"Say you have to fart."
INFINITE JEST
David Foster Wallace
Much in the spirit of the encyclopedic, so much has been written about this book that it's perhaps easier to wonder what hasn't been said about it. I'd purchased it with two Dostoyevsky novels back in 2011 (I think), and it had been staring at me, accusingly, for several years from its perch on my bookshelf back home. At that point, I'd flown past my aversion to universally praised things and had settled comfortably into my attraction to monstrously large tomes. It looked quite pretty, spine facing me, and I could only imagine at what I'd find therein, knowing only the broad contours of certain of its aspects, that it contained much about addiction, and that I would warm to that and perhaps other subjects it tackled. But no amount of imagining could have prepared me for this thing. And it does indeed come to mind more as a thing than a book. It was experienced.
With several friends, I embarked on this project to read it over the "summer," ten or eleven pages a day starting from some time in June through part of September. I figured, if nothing else, I'd have that warm satisfaction of having finished a big thing, similar in breed to the feeling that thrills through me when I finish writing a book.
The Pale King prepared me for this book more than his non-fiction had, in part because I knew at some point he was capable of Tolstoyan compassion, a thing that would perhaps battle his titanic levels of intelligence to make this thing more than 1000+ pages of muscle-flexing. And there is a lot of that here, the references to Arthur Koestler, the ventriloquism at work when he puts film studies majors on display, and the fact that one of his characters (more a cypher than a human being, and aware, in the way of human beings, of being a cypher) has actually read through and memorized the entire dictionary. But the heart of the book--not its meat and potatoes but its heart, its ability to feel--burst to life in the addiction sections, so that it seemed, of the two major locales in which the book is set, the tennis academy was for thinking and the halfway house was for those who feel.
And those endnotes...
There's no plot here. There are simply places and the people in them. The tennis academy and the child-athletes, some of them verging on prodigy, many of them arcing towards premature emotional expiration; and the halfway house, populated by people way past their expiration date, who are more husks that ache and regret and hope, than physically capable beings, made prominent in the narrative more by deformity than by any sort of wholeness and, to this reader, shown with more enlarged spirits than those of the somewhat stunted ETA kids.
But that head-heart dichotomy, to very pleasant surprise, started to lose its Manichean starkness, and the footnotes became meaningful in a addition to having already been clever, and suddenly, the ways in which the ETA tennis kids were broken began to matter, and the visceral descriptions of depression in the halfway house sections and the experiences of drug addiction grew thinking parts. It becomes apparent at some point that this book was written by someone who may have felt crippled by their intelligence, saddened profoundly by the notion that they might very well be the smartest person in any room they'd walked into, and fighting so strongly against that to nonetheless relate to people, connect to them, manifest some form of togetherness.
To read this book is to watch tennis become a problem in quantum physics; it's too watch depressives struggle with the language to describe their anguish; it's to watch the inside of a young man's head as he tries to think his way out of and then to the next hit; it's to watch a family in extremis; it's to watch the comedy of errors that is occasionally made of terrorism and geopolitical machinations; it's to watch television become a seductive death-trap; it's to watch narcotics and the insidious ways in which they destroy the human body shown in chemical equation; it's to watch a father struggle with language to tell his son he loves him.
Many of my more minute thoughts were captured piecemeal in group discussion, relating to specific sections as we read, noting the connections (some of which we may have forced on our own), catching references and relating our own experiences with the book's thrill and its slowness.
It brings to mind a concept that I first encountered in Ghost in the Shell, the notion that artificial intelligence could arise organically out of a system populated with enough information. The conceit involves an entity that becomes sentient out of the Internet. All this information we've connected to and plugged into this space creates a soup and then the soup assumes form and speaks in our voice and encounters us. This book is built on minutiae, each brick by seemingly inconsequential brick is logged and noted. We are made privy to the soup that has been made out of all this information. And then, at some point, perhaps at the end or perhaps before or perhaps after, a face has risen out of it with features like ours, speaking in a voice like ours, having become something we recognize. And it manages simultaneously to be his face and ours.
David Foster Wallace
Much in the spirit of the encyclopedic, so much has been written about this book that it's perhaps easier to wonder what hasn't been said about it. I'd purchased it with two Dostoyevsky novels back in 2011 (I think), and it had been staring at me, accusingly, for several years from its perch on my bookshelf back home. At that point, I'd flown past my aversion to universally praised things and had settled comfortably into my attraction to monstrously large tomes. It looked quite pretty, spine facing me, and I could only imagine at what I'd find therein, knowing only the broad contours of certain of its aspects, that it contained much about addiction, and that I would warm to that and perhaps other subjects it tackled. But no amount of imagining could have prepared me for this thing. And it does indeed come to mind more as a thing than a book. It was experienced.
With several friends, I embarked on this project to read it over the "summer," ten or eleven pages a day starting from some time in June through part of September. I figured, if nothing else, I'd have that warm satisfaction of having finished a big thing, similar in breed to the feeling that thrills through me when I finish writing a book.
The Pale King prepared me for this book more than his non-fiction had, in part because I knew at some point he was capable of Tolstoyan compassion, a thing that would perhaps battle his titanic levels of intelligence to make this thing more than 1000+ pages of muscle-flexing. And there is a lot of that here, the references to Arthur Koestler, the ventriloquism at work when he puts film studies majors on display, and the fact that one of his characters (more a cypher than a human being, and aware, in the way of human beings, of being a cypher) has actually read through and memorized the entire dictionary. But the heart of the book--not its meat and potatoes but its heart, its ability to feel--burst to life in the addiction sections, so that it seemed, of the two major locales in which the book is set, the tennis academy was for thinking and the halfway house was for those who feel.
And those endnotes...
There's no plot here. There are simply places and the people in them. The tennis academy and the child-athletes, some of them verging on prodigy, many of them arcing towards premature emotional expiration; and the halfway house, populated by people way past their expiration date, who are more husks that ache and regret and hope, than physically capable beings, made prominent in the narrative more by deformity than by any sort of wholeness and, to this reader, shown with more enlarged spirits than those of the somewhat stunted ETA kids.
But that head-heart dichotomy, to very pleasant surprise, started to lose its Manichean starkness, and the footnotes became meaningful in a addition to having already been clever, and suddenly, the ways in which the ETA tennis kids were broken began to matter, and the visceral descriptions of depression in the halfway house sections and the experiences of drug addiction grew thinking parts. It becomes apparent at some point that this book was written by someone who may have felt crippled by their intelligence, saddened profoundly by the notion that they might very well be the smartest person in any room they'd walked into, and fighting so strongly against that to nonetheless relate to people, connect to them, manifest some form of togetherness.
To read this book is to watch tennis become a problem in quantum physics; it's too watch depressives struggle with the language to describe their anguish; it's to watch the inside of a young man's head as he tries to think his way out of and then to the next hit; it's to watch a family in extremis; it's to watch the comedy of errors that is occasionally made of terrorism and geopolitical machinations; it's to watch television become a seductive death-trap; it's to watch narcotics and the insidious ways in which they destroy the human body shown in chemical equation; it's to watch a father struggle with language to tell his son he loves him.
Many of my more minute thoughts were captured piecemeal in group discussion, relating to specific sections as we read, noting the connections (some of which we may have forced on our own), catching references and relating our own experiences with the book's thrill and its slowness.
It brings to mind a concept that I first encountered in Ghost in the Shell, the notion that artificial intelligence could arise organically out of a system populated with enough information. The conceit involves an entity that becomes sentient out of the Internet. All this information we've connected to and plugged into this space creates a soup and then the soup assumes form and speaks in our voice and encounters us. This book is built on minutiae, each brick by seemingly inconsequential brick is logged and noted. We are made privy to the soup that has been made out of all this information. And then, at some point, perhaps at the end or perhaps before or perhaps after, a face has risen out of it with features like ours, speaking in a voice like ours, having become something we recognize. And it manages simultaneously to be his face and ours.