Preemptive Retaliation

There’s an in-joke in the reading/writing community that would rephrase the act of reading Infinite Jest. I’ve seen people state that they are attempting to read it, or inflicting it on themselves. They are undertaking Infinite Jest, as if it is a passage or ritual that needs to be suffered through. Admittedly, that was what enticed me to it in the first place. I spied it out in bookstores, reading and re-reading the first few pages. Sure, the language was dense and florid, and seemed to go into excruciating detail, but I understand it easily enough. I put it back on the shelf, smug that, when I got round to it, I’d handle it no problem.

I guess we can all be wrong sometimes.

Currently I am about 250 pages in and almost drowning in the rambling yet sharp prose that David Foster Wallace has written. I don’t understand a portion of the words, I can’t follow a lot of the descriptions, and things jump around so much that I find myself reading half a page and being completely lost. And I am loving it.

I am about a fifth of my way into the book, and I don’t honestly know exactly what’s going on. I know there’s a tennis academy up a hill from a drug recovery house. I know there is an eccentric family of geniuses and prodigies. I know that there is a film that renders its viewers comatose, and I know there’re political extremists possibly behind its distribution. Those facts are like slivers of seaweed drifting by during a storm, picked out not by their outlines but sensed by the shadow they make in the water. At first I would try and grab on to these plot points as some kind of life raft, only to have them become lost soon after. It was distressing and weird and even though I kept reading I felt wounded that I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was.

This was until a few days back, when I abandoned the idea of a plot, where I stopped trying to explain to colleagues and family members what it’s about – going from “I think it’s about drug addiction and American life, but also about obsession and compulsion, and maybe there’s a film that puts people into a comatose bliss, and maybe that’s a metaphor for drugs” all the way to “it’s a big book with footnotes, and those footnotes have footnotes, and I have no idea what’s going on but I’m loving it” – and I just started to read it. I read it and imagined it and I found a character that I instantly fell in love with. It was just her and her problems and her transient links with others in the novel, and I loved reading it. Instead of being tossed in a chaotic sea of world and meaning with no common thread, I found myself swimming through it and enjoying the water, despite the seaweed.

What I love about it as well is the time and patience that DFW has for his work. A simple description of someone sneaking off to get high is stretched over pages and pages of justification and backstory; so not only do we understand that someone wants to get stoned privately, but also the extent he which he has gone to ensure that privacy. I could take a machete to the words and still make something understandable, but it would lose all its charm and vulnerability. I feel I know that character’s thought process more deeply, just in the way he hides himself when he goes for a smoke. I know more about this woman’s life on the walk to a party than I would if she was just at the party herself. It’s a polar end of the spectrum between showing and telling.

Usually on these blog posts I try and summarise something into a punchline – here’s the lesson of today children always trust your parents and be nice to your friends – but I don’t really have one for today. Maybe I’ve learned that taking my time writing something isn’t a bad idea, that trusting characters to speak for themselves, but I haven’t reached the end of the book yet so I don’t know if it’ll become tedious. Maybe it’s that coming up with fuller, fleshed out histories (spanning back to childhood) for each character will keep the more believable, but then when do you go too far? Maybe it’s that I should stop worrying too much on finding meaning in things, and instead just enjoy them for what they are?

Yeah, no punchline this week. No special revelation. I guess I just wanted to gush about a book I’m reading.