I generally have the same approach to talking or writing about books. When I used to teach literature, I would structure my syllabus so that the course would start out with short stories, poems, or essays. The daily reading wasn’t too hard because there would be a novel looming a couple weeks out and when we started talking about the novel, the students were expected to have completed it. Same goes for the next one. While we are discussing and writing about novel #1, they are reading novel #2. It is challenging to teach a book in chunks and I am not convinced it helps the students value the work. It puts the teacher in the role of tour guide, explaining the meaning of things as we pass them.

I think this is why I haven’t been writing about my infinite summer and my reading of Infinite Jest. I am about half way through the book and I still love it. In fact, I think it is going to end up as a favorite of mine, but I would rather not put it on the list yet. After all, I don’t know what is to come in the next half. It might suck. I doubt it, but it might.

I am also not a social reader. I have given guest talks at book clubs, but I don’t participate in any. Don’t get me wrong, there is a time and a place for talking about books. The time, is after they are read, the place is usually a bar. Right now much of the online discourse about Infinite Jest is about getting through it, whether people should finish or not, and what the author “meant” by X, Y, or Z. I am not critical of that (ok, I am critical of all the talk of authorial intention), and I hope that the discussions and the tips for sticking with it are helping people enjoy the book.

For those who are not enjoying the book, I say move on. Life is too short to read books you don’t like in your free time. There are plenty of other books to enjoy. For those who plan to complete it, I hope the discussion will really kick in when the book is complete, because that should be the most fruitful time for all this exegesis.

So, unless I am really moved to write about some segment of the book in the next weeks, I probably won’t post on Infinite Jest again until I finish it. I am enjoying the book. I don’t find it to be a difficult book, but it does take time, time that is sometimes hard to find.

Happy Reading

As I expected, this is a funny book.¹ I have been doing lots of my reading on airplanes and have found myself laughing out loud on several occasions, silencing my chuckles as fellow travelers peek out from under their sleep masks to see what kind of lunatic is sitting in 6H. The sheer absurdity of some of the situations is amusing, but it is usually the puns that incite audible cachinnation in this jet-lagged reader.

‘Urine trouble? Urine luck’

Yes, the humor can be scatological, but it is often more cerebral as well.

‘…a truly ghastly Bret Ellis period during Lent.”

Wallace is clever without pause. His narrative doesn’t break to let you laugh. It keeps moving and sometimes the jokes are strung together so you risk missing them as you slowly wrap your mind around the one you are currently chuckling at and your eyes continue moving across the page. I am sure that I am missing a good deal of humor in my first reading, but it will be there next time for that deeper appreciation that you get from subsequent readings of such a book.

1. It is probably better characterized as a profoundly sad book. It helps to remember the full context of Hamlet’s Yorick quote to appreciate the sense of forlorn despair that permeates this text:

‘Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now?’ (Hamlet, V.i)

Clearly, his jests were finite.

Infinite Jest is populated by characters suffering with drug addiction, mental illness, and wretched existences beyond their control. They are usually sympathetic, despite their absurdities and extremities of behavior, and in many cases, empathetic to readers who share their sense or circumstance. Death, especially suicide, is often their only exit, but there is also a sense of solace in there being any exit at all.

Perhaps I am reading DFW’s own suicide into the text, but death and suicide are treated as welcome alternatives to the meaningless and torturous circumstances of life. I find myself thinking of Sartre’s No Exit in which “hell is other people.” The characters of this novel treat their fellow sufferers poorly, to say the least, and suicide is depicted as “having Too Much Fun.” The only consolation seems to come in the recognition that it is all finite indeed, the power to end it all is within the grasp of the sufferer.

Unlike Sartre’s characters who never take the exit, Wallace’s do, and sometimes they look forward to it, plan for it, and relish in the prospects of escape. Given the more literal translation of Sartre’s title as In Camera, there might be more to this connection than my simple associative reading. Camera and “cartridge” play important roles in the work as well, but I will save that for another time.

I got through my first significant chunk of Infinite Jest on a flight to Australia. I was seated on the aisle next to a Russian woman and her twelve-year-old son who was continuously airsick. Sleep was not much of an option for me as the woman got up to dispose of the neatly packaged vomit and stock up on fresh airsick bags about every hour and I had to get up to let her out. The flight was packed. There was nowhere to go.

Headphones in to block the sound of retching, reading light on the Kindle, I dove in. In fact, I couldn’t put it down. I can’t wait for my return flight for another long reading session, but I do hope to have less effluent seat-mates next flight. It is certainly a book that favors dedicated reading time.

As I was reading, I kept thinking of Pynchon, specifically of Gravity’s Rainbow, his “unreadable, turgid, overwritten and obscene” novel from 1973. Surely DFW was influenced by this work, but was I falling into a mode of literary post hoc, ergo propter hoc? After all, it is like Pynchon on one level, but it is hard to explain. On the other hand, it is definitely different. Similar, like the fact that there are numerous characters just dropped into the narrative without transition or immediate relevance. There is the scatological humor. There are the various episodes that only start to show connections as the readers presses on. It just feels a lot like reading Pynchon, but different…

So after arriving in Australia and collapsing into 40,000 winks (equivalent to 12-13 hours of comatose sleep), I decided to do a little research on the connection. It turns out that the comparison was a bit of a sore subject for DFW. The block below is from a February, 1997 Interview with the Minnesota Daily.

So now we see Pynchon scrambling to keep up with the techniques that television stole from him. Pynchon’s another one whom I regard as really kind of old-fashioned. I like early Pynchon. I like The Crying of Lot 49. I like Gravity’s Rainbow. But the Pynchon of Slow Learner and Vineland, which I didn’t like very much, seems to be making the same tired jokes — ‘look how shallow and superficial the culture is.’ All right — I’ve been told — TV itself now tells that to me. It just seems like more of the same. I’m not as big a Pynchon fan as some other people are. The word Pynchon is on every one of you’re book covers as a comparison. Does this drive you crazy? Pynchon was important to me when I was in college. The first book that I wrote, Broom of the System, some reviewer for the New York Times said it was a rip-off of The Crying of Lot 49, like that I hadn’t read yet. So I got all pissed, and then I went and read The Crying of Lot 49, and it was absolutely, incredibly good. I think a certain amount of this is marketing, and, you know, the fastest way to tell what something is like is to compare it to something else. And having read Gaddis and having read Pynchon and DeLillo and Coover and McElroy and Sorrentino, I can see that the kind of stuff that I do or like that Bill Vollmann does or that Richard Powers does is certainly more like that than it’s like, you know, Irwin Shaw or John Updike. Writers are bad to ask about this though, because we’re all egomaniacs, and we all want to be utterly unique and, you know, not like anybody else, and so there’s a certain amount of bristling about it, but after a while there’s just no way to help it. Gravity’s Rainbow is a great book, but for the most part Pynchon kind of annoys me, and I think his approach to a certain amount of stuff is kind of shallow, to be honest with you. So I get uncomfortable about that, and when people ask it over and over again I get the sense that they’re saying they think I’m ripping him off or just rehashing stuff he’s done, in which case I get pissed, but if that’s how they’re seeing it, it means I’ve failed. I mean if my stuff’s coming off derivative of somebody else, it means there’s something that I’m doing that isn’t right. But I find myself doing it all the time. I’ll see a movie, and I’ll really like it, and I’ll recommend it to friends, and I’ll say, well, it’s sort of like this combined with this. I mean it’s such a convenient shorthand. And nobody likes to have it done to them. You don’t want to have a friend say to you, ‘You’re just exactly like this other guy we know.’ You say, ‘No, I’m not. I’m me.’ But we do it to each other all the time.

And this one is from a 1997 Interview with Zachary Chouteau of American Booksellers Association.

BTW: You’ve been compared to Swift, Pynchon, and Barth. Who do you think your writing might compare to? DFW: That’s a tough question. The Pynchon thing really annoys me. I haven’t read him for so long. I get tired of it, pissed off by it. BTW: What writers have influenced you? DFW: There’ve been so many different ones during different stages of my life. In college, Donald Bartheleme had a big impact on me. More recently Cormac McCarthy — who did “All the Pretty Horses” (Vintage) — has sent shivers up and down my spine. Manuel Puig is another writer that I really admire. William Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Wolfe…

Notice the lack of Pynchon in that final list.

So what do we make of all this? It is dangerous to take an author’s words as gospel. DFW even says all authors are egomaniacs. But he also validates the comparison as a way of talking about his work, using Pynchon as a cultural reference instead of an analog. They really aren’t that much alike, but they are different from a lot of other writing in similar ways, if that makes any sense. It is like saying “the experience of reading DFW is a bit like the experience of reading Pynchon, even though their works are completely different.”

That last point is where the comparison becomes important. It makes no difference whether DFW was influenced by Pynchon or not. A definitive answer would not provide some key to the meaning of the work. But I do think that readers of Pynchon (or Barthelme, or Coover, or Doctorow, etc.) will have an easier time with this work because we have learned to read a certain way that is conducive to tackling works like Infinite Jest.

So what lessons can readers of Pynchon bring to reading Infinite Jest for the first time? (remember, I haven’t finished the novel. This can all turn out to be bunk, but it seems to be working.)

• Don’t sweat the characters: Gravity’s Rainbow has over 400 characters and they are introduced in what seems to be unrelated narratives. It will all come together as you keep reading. All the necessary information is revealed; just be patient. You will figure out how they are all related and who are the major vs. minor characters as the narrative progresses.
• Don’t sweat the seemingly unrelated narratives: See above. It will all come together and discovering the connections is a big part of the fun. Just read it.
• Remember, it’s funny: You just can’t take everything seriously. The complicated stuff is really meant to be absurd. Call it mimesis. Life is absurd. Look for puns.
• Don’t go deep: The text won’t let you. The work resists meta-narratives, keeping you engaged with the construction and evolution of the actual narrative. If you are asking yourself “what does it mean?” make sure you mean “what does it mean to the narrative?” not “what kind of great philosophical point am I missing here?”

That’s enough insight for tonight. I need to take my Kindle down to the bar and get some of that wonderful (and cheap!) Australian Shiraz.

I’ve read Ulysses three times. I’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow twice. I read Underworld and Mason & Dixon in the same year. Hell, I read Portrait of a Lady, The Golden Bowl, and The Ambassadors in a single summer. Admittedly, I was studying for my comps and it sucked.

Enough literary muscle flexing though. Let’s just say that big books aren’t necessarily difficult books. Take Moby Dick, for example. Sure there is a lot of symbolism and such, but you can read it as a glorified fishing story (Melville thought the whale was a fish, just read the cytology chapter).

So why is it that everyone cites the length of the work when they talk about the challenge of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest? Sure, it is long, but that shouldn’t be an issue unless you are working on your bucket list. When you see it, it is what Lori Anderson would call a “book thick enough to stun an ox,” but I am reading it on my Kindle, so all I have to remind me of my prolonged commitment is a progress bar that is slow to, well, progress.

I suspect the real anxiety is over the nature of the work. It is well known for its convoluted form, endnotes with endnotes, and prankster-like conventions. It is, to use a term coined by Espen Aarseth, ergodic literature. It requires work and commitment, two things that people either have too much of already, or are not very good at anyway.

Frankly, I can’t believe I haven’t read this book yet. I love difficult books. I almost (before sanity struck) dedicated my life to reading and teaching such books. This one has been on my ‘to do’ list for years (just like finishing the built-in seating in the kitchen). Perhaps Pynchon and Delillo distracted me by releasing their big books the following year, or maybe it is just that I read a hell of a lot more non-fiction these days. You know what they say, excuses are like…

So, this summer, the fates have conspired for me to read Infinite Jest. Amazon keeps recommending the book as a Kindle read for me. I need a long book for my trip to Australia this week, and I am intrigued by the group reading project over at Infinite Summer (more on that in a future post).

The book is on my Kindle; I am on my way to Australia. I have publicly stated my commitment to do this.

Bring it on