Infinite Jest

[dave from knoxville]

Read it twice and loved it. The first hundred pages or so were kind of rough to get through but only because the book isn't exactly arranged chronologically. Yeah, there's that fractal structure, but I'm too dumb to understand that. I don't want to say anything about the plot or the structure because figuring that out is part of what makes it such a fun thing to read. I will say that Wallace puts a lot of heart into the characters in this book. And the more you learn about his life, the more some of the characters seem to be drawn from his experiences.

Once I'd finished it, I went back to see what I'd missed and ended up reading it all over again... over the course of a little while, with some other books read in between. It's going to take a few years before I can think about reading it again, though I'd love to. I was very upset about his suicide. Still am, honestly.

Anyway, Cloud Atlas is also a humdinger. The literary agent stuck in the old folks home by his sister (I think that's how it went) was my favorite little part of that.

A good, short book sort of in this vein is Spaceman Blues by Bryan Slattery too.

I've got a copy of Spaceman Blues out in the car. You're saying I should actually read it, huh?

[franks.]

I've got a copy of Spaceman Blues out in the car. You're saying I should actually read it, huh?

There are extraterrestrials in it.

[franks.]

It's both so funny and so sad. The portion of Infinite Jest about suicide seems really poignant considering his own death. I guess that's a very obvious thing to say. very sad. I guess that's obvious too. Here's the passage:

"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."

In a similar vein, I'd recommend William Gaddis's The Recognitions to anyone who enjoyed Infinite Jest. It's probably a more difficult book (much more difficult, I'd say) but it's equally funny and especially rewarding for multiple readings (just persevere through the first 100 pages or so and you're golden). The Recognitions is probably my favorite novel ever. I re-read it every two or three years.

There's an essay DFW wrote in the Amherst Review when he was in college that put a lot of things in perspective as to his mindset towards depression, etc. I have PDF of it, and if anyone wants to read it, just send me a note.

On a lighter note, I have not yet tackled The Recognitions, but I did read JR over the summer. It took me a few years of attempts to finally get through it. People have told me that it's really funny, which is why I kept picking it up and giving it a shot (I like to laugh), and it took a long time before I found the humor in it and didn't just feel like I was slogging through. But I did and I'm glad I stuck with it.

[Matthew_S]

Has anyone tackled Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities?

[mcphee from the forum]

franks -- I'd love to read that essay.

As for Gaddis, you could probably make a strong and accurate argument that his humor sometimes takes way too much work. But I think some of the best "jokes" in his books are rewards for actually picking up on the little thrown away details (as in JR when Eigen or Gibbs -- I can't remember which) gets beat up by the five Jones brothers for calling them "the five Jones brothers" in spanish. It's such a dumb joke, and that's pretty much all the info you get, but if you can put it together without just rushing by it's pretty funny (to be pedantic: five jones = cinco jones = sin cojones = without testicles. It's an awful lot of work to get to a ball joke). But the overwhelming nature of the language makes all the situations so much more chaotic and amusing. I mean, he's not hilarious, but he manages to keep things pretty light and amusing in what is, at its heart, a pretty bitter and sad book.

I really love both JR and The Recognitions.

[franks.]

Gotta love the postmodern dick joke.