Comments on: Infinite Jest, Digested: Part One

By: sean

sean — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 21:03:40 +0000

Is anybody impressed by DFW’s incredibly huge and increasingly apparent Christian balls? Just read his “Good People” short story from the upcoming The New Yorker(see The Howling Fantods for a link)? In this day and age to actually care intensely and overtly in an ideology is amazing to me. As he shares in his essay “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” it appears his goal is pretty much to expand the Christian-type canon. Call me a new-age fundamentalist but i’m growing more and more to see IJ as His literary second coming. Don the Gate together with Hal’s brains and Mario’s goggles! As a nurse aid working in a hospital Wallace has definitly helped me doff some of my prior administrative bones to pick with God’s laid back management style.

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 23:59:38 +0000

I’d like to echo Phil’s assessment of the novel. I’m on page 575 right now and thoroughly enjoying every minute.
As for IJ, the novel-blurb adjective “humane” has never really meant much to me; yet, it is the best one-word assessment of the novel. IJ is hilariously funny and also profoundly moving in the same way that V.V. Nabokov’s stuff is funny and touching. (If the only Nabokov you’ve read is Lolita, you owe it to yourself to read more of his stuff; VVN and DFW have more than a few things in common, as writers.)
What do Nabokov and DFW have in common? They both attempt in their writing to give the reader as honest (meaning “true”) an experience of inhabiting both the human consciousness and the divine consciousness as anything I’ve ever experienced.
Put another way, IJ seems to me to be trying to capture the full scope of human experience, from the bad to the good to the sublime.
I haven’t yet read any commentary on IJ–I’m saving that for after-novel delectation–but I hope that more than a few readers have picked up on what a beautiful, heart-breaking, and truly inspiring character DFW has created in Mario. Seriously, I am full-on loving the experience of reading IJ. I could gush, but I won’t. It’s easily, in this reader’s opinion, the best fictional thing DFW’s written to date. (After I’m done with IJ, I’ll have read every-DFW-thing except for the so-called “math book.”)

By: Brandon

Brandon — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 16:39:51 +0000

I’m having the same experience with “Gravity’s Rainbow.” As a blogger, it’s hard not to come across other bloggers writing about the book, praising it and talking about how difficult and digressive it is. So my expectations for it have been pretty high. I hadn’t expected to be completely bored with it. So now I’m wondering what I would think of the book if I’d come to it blissfully unaware of what the it’s supposed to be. And I’m wondering if endless praise is self-defeating. In the case of “GR,” I think all the talk set my expectations so high that, no matter what, the book would never live up to the hype. And that’s why, whenever possible, I try to approach a book with a blank slate.

By: BookBlog [dot net]

BookBlog [dot net] — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 16:14:09 +0000

Present, Past, Future

I almost started this with “Good morning, it’s…” Now that I’ve written a few posts attempting to imitate A Box…

By: Steve Russillo

Steve Russillo — Sat, 27 Jan 2007 16:35:17 +0000

re Alex: Nowhere in IJ did I find 400 pages of boredom. And as for valuing the exesssive length, if you like the Author, any length is not enough. (Which is an exaggeration, I realize, but still. I like DFW’s style, have devoured everything of his I could find, and rarely have been disappointed.)
Having read IJ only once (far too many books on my To Read list to double back on a 1100 pager…yet someday I MUST!) I WISH I’d had some help during the two months I spent reading it. I kept two bookmarks and four sets of notes: characters, vocabulary, chronology, and thumbnails. (The thumbnails were the only thing I cleaned up enough to post on my site.)
I would strongly recommend utilizing any resource you can get your hands on when tackling huge books like this. I used no fewer than four “helpers” for Gravity’s Rainbow (three web based summaries and Weisenburger’s invaluable “Companion”) and looked for similar help with DeLillo’s Underworld, Powers’s Gold Bug Variations, and of course with Ulysses. My rationale has been that I will most likely only make one trip through these behemoths and I should get as much out that trip as possible.
The copious notes–and especially the thumbnails–are really only an extension of that; I HATE it when I try to remember details about a book after 5 or 10 years, and drawing a blank on anything beyond major plot points.

By: Phil

Phil — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 02:38:55 +0000

To Alex: The Marathe/Steeply conversation is in fact a long conversation, but it is spread out through the entirety of the novel, ie it is not given to you in one large chunk. Also, “several hundred pages” might be an overstatement on Scott’s part.

By: Kristy

Kristy — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 01:36:03 +0000

I love that you write about Infinite Jest as an experience you went through. It is my goal for 2007 and I’ve nearly lost the month of Jan. I love that you haven’t forgotten about it..not even enough to never write about it after the fact. This really pushses me to just read it.

By: Alex

Alex — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 17:19:22 +0000

400 pages of boredom. Wow. I must admit, I have trouble seeing how the rest of the book could possibly be so good as to redeem such a sizeable chunk of drudgery. I’m not a particularly fast reader, so the thought of spending two or three weeks plowing through such a desolate stretch, when there are plenty of excellent 200, 300, and 400 page novels I could’ve read in the meantime, isn’t an enticing one.
I’d be curious to know whether people who’ve read the book believe that all its length was really necessary for its full effect. Perhaps it was, but perhaps DFW could’ve used a slightly more exacting editor? That someone could write a book with such a vast, desolate stretch in its middle is evidence of an almost antipathetic stance toward the reader.