My understanding is that David Foster Wallace wrote this about Elizabeth Wurtzel and it was meant to be a kind of slam of her as not being depressed but merely narcissistic.
I have no idea what is the context of this or who this woman is, but narcissism is a mental disorder as well so I'm not sure why anyone would try to belittle someone for being narcissistic.
This whole "my disorder is better than your disorder" doesn't impress me, neither does the universal adoration of DFW.
The question is a bit more complicated than just belittling someone's disorder.
Wurtzel wrote Prozac Nation, which was nominally an account of her own depression and a broader reflection what personal struggles with depression look like in America. It was widely seen as revealing but unpleasantly self-indulgent and unreflective of common experiences with depression.
That might clarify why DFW, struggling with depression himself, was rather less than kind to Wurtzel and her book. Narcissism is something to sympathize with, certainly, but seeing a popular book portray narcissism and a rather entitled life as representative of depression put a lot of people's hackles up. The context, and the move from "disorder" to "book about having a different disorder", are vital.
None of which is a simple endorsement of DFW, but it's at least worthwhile context for the piece.
It seems like he's also making some similarly unkind statements about therapy in the story. Most of the character's issues seem to derive from her being given all these dimensions to constantly measure herself on (being a narcissist helps to amplify the effect here of course), so that she can't just be natural with others—and yet she has also been given all these goals by her therapist which presumably would just happen organically by interacting with others, if she didn't always have this agenda of being maximally empathetic and non-toxic etc. And then there are the issues she's dealing with in therapy explicitly stated to derive from therapy in the story.
The tension between overanalyzing everything and trying to focus on the 'small things' and 'little truths' is by far my favorite DFW 'theme', because I feel that tension in myself constantly. The only other writer I've come across who does this as well (if not better) is Dostoevski.
And to make it all a bit meta, I can't help but wonder how much good it does me to read too much of this type of hyper-aware stuff.
I wonder about that too. I don't think it's unhealthy as long as you don't believe it's going to provide you with a solution. The only thing I've found that actually helps is spending sufficient time doing things that don't involve thinking so that you form different habits. Meditation has helped in my case, but I bet prolonged exposure to sports/exercise or anything else like that would be of similar benefit.
> I don't think it's unhealthy as long as you don't believe it's going to provide you with a solution.
While I'm not sure if that's true, I think the main danger is that, at least based on experience and observation, there's something strangely addictive to rumination. It feels useful.
Plus, as you point out, doing non-thinking things is very important. Thinking too much, especially when alone, gets in the way of that non-thinking.
In the context of this here conversation I'd say 'Notes From Underground' is appropriate. It's basically a spot-light on one particular character that makes an appearance in his other books too. It was really confronting to read the thoughts of such a 'loathsome' and sad character, and to then realize that my thoughts (and to some degree behavior) often mirrors that of the 'underground man'.
I enjoyed 'Notes From Underground' too. Had a similar experience reading it.
> While I'm not sure if that's true, I think the main danger is that, at least based on experience and observation, there's something strangely addictive to rumination. It feels useful.
I think the main issue with reading these kinds of things with aims towards a solution is they support the idea that there's some problem with yourself that you need to solve in the first place, whereas—in many cases—the only problem is that one keeps trying to solve this 'problem,' and if they stopped for sufficiently long, things would eventually return to normal. Although another requirement may be that you have to consider it not a problem when negative mental states arise (otherwise you just keep trying to problem solve your mental state), and reading can definitely help to acquire that. But anyway that's just my thinking on this atm—can't say I put it into practice super well ;)
Send me an e-mail if you'd like to discuss further (westoncb at google's email service).
interesting--as DFW fans know, FD was in fact DFW's favorite writer. ("Consider the Lobster" is the only DFW work i'm aware of in which he mentions this and discussed FD's influence on his own work.)
FD and Pynchon share that title from what I remember from Every Love Story is a Ghost Story. Pynchon's V. inspired DFW to write his first novel, The Broom of the System.
Every time I read "Infinite Jest", i wonder how much of it is basically autobiographical with a thin veneer of difference and a heap of really, really tight prose.
The recursive spiral of recursion is really hard to avoid with DFW to the point you think it is the point, which, of course, is itself recursive.
I took a whack at IJ and got bogged down after ten pages or so. This is from TDP, not IJ, but it's illustrative:
"And the depressed person always took care, when as an adult she attempted to describe to a supportive friend the venomous struggle over the cost of her orthodonture and that struggle's legacy of emotional pain for her, to concede that it may well truly have appeared to each parent to have been, in fact, a matter of "principle," though unfortunately not a "principle" that took into account their daughter's feelings at receiving the emotional message that scoring petty points off each other was more important to her parents than her own maxillofacial health and thus constituted, if considered from a certain perspective, a form of neglect or abandonment or even outright abuse, an abuse clearly connected-here she nearly always inserted that her therapist concurred with this assessment-to the bottomless, chronic adult despair she suffered every day and felt hopelessly trapped in."
That was one sentence. There are many favorable adjectives one could reasonably apply to it, but IMHO "tight" is not one of them.
(BTW, that sentence is not an isolated example. Here's the very next sentence:
"The approximately half-dozen friends whom her therapist-who had earned both a terminal graduate degree and a medical degree-referred to as the depressed person's Support System tended to be either female acquaintances from childhood or else girls she had roomed with at various stages of her school career, nurturing and comparatively undamaged women who now lived in all manner of different cities and whom the depressed person often had not laid eyes on in years and years, and whom she called late in the evening, long-distance, for badly needed sharing and support and just a few well-chosen words to help her get some realistic perspective on the day's despair and get centered and gather together the strength to fight through the emotional agony of the next day, and to whom, when she telephoned, the depressed person always apologized for dragging them down or coming off as boring or self-pitying or repellent or taking them away from their active, vibrant, largely pain-free long-distance lives.")
I actually love these two sentences. They perfectly drag you into a relationship with the narrator.
As the sentence drags on longer and longer, you feel the narrator trying to glean just a bit more of your focus and attention. Her unwillingness to end the sentence and give you a moment to retract and catch your breath shows how desperate she is for connection and makes you literally experience the same feelings of those around her.
All of the little qualifiers and clauses show how acutely self-conscious she is, always amending and curtailing her expression of herself. It also shows how self-aware of her own negativity she is. Many of the extra clauses go out of their way to show that she is aware of the positive aspects of things.
But that in turn just reinforces our perception of her as depressed because we see that while she is aware of all of these positive things—having a support system, the expertise of her therapist, etc.—we also know she is depressed and her depression must be profound to persist in spite of all those good things she laboriously lists.
Prose like this is exactly why writing in the first person can be so powerful. You get to read the story, and the way the narrator experiences the story, and the way the narrator chooses to tell you how they experienced the story, and the unintended (from the narrators' not author's perspective) things that sneak out around what the narrator is aware of choosing to say.
If you've ever seen the movie Stranger Than Fiction, which is cutesy but good graded on the curve for cutesy movies, that's the narrative mood DFW seems to be going for: the detached narrator who is not in fact entirely detached. The third person perspective is often meant to be partially ironic, as is (when he uses it) the first person.
In this case, the viewpoint is an interesting omniscient third person where you kind of feel like you're in the head of the character, but not quite exactly. Are we reading a third-person narrative that is maintaining ironic distance from the character, or a first-person narrative where the character is referring to herself in the third person?
On a couple occasions I've tried narrating vignettes from my own life in a detached omniscient candid way, which a) makes me feel ridiculous, like I'm making fun of myself, but b) is sort of therapeutic, like I'm forgiving myself for my head being full of stupid vanities which look very small from a little distance.
I think in Infinite Jest the writing style -- not just sentences like these but jumping between text and endnotes -- gives the reader a deeper experience with his argument about attention, boredom, and the ways modern society seeks to constantly distract us. Much of his non-fiction writing explores these themes more directly and succinctly, particularly his Kenyon College commencement speech.
This particular work seems to use complex sentence structure to embody the emotional distance the depressed person feels from others, the difficulty he raises in the first sentence of expressing one's pain to others making you more isolated.
I've never been a big fiction reader, and I don't know how much time you spent trying his fiction, but I highly recommend giving Infinite Jest a shot.
I had to take a 3 month break in the middle of Infinite Jest (not recommended) and even then, finishing it was the most rewarding and somehow obscenely frustrating literary experiences I've ever had.
This accomplishment/frustration thing is also central to the book and is "the point" (really one of several). The fact that it still has that effect even when I know it was meant to is a testament to how well it worked.
IJ is ~1100 pages and the writing style doesn't allow one to read quickly.
And while you are reading you are constantly wondering if this book is better than the 10 other books you could finish in the same amount of time. At around page 200 I concluded that it was not. But I am certainly glad I read those 200 pages.
I had a similar thought, but then a few hundred pages beyond that you get to some incredible stuff. The stories from the AA meetings and Don Gately's time in the hospital are fantastic
I unashamedly like IJ, even though it's a white male nerd trope to like it and is the kind of thing anti-hipster hipsters will make fun of you for.
And, having said that: it's unfortunate but you probably need to get past the first third of the book to appreciate it. And that's a high-risk endeavor, because there are legit reasons why you might never appreciate it. True believers say you actually need to read the whole thing twice; I can't make myself do that.
I sat in stunned disbelief for a second after finishing the book before turning back to page 1 and starting in on it again. I only read the first few chapters/vignettes again, but I could see the allure in continuing. I didn't have the structure of the characters, the institutions and their relationships cemented in my mind until the book was nearly over. And after I started in on those first few chapters, I ran across a line from Hal which was to the effect of '... and I dug up the stuff in the garden with Gately...'
And I imagine these kinds of references continue throughout the book. References whose significance I wouldn't have picked up on without having first read the book. But more generally, I don't think I've encountered a work before on which I've vacillated so much between considering it brilliant or insufferable. Maybe that's part of what I find intriguing about it.
Same. DFW at least plumbed some of the psychological deep-end that I (apparently) have as a white male nerd. Such as: some confusing feelings about class and the relative merits of high- and low-brow art, and this strong un-expressed emotion (evoked in IJ chapter 1) of being fundamentally unable to make myself understood. (Not to say that I actually have anything important to say, but, on an emotional level, the sentiment is in there.)
My tactic has been to read a challenge book (IJ, currently The Pale King) and then have a few easy reads to go along with it (Millennium/Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy, currently Fahrenheit 451).
When I want a book to make my head spin, I read the challenge one. When I want to end a long day of head-spinning at work, I read the easy one.
Completely agree - IJ is one of the very very few books that I've outright stopped reading midway through. There were some very interesting aspects of how the text is constructed, but that stopped being new or contributing to the continued development/reading of the book for me to be worth continuing the slog.
Based on my experience and that of many of the Infinite Summer readers, the first 250 pages or so are really difficult, and it (generally) gets more palatable after that.
I can also recommend using the Infinite Summer blog as a companion. The bloggers often provide interesting viewpoints, as do the commenters, and they offer some (basic) help here and there to make the whole experience a bit more pleasant.
anyone who is that deep in this thread, might enjoy "The Onion" piece on DFW (http://www.theonion.com/article/girlfriend-stops-reading-dav...). It was published in 2003 (about eight years after IJ). In the hilarious article, DFW's girlfriend, receives a break up letter from DFW that is 67 pages long and which she only read the first 20 pages of. She goes to to critique his letter--eg, " 'One thing I found annoying was that you had to read all the way to the middle to figure out what things on the first page of the letter were talking about,' Thompson said. 'For instance, he kept referring to somebody named The Cackler without explanation until page 11, at which point I finally found out that The Cackler is my friend Renée' "
As another commenter has pointed out, maybe the pointedly run-on style of this prose is meant to reflect the ceaseless self-doubt and second-guessing that goes on in the mind of the "depressed person" such that they can't even feel secure in their ability to finish a single thought without their mind jumping off its rails. I can personally attest to that phenomenon.
Infinite Jest is a look into the sick self-doubting mindset that has infected the US(and other parts of the world).
I read while I was severely over-weight and 'depressed' and it was extremely validating to see the mindset so accurately reflected. I've never had a book where I can't read it without stopping if desired before(unless it's purely technical).
I couldn't get through more than 50pages/sitting for Infinite Jest.
It might, but for me it was therapeutic. It made me want to get out of that state of mind and go out and experience life and connect with people again.
Don't let the length and structure of the sentence fool you into thinking it wasn't meticulously crafted, worked, edited, reworked, etc.
DFW is extremely "tight" in that he uses his powerful (and precocious) intellect to think about everything way, way too much. This overthinking translates into his choice of words, grammar, punctuation, what the sentence conveys, how it adds to the overall tone, and even the topics he decides to write on. It's what makes him so fun (and, sometimes, painful) to read.
He's certainly not concise, but he's one of the tightest writers I've ever read.
Existentialist prose is agonizing to read no matter the person in which it's written. It leaves me flabbergasted that anyone could possibly describe as 'tight' such stacks and piles and reams of words, whole paragraphs at a time of them without the leaven of a period and barely even a comma as a kindness to the reader, until one feels one's head is being slowly shoved through wallpaper paste - and in both cases one eventually comes to feel that to finally suffocate would be a mercy.
Having not looked closely before now into Infinite Jest, I think I better understand why it serves as such a pons asinorum for literary fiction in general. It takes a more than ordinarily diligent and accommodating person to get through it at all without her eyes glazing over, much less to come out the other end with any sense of what actually happened between front cover and back.
(Oh, also: "ghastlily"? Really? Far be it from me to speak ill of the dead, but...)
Honestly, most of Infinite Jest is not like that. It's only like that when you're "in the head" of certain characters.
But you have no idea what's going on in the book for the first 300 pages or so. It takes until around 500 pages in before you're immersed in the story, and then reading it becomes kind of an addiction. And once you're done, you feel an intense need to start it over again, knowing what you do now.
I only really got the theme of it on the second reading. I actually put it down for a few months the first time I tried to read it because I was confused. But it's worth it...oh man, is it worth it.
As I mentioned in a comment near this one, you're far from the first person in this thread to say so, and the frequency of such statements is starting to make me wonder if I haven't rushed to judgment. After all, the Illuminatus! trilogy could be described in much the same terms, and despite it taking many rereadings over something like five years to feel I really had a solid grasp on the book from beginning to end, in the end I'd have to say it was very much worth my while. (Don't get me wrong - well over 99.9% of Illuminatus! is unmitigated, top-tier, Grade A bullshit, good for fertilizer and not a whole lot else. It's just that the remainder is solid gold, five nines fine.)
In any case, I've just bought a copy of Infinite Jest, so pretty soon I'll be finding out whether I've treated it too harshly or not harshly enough.
Oh, thank you very kindly! One does one's humble best.
I do wish to note that, when I wrote the comment to which you reply, I hadn't yet read far enough into the thread to encounter the many people saying "Oh, you just have to power through the first {100,300,...} pages, and then it gets amazing!" Such claims for Infinite Jest are new to me, and it's an argument to which I'm not without sympathy; I'm forced to consider the possibility that I've judged the book too harshly, and that this may be a case where I'd be well served to suspend the usual criteria by which I decide that an author is wasting my time.
(And I have to say, that cruise review piece you linked is doing a good job winning me over, too. Thanks for that!)
i nearly posted an almost identical comment as you; then i thought, well this person is probably chair of the Contemporary Literature Dept at Amherst, etc. so one should expect insight like this
Not that I don't appreciate the thought, but given what I know of academia, I think I'm more horrified than flattered. The banal enormities one must no doubt both suffer and inflict, to achieve tenure in the humanities...no, thanks. If I'm to wind up in a hell of my own devising, I should at least like to hope I've the wit to make it a livelier one than that.
You do have a very, uh, 'Literature Department' way of communicating though, surely you're aware of that? I figured you were doing it to make a point...
But so anyways, by all means write exactly as you feel like writing. I'm a huge fan of DFW, for example, precisely because he is all fancy and colloquial at the same time, which happens to tickle my fancy quite a bunch. I just wanted to point it out.
Do you mean by that to say I write like a pretentious ass? Because if so, well spotted! I'm absolutely a pretentious ass. Like any such, I thrive best well away from others of my ilk, because we can't help striking sparks off one another; based on what I've seen of Eng lit academia, I tend therefore to think it is the wrong hothouse for me.
I still don't get how being a pretentious ass and wanting to distance yourself from your ilk is best achieved by emulating their style.
Either you don't give a shit about 'them' and write as pretentiously as you desire, or, like myself, you adjust your style to distance yourself from 'them' because you dislike the association.
As it is, it's rather confusing to me because I can't tell the difference between you and the 'Eng lit academia' you seem to wish to avoid.
All that said: I don't think you write like a pretentious ass and I feel anyone should communicate however they want as long as the message comes across. And personally I like your style. So rock on, I guess :). But it's essentially what DFW is doing too, I think.
He is well-known for long, grammatically correct sentences and abundant footnotes. Some of it was fitting in as an academic?
I find some of the writing tough (i.e. impossible to read at night in bed) but the audio book for Infinite Jest narrated by Sean Pratt [1] is really nice. The narrator's speech is somehow easier to follow despite the number of clauses and whatever else in the writing.
The footnote thing tripped me up. Some time after reading Infinite Jest (and Gravity's Rainbow) I decided to take a shot at writing a novel, and I splattered it with footnotes. It was great fun, but it quickly becomes an annoying habit, the kind you know you don't want to do that but you constantly find yourself doing that anyway. (So breaking the habit was exceedingly annoying.)
There are far too many acronyms to deal with, getting down into a comment thread and seeing one 3-4 levels deep didn't connect with me as one for the linked content.
This essay, especially the part detailing the I.-C.-F.E.T. retreat, reminds me of his brilliant description of AA meetings in Infinite Jest and the bizarre rituals that people undergo to help one another behind closed doors. Reading thru this essay, you definitely get a sense of how tight his prose is - what would be egregiously long and cumbersome run-on sentences for any other writer are fluid and make perfect sense as spiraling thoughts.
I'd recommend "Every Love Story is a Ghost Story," D.T. Max's biography of DFW. It gives a good outline of his life without straying too far into speculation/psychoanalysis. I usually try to approach books without any knowledge of the author but I feel like knowing DFW's history enhanced my enjoyment of his writing (especially non-fiction).
on the point of recursive loops: The most amazing thing about IJ, to me, is how the book itself _does_ recurse; chronologically the first scene in the book takes place after the last, and when you reach then end you could reasonably start again from the beginning, with the knowledge you've picked up on your first reading informing your second and fundamentally changing the tone and mood of the book.
i.e./tl;dr, Infinite Jest is itself the infinite entertainment it describes.
Sure, my point was not that it cannot have these things embedded or implicit, but that they are not lifted directly into the story as the focus of narration.
I've been hunting for someone that has read IJ without reading the footnotes for a long time. My hypothesis is that the story has a completely different plot without the footnotes. Unfortunately (fortunately?) I read the footnotes, and don't think I can really hold the two plots in my head during a re-read.
How would that even work? The footnotes contain clues about how things all tie together if I recall. Ignoring the footnotes just means fewer clues. The basics of the plot are in the main text I recall (basically the first 50 pages are the ending and wouldn't change by ignoring the footnotes).
I think one major plot element contained only in the footnotes is the PGOAT's face status, that is, the status of the face is very different if you read only one and not the other. But it's been a long time since I read it, maybe 20 years, so I'm only telling you what I remember thinking.
i believe a lot of it is lifted from AA meetings he attended. i remember reading an interview with a few of the fellow attendees who seemed a little miffed that he'd taken their stories.
but beware! that's what happens when you're around a writer.
IJ is by far my all-time favorite book. just amazing.
(though the tech and math parts are cringe-worthy!)
Not only did he lift their stories, in many cases he didn't even bother to change names. One person he wrote about, who was a friend of his and a fellow author, told his agent as much before IJ was published and strongly suggested he change the names, but no action was taken.
he nailed the social factors, but his attempt to describe the mean-value theorem was incoherent, and his attempts at cyber-punky computer descriptions i found to be basically mimicking language without a deep understanding, resulting in something somewhat ridiculous.
i think stuff by e. g. william gibson from even earlier still holds up, so it's not just a "oh, time passed him by" thing.
apparently the book originally had much more of a cyber-punk bent, and his editor convinced him to trim most of that out, which has got to be one of the all-time great wins in editing.
Don't make the mistake of confusing the text in Infinite Jest with David Foster Wallace's actual understanding of the Mean Value Theorem. (Read Everything and More, his really awesome book on the mathematical history of calculus, if you need a demonstration.)
99% of writers would never consider mentioning a theorem of the calculus in a novel; of those who would, 99% would think it was important to get the details right, either to show off or to avoid criticism. And then there's Wallace.
Authors have a way about telling a story. I guess it's "style". With longer books, you sort of build up a predictive parser for that particular author, so they get easier and easier to read.
For example Douglas Adams likes punchlines. He'll give a long and detailed description of a kitchen, and oh by the way there's a dead body bleeding in the middle of the floor. You kind of learn detailed descriptions are garden paths, the details don't matter. If you're just kind of trying to get through the book you can skim to the punchline, smile, and move on.
Casual reading isn't like technical reading. Missing a detail won't cost you a week of effort. Song of Ice and Fire(game of thrones) is a better example. If you don't particularly care for a character, just skimming their part of the story isn't going to kill the book. You get that so and so is sad, and went for a long walk. Ok, whatever.
If you like reading for entertainment, there's nothing special about page count. It's just the fun of being on an adventure. I'm not exactly saying you just skip the boring parts, it's more that you internalize the author's style, and implicitly read the boring parts less closely.
I've read Infinite Jest three times -- the second reading being immediately after the first, of course, since the narrative is circular and the first part makes full sense only when you cruise into it from the last bits. I read it for the third time this year due to all of the 20th anniversary publicity and enjoyed it even more.
Other kilo-page doorstop-sized single narratives that I've read and recommend include Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, Wm. Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Tolstoy's War and Peace, and Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. (The world is also full of good single narratives that span multiple thick volumes, of course.)
I think Wallace disliked the idea of trying to read into an author as a person from their work. His writing on suicide/addiction/depression in this book doesn't necessarily give you insight into his personal struggles
I read his biography 'Every Story is a Ghost Story' (which is very good BTW) and was struck by how much matched IJ in terms of experience at both ends of the social spectrum he describes.
And as a counter-point, I really, really hated 'The End Of The Tour', which felt icky and cheap somehow. If you're interested in knowing more about DFW, go for 'Every Story is a Ghost Story'!
DFW's writing comes up from time to time, and I always react by venting the frustration I feel with his work, which I promptly destroy because it seems wrong to criticize a (relatively recently) dead man.
But I'll say it: his writing style is incredibly self-indulgent and dreadfully dull. I guess it's a matter of taste, but it takes a unique talent to attend a pornography award show and afterparty, and churn out something as soulless, humorless, and completely devoid of a point-of-view as "Big Red Son."
I'll probably delete this soon -- I feel like an awful person for writing it, although I'm not entirely sure why.
I thought "Big Red Son" was hilarious. Humor comes from the clash of high culture with low culture. I'm not sure what the point of view was but I'd guess it's "we're all human here" which is a common POV of Wallace's work.
It's quite acceptable to criticize a dead person's writing. In fact, almost all literary criticism does it. So, definitely don't feel bad.
But, I disagree with the opinion of the work. It's hard to take Wallace's style and content without considering the 90s and its historical and social context. A lot of what you don't like about his writing is actually his point.
I've considered that "Big Red Son," to use that example again, is intentionally tedious and humorless. Readers expect something titillating, or at least mildly interesting, and instead DFW reflects the mundaneness of the awards show through brutally dull prose. Perhaps, and the original title, "Neither Adult Nor Entertainment," would support this. But at the end of the day, you're just left with an exceptionally boring essay.
I don't think you should feel guilty about writing that criticism. I feel almost completely the opposite as you do about DFW's writing style, but I recognize it's very much a subjective matter of taste. He gets a lot of hype, so that he has a lot of detractors only seems fair and balanced.
as others say, totally legit to criticize the writing of a dead or living writer, they take on that risk when they decide to publish.
mostly here to say: all of DFW's writing is basically a pain in the ass to read, and many folks (including myself) consider that to be very much on purpose - he wrote (posthumously so maybe wrote is the wrong thing to say..) a 550 page book (the Pale King) about the IRS, tax code and boredom (yes, that explicit ha) and honestly, it’s one of my favorite books of all time, though sometimes really boring ha (a choice quote, from an accounting professor to class: “To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish”).
the fact that you were able to make it through Big Red Son at all (even though you didn’t specifically enjoy it) makes me want to recommend more DFW to you, because not everyone has the will/patience to get through a piece like that in the first place. To that end, I think for a HN audience there are definitely more interesting pieces like:
“Television and US Fiction”
https://jsomers.net/DFW_TV.pdf
(interesting take on TV, advertising and its effect on society, consciousness and fiction - it was written pre social media and even pre ubiquitous internet, so can feel dated but towards the end feels prescient, esp. as it focuses a lot on one of DFW’s favorite themes: “what we pay attention to and why and how that affects our consciousness”, etc.)
plenty more, but i think those are both good places to start.
(PS: if you like David Lynch or Dostoevsky, DFW has AMAZING essays on each of them too, highly recommend)
Aaron Swartz's explanation of Infinite Jest's ending comes highly recommended-not to mention their convergent trajectories. Their deaths greatly impoverished the public intellect.
I am an advocate of ditching books you don't enjoy BUT
After the first ~300 pages, I began to understand how all the stories fit together and the book went from feeling like work to being a page turner I just had to devour.
My sister gave me IJ for christmas a few years ago, and I basically started reading it out of guilt. I will read 100 pages, I said to myself, and if I don't like it by then, I will drop it. I really expected to hate the book and drop it, but after 100 pages, I was completely hooked.
I started reading the physical copy and switched to kindle after a few hundred pages. I know it's not the "pure" way to read it but it improved my experience considerably. Not only does it make the book very mobile, but flipping back and forth between the footnotes is way easier.
If there's ever a book that I found better on an e-reader, Infinite Jest is it. The movement between the endnotes was so much more fluid and not having the bulk of the book itself was a huge plus. Still have a physical copy for the at home reading (been a bit since I read and want to go for a third go around) but the e-reader experience felt like the experience the book was made for, but preempted.
Oh that's interesting. I bought the hard copy specifically because I assumed it would be easier to flip around the footnotes. Maybe I'll give it a shot then.
It might depend on the ebook reader you're using. I'm using Marvin for iOS and while there's a bit of loading, it's pretty quick.
Speaking of Marvin, it's by far my favorite ebook reader. One thing I rather like, specifically in relation to IJ, is that Marvin has a journal function that automatically tracks all the words you've looked up and the stuff you've highlighted or commented on.
Seconding the Marvin recommendation. If you need an iOS ebook reader, look no further, and you can read Kindle books with it too, after downloading them via a Kindle app and shoveling them through a Calibre-powered format conversion.
It's a massive book, but it really is very entertaining as well. Give the first chapter a go, and if you're totally sucked in and laughing, you might be just glad that the book is as big as it is. If you aren't enjoying it on a page-by-page basis, it's probably almost impossible to power through. It's one of my favorite books, but it doesn't contain the meaning of life, or anything.
Tear/cut it into 3 pieces. The footnotes are one section and then cut the main part of the book in half. Connect the footnotes to the part you are currently reading
I really wish there were an edition with the footnotes inserted into the main body in some clean way. Like a quarter of the book is in those notes and many plot critical segments are buried back there.
Isn't that the point though? Its not meant to be an easy read. The writing requires a lot of attention in order to absorb its message and the book itself is physically difficult to read. The endnotes are Wallace's way of talking about two things at once.
Also there are multiple endnotes that you read more than once, so I'm not sure putting it in text would work.
Some footnotes are chapters in themselves (or have their own footnotes), and I couldn't shake the feeling that the confusion I felt upon realizing that I had still been in 'footnote territory' was entirely intentional, similar to his run-on sentences that have a very specific effect. I rather liked how reading an ebook version made it even easier to forget I was reading footnotes.
Also, one of my favorite jokes wouldn't work if he'd put the footnotes at the bottom of the pages.
This is similar to what I've been planning as a strategy for tackling "The Anatomy of Melancholy," taking it to a bookbinder and splitting it into like 5 or 6 200p volumes.
Taking on Infinite Jest as your introduction to David Foster Wallace is a little like getting started in rock climbing by tackling Mount Everest.
A much friendlier/more accessible place to start is A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (https://www.amazon.com/Supposedly-Fun-Thing-Never-Again/dp/0...), a collection of his essays. They're shorter, tighter and generally much better commute reading.
I actually find his non-fiction in general to be much more satisfying than his fiction. He was such a gifted guy, and so funny, but when writing fiction I just feel like he was un-grounded to anything relevant to me, just wandering in the depths of his pyrotechnic writing-for-its-own-sake. For example in _The Pale King_, as an English major with lots of experience deconstructing and analyzing texts, I can see how subtle and clever his portraits of the characters are, but after a while I find I just don't care, because the story isn't interesting me as a story. Reading his non-fiction, I feel like he's always getting somewhere, and it's usually much more interesting to me.
Not to detract from your overall argument, but dinging The Pale King for not getting anywhere is a bit unfair, what with him dying before completing it.
I don't think I'm the first person to say this, but I've found it to be true: Most people give up in the first two hundred pages. But of those who don't, everybody finishes the book.
It takes a while to sink its teeth into you. But once it does, you won't want to leave the world he's built. As horrifying as it may sometimes be.
I'd guess a lot of people get lost around this point when he starts to spend a lot of time with the street addict, writing in POV-style broken english.
The formatting of the footnotes was fine for me. Kindle's footnote navigation system wasn't really set up to handle pages long footnotes when I read IJ, but the latest update seems to have brought some improvements to that UI. Overall, IJ's footnotes should be very manageable.
I love Infinite Jest, but its not for everybody. If you do want to read it, I wouldn't recommend reading it on a commute. Its very dense and requires a lot of attention, and I don't feel like it would work well if you are in a place with a lot of distractions and hard cutoff times to stop reading.
I read it during my commute. I had ~40 minute uninterrupted on a train each way, each day.
It was problematic. During that period were the only times I ever missed my stops, both going to work and home. And that's with 2 voice announcements per stop over the train PA. Far too engrossed.
Also the closest I've come to getting seriously injured in the station because I refused to stop reading on arrival.
I can see how that happens. The thing that impressed me most about Infinite Jest is the incredibly deep introspection that the characters had. But the passages were very long, and because they weren't about actual stuff happening, its tough to just stop reading all of a sudden. You cant just jump back in where you left off. It wouldn't make any sense unless you were following the entire train of thought, which means you need to backtrack quite a bit.
I honestly have no idea how people read that book in public. I read it during the winter in my bedroom, which was perfect because there was nothing to pull my attention away and interrupt the experience.
You know, I actually find it easier to read long texts in paper book form. The fact that I can see myself physically progress through the book is encouraging. Ebooks often just seem like an endless stream of text.
Ereaders usually show a percentage and either an estimate page number or (kindle) some arcane fraction.
For me, seeing it go from 1% to 2% was a lot encouraging.
To gain insight into minds like the Depressed Person's - not just as described dryly, but actually experienced first-hand as a result of the way it is written.
I understand the purpose of the writing style. And it works on me. That's why my brain hurts. My question was why anybody would do this to himself? Masochism?
Probably the most important thing that literature can do, in my opinion, is transport us into someone else's mind. Even if it isn't necessarily pleasant, it can still be broadening.
I feel the way you do about Eraserhead, to some extent. It's an amazing work of genius that I'll never watch again, because it made me feel physically il. I'm still glad I watched it once.
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/six-things-you-didn...
There's probably a better source but that's the first one I found on google.