The Infinite Jest Challenge

Of course I haven’t listened to that interview, but thanks for putting up the link to the transcript – I enjoyed it. Whew! It’s hard to imagine anything much more terrifying…uhhh, I mean thrilling… than interviewing him.

I think a lot of the avant-garde has forgotten that part of its job is to seduce the reader into being willing to do the hard work. And so doing something like this, there were a lot of fears and one of them was “Oh no, this doesn’t make any sense.” Another was, “Oh no, this is going to come off as gratuitously long or gratuitously hard.” And I don’t know, it makes me happy you said that because, yeah, I worked harder on this than anything I’ve ever done in my life and there’s nothing in there by accident and there have already been some readers and reviewers that see it as kind of a mess, and as kind of random, and I just have to sort of shrug my shoulders. – DFW (see Day 13 interview)

He’s human! Am I charmed? Maybe. Seduced? Not quite yet, but I’m charging through. As I’ve started to enjoy the story more, the fear that I might manage to finish the thing without ever absorbing some essential central point of it has gradually replaced the old fear that I would never figure out what was going on. In a way, I guess that it doesn’t really matter if I miss something important as long as I enjoy the book as I’m reading it, but I do dislike constantly feeling as though I’m just skimming the surface for a story and missing the goodies under the water.
I’ve been hungry for fish all week, can you tell?

A lot of important things have been explained over the course of the past few days’ reading, most notably Eschaton (a 13-year-old boy’s DREAM version of “Risk”) and the Infinite Jest-ian vision of the near-future, which feels oddly dated to me. Obviously there are a lot of problems in the future, but isn’t there anything new and neat? I give Wallace lots of credit for basically anticipating TiVo and iTunes video rentals, but I hope that by the time we reach our own “Year of the Whopper,” we’ll have at least one or two really cool things to make up for the out-of-control pollution and weird president. Some suggestions:

Also in this week’s reading, three side-stories notable to me only for their horribleness. We’ve got the “Abused Invertebrate Sister”(367) that business with the dead baby(376), and the Clipperton suicide(430). So maybe the book it isn’t gratuitously long or hard, but note that he never claimed that it wasn’t gratuitously appalling. The Clipperton suicide had a streak of silliness and unreality to it and it connected with the rest of the story, but the other two were mostly just disturbing and crazy enough to feel, well, ICK.

So that’s me finally saying something about the book.
I apologize and leave you with another troubling vision of the future.