Infinite Jest

I spent the weekend in Ohio, celebrating my cousin's wedding. I also got very behind in email and RSS. So it wasn't until Monday that I learned of David Foster Wallace's suicide, and the news derailed me a little bit. In full disclosure -- I have never read a single one of his books. I've read some of his essays and a few of his stories and even fewer of his journalism pieces, but I have felt, since first meeting him, that he belonged to me. This is something that I am sure would have bothered him in some way. I realize he is not a thing to be consumed. But I met him, not literally, in Prague, and he became, quite by accident, a character in a screenplay I was working on for a class there, and since then, I've considered him a dear friend who I don't keep up with as well as I should.

That he was one of our most brilliant minds and that he left too soon is without contention. I think it is also fair to say that he left us at a time when we needed him the most. I cannot help thinking about his last days on earth, and the loneliness I imagine he felt before he hanged himself. And when I get to that image -- the starkness of his suicide -- I get physically ill, as I am now.

When I was 25 I bought Infinite Jest and I read something like 33 pages of it. I had never heard of it before. And no one had ever recommended it to me. Rather, I came across it the old fashioned way, in one of the few independent bookstores still open in this country. It was a 10th anniversary reissue with a forward by Dave Eggers. Eggers and Wallace (along with Franzen and Lethem and others) belong to a group of writers affectionately called The Maximalists. And I like every one of them. But Wallace has always been a favorite, despite what little of his work I've read.

So. Jest has been sitting on a bookshelf for over two years. I look at its spine nearly every day, and think loving thoughts about it, and mean to start it again, and don't. But I feel that right now, this very day in fact, there is not a more sensible thing I could do than to climb into bed with it once more.

The book is, in the most general sense, about addiction and entertainment. It's a really big book, about really big ideas, and we are living in what I quite seriously consider perilous days. This election has me, at best, flummoxed. I often feel like I live with aliens, here in my Red state. I wonder if we, as a nation, are really as unserious and cruel and stupid a people as our media and their polls are making us out to be. Ever since John McCain chose Caribou Barbie as his running mate, I have been considering rereading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. But then Wallace died. And left me feeling so alone, that it seems, as I've said, the only thing left to do is pray, get some sleep, continue to register voters, and read Infinite Jest. So, that is what I plan to do. If you need another reason to read this book, here is some of what Eggers had to say in the Forward:

"And yet the time spent in this book, in this world of language, is absolutely rewarded. When you exit these pages after that month of reading, you are a better person. It's insane, but also hard to deny. Your brain is stronger because it's been given a monthlong workout, and more importantly, your heart is sturdier, for there has scarcely been written a more moving account of desperation, depression, addiction, generational stasis and yearning, or the obsession with human expectations, with artistic and athletic and intellectual possibility. The themes here are big, and the emotions (guarded as they are) are very real, and the cumulative effect of the book is, you could say, seismic."

And, later:

"And now, unfortunately, we're back to the impression that this book is daunting. Which it isn't, really. It's long, but there are pleasures everywhere. There is humor everywhere. There is also a very quiet but very sturdy and constant tragic undercurrent that concerns a people who are completely lost, who are lost within their families and lost within their nation, and lost within their time, and who only want some sort of direction or purpose or sense of community or love. Which is, after all and conveniently enough for the end of this introduction, what an author is seeking when he sets out to write a book -- any book, but particularly a book like this, a book that gives so much, that required such sacrifice and dedication. Who would do such a thing if not for want of connection and thus of love?

"Last thing: In attempting to persuade you to buy this book, or check it out of your library, it's useful to tell you that the author is a normal person. Dave Wallace -- and he is commonly known as such -- keeps big sloppy dogs and has never dressed them in taffeta or made them wear raincoats. He has complained often about sweating too much when he gives public readings, so much so that he wears a bandana to keep the perspiration from soaking the pages below him. He was once a nationally ranked tennis player, and he cares about good government. He is from the Midwest -- east-central Illinois, to be specific, which is an intensely normal part of the country (not far, in fact, from a city, no joke, named Normal). So he is normal, and regular, and ordinary, and this is his extraordinary, and irregular, and not-normal achievement, a thing that will outlast him and you and me, but will help future people understand us -- how we felt, how we lived, what we gave to each other and why."

If this had been the first book I'd ever read, I'd have never read another

I own exactly one book whose cover bears Oprah's golden seal of approval. I own this book because its author caused an uproar by politely declining his invitation into her sorority, was later snubbed by the Pulitzer and finally awarded the National Book Award. Thousands of covers had already been printed before he made his announcement, and I found them remaindered and couldn't bear to see them that way, so I bought one. I'm not a hater -- I love every single thing that Oprah has done for reading in America, save defacing perfectly good covers. And yes, I've read many of her selections, both before and after she chose them. But I've never read a one whose cover bore her name.

I had to explain this to the good folks at Borders the Saturday before last: that I needed a copy of The Pillars of the Earth but that if the only ones they had were Oprah's, they could go ahead and forget about it.

Here is how I came to read this book: I was dragging my feet in finishing Brideshead and freaking out about what would come next. There was this real sense of urgency (not uncommon for me) in needing to know what I would console myself with once Brideshead was done. As I said before, it was Saturday, and naturally, I was watching non-stop coverage of the Olympics, like any other legitimate American. The men's road race was on at the time, and as I watched the peloton slowly climb into the mountains above Beijing, nearing the Great Wall, I was overcome with the desire to read a huge novel that dealt with people who were swept up in something larger than life. And because I don't know of anything off the top of my head that's about the Great Wall itself, and it seemed like too much effort to google or wiki anything, I settled on Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth. It had a very pretty cover and a lovely title and was about something that strikes me as infinitely fascinating -- building a medieval cathedral. Plus, I was under the impression that it was a really good book and had been wanting to read it for a longish time.

So, off I went. The prologue held my attention. I felt, if not affection, a certain interest in the initial characters. It wasn't great writing by any means, but it was simple and it was solid, and I thought, maybe the writing will begin to take shape with the cathedral itself.

My rule is that before I allow myself to abandon them, I give troublesome books 100 pages.

And I would have really appreciated it if Pillars's editor would have given me the same courtesy. But if there ever was an editor, it seems they didn't make it out of the gate. I am trying so hard to like this monster, but right now, I'm galled by it.

For starters (and this was my first clue) it had like three (three!) endorsements in the opening pages. Three. The book was published almost a decade ago and was (even before Oprah's magic wand) Ken Follett's best-selling work, and they could only come up with three endorsements? Secondly, the book opens with the Prologue and then Part One followed by Chapter 1 (as in the number). Chapter 1 the number is followed by II, as in the Roman numeral. Which is then followed by III, IV and V. These are followed by Chapter 2. Which is then followed by II and III and so on. Am I missing something? Is this some literary device I'm ignorant of? Is it really so hard to stick with one or the other?

One reviewer I'd read had commented on the novel's gratuitous sex and how it was slightly off putting. I rarely find sex gratuitous and think mostly, what we need is more of it in fiction. (Or in Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. Please?) But the first sex scene in this book is so cringe-awful that I will not even dignify it with a spoiler alert. Don't ask me what Ken Follett was thinking when he had a woman semi rape a starving, half-dead-with-grief man in a clearing in the forest, while his recently motherless children slept nearby. And let's not forget that this man is still covered in his dead wife's blood, that she isn't 12 hours in the ground, that he's just committed infanticide and likely hasn't showered in months or brushed his teeth in, I don't know, ever? It doesn't matter how barking horny you are, or how the security of the rest of your life depends on seducing this one man, no one, not even a two dimensional stock character, does this.

It gets worse.

After this grotesque coupling, Follett commits the cardinal sin. Exposition, exposition, exposition. He has a chance here to make another play for me, the reader, by showing and not telling. We've been told for the past 100 pages. All's I want is to be shown a little bit. Instead, Follett writes: "Tom was no less bemused. Life was moving too fast for him to take in all the changes. It was like being on the back of a runaway horse: everything happened so quickly that there was no time to react to events, and all he could do was hold on tightly and try to stay sane." After this little gem, where he's stated the same thing multiple times, Follett then gives us a play-by-play of all the changes that have just happened so fast to poor Tom. Because, presumably, we weren't paying attention when we were told the first time.

And then! Then we find out that the baby has really lived. Zing! It didn't die in the forest on its mother's grave after all! Previously, before the baby is left to die, it is twice described as having dark luxurious hair, like its dead mother's. Two or three pages later, the baby is bald. Look, I don't care if the kid has flying squirrels growing out of it's skull, just be consistent. If you make a point to tell us something about a character, stick with it.

Also, within the first 164 pages the phrase "hot body" appears. Twice. Just to be clear: the phrase "hot body" has no place in historical fiction.

And yet, I think I could get over all of this. The abysmal writing. The weird chapter numbering. The creepy sex. I could look past it if the characters were in any way engaging or compelling. If they weren't dull as hell. The other cardinal rule of writing? Never bore the reader. Derrick Jensen has told his writing students that they ought to aim to write things that are so good he'd rather read them than make love. Well. I would rather engage in the kind of horrifying sex act I just described than read another page of this beast.

OMG, I'm so depressed at how much I don't like this book. And I have over 900 pages to go.

At least I have Michael Phelps.

Ed. Note: there were four endorsements, not three as I had remembered. BFD.

"Brideshead Revisited" by Evelyn Waugh

Two weeks ago, I first saw the sumptuous trailer for Brideshead Revisited and thought, Mother of Pearl, I'm gonna have to read that beast in the next six days. This, not one day after I'd bought 5 other books that were lounging on my bedside table, waiting to be read, in addition to the 4 I'm currently reading. But I've been meaning to read Brideshead for about a decade, and I can't see the film before I do, and I want to see the film ASAP. So there you have it.

Brideshead is one of those books that's been shelved in a mental library alongside other titles that have been recommended to me by Readers -- those whose own literary tastes and conquests I both admire and envy. I seemed to remember a relative of mine (the one who is a somewhat renowned Joycean scholar) encouraging me to read Brideshead, but when I pulled up the email, what she'd actually said was that the novel, "finally, isn't all that good." Now, on this, we disagree. Mightily. For what I felt, in the handful of hours that it took me to barrel through this book, was rapture.

Hyperbolic? Perhaps.

But I honestly had no clue what to expect from this book, and feared that I too would find it not all that good. Rather, I was almost giddy to discover Charles Ryder. I haven't fallen so hard for a narrator since Nick Carraway.

Here is as much as I can tell you: the novel takes place in England (with jaunts to Venice and Paris and Morocco) in between the two World Wars. Charles Ryder, a middle-class, aspiring artist, comes to Oxford to read history. There, he meets and (presumably) falls in love with Lord Sebastian Flyte, the charming but haunted youngest son of a fading English dynasty. Sebastian's attempts to keep Charles away from his family ultimately fail, and if you want to get overly simplistic, you could say that once Charles's path crosses with the rest of the Flyte family, the wheels of their downfall are set in motion. Only, Waugh doesn't ultimately believe in downfall (at least not for the the main characters), and seeks to suffuse everyone's experience ultimately with grace. Whether you find Waugh's version of grace in line with your own (I don't), or even in line with what you'd like to see happen to these characters is beside the point. The point is that Waugh is a damn fine writer.

Here:

Charles's decision to go and formally meet Sebastian: I went there uncertainly, for it was foreign ground and there was a tiny, priggish, warning voice in my ear which in the tones of Collins told me it was seemly to hold back. But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.

Or this, shortly after Ryder's acquaintance with the Flytes: But I was as untouched by her faith as I was by her charm; or, rather, I was touched by both alike. I had no mind then for anything except Sebastian, and I saw him already as being threatened, though I did not yet know how black was the threat. His constant, despairing prayer was to be let alone. By the blue waters and rustling palm of his own mind he was happy and harmless as a Polynesian; only when the big ship dropped anchor beyond the coral reef, and the cutter beached in the lagoon, and, up the golden slope that had never known the print of a boot there trod the grim invasion of trader, administrator, missionary and tourist -- only then was it time to disinter the archaic weapons of the tribe and sound the drums in the hills; or, more easily, to turn from the sunlit door and lie alone in the darkness, where the impotent, painted deities paraded the walls in vain, and cough his heart out among the rum bottles.

Do not let me misrepresent Charles Ryder, he is not all soliloquy. I jotted down the page numbers of dozens of these passages and phrases (and as I flip through them now, I am compelled to turn off the Olympics and begin the whole brilliant mess again) but if I don't rein myself in now, it'll be too late.

Three things that were evident nearly immediately in this book: that I would miss it sorely when it was finished. That it would be finished too soon. And that (even now, after a few days to think it over) I would be hard pressed to come up with another author whose panoply of characters are so alive. There is a largish cast here. And it seems the secondaries were never let in on their second-class status. Waugh has written each one so completely and effortlessly and lovingly that I should nearly expect to bump into them were I to find myself in London or Paris or Venice or Morocco during those in between years.

It's hard to speak in any more real detail about this book without spoiling it. It is a tragicomedy. And a love story. And then a second love story. There is a moral imperative, which I find neither moral nor imperative, but am perfectly satisfied with nonetheless. It was a delight to read.

As soon as I finished it, I sent a text to Martin that said: Just finished Brideshead. Right now, at this very moment, the thought of ever reading another book again feels like adultery.

I don't have much higher praise than that.