Infinite Flameout
I really wanted to get with the zeitgeist and read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest this summer. But at page 236, in the middle of a unparagraphed stream-of-consciousness passage about a melodramatically veiled woman smoking crack with an improvised works, I couldn’t take it anymore. I may be a victim of our short-attention-span society—and part of why I wanted to read the long, long, novel is that it seemed to run counter to our growing preference for “the short, the sweet, and the bitty,” as Tyler Cowen says—but I kept feeling I was expending a lot of effort on the book with virtually no reward.
It’s not that I don’t read long books—I’ll happily plod along through Trollope’s triple deckers, and in graduate school I worked mainly on the novels of Samuel Richardson,whose Clarissa clocks in at 1,500 pages in the Penguin edition. I just don’t have patience for long, incoherent books. Infinite Jest seemed like pointless jigsaw puzzle; unlike Pynchon’s books, in which their seems to be so much interconnection between the various threads and so many resonating levels of meaning criss-crossing through the text that it’s almost overwhelming but always compelling you to work at holding it together in your mind, Wallace’s book just seems to dump a bunch of confusing stuff in your lap and hope that you are too disoriented to recognize that it’s not interesting. I kept wishing I was reading the Cliffs Notes version of Infinite Jest that put the action in the right order and explained what all the stupid abbreviations stood for. It didn’t help that the novel is preoccupied with several things I just have little interest in reading about: high-school tennis, boarding schools, the self-defeating behavior of drug addicts, the city of Boston—it sounds dumb, I’m sure, but I would have kept reading a little longer if it was set in Philadelphia.
Maybe I needed to follow Samuel Johnson’s advice regarding Richardson: “If you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment.” I know the plot is sort of beside the point with Infinite Jest and that wanting to have it explained is just a way of seeking the satisfying sense of an ending when the thematic closure feels elusive, requiring far more effort and patience. Still, though immersing oneself in the texture of Infinite Jest must be the appeal, but I found it off-putting to get into the finer nuances of smart, analytical people destroying themselves.
Wallace’s periphrastic style, so effective in his essays, when it helps him establish a particular attitude toward his material and drives him to uncover minutia that pays surprising dividends, was totally infuriating in a novel, when the often arbitrarily dense detailing was just more crap he was making up and more stuff I was supposed to work hard to figure out because he was tauntingly withholding the explanation from me. I found myself growing extremely resentful about that, and it seemed ridiculous to be mad at a book when I could just put it down and read something else. It reminded me, too, of Wes Anderson’s later movies, overloaded with detail yet at the same time claustrophobically fastidious and self-referential, precious—gifted people obsessing over the pressures of being recognized as gifted; all the advantages of talent reduced to morbid sensitivity.
His tendency to overwrite reminded me of when I used to write college papers on a typewriter back in the 1980s. It was hard to delete anything that didn’t work out once you typed it into the body of the paper, so I would generally try to write myself out of corners I’d found I’d backed myself into. Wallace is at his worst when this seeming can’t-revise/won’t-revise approach is combined with pretentious and showy vocabulary, awkward sentence structures (derived perhaps from spending too much time analyzing grammar) and a stream-of-consciousness structure which meanders and turns in on itself. (Who likes stream-of-consciousness? Is there anything more tiresome than an unedited regurgitation of someone else’s thoughts?) I didn’t think it was especially funny either, despite trying very hard to get in the spirit of the thing. It was too much like gallows humor, and Wallace’s suicide, unfortunately, hangs over the book like a pall.
Still, I wish I could find the book readable. Crammed with failed people and their failed strategies for dealing with the strain of social reality, the book succeeded in making me feel like a failure. Thanks for that.
Comments
Man—there’s so much that I want to say in response to this post . . . but instead of trying to say it all (as Wallace usually did, often to his detriment), I’ll limit myself to these two ideas (and preface this comment by saying that I’m a huge DFW fan who took his death harder than I would ever have expected):
1) In the D.T. Max New Yorker piece, and elsewhere, it’s been revealed that DFW (apologies, by the way, for the abbreviation, but I’m too lazy to type “David Foster Wallace” over and over again) was suspicious of non-fiction writing because it seemed too easy to him. In other words: he was so good at writing essays—and the process was so enjoyable and effortless for him—that he sensed that this kind of writing couldn’t be the right thing to do. The difficulty of fiction writing proved its value.
When a brilliant writer dies tragically, there’s an unfortunate tendency to assign great wisdom to the things he said and thought about himself and his own work, and I can already see that happening with DFW. I don’t think it’s too middlebrow to point out that the fact that someone committed suicide should cause us to question some of his insights about himself, and about the meaning of his own life.
Mental illness, while currently uncool (we’re all supposed to think, now, that psychoactive drugs are just part of a capitalist conspiracy meant to medicalize the human condition), actually exists. I grew up in a house that was completely dominated by a fully treatable mental illness (which was eventually successfully treated). Stuffing rowdy kids full of Ritalin is fucked-up and sick—but so is pretending that bipolar disorder, PTSD, and schizophrenia aren’t real.
It’s pretty clear that DFW was clinically depressed for much of his life, and it’s hard for me to separate his own suspicion of essay-writing as a worthy project from his mental illness. One reason that these two things—his illness, and his distrust of non-fiction—seem so connected is the sheer irrationality of his belief that essay-writing wasn’t a worthwhile use of his time. As a fiction writer, Wallace was less and less interesting with each passing year, but his essays were indispensable. And the problem with much of his fiction is that he was trying to will it to accomplish something that non-fiction is much better suited for.
I’m not sure—no offense, Rob—that I’d want to read a thousand-page novel designed to communicate and distill the thoughts and insights that you offer daily on this blog. The blog, on the other hand, is something I admire, and wouldn’t go a week without reading.
DFW’s essays were, far and away, the best writing he produced. While his fiction was sometimes astonishing and sometimes unreadable, his essays were consistently remarkable. Consider the Lobster, his last collection of essays, is as excellent as anything he ever wrote.
Some writers—Philip Roth is one that comes to mind—can blend their criticism into their fiction in a way that makes the criticism more penetrating, more illuminating—just more, period. DFW wasn’t one of those writers. When people say, in dismissing his fiction, that “he was trying too hard,” they may be closer to the mark than some of us would care to admit.
To write great fiction was a heroic ambition for DFW. All heroic fantasies are narcissistic. Some narcissism is useful, even essential. (That’s one of the places, Rob, where the analysis on this blog feels incomplete to me: your reluctance to acknowledge that a preoccupation with self-image, even an obsession with “personal branding,” can occasionally produce miracles.) DFW’s narcissism, in the end, wasn’t essential, or useful; I wish so much that he’d been able to surrender some of his ambition and content himself to be the greatest essayist of his generation.
I’ll qualify all of that by saying that some of his stories—“The Depressed Person,” for instance—are near-perfect, and that I love a lot of Infinite Jest. You have to be willing to do a lot of tedious work to get to the good stuff in that book, but it is there. (But then, I’m also a huge tennis fan. With Infinite Jest, that helps a lot.)
2) When I read Infinite Jest, I was a freakishly nerdy sixteen-year-old college freshman. The fact that a book was “difficult” was a huge sell for me, even if the book was wildly indulgent. I prided myself on never quitting a book until I was done, which meant that I ended up wasting months on books that I really ought to have put down on page 10.
There’s no way, today, that I’d ever be able to read Infinite Jest for the first time. I’d be calling bullshit on it constantly, and I’d be right most of the time. I’d dismiss a lot of it as adolescent, and I’d be right there too. I couldn’t even finish Oblivion; I kept muttering, “oh, come on,” and “fuck off,” and finally put the book away with a disappointed sigh.
That’s one of the bad parts of getting older, I think. In losing your faith in the conventional wisdom that declares that “Infinite Jest is one of the most important novels of the decade,” you end up closing yourself off to the moments of genius and revelation buried in this massive, chaotic book.
If you’re like me, then one of the reasons that Pamela—and, for instance, Anna Karenina, which at its worst is much more of a slog than most people with graduate degrees are willing to admit—continues to be readable in a way that books like Infinite Jest are not is that these novels have many fascinations apart from their genius and innovation and the beauty and clarity of the prose. They’re more than works of art; they’re works of art from another time—another world, really.
Unfairly, then, I expect a lot more of contemporary writers than I do of Tolstoy. Their world is my own; I live in it. This means that there’s less and less contemporary fiction that I’m able to respect and love. I still find stuff that leaves me breathless—Miranda July’s short-story collection is a recent example—but I’m too old, at this point, to forgive as much self-indulgence as you have to be ready to forgive in order to get excited about Infinite Jest.
At seventeen, I was easily able to forgive DFW’s awkwardness and prolixity—and often confused his awkwardness and prolixity with genius—but, again, I could never read either of his novels now. Maybe that’s a loss for me . . . but on the other hand, there’s more great fiction out there than I could read in a lifetime, so maybe it’s okay. I don’t hear a lot of people raving about Flann O’Brien these days—so maybe the world needs my obsessive Flann O’Brien fandom in the way that it needed David Foster Wallace’s essay-writing.
Comment by BelaTarr from Austin, TX — July 27, 2009 @ 11:46 pm
PS: You really “wanted to get with the zeitgeist this summer?”
Really?
Comment by BelaTarr from Austin, TX — July 27, 2009 @ 11:48 pm
The Infinite Jest “memorabilia” thought provoking: http://www.cafepress.com/tritone/6055879
It raises many questions not the least of which is, what would it “mean” if someone wore a “Who is John Galt?” sweatshirt over a t-shirt reading “I am in here?” What would happen if the order were reversed?
It seems perverse that any shirt referencing DFW, who was the Rush or perhaps Dream Theater of literary fiction and essay writing, would be so curt. A more apt t-shirt might have on the front the word “the” followed by footnote 1. On the reverse footnote 1, in very small print, would read, “Which word is the first word appearing on a t-shirt that was purchased (or perhaps received as a gift from a well-meaning friend or relative) and then worn or perhaps not worn by a person who would very much like others to be aware of the fact (without coming off as an attention whore) that they have read and apparently enjoyed a certain book written by one David Foster Wallace (who is also, as it happens, a character in that certain book, as well as being a character, of sorts, on this, the t-shirt that references the aforementioned book.).”
Comment by Hermes T. from Laughlin, Nevada — July 28, 2009 @ 12:42 am
I can count the novels I refused to finish on two hands. Infinite Jest was one of those novels. There’s always the Twilight series, Rob! God help us all…
Comment by K. Roberts — July 28, 2009 @ 10:26 am
“Infinite Jest seemed like pointless jigsaw puzzle; unlike Pynchon’s books, in which their seems to be so much interconnection between the various threads and so many resonating levels of meaning criss-crossing through the text that it’s almost overwhelming but always compelling you to work at holding it together in your mind, Wallace’s book just seems to dump a bunch of confusing stuff in your lap and hope that you are too disoriented to recognize that it’s not interesting.”
How can you make this assessment after having read less than a quarter of the book? Do you think in reading 150 pages of Gravity’s Rainbow you’d have any understanding of how things are interconnected, or how the book as a whole is coherent? This isn’t so much me thinking you’re wrong (though I certainly do think that) and more about you approaching this from a weird angle. What I get is: You’ve given up on this book (which, fine, that’s up to you) and now, I don’t know, you want to justify that decision?
DFW has a reputation for being “quirky” and irksomely idiosyncratic, but once you get past the lengthy prose and footnotes (among other things which, granted, are offbeat), his fiction is some of the most earnest and sentimental contemporary writing you’ll find anywhere. To dismiss him as pretentious is to miss the point entirely.
In short: You’re missing out. It is very, very worthwhile to read (and finish) this book.
Comment by Calum — July 28, 2009 @ 10:48 am
The only person who seems too sensitive is you, Rob. Don’t be so insecure. There’s always going to be someone smarter than you. Wallace was smarter than all of us. It’s okay. That you couldn’t extract anything (except that you don’t like it and that Wallace used words you don’t know) from IJ is perplexing to me.
Comment by Chris — July 28, 2009 @ 11:01 am
“To dismiss him as pretentious is to miss the point entirely.”
Ah, the clarion call of postmodernism, of which there is nothing left at this point but posing and pretention. We plebes just don’t “get it”, although Beckett and Sterne and Richardson and Conrad and Shakespeare don’t seem to present any problems. Why should literature make sense? Why should we enjoy reading it? And how could we not care deeply about so many rich kids hating on themselves? The mind boggles…
Comment by K. Roberts — July 28, 2009 @ 12:11 pm
In 1990 David Foster Wallace wrong an essay called “E Unibus Pluram: Television And U.S. Fiction”, which argued passionately AGAINST postmodern fiction’s posturing and pretension. May I assume that you’ve never read his work and thus know nothing about it?
What I meant by “To dismiss him as pretentious is to miss the point entirely” is that DFW is not the hip, disaffected postmodernist everybody seems to assume he is. At heart, Infinite Jest is deeply moving and totally sincere—it makes sense, it’s highly enjoyable, and DFW is no smarmy self-hating rich kid.
Again: you’re missing out.
Comment by Calum — July 28, 2009 @ 2:05 pm
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As Calcum said, you’re missing out. I’ve never understood why people even call him a post-modernist. It is sincere, it is dense, it is difficult, but not postmodernist. The bigger issue I have though, is the notion of writing a lengthy review bashing a book one chooses to not finish. Other major works of fiction in the past have been ruined by this sort of foolishness. DFW spent the first chunk of Infinite Jest asking the readers to trust him, because what starts as a bunch of discrete bits of “confusing stuff dropped in your lap” turns into a single cohesive (and relatively easy to grasp) plot. Every Character has some connection to the other characters, every plot line begins to weave together. His own idea for the form of the novel (A Sierpinski gasket) comes across clearly.
In short, finish the book before you bash it (and its author) with such great pleasure.
Comment by D. Cobb — July 29, 2009 @ 8:57 am
I dislike seeing it implied that people who cannot finish IJ somehow “just don’t get it” almost as much as I dislike the implication that if I enjoy IJ I must be a pretentious dilettante who’s only ‘pretending’ to like it.
People think in different ways, based on age, experience, environment, whatever. Is it so hard to believe that a book could be so idiosyncratic that it might be impenetrable to some and to others strike an absolutely personal emotional chord? I fall into the latter category for IJ, more than I would have ever expected when I started reading it this summer. But even so, it’s easy to see why others might find the book tedious and impossible. Neither side of the debate holds a superiority over the other.
There are books that simply have to be received at the right moment and by the right frame of mind. I can acknowledge that “Catcher In the Rye” is a classic book worthy of its rep. If I’d read it in high school it would have been life-changing. But I read it in college, and I found it irritatingly whiny and I wanted nothing more than to beat the shit our of Holden Caufield any chance I could get.
I think that says a hell of a lot more about ME at the time I read it then it does about the book itself. And I think a book that can cause reactions of such varying degrees is really something special, even when I’m sitting on the negative side.
Comment by Paul — July 29, 2009 @ 12:01 pm
Wow. K Roberts seems like an uninformed and annoying Wallace hater for no reason in the comments here. As for the Blog post, the following passage was telling for me:
“Wallace’s book just seems to dump a bunch of confusing stuff in your lap and hope that you are too disoriented to recognize that it’s not interesting.”
Confusing? Sure, if you don’t read the whole thing and then take a step back for perspective. Not interesting? Wow. Maybe you find life uninteresting. Or struggles with contemporary culture and its technology and modes of communication… I’m with Calum. Writing a ‘review’ like this is so misleading that it makes me wonder how much attention you actually paid reading the small portion of the book you did. It would be better to just confess how uninformed you are about the whole book overall. Stick with the ‘it wasn’t for me’ if you can’t even read a quarter of it, please.
Comment by freddy — July 30, 2009 @ 1:28 pm
Just Keep Coming!
Comment by A. Jordan — July 30, 2009 @ 1:48 pm
it’s so obvious, rob, that if you don’t like what i like you must not be as smart as me—or as david foster wallace. my liking infinite jest is something like my liking, oh, ulysses. i’m smarter than you. get it? i get it. got it? tennis. shaving. what does it mean when it snow blankets the whole city? i mean euphemistic, not metaphoric, snow, and the city is tucson. not boston.
you know what i’ve come to hate in the last week? the term “food porn.” it’s used far too liberally and it just means the writer is in with the right crowd, it doesn’t actually mean anything about food. the new david foster wallace will find a way to deconstruct this, but you’ll miss it because you won’t know who the new david foster wallace is until you’ve already decided he’s not worth your time (and it will always be a “he”), and then you’ll try to get in on the zeitgeist, but will quit a quarter of the way in because it’s boooo—rring.
but back to my point, which is that if you don’t get it, and by it i mean dfw (or maybe dwr?) it’s because “it” is smarter than you. and this time by “it” i mean “me.”
Comment by ari — August 5, 2009 @ 9:37 am