Here Be Monsters

‘Infinite Jest’ Check-in #2, or: Forgive Me, for I Have Skimmed

It is thirty days until the end of summer, and I am 428 pages from the end of Infinite Jest (not counting the 96 pages of “Notes and Errata”). To finish the book by the end of summer, all I need to do is average 14.26666666667 pages a day. This seems reasonable and perfectly digestible. Which is good, because I’m already feeling full.

In The Times Magazine this past weekend, Maud Newton wrote about David Foster Wallace’s recursiveness as rhetorical style, what she quotes Geoff Dyer describing as “the extravagance, the excess, the beanie-baroque, the phat loquacity.” Newton riffs mostly on the style of Wallace’s nonfiction, but the excess of course appears in Wallace’s fiction, too. Shall we break it down?:

The thing about this Marlon was that he was always wet.

In Wallace, this represents a pretty plain sentence. In a creative writing workshop, such a sentence might be applauded for its economy, the content of the line praised for its originality. He’s always wet! How interesting. How unusual. How marvelous. Perhaps workshoppers would ask for a little more, however. Perhaps they’d like to see something like this:

The thing about this Marlon was that he was always wet. Like he’d been rained on. But it wasn’t rain. It’s like Marlon hadn’t been dry since the womb.

But this being Wallace, that is hardly all we get. No, these details are but single drops in a microburst of sentences describing the quality and depth of Marlon’s wetness problem:

The thing about this Marlon was that he was always wet. Arms purling, T-shirt darkly V’d, face and forehead ever gleaming. … It had had a lemony, low-cal taste, the boy’s omniwetness. It wasn’t exactly sweat, because you could lick off the forehead and more beads instantly replaced what you’d taken. None of the real sweat’s frustratingly gradual accretion. The kid was always in the shower, always doing his best to stay clean. There were powders and pills and electrical appliqués. And still this Marlon dripped and shone. The kid wrote accomplished juvenile verses about the dry clean boy inside, struggling to break the soggy surface. He shared extensively with Lyle. He confessed to Lyle one night in the quiet weight room that he’d gone in for high-level athletics mostly to have an excuse of some sort for being as wet as he was. It always looked like Marlin had been rained on. But it wasn’t rain. It’s like Marlon hadn’t been dry since the womb.

Much of this is funny, the layering of sentence upon sentence heightening the absurdity. And to be sure, here we learn much more about Marlon beyond his wetness: we understand the burden of his affliction, the anxiety it causes; we see his doggedness in trying to conceal the problem; we understand the depths of his misery (so deep as to inspire verse!). We can see and taste and smell and feel the wetness of Marlon. And all this makes Marlon stand out in a chapter that’s not about Marlon at all. The question is, how much does this sort of piling-on try the reader’s patience, especially as the technique is deployed again and again? How long will it take before you, like Dyer, throw up your hands and declare, “This just bugs the crap out of me”?

If you haven’t yet read the book and are thinking, Well, that Marlon business doesn’t seem all that bad, keep in mind that the Marlon graf is a pretty mild example of Wallace’s excess. For one, it doesn’t deploy any abbreviations or acronyms. That is when things get truly cross-eye-inducing — particularly in paragraphs that go on, without break, for over a page.

Here is when I admit that in my quest to finish Infinite Jest by the end of summer, I’ve been forced at times to resort to skimming. For instance, when I reach a paragraph like this:

On Interdependence Day, Sunday 11/8, game-master Lord’s Triggering Situation unwinds nicely, on Pemulis’s view. Explosions of suspicious origin occur at AMNAT satellite-receiver stations from Turkey to Labrador as three high-level Canadian defense ministers vanish and then a couple of days later are photographed at a Volgograd bistro hoisting shots of Stolichnaya with Slavic bimbos on their knee. Then two SOVWAR trawlers just inside international waters off Washington are strafed by F16s on patrol out of Cape Flattery Naval Base. Both AMNAT and SOVWAR go from DEFCON 2 to DEFCON 4. REDCHI goes to DEFCON 3, in response to which SOVWAR airfields and antimissile networks from Irkutsk to the Dzhugdzhur Range go to DEFCON 5, in response to which AMNAT-SAC bombers and antimissile-missile silos in Nebraska and South Dakota and Saskatchewan and eastern Spain assume a Maximum Readiness posture. SOVWAR’s bald and port-wine-stained premier calls AMNAT’s wattle-chinned president on the Hot Line and asks him if he’s got Prince Albert in a can. Another pretty shady explosion levels a SOVWAR Big Ear monitoring station on Sakhalin. General Atomic Inc.’s gaseous diffusion uranium-enrichment facility in Portsmouth OH reports four kilograms of enriched uranium hexafluoride missing and then suffers a cataclysmic fire that forces evacuation of six downwind counties. An AMNAT minesweeper of the Sixth Fleet on maneuvers in the Red Sea is hit and sunk with REDCHI Silkworm torpedoes fired by LIBSYR MiG25s. Italy, in an apparently bizarre EndStat-generated development Tois P. Lord will only smile enigmatically about, invades Albania. SOVWAR goes apeshit. Apoplectic premier rings AMNAT’s president, only to be asked if his refrigerator’s running. LIBSYR shocks the Christian world by air-bursting a half-megaton device two clicks over Tel Aviv, causing deaths in the low six figures. Everybody and his brother goes to DEFCON 5. Air Force One leaves the ground. SOUTHAF and REDCHI announce neutrality and plead for cool heads. Israeli armored columns behind heavy tactical-artillery saturation push into Syria all the way to Abu Kenal in twelve hours: Damascus has firestorms; En Nebk is reportedly just plain gone. Several repressive right-wing regimes in the Third World suffer coups d’état and are replaced by repressive left-wing regimes. Tehran and Baghdad announce full dip-mil support of LIBSYR, thus reconstituting LIBSYR as IRLIBSYR. AMNAT and SOVWAR activate all civil defense personnel and armed forces reserves and commence evacuation of selected MMAs. IRLIBSYR is today represented by Evan Ingersoll, whom Axford keeps growling at under his breath, Hal can hear. A shifty-eyed member of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff vanishes and isn’t photographed anywhere. Albania sues for terms.

That is equivalent to about one page of Infinite Jest text. It’s not even the end of the paragraph (which goes on for another half-page). And it appears in the midst of an entire 21-page chapter that unfolds pretty much like this — a chapter about Eschaton, the game the junior tennis kids play, for fun. Undeniably this chapter is impressive, memorable, monstrously inventive and brilliant in its madness. (It has even, as was reported today, inspired a music video.) The piling-on is intentional. It creates an effect. It’s even funny — the diction is funny, the zany headlongedness of it is funny. Hysterical, even. But read enough of this sort of thing and I can’t believe you would blame a reader for stepping back, mashing her hands into her face in an attempt to uncross her eyes, and wondering: When it comes to telling whatever story Wallace is trying to tell, is all of this necessary?

‘Infinite Jest’ Check-in #1, or: The Going Gets Going

Just over 300 pages into Infinite Jest I was beginning to despair. I needed support. A pep talk. Someone to say: Soldier on! You can do it!

Things seemed to have stalled. Where was this going? Where had we been? What was the point of this whole Québécois separatist thing? How in the world were Hal and his drugs and the tennis academy and the N.A. meetings and Eschaton and the complete filmography of James O. Incandenza and those dazed, stranded cartridge-watching victims ever going to fuse together in a coherent whole? I did love certain set pieces, taken alone: the stuff about the addict preparing for his four-day high-octane ganja binge; much of the tennis stuff, which in its micro-obsessiveness reminded me a lot of my old ballet stuff. But the long, wide, paragraphless pages of obscure acronyms/abbreviations and tennis-camp architectural detail and patience-trying forays into bizarre dialects? A bit much. The scenes between Marathe the Yoda-like Québécois and Steeply the cross-dressing U.S. agent? Meh.

But then I got to p. 320, and lo: breakthrough. In a passage starring Marathe and Steeply, no less. Here the two fall into heated exchange — in a scene that led me to think about, of all things, Jonathan Franzen and Freedom:

Marathe’s chair squeaked slightly as his weight shifted. “Always with you this freedom! For your walled-up country, always to shout ‘Freedom! Freedom!’ as if it were obvious to all people what it wants to mean, this word. But look: it is not so simple as that. Your freedom is the freedom-from: no one tells your precious individual U.S.A. selves what they must do. It is this meaning only, this freedom from constraint and forced duress. … But what of the freedom-to? Not just free-from. Not all compulsion comes from without. You pretend you do not see this. What of freedom-to. How for the person to freely choose? How to choose any but a child’s greedy choices if there is no loving-filled father to guide, inform, teach the person how to choose? How is there freedom to choose if one does not learn how to choose?”

And so I found myself appreciating anew the tingly satisfaction of reading across a breadth of contemporary texts, sensing how they speak to one another, inform one another, whether consciously or not. I thought of Hemingway and Faulkner and their drive-by intertextual tweakings (the Charlotte of Wild Palms, the Catherine of A Farewell to Arms). And I imagined DFW and Franzen perhaps conversing on the subject of “freedom” — via dial-up e-mail, say — and wondered whether Franzen had felt a reverberation in the force, felt the frisson of echo when he’d landed on his driving theme; whether he and his friend had indeed discussed “freedom,” and whether each had agreed it was The Issue of our time; or whether it was simply inevitable that a certain kind of author, independently, should gravitate toward “freedom” as a thing to interrogate. And I imagined Franzen grappling with what to call his Big American Novel, and harking back to a conversation he might have had with his friend DFW, or even perhaps to his own reading of his friend’s Big American Novel, and possibly, maybe, to this particular passage on p. 320, and deciding to use “freedom,” to own “freedom,” to write it across his novel’s title page in a sort of cosmo-literary high-five to his old friend (shouting, “Freedom! Freedom!”). And although this is all pure speculation and most likely silly — and by no means am I implying the idea was a theft (which would be totally absurd): no, quite the contrary, this is about connection and fraternity and maybe in a way kismet — I have to say, something about considering these coincidences and possibilities was rather nice. It made me suddenly like Marathe and Steeply — and spurred me to read on.