously. They start in the locker room as several student athletes rest from a long day of classes and sports. In this first scene we hear them complaining to each other in an arch, jokey way that is also somehow formalized -- and indeed it's later referred to as a "ritual" -- about the heavy load of studying and tennis practice. the author also establishes for the reader the academy's system of mentoring, in which an older teenager is responsible for shepherding and encouraging several younger ones, as young as age 10. In the following scenes we see this mentoring several times over; we see how each of the older teenagers goes about it. And it's enormously sweet the way the older kids take the younger ones in hand, rather than bullying them, which is what you'd expect Americans to do, or at the very least holding them at arm's length with the kind of needling that so typifies the emotional immaturity of American males with each other.

The oblique way they talk to each other in the first locker room scene reminded me a little of Don De Lillo and they way his teenaged characters banter, but instead of going the alienated, hostile route that De Lillo's characters usually choose, these kids have an underlying warmth and camaraderie that keeps their talk from becoming the sort of war De Lillo's characters are usually engaged in with each other.

These scenes alternate, as I said, with a single scene on a ridge outside Tucson, as two secret agents -- one Canadian and one American, I think, the former in a wheelchair and one of the "wheelchair assassin" squad -- banter about tradecraft, gossip about the latest news, and feel each other out as to who's responsible for the deaths and injuries caused by the magically compelling videotape. Neither one seems to know much about it, but since they're spies they could be lying to each other. In any case I didn't cotton too much to this scene. I suppose the author is laying plenty groundwork for a geo-political farce having to do with the reapportionment of territories between Canada and the U.S. (perhaps not a union as I earlier surmised). But it just didn't seem that interesting. He imbues the scenes in the tennis academy with much more warmth.

There follows a seven-page scene narrated in first-person by an unknown drug addict and thug, written in an unidentifiable patois that is a mixture of street dialect and intentionally bad spelling. I was surprised that I found myself drawn in by this narrative, because I avoid books written in dialect. But it's a very well-shaped story, a sort of horror tale involving the violence of the narrator and his two comrades in thuggery, and their relations with a sinister Chinatown drug dealer. Again, the author must be setting up some longer thread, because while we've seen stuff about drugs already (an unnamed man waiting for a delivery of high-class weed, and a scene on a psych ward between a shrink and a young woman), I think it's the first time we've seen these characters. Maybe all the drug-related characters will come together later.

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 2

I was wrong in my last entry, I wasn't on page 70, I was on page 60.

Now having read 12 more pages I am thinking about the plot thread having to do with the magically compelling videotape (or whatever the so-called "cartridge" is -- we don't know yet whether it's a feature film, a live shot of something, a hypnotic abstract design, or what -- I'll just call it a videotape until I know more).

First of all, at this early point the author is very cagey about the content of the magic videotape and what makes it compelling. And that's obviously the right choice -- you never show the monster in full light and full figure until the last ten minutes of the movie. And this being a literary novel and not, say, Cloverfield, I'm reading and thinking it doesn't really matter what's on the videotape. It is horrifying? Beautiful? Doesn't matter -- what matters is its effect.

Two points here. First, in the current state of ambiguity as to the content of the videotape and even whether it is horrifying or beautiful, it seems to me the author is saying that horrifying and beautiful are in some sense the same thing -- that they meet on both ends of the spectrum. The word "awesome" in its original meaning would apply, as the viewer's reaction of awe is what's important, not whether or not the material is awful.

What do I think about that -- beautiful is the same as horrifying? What's the author trying to say here? Is he suggesting that this equivalence is true, or is he (with a level of irony) suggesting that modern entertainment issues forth from this position of equivalence? The latter would be a more interesting point. The more you think about it, the truer it seems. Think about today's television. On the one hand, some good programming ("The Wire," "Mad Men," etc.). On the other hand, atrocious shit (take your pick). To the television/cable networks, it doesn't really matter. High class? Low class? Who cares as long as it pulls in the viewers? And the magically compelling videotape is the logical extension of this ad absurdam.

Second point: If I were to try to guess what's on the videotape -- an exercise which the author clearly understands is impossible for the reader to resist -- I can't imagine. Being 55 years old, I'm well aware that the avant garde of horrifying filmmaking has long passed me by. Between films like Hostel, with its images of torture, and those of Sion Sono (cf. Suicide Club, where a certain television commercial has the power to drive people to self-destcructive acts), I recoil from stuff that 23-year-olds eagerly consume. (In fact, I began this process when I was 23, when I walked out of Alien. ) In any case, to effect the weaponized hypnotic effect described in "Infinite Jest," the material would have to be geometrically worse.

If such horror (and let's say it's horror, not beauty) is unimaginable by a softy like me, maybe it would be imaginable by some freaky youngster. But I kind of doubt anyone could imagine anything that bad. Such horror is achievable only by a supernatural power; call it Satan. I assume the author is not writing a book about a literal Satan, so that means I have to suspend my disbelief here. In other words, I don't really buy the magical powers of the special evil videotape. But I'll have to take it on faith.

The way I read is, if I have to consciously do this -- say to myself, Okay, there's a hole here in the author's reasoning, a hole he doesn't want me to notice if I'm to continue to invest myself emotionally in his book -- that's sort of a strike. A book can sustain a number of these, the number varying depending on many factors. The book's reputation means I'll cut it a lot of slack.

 
For further reading: Scott Esposito in The Quarterly Conversation with a perspective on Infinite Jest fifteen years after its advent. I had no idea the book was already fifteen years old.

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 1

On the urging of my friend Katia, we're both reading Infinite Jest this summer. I picked it up on Saturday after seeing it in the window of a local bookstore. It was a new copy, the proprietor said -- "we hardly ever get it used." I guess if you finish it, you want people to know it and you put it on your shelves. But it's odd that there aren't a bunch of used copies out there from people who never finished it.

It's a thousand-plus pages. I'm not intimidated by very large books, having read Underworld, 2666 and The Savage Detectives, Europe Central, and all three volumes of Your Face Tomorrow, a magnum opus by Javier Marías. And yes, they are all proudly on my shelves.

I'm up to about page 70 of Infinite Jest, and I'm learning about this surreal tennis academy and the Incandenza family. Also there seems to be some kind of comic subplot having to do with a union between the U.S. and Canada and a Quebecois separatist movement. And there is some odd obfuscation by the author regarding video storage and viewing technology, perhaps under the assumption that any technology he wrote about would soon be obsolete and would date the book, so he made up something that was slightly off having to do with "cartridges."

I happened to read something today that said Don Gately was the central character, which seems strange since so far it seems Hal Incandenza, the youngest of his family and an obvious stand-in for the author, is the main character.

So far I admire the effort. I'm skipping just a little bit when I decide I don't need every single detail of a character's perceptions of the setting, which is something the author really extends.