Footnotes and Fractals: RidgewayGirl takes a long look at IJ

I've got my copy and will begin tomorrow.

"Fractals"! Love it. Sounds like a certain RidgewayGirl has done some homework prep.

Minimal, EF. Having carved out a bit of time for reading this evening, off I go, into the wilderness, about as unprepared as any idiot unpacking their brand new hiking boots at the edge of the Pacific Crest Trail.

I'm a few chapters in and my first impressions are that this is, so far, an imaginatively written book set in the near future that could almost have been written by Jonathan Letham or Michael Chabon. Which is to say, very good but not scary by any stretch of the imagination. Is DFW letting me get all comfortable before wacking me upside the head?

He writes descriptions so well, with a deceptively simple, yet surprising use of simile and metaphor that seems to just flow but must take an enormous amount of effort and skill to get to. The Phoenix heat vs over-active air conditioning as well as the wretched desert roaches was perfectly written. Also, Hal's tender relationship with Mario has me rooting for him in a way his episode at the beginning of the book did not.

3> Hey RG, off topic, but missed your earlier comment. The Pacific Crest Trail is an awesome travel narrative on the early days in the mid-Seventies, two guys hiking the PCT. Written for National Geographic. I've hiked about 250 miles of it here in CA, incrementally in scattered day trips.

4> Deceptively simple. Yes. The colloquial "conversationality" of his prose makes it that way for me. Kind of ironic, maybe, that gentle, sensitive, yet disfigured, developmentally challenged, Mario, is the least emotionally "challenged" person in the book.

I'm coming down from reading Nabokov, and finding that the language of IJ is feeling show-offy. DFW is so over the top in his creations. Wheelchair assassins? Cross-dressing spies? The wrapping is getting in the way of the structure underneath. There's hyperbole around Mario and his relationship with Hal, but the feeling manages to shine through there.

I will say that I am not bored.

I think that is just the contrast and it will wear off. They just have idfferent styles. I find that IJ has a very real, though very maximalist, style.

Apropos of Nabakov did you do more dictionary hunting with him than with DFW? I certainly did. If Lolita was a best seller back in the day it sure must have been a vocab lesson for lots of people.

No, I thought Nabokov certainly used all his words, but I'm using the dictionary more with IJ. Although that may partially be because I'm reading it on the kindle, so looking up words is effortless.

I enjoyed this morning's reading more than yesterday's, so you may be right.

I'm reading slowly, but steadily and enjoying it. Or I was until the previous Limbaugh administration was mentioned.

My how the pop culture times have changed in twenty years. What a Hot Commodity that Limbaugh fellow was in the '90s, not so much now. And what a dark sense of humour Wallace had to contrive such an all-too-plausible scenario at the time.

I've set IJ aside for a few weeks. I hope to start up again in a few days.

RG, I'm glad you set this bloated, blasted book down. My hope for you is that those "few weeks" will turn into a "few years" and that you'll soon forget about this beastly novel I still deeply regret ever reminding you (or anybody) of. It's just too sad and dark and disturbing, I see now in hindsight, to have foisted on anyone under the guise of an "invitation" to what has amounted to a sputtering fizzle of a "group read" -- and rightly, justifiably so -- the fizzle.

Other Infinite Jesters out there presently reading (or who have recently been reading) the novel in question, please, won't you follow Ridgeway Girl's noble lead, and set Infinite Jest down for a few years? I hear James Branch Cabell's forgotten novel, The Cream of the Jest, is quite good.

No, I'm enjoying it. It does ask to be meandered through, rather than concentrated on to the exclusion of all else, though. I want to find out what happens to Hal and the tennis and addiction themes are interesting.

EF, are you in that wretched place where you find that the book you loved earlier no longer seems that great?

Oh probably not as wretched as my posts make it seem, though you've definitely nailed the truth that, for me, and for a variety of reasons I won't elaborate on, the novel has lost a lot of its sheen.

I have mine on Friday. Read upto ...The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment...