Summer of Jest Part the Eighth - Chapter 11, Mostly

So now the Entertainment, aka the Samizdat, has claimed lots of victims, we meet yet another character (Tiny Ewell) who's on his way to his rendezvous with all of the other characters in rehab, we've learned that the United States Bureau of Unspecified Services thinks the Quebecois Wheelchair Assassins are responsible for the distribution of the Entertainment (and have only gotten hints so far, via perhaps the extensive footnote that lists JOI's entire filmography in exhausting detail, as to who the creator of said Entertainment might be) by way of protesting/fighting against the Great Concavity/Convexity (into which the United States' Empire Waste Disposal service literally flings great catapult loads of U.S. trash -- it's a giant uncleaned Superfund site-cum-landfill occupying territory that used to be Maine and Vermont and New Hampshire, is the Concavity), and that junior tennis players are stressed out, self-medicated and weird.*

I won't say that all the pieces are in place, but quite a lot of them are, enough to where DFW now indulges, in Chapter 11, in quite an extensive round of character development via first, a bitching session in the locker rooms of E.T.A. after PM drills, when all the upperclassmen are showered and trying to work up the energy for dinner and Little Buddy time and are just venting their frustration and paranoia and annoyance and exhaustion, and then the Little Buddy sessions as well, in which DFW winds up pulling a Ted Sturgeon (for an explanation of that see footnote to this post) in that midway through the Big Buddy riff he stops identifying speakers and rooms altogether and just lays heaps of dialogue on us and we can tell which speaker is easily, if we've been paying attention at all.

Curiously missing in all of this, I notice this time around, is any actual spoken dialogue from N.R. (as in "Not Really") John Wayne, the one ETA student most clearly destined for the pro circuit ("The Show"), whose portrayal reminds me a lot of DFW's real life portrait of middling pro Michael Joyce for Esquire magazine (also collected in his A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again); he is focused completely on his game (and on a certain semi-illicit liaison we'll learn about later, but that doesn't require him to talk much, either. Though how he'd get a word in edgewise...) to the point of seeming terribly dull. He says close to nothing, letting one of his Little Buddies do the talking for him in his session and his only contribution to the conversation in the locker room bitching session is to lift one leg, Canadian style, to fart.**

Which speaking of farts, there is a hilarious conversation about to fart or not to fart in one of the Big Buddy sessions, conducted in earnest, that kills me every time.

There really is something for everyone in Infinite Jest...

*Like using Lemon Pledge for sunscreen weird. Which my friend Heather and I are now borderline obsessed about, this time around. Are there people out there who really do that? Because it has the weirdly specific ring about it of something that DFW, once a middling junior tennis player himself, actually did and is recalling with his trademark mixture of fondness and horror. Does anybody know? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

**Again, I'm wondering if this is really a thing. I've spent a bit of quality time in Canada and never observed this behavior and suspect it's urban legend, but...?

Summer of Jest Part the Seventh: A Good Chunk of Chapter 11

I will persist in referring to Hugh Steeply, agent for the United States' Bureau of Unspecified Services, as Helen because he spends pretty much the whole novel in drag and seems to enjoy it rather a lot. At any rate, I am always somewhat jarred on the odd occasion when, as here, he is referred to by his actual name.

When I first encountered him and his foil, Remy Marathe, I didn't know what to make of them or what in the world they could possibly have to do with anything else, but that's been true for almost everybody we've met at this stage of the novel; the only stuff that hangs together involves the Incandenzas. This scene, too, involves them, but in ways we (mostly) won't even begin to realize until much later on, so for now it just hangs there, like Helen's and Remy's giant shadows over Tucson as they meet in semi-secrecy to discuss, as it turns out, what has happened to the medical attache and dozens of other people who have come into his apartment looking for him or for his wife or for the neighbors and later emergency services types who have gone in, never to return, all just happily watching the unlabeled cartridge (referred to as a samizdat) on infinite replay; it's so entertaining no one is eating or sleeping or using sanitary facilities, no one is doing anything but watching, turning into the giant eyeballs JOI once posited in a film...

Helen thinks Marathe's cell of Les Assassins des Fateuils Rollents (Wheelchair Assassins) are somehow behind this weird form of attack-by-entertainment ; the medical attache is also of French Canadian descent, after all, and is of some strategic importance to ONAN by way of his job for the Saudi Minister of Entertainment and whatnot. Marathe scoffs at this but doesn't really convince Helen. Nor does he convince me. Guys weird enough to deliberately jump in front of trains that they might lose or cripple their legs and be confined to wheelchairs as part of an initiation into anti-ONAN terror protesting the "gifting" of most of uninhabitably polluted New England, inhabited by devastating locust-like herds of feral hamsters (as we see in an interlude, here) and worse monsters, to Canada, well, they're weird enough to hit people with fatally entertaining film cartridges, too.

Oh, the Concavity (which Canadians refer to, usually resentfully, as the Convexity). Any other writer would treat us to more than a few odd glimpses of its wilds, but DFW just teases us with tantalizing little bits of it, because while its existence is vital to the backstory of IJ, that's all it is: part of the milieu. I'm sure some enterprising souls have written Concavity-based fan fiction, though, involving fighting off giant overgrown feral infants and whatnot, and I bet it's a hell of a lot of fun to read, but we're concerned with the place's geopolitical importance here, not its phenomena. One staggers to think of how much longer IJ would be if DFW had included more than just the odd vignette...

At any rate, here we leave them, Steeply getting ready to go back undercover as a journalist who shall shortly be pestering Orin Incandenza; Marathe to his double-life as an agent for the Wheelchair Assassins and as an informant for the Office of Unspecified Services (they have been providing unspecified [heh] medical care for Remy's wife in exchange) -- or is he? Is he only pretending to betray the Assassins? Intrigue upon intrigue!

Summer of Jest Part the Sixth: More of Chapter 10

Just as I seem to be sympathizing more with James Orin Incandenza than his son this time around, I'm newly fascinated with another fixture at Enfield Tennis Academy that I've usually just treated as local color: Gerhardt Schtitt. He is a striking, incongruous figure to find there even before he dons his leather aviator helmet and goggles and starts tooling around in an old BMW motorcycle with Mario in the sidecar. That alone, even before we get into his philosophy of education and junior level competitive sport, makes him someone I dearly wish I could have actually seen, riding the streets of the greater Boston area behind the jogging files of ETA students on their daily conditioning runs.

But his philosophy intrigues me more, even as it makes me a bit melancholy. In Schtitt's view, education, and sports at the junior level (and perhaps even beyond?), are chiefly valuable as training for citizenship -- an outmoded idea to be sure, even more so now than when IJ was written, I sometimes think, for the focus on education as training for the assumption of some economic role or niche seems greater than ever, and how is competitive junior level tennis in any way preparation for that, unless you really are training little pros to entertain the masses in big Grand Slam type events someday?

But that old-fashioned idea, that competitive sport prepares one to be a citizen by training him to submit to the needs of a team and to a set of rules, that's still a very, very good one. I'm not sure Schtitt -- or anyone -- achieves his goal in IJ, but of all the agendas at work in IJ I think Schtitt's the most admirable. Which makes Mario's dialogue with him in Chapter 10 all the more wistful and disappointing and sad, because Mario casually leads the discussion to its most depressing conclusion. Tennis is not a team sport, he posits, and Schtitt agrees: it's just you versus the other guy. Ah, but, Schtitt says, your opponent is not the other guy; the other guy is your partner in your competition with yourself. Then how, Mario asks, is playing tennis different from suicide -- the ultimate defeat of the self. Schtitt cannot answer, and neither can we, and suddenly we're back in Kate Gompert territory and IJ suddenly starts feeling like a gigantic suicide note written decades before the deed.

Because what all of the interconnected plots in the book have in common is people desperately trying to find something worth giving themselves away to -- sport, drugs, or, as we are gradually watching in the medical attache updates, mindless entertainment. And nothing ever really fills the hole, but will gladly take over your life. And give what in return?

That's all I've got the energy for today, but there is hope on the horizon, for the bizarro figure of Helen Steeply awaits. Which means we're soon going to meet the weirdest terrorists, maybe EVAR.

Image source: a Slate article about a 24-hour long stage production of IJ in Berlin! Imagine!

Summer of Jest Part the Fifth: Chapters 9 and some of 10

Even after all these years and all these re-reads, I still find the first part of Chapter 10 of IJ some of the most difficult reading the novel offers -- not for any matters of technique or comprehension or anything, but just the nature of the scene it depicts, the character and the subject matter. And the difficulty only grows, it seems. Eugh.

But first, Michael Pemulis!

A Google image search brought up this absolutely perfect image of him:

Perfect even though he's missing his maroon paratroopers' pants and orange turtleneck, which is the ensemble he wears, along with the yachtsman's cap, whenever he has to meet with Authority. This is one insouciant motherfolklore, Pemulis, though he's got some ridiculous habits that belie his cynical coolness, like the way he always looks both ways before he speaks...

Here we come upon him at long last, in all his pedantic goofy glory. An upperclassman, he is a Big Buddy, assigned a small group of Little Buddies that he might help them acclimate to Enfield Tennis Academy and its rigors, a role he interprets to mean having to spell out for them, in excruciating and painstakingly researched detail, the precise biochemical and psycho-pharmeceutical effects of every last recreational substance that the littler kids might encounter, from crappy synthetic Bob Hope (local argot for marijuana) to high grade designer drugs that still only have chemical nomenclature designations. He lectures blithely on, oblivious to all of the attention his Little Buddies aren't paying him. His future, both within the narrative of the novel and in general, is not great, but he doesn't care. He is Pemulis. Wolf Spiders Rule.

From there we have, it would seem, nowhere to go but down. From Pemulis in his jaunty cap telling his Little Buddies what drugs he would sure as heck avoid were he they, we move to the psych ward of a nearby hospital, where one Kate Gompert, another marijuana addict with all of the same problems Erdedy displayed in Chapter 6, plus crippling clinical depression to boot. She's hospitalized following a very nearly successful suicide attempt. When asked why she wants to hurt herself, she says, she doesn't want to hurt herself, she wants to kill herself. There is a difference.

Kate then goes on to describe The Feeling in excruciating detail, and I do mean excruciating. I've had a brush or two with that kind of depression since I first read this book, and I sometimes catch myself slipping into Gompert-Instead-Of-Sherrod when things get really nasty. As did DFW, we now know. Oh do we know. And really, I should have realized back then that his descriptions and verbalizations on this topic were a bit too spot on to be merely literary productions. And we know that depression is what got him in the end. This passage still really, really scares me.

And so there I'm just gonna stop for this post. Ya gotta be careful with Kate. She can annihilate everything, in a perfectly ordinary, animated voice. Just don't look at those dead eyes. Eugh.

Summer of Jest Part the Fourth: Chapters 7 and 8 with a bit of leftover 6

First of all, I have to say oops, but to add that this is the sort of thing that can happen to someone who has read a large and complicated book like this multiple times. I've mixed up the appearance of an incident, namely Hal's and Mario's discussion of Avril's reaction to their father's death with an earlier scene in their dorm room when Orin makes a kind of pointless, aimless phone call that basically just serves to introduce his character. Apologies! I wonder how many lazy students' homework I've just screwed up.

Also, I left out of yesterday's post the last bit of Chapter 6 in which we meet Bruce Green and Mildred Bonk, a charming, melancholy interlude in which we meet the housemates of the pot dealer with the harelip who is the supplier, one way or another, for most of the marijuana users in the story. In Wire terms, he's maybe Proposition Joe, though without Joe's sophistication or swagger, being instead a trailer trash guy who keeps snakes whose stinky tanks he can't smell due to the harelip blocking his nose. How Bruce and Mildred become his roommates is deftly told in a sketch that could come straight from the Wire: boy falls for girl when they're in middle school and she is "a vision in a sundress and silly shoes", girl starts to hang with a bunch of burnouts in high school, boy becomes the biggest burnout to win girl, boy impregnates girl but they're both such burnouts that living with Harelipped Pot Dealer seems like a reasonable choice for living environments in which to raise their child. Ah, me.

I also left out our first Orin interlude, in which he sleeps in and we learn about his routine with women whom he refers to as "Subjects" and regards them as interchangeable and just sort of makes me want to kick him in the crotch almost as much as it makes me want to scream at them to have some self-respect. Which is really all I have to say about that part, as Orin mostly just bores me, at least until the wonderfully Tim Powers-esque Helen Steeply gets hold of him later on, and even then it's mostly for Steeply that I read, there.

But so finally moving on to Chapter 7, we are at last getting a good look at the physical plant at Enfield Tennis Academy, founded by Hal's and Orin's and Mario's parents as a serious academic institution-cum-sports academy, and aping the old, old curriculum of the great medieval universities to make sure that the next generation of hotshot tennis pros is full of highly erudite smartasses who will do things like quote Spinoza in interviews with the jock sniffer press and make everyone else feel really, really dumb. Or at least are prepared for unspecified brainy careers of some sort if/when they fail to make it as professional tennis players and all the "prorector" positions at E.T.A. are taken by earlier washout alumni. As such.

DFW goes into staggering detail in describing the school's layout and facilities and especially its equipment for turning the middle section of its outdoor tennis courts into habitable playing space in wintertime: the Lung. I'm pretty sure a talented HVAC professional could build the apparatus from DFW's descriptions, shared with us from the point of view of Hal Incandenza as he goes through his elaborate rituals for getting high in secret. Of course, this interlude just makes me anxious for when we'll finally get to meet his friends and schoolmates, who are highly entertaining people of the sort I wish I'd had as friends and classmates when I was growing up but who would probably have eaten me alive because I'm nowhere near as athletically or intellectually gifted as they were so I'm probably just better off being a fly on their walls via DFW. Sigh. Anyway, them. I'm really looking forward to them.

But first, back to the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland (the year before YDAU, i.e. this is a one-year flashback from the perspective of most of Hal's story) and one Don Effing Gately, whom I now cannot imagine as anything other than Rory Cochrane on steroids (Cochrane turned in a bravura performance as Charlie Freck in Richard Linklater's film adaptation of A Scanner Darkly). I'm not sure I can exactly justify or defend this, but that's how my brain casts this part now.

Gately has perhaps the broadest character arc of anyone in IJ and sometimes I think of him more than Hal as the novel's real hero, even though he appears much less.* Oh, what's not to love about Don Gately? I mean, if you're going to love a character who's a drug addict and a criminal and kind of a dumbass until he finally learns all of his lessons the hard way. I still laugh like a loon at the story of the revenge he took on an Assistant District Attorney who got him convicted of one crime, revenge I won't spoil for first time book readers who will have to read its disgusting hilarity for themselves. And I still shake my head in wonder at the bumbling, ridiculous story of how he accidentally became a murderer due to a language barrier and a headful of snot. Someone else's snot. In someone else's head. Oh, go read the story. I don't want to spoil that either. Except insomuch as to observe that Gately's choice of burgla-murder victim wound up having vast implications for the rest of the story in that said victim was a key figure in Quebecois objectionism to the United States' having "gifted" Canada with a big chunk of uninhabitably polluted and ruined former New England territory and other such "experialistic" crimes, which objectionism takes on some truly bizarre and surreal forms and will be discussed at length later on, I'm sure.

Also, yuck, thanks a lot, DFW, for making us focus on snot and matters nasal again. No, really, thanks.

Now we move on, back to YDAU and the good old ETA, where there is as yet no sign that there is any connection between the ETA/Incandenza story and the Gately story OR the sad tale of Wardine OR that of the medical attache, we just have to have faith that there WILL be and yes, indeed, there is, but hundreds of pages of text and footnotes and thinking on your part, dear reader, yet separates you from all of those aha moments. For now just trust us and enjoy finally meeting some of Hal's schoolmates, whom up till now we've only seen in footnotes. Chief of these here, in terms of focus, is Jim Troeltsch, the one who dreams of someday being a sportscaster and spends most of his non-tennis-playing, non-academic time practicing/pretending he already is one, but whom we find here at first in bed with a cold, allowing DFW to indulge in another round of rubbing our noses in various studies and observations of the theory and practice of nose goblinology, as it were, ew and harumph. Fortunately, though, this go-around DFW is more interested in making observations about the kind of fugue state-cum-four-alarm-nightmares that I usually only get when I take Nyquil but which Troeltsch just needs to be sick to have -- observations which are startlingly accurate, I think.**

While that's going on, we get the barest glimpse of another favorite character of mine, Michael Pemulis, townie from good old, bad old Allston Mass ("broken dreams strewn amongst the broken glass" as the old song says), affector of a yachtsman's cap the way Hal affects a bow tie (yes, bow ties were cool long before Matt Smith), discriminating drug connoisseur and dispenser of dubious advice, but only at a remove. We will hear more of his wisdom later.

Then it's on to the story of the Enfield Tennis Academy itself, and of its founder, James Orin Incandenza, aka Himself, sometimes also known by his initials JOI. We learn he was sort of forced, Dondi Snayheever-style, into becoming a semi-tennis prodigy, but parlayed his tennis scholarships into advanced degrees in optical physics, which he then put to work pioneering, among other things, the research that led to "annular fusion" and the solution to North America's energy independence issues. He met Canadian braniac Avril Mondragon, the most gorgeous blond bombshell ever to grace North American academics, and married her despite a series of bureaucratic hurdles complicated in no small part by her slender ties to certain angry Quebecois objectionist types (we are told the birth of their first child, Orin, was at least partly a legal maneuver) and together they founded ETA, after which optical genius JOI discovered his true calling as a filmmaker. This last bit being the most important thing about him aside from his being the father of Hal and of ETA.

But speaking of Orin, dreary old Orin, enduring some of the novel's best pure satire, the pre-game spectacle at an away game (he is the punter for the National Football League's Phoenix Cardinals) at none other than Denver, CO's  Mile High Stadium***. This is one of the funniest and stupidest passages in IJ: DFW has taken the hype machine show biz silliness of the NFL's penchant for spectacle and turned it up to eleven. In IJ's world, the players have to dress as their mascots and enact a big dumb and sometimes dangerous bit of pageantry before the game. The Denver Broncos just have to caper about in two-man pantomime horse rigs, but the Cardinals have to don bright red feathers and some kind of hang-gliding suit and jump off the edge of the stadium and swoop down over the crowd to land on the field. Financial incentives exist for players who squawk or otherwise make an effort to sound like a bird to descend. Orin, though, just bitches to the old quarterback plummeting next to him, who tries to cheer him up with a "cleavage check" as they descend. See? Pure foolishness. Like Idiocracy. DFW having apparently shared Mike Judge's general perspective on the American Future.

Tell me he's wrong.

Next on Summer of Jest: we finally meet Pemulis directly. Hooray!

*Kind of the way I've become convinced that Jaime Lannister is the real hero of A Song of Ice and Fire. Hero in the sense of being the most important actor in the plot(s) and in the sense of being what passes for a moral center in the books. I mean, aside from the sister-schtupping, of course. But as a wise woman once told me, we don't get to choose whom we love, or who loves us. But anyway, I may also favor Gately as Hero just because his Boston story comes closest to being something like mine; he winds up in a halfway house for a good bit of the novel and my first real job in Boston was as a temp secretary at a pre-release facility that still counted as a by god Massachusetts State Correctional Center but was focused towards drug and alcohol recovery for the less hardcore types like say, Tobias Beecher on OZ, who was a perfectly law abiding citizen until his drunk driving killed a girl and landed him in the clink. IJ was published just maybe two years after I left that job, so I could totally picture Gately and the rest of his gang as residents of my former workplace though, as I said, it was still a prison rather than a residential halfway house.

**Conveyed as they are in an odd second-person interlude, all they could make me think of, this time around, was what horrible experiences inspired them. I bet DFW was a helluva cabin- or dorm-mate at whatever summer camps he got sent to when he was a kid.

***I'm amused that DFW, inventor of "subsidized time" has the name of Mile High Stadium surviving into his brave new future; that joint was torn down some time ago and is now known as Invesco Field. Unless some other corporation has taken over the naming rights. I can't keep up.

Summer of Jest Part the Third: Chapters 5 & 6

These next two chapters have neither of them ever been favorites of mine, though one is a giant plot mover and the other is a pretty remarkable literary achievement. I admire but do not love them.

They made me realize this time around, though, just what a big task DFW set for himself in this novel; the only comparable endeavor I can think of is the brilliant HBO series The Wire. The Wire wasn't so much a police drama as an anthropological/ecological study of community-as-ecosystem, as food web, with the Baltimore Police Department and its internal struggles as pretty much just a convenient framing device for the storytelling. Similarly, IJ is looking at a whole city, Boston this time (and, to a lesser degree, an imagined nation of ONAN), as ecosystem, with the Enfield Tennis Academy in the role filled by the Baltimore Police in The Wire. And DFW did it first, all by himself, and did a whole lot of science fiction-y world building to boot!

But so, Chapter 5 brings us around to the weirdly delimited little world of a Saudi Arabian medical attache, an Ear Nose and Throat specialist whose job is to keep his country's Minister of Entertainment's never-ending naso-pharyngeal yeast infections at bay* while the big man is in Boston striking a big deal with ONAN's big Netflix/Redbox analog, Interlace Entertainment. Which yeast infections the Minister is pretty much constantly aggravating via his staggeringly poor lifestyle choices. Our unnamed attache is pretty much in Sorceror's Apprentice mode without having had the fun of casting the spell, poor guy.

Attache's only happiness is to come home, sink into a futuristic superchair that converts into a bed, sheets and all, when he's ready to go to sleep, strap on a tray that's more like a feedbag, and eat dinner and watch "entertainment cartridges"** while his wife does the hard work of keeping crumbs out of his beard and whatnot. Except on Wednesdays when he usually works late and she gets to go play Burqa Tennis. Aren't we all jealous as hell of her life.

On this particular Wednesday, though, our man gets home early, to no dinner, no pre-selected DVDs, nothing but crap on broadcast/cable ("spontaneous dissemination"), his mail unsorted, himself bereft of options. In desperation he decides to watch an unlabeled DVD some unknown party mailed to him, a decision which seems utterly innocuous and utterly time-wasting, but will turn out to be pretty much fatal and crucially important to the overall plot of Infinite Jest. I'd say it's probably equivalent in its combination of banality and importance, if not in, you know, actual content, to McNulty's spouting off to a judge about how the Barksdale Outfit keeps intimidating witnesses in The Wire.

Our only hint that something unusual is going on is hints toward the end of the chapter that the attache is watching the program for like the third time in a row. It's that entertaining, apparently.

Moving onto the next chapter, we are jolted further out of our contemplation of the Incandenza family's drama (remember the Incandenzas?) by an entire chapter written in, what appears to this white girl anyway, perfectly rendered Black English, a study in unconjugated verbs, phoenetic spellings and all. The chapter, from the point of view of a pre-teen black girl, tells an old, old story, of a pretty young woman, Wardene, who is desired by her icky stepfather figure, Roy Tony, is brutally punished for it by her mother, and runs to her boyfriend Reginald for shelter and comfort. We get hints of a future conflict between Reginald and Roy Tony. All of this will have implications in the larger plot later on, but for now it's just sort of sitting here confusing readers and perhaps annoying them even as they might admire DFW's dual achievement of technical skill and sheer ballsiness.

We'll be doing that a lot.

*Thus introducing the icky theme of dealing with mucous membranes and nasal secretions that recurs in IJ in surprising and sometimes seriously plot-propelling ways, as we'll see shortly in the backstory of one Don Gately.

**Let's just make like they're DVDs, because DFW was very close on this. To the point where I call the TV in my living room, not connected to cable but via an Xbox 360 to Hulu Plus and Netflix and Amazon Instant Video, the teleputer. Which confuses the hell out of my lodger who has not read IJ. Tee and also hee.

Summer of Jest Part the Second, Chapters 3-4

One of the weirdest, saddest and most strangely touching bits of Infinite Jest for me is always this next scene, in which our man Hal, at age ten in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, is persuaded to take a detour from his normal routine to keep a mystery appointment with a service provider of unspecified function. "Are you a dentist?" he keeps asking as the provider implores him to have a soda to allay the dry mouth sounds Hal is allegedly producing as he talks.

No, he and we learn, this is a professional conversationalist, which (as far as I know) does not exist in our real world, but well might in the IJverse and so we're in danger of just accepting that surface fact and rolling with the scene, at least until Hal notices a lack of credentials on the wall. And that his interlocutor has a great deal of specific knowledge about Hal, such as the boy's fascination with Byzantine erotica, and is also startlingly well-informed about Hal's mother Avril's entertainingly varied sex life.* And other little details that are somehow off.

I love the way this scene unfolds, purely through dialogue, dialogue that is perfectly natural (if you're David Foster Wallace or his alter-ego at least) but still conveys all the details of what's physically going on in the room as the professional conversationalist's disguise and act start to melt away and collapse, revealing none other than The Man Himself, James Incandenza, Hal's Own Dear Personal Father, who may be a "towering figure in optic and avant garde cinema" but at home is sort of coming apart just like his disguise is and suffers from a wide range of delusions, including that Hal doesn't talk to him; even when Hal does talk to him, James seems to think** that Hal is merely moving his mouth, that no sounds come out.

Hence this elaborate charade, staged with the full cooperation of Avril, a charade that, once Hal penetrates it, he abandons immediately for a return to his demanding schoolboy-cum-tennis prodigy life. Nothing gets resolved; James is left forlorn and clinging to his deception and his delusions. It's heartbreaking.

This time around, reading, I feel much more for James than I do for Hal, with whom I of course identified when I first read IJ at age 26. Now I'm at James' time of life, though I don't have children to fret over, but the image of him trying so desperately to connect with his son affects me nonetheless, and more deeply than identifying with Hal's disgust at this ploy ever did.

We then move along to another glimpse of Hal's family life, in Y.D.A.U., which year we can pretty much regard as the novel's present. Hal is trying to sleep, but his older brother and roommate Mario wants to talk, and to talk specifically about Avril, whom the family calls "The Moms" the way they call James "Himself", and how she was the only member of the family who doesn't seem to have been sad when Himself died (we do not yet know the spectacularly weird way that happened, nor will we for a while, but re-readers probably flash forward to such outbursts as "something smelled delicious!"), indeed, seems to have gotten happier. The important bit here is Hal's metaphor for a half-mast flag. There are, he explains to Mario, two ways to bring a flag to half-mast. One is to lower the flag to the necessary height, and the other is to double the size of the pole, the implication being that Avril chose the latter means. I'm not quite, quite sure she deserves that much credit, but just as I find myself identifying way more with James this time around, I may come at last to have some sympathy for Avril. We shall see.

But so, already in just these few chapters we're juggling a lot of themes, aren't we? The impossible illusion of connecting and communicating, first elucidated by Hal's disastrous college interview and then illustrated in new iterations through our brief tour of Erdedy's skull to round out with the Professional Conversation; the agonies suffered by the addict (and especially the addict who is addicted to something most people consider lame and harmless), the challenges of precocity and hyper-awareness, the burden of self-consciousness... it's all, isn't it, very Hamlet. Wow!

*I love this kid. Seriously, does anyone ever read this book and not just freaking love this kid?

**I say "seems" because I can't ever shake the notion that James only pretended to think this, that it's an elaborate passive-aggressive pretense of delusion designed to convey to his middle son that he wishes they'd communicate more. Although really that's more Avril's style, isn't it?

Summer of Jest: Post the First: Chapters 1 and 2

Already, as these first chapters get going, David Foster Wallace is indulging in a bit of reader annoyance, but also quite cleverly confounding a common habit of a certain type of science fiction reader I call a Prediction Sniffer.*We don't know where the Year of Glad is supposed to fit in our timeline so it sort of hangs there in a literary timelessness that encourages us to let it go, nerd. Maybe O.N.A.N. doesn't exist for us yet in whatever year it's actually supposed to be, but that's not to say it mightn't someday, you know?

Furthermore, only re-readers like me who have paid attention to the chronology presented somewhere in the middle of the book and bothered to remember it know immediately that Chapter Two, which is set in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Y.D.A.U.), is actually taking place the year before the events described in Chapter One, though again, so far, that doesn't seem to matter much, as there is really nothing more timeless than a closet stoner getting anxious about how his next big marijuana binge needs to be his absolute last even as he is self-consciously and anxiously repeating almost exactly his time-honored rituals established in previous absolute last marijuana binges.

But so, back to Chapter One, in the Year of Glad (and don't we love Subsidized Time? Can't we just imagine our governments choosing to make an extra buck or two by selling the naming rights to a calendar year as they might to a football stadium? And doesn't it just scare us to death that someday this might actually seem like a reasonable idea? DFW would have lost his mind watching our current Congress and POTUS and SCOTUS in action. It's hard to say which branch would have driven him craziest), in which our hero, Hal Incandenza, is juking his way through his college admissions interview with the help of an influential alumnus from his prep school and his uncle. The tension in this chapter is marvelous: we are sharing Hal's internal monologues in which his dazzling precocity and erudition are in full evidence, the kid is near genius level and quite marvelously level-headed about it, and that he is also an awesome "balletic" tennis player just makes him seem like even more the kind of kid every school would be chasing after with scholarship offers and letters of intent even though he plays a minor sport, but there is a creeping sense that something is very strange, even very wrong. We re-readers know what has happened to him -- there is a positive "Dick Click" type revelation that finally explains this scene at the end and makes it even more terrible than it is on first reading -- but even knowing why and how it happened, we're riveted a the results on display here. Something has come profoundly unstuck in Hal's mind, something has created a vast gulf between his mental processes and his outward aspect. The erudite and articulate thoughts to which we have been privy are not translated to his speech: he gibbers and makes animal sounds and twitches and we-don't-know-what-all but whatever he does, it terrifies his interviewers to the point where one tells Hal's uncle that his sleep will be forever disturbed by what he has witnessed.

As far as setting up mysteries go, that's pretty original, and first rate, I'd say.

Then we go back in time to sit and wait with Ken Erdedy, who has started up his marijuana binge machine again and is caught in brain loop after brain loop of pothead anxiety, waiting for the girl who said she would show up at a certain time with a good quantity of high quality weed and worried that his attempts to make it seem casual were maybe too successful, worried, too, about all the other kinds of self-versus-other, reputation-obsessed, relationship analyzing, self-flagellating habits of mind that all humans, really, get caught up in but that potheads like Ken seem to be especially, acutely, painfully conscious of to the point of minute over-analysis of their own aspects, thrown in with more than a little magical thinking. All of this is exhausting and exquisitely uncomfortable to read, and it's the kind of thing David Foster Wallace did better than just about anybody, and thus even more uncomfortable to read now, knowing how things ended for Wallace. Honestly, at one point re-reading this chapter, which is only a taste of the kind of stuff that is to come, I doubted whether my going on to read the whole book again was such a good idea. I might have even cried a little. But then Wallace made me laugh again.

And so, I say to the book and to all of you other SoJ types out there, well, okay. Bring it on.

*When a book is set in the future, but that future is now the reader's past, a reader who is a Prediction Sniffer spends a lot of time and energy going over the text to see what the author correctly and incorrectly predicted, whether to herald the author as a prophet or to indulge in Nelson Muntz laughter, doesn't matter which, really.

Summer of Jest - You Have Been Warned

And but so, if you can't tell from the prose style into which I tend to drift on this blog, I'm kind of a fan of David Foster Wallace.* I like his fiction and his nonfiction (though I do tend to be somewhat partial to his fiction insomuch as I enjoy its autobiographical character in that it reminds me a lot of my own thought processes because our backgrounds, David's and mine, are not as dissimilar as some might think) and his in-between, but first and foremost, I like his weird blend of the two that is Infinite Jest. I am one of those first generation readers of same who spoke, as I staggered around Boston with a first edition hardcover copy of same in my ubiquitous backpack, of my "Infinite Jest cramp" and who enjoyed poring over the novel's minutiae with other Boston friends solely for the purpose of elucidating how Wallace wasn't entirely accurate as regards the street map of various areas of Alston and Cambridge and other bits of the Greater Boston Area but also agreed with them that the errors we found only made the book more endearing. Mostly.

So here's the point in the post wherein I refer you to Summer of Jest, an organized group read/re-read of my hero**'s breakout novel that kicked off today but which I only learned existed a scant two days ago.

But of course one of the participants is my beloved friend SJ, whose literary dumbassery I am generally somewhat powerless to resist. Witness last summer's non-stop sojourn through The Dark Tower, from which I am still recovering. But really, I love this book. I'd probably be up for doing this even if she weren't. Because David Foster Wallace. And all the rest.

So, if you haven't read this book, I will counsel you to ignore all my upcoming posts with "Summer of Jest" in their title, because they will probably be spoilery -- although really, of all the books I've loved this one is the least capable of being "spoiled" by a mere plot revelation or two, because the plot is only the smallest tiniest element of what is on offer here in this ridiculous, impossible, ponderous doorstop of awesome of a novel/stream of consciousness/meditation composed by a man I'd long dreamed of meeting someday and whose suicide on Sept 12, 2008 is a terrible, wrenching, horrible, soul-destroying milestone in my own dear personal life that dwarfs, say, Sept 11, 2001 and make of that what you will. I still cry like a baby every year now on that anniversary, and have yet to finish reading his posthumously published The Pale King because I can't bring myself to finally complete my first reading of his last bits of fiction. Instead I just read his nonfiction collections over and over and over again to the point where I have most of the essays by heart (and completely freaked out my Simpsons-loving little sister last summer when I hilariously overreacted to an episode I was seeing at her house for the first time ever, based on his famous cruise ship indictment*** "A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again"****). And about once every year or so, and yes, during the summer, I pull out my giant herniating hardcover of Infinite Jest and read it again, just to enjoy, just to admire. And yes, just to  be annoyed all over again.

Now, of course, with my completely ruined elbow tendons (all four of them, in each arm now!) I am reading it in ebook form again. How different will it be, I wonder? Stay tuned, true believers.

Stay tuned.

*And, more importantly, a frequent and not wholly conscious imitator of his style inasmuch as certain quirks of his have drifted into my own prose style, namely lots of footnotes in works of so informal and loose a character as being not wholly but almost entirely not the sort of thing that would normally employ footnotes, but hey, at least so far I've mostly managed to confine my footnotes to the length readers of modern Standard Written English generally consider to be normal footnote length, i.e. not a printed page long or longer, so far. So far.

**So okay, I have a lot of heroes. I am a child of my age. Deal.

***Oh dude. Every bit of poop cruise type news that hits my feeds, I wish he was around to hoot at in his erudite, eloquent, pathetic way.

****One of my friends from my Boston days, who may Tweet at present under the username of @Hoover_Dam, once seized the opportunity after a talk of his to thrust a Celebrity Cruise brochure under his nose to sign, only to be told with a sigh "I thought I was done with these." Poor guy.