Infinite Jest proves to be finite

[skwantz]

... we came in?

I finished reading last night and have to say I harbor deeply mixed feelings about what this book means, what it is about.  I tried to take Steve's advice to heart and read it as a landscape or as like a helicopter ride over a strange and fascinating alien place, taking in the details and soaking in the local color.  At the same time

Comments

[heyitsgogi]

I like this review, Joe. IJ is definitely frustrating. It's a shaggy dog story, but it's also intentional. I think DFW had a lot of reasons for why he wrote it like that -- not the least because he was DFW, and had compulsions. But also he was pretty brilliant, and I think the idea that the Entertainments (including IJ) were just to fuck with the audience and for no other reason might be a red herring. I had forgotten that part about "one's inescapable POV" but I like that you brought that up. It makes sense to me that DFW would be trying to write that -- though arguably every book is an escape from one's personal POV.

... maybe what IJ attempts is to break apart POV all together. It wants to shake the reader up, confront her/him with a story, or connected series of stories that are larger than any one POV -- than any one movie could be. Basically, I think he wants to take the novel to a place that any other format -- movies or plays, miniseries, whatever -- could never go. Part of that involves going deeper with every bit of information than any camera, any single particular point of view both literal and figurative, could ever go. The effect is to present you with the opposite of a tightly-written weekend drama. And the genius, maybe, is that it's readable at all. I imagine that this book is much more like the old Russian Novels -- War & Peace, Anna Karenina, or Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities, (or Proust) than like anything that's really being written in America today.

Incidentally, DFW himself was pretty jaundiced about the "remarkable" "genius" or other adjectives tagged onto the book by reviewers. As he noted, they started coming out almost as soon as the book was released -- long before anyone could have actually read the thing.

BTW, Aaron Swartz, has a pretty accurate-sounding breakdown of everything that "happens" after the book ends -- tying all the loose ends of the book together. You might find it relieves some of the frustration to read it, or you might find it to be a bit of a letdown, but it's here: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend

[skwantz]

That's good stuff, the Swartz material, and very observant. He must have read the book several times to pick out that kind of obscure shit. Fascinating though -- in fact, the original reason I had for even writing again about IJ is that, after I finished, I went back and reread the first few chapters and was thrown totally off balance by this line from Hal in chapter 1: "I think of John N. R. Wayne, who would have won this year's WhataBurger, standing watch in a mask as Donald Gately and I dig up my father's head." I thought, Fuck! what is this? There's so much contained in that line, it freaked me out.

Red herring, though, I'm not sure. I don't see any of these ideas as being mutually exclusive, however I take your point about the escapist nature of all books. Still, I see connections between the entertainments/the creator of them and Infi-Jest/the creator of it. And it seems to be, at least in some pages, self-referential. So there.

[heyitsgogi]

You saw The Informant? What did you think?

[skwantz]

Um, heh?

No, I haven't seen it. Is it good? Do they talk about Infinite Jest in it?

[heyitsgogi]

ah, no. But "So there." plays a part right in the beginning, and it's funny, and used in a similar manner.

But you should go see it. It has nothing to do with IJ, except that it's good, and Mark Whitaker (Damon's character" is as exasperating as DFW's book. But to everyone else, not the reader/viewer.

[skwantz]

saw The Informant! this weekend. Now your comment makes sense.

I enjoyed it. And yes, he's as exasperating as DFW--I wonder if DFW has a history of bi-polar disorder in his family. that would explain a few things.

[heyitsgogi]

Curiously, just as you wrote this, another blogger that I like, Ron Silliman, wrote a review (sort of) of Pynchon's "Against the Day" which makes it sound just as convoluted, open-ended, and potentially frustrating for you as IJ.

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2009/09/in-20-months-that-it-took-me-to-read.html

Silliman loved it, and he gives some not-unpersuasive reasons for what might make a book like this interesting, and how one might judge its worth, if the "tightly driven plot" structure is gone.

Personally, I find Silliman himself too dogmatically against traditional plotting (mostly he talks about poetry, and he's equally dismissive of traditional poetry, which is what I consider myself a writer of) but when he's not going negative, as the pundits say, he makes convincing cases for how to read, and how to enjoy more experimental writing.

Just some thoughts. Oh, and DFW was, as far as I know, pretty publicly bi-polar. He was on and off meds pretty much his whole life. He went off them a few months before he made his final, successful suicide attempt. I don't think it's what made him a genius, but I suppose it would be hard to think of his book without considering the mania it would have taken to produce some of those really lush passages. I don't believe Pynchon is bi-polar.