"Mmyellow"
You can almost hear DFW answering the phone, a land line, maybe a rotary phone. But this is Hal's phone answering standard.
Phew! That was quite an interlude. Six years. Actually, 8 years. But who's counting? Let's pick this up again.
We're reading Infinite Jest, the 20th anniversary paperback from Back Bay Books (2015). We started in 2016 but circumstances intervened and we paused.
In the years since much has happened. #MeToo and the whole revelation of DFW's fucked-up-ness (as if IJ wasn't a crystal ball insight into the man himself). Tales to tell, darts to hurl, judgment to pass. DFW has lost his literary shine. And worse.
Patricia Lockwood and her London Review of Books 2023 takedown (volume 45 Number 14 July 13 2023), for example.
(PL):
"Infinite Jest - man, I don't know. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more had the rhetorical move not so often been 'and then this little kid had a claw.' It's like watching someone undergo the latest possible puberty. It genuinely reads like he has not had sex. You feel not only that he shouldn't be allowed to take drugs, but that he shouldn't be allowed to drink Diet Pepsi." (PL, LRB 2023)
She asks "What are we learning when we discover that someone was not good."
It seems that PL has come to pronounce judgment. That she is reading to find what she is looking for.
But enough of Patricia Lockwood.
Let's refocus.
This whole bloggy effort started out as a 3 way "read Infinite Jest" among friends; two friends quickly dropped out leaving me to carry on.
I paused in 2016. I was 127 pages in, my second time reading it.
I have now reread from the beginning, powered through the first 127 pages with a feeling of "ah, it's good to be back" and kept going and here we are 257 pages in. DFW's familiar voice telling me stories, making me laugh.
Light bulbs of understanding going on reading the Hal/Orin phone call (starting on pg 242 (5 NOVEMBER - YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT). Incandenza family history.
We will get to summaries and comments on those intervening 100+ pages but the important broad generalization is that the second time around things become much clearer the characters more familiar the plot lines less obscure and more intertwined the whole "what the fuck is going on?!" frustrations and sentiments of a first time reading tempered by the gradual then sudden understanding of what's going on.
Though "what's going on" maybe isn't the best phrase to employ for IJ. More apt might be to say that what was, upon first reading, disparate & obscure & rife with uncertain connections/characters/plot lines become, on the second reading, a gradual cohesion of connectivity and a familiarity with the myriad different characters (most of whom have weird and unlikely names that are often harsh awkward in the mouth [e.g. Troeltsch, deLintt, Schacht]).
Pages 127-258 Madame Psychosis aka Joelle van Dyne; Michael Pemulis; James Incandenza aka Himself; the Incandenzas as a twisted family of oddities; Hal the stoner tennis prodigy; his deformed brother Mario; Gately the criminal; Poor Tony and addiction. Junkie crime, horrific scenes you cringe reading.
Addiction. Shot through the book like glacial layers of deposited desperation. This is the sadness that juxtaposes the hilarity.
A comfortable clarity now reading this for a second time. Open attention to the actual writing, the tale-telling, the descriptive power.
NOTE: Helpful additional sources consulted since first attempt at second reading IJ; Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (D.T. Max), essays, the interviews with Michael Silverblatt, The Pale King, Conversations with David Foster Wallace (University Press of Mississippi Stephen J. Burn, editor), Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself (David Lipsky), In the Land of Men: A Memoir (Adrienne Miller).
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