Author: Daryl L. L. Houston

In Which He Exhales with Relief and Gets a Small Case of the Shivers

Daryl L. L. Houston2 Comments

Usually what you hear about Infinite Jest is that it’s difficult and long and like climbing a mountain and dear sweet lord, those end notes and the esoteric information and the pages-long sentences and…

Of course, long-time fans of the work don’t gripe about these things, but it’s what you hear from people who’ve tried and failed to read it (or opted not to give it a shot at all based on similar comments).

So then to read things from new readers (and fellow zombie bloggers) like this from Anna:

So imagine my surprise, then, when I start reading and it’s not bad. It’s not so opaque as to be incomprehensible, only opaque enough to be, you know, interesting. It’s funny. Sure, I’ve highlighted some parts. Dictionary.com may become my home page. But it’s…wow. It’s good. It’s readable. Is it possible that I might even like it?

and this from James:

So far, I’m really enjoying the novel.  It’s challenging (even taxing) in places.  But, on the whole, it’s solidly entertaining.  DFW throws in enough humor and suggestion of things to come to keep me happily chewing through his prose.  It’s not, so far, the most difficult or challenging book I’ve been subjected to (or, in some cases, have subjected myself to).  And that’s a relief.  And there are rewards at every turn:  a novel turn of phrase here, a darkly comic situation there, a scrap of esoteric knowledge, nice little references to what’s gone on before, etc.

is really encouraging and exciting and even in a way validating. I’ve spent years being defensive about the book, even making pre-judgments about how well it would be received by some person or another and declining to recommend it from time to time on the basis of its difficulty. But reading my fellow bloggers’ comments and tracking #infsum on twitter is really invigorating for me, reminding me that, yes, there are parts of the book that are hard, and it’s a big investment to read the thing, but there’s so much reward too, so much humor and humanity and heart that even those doubtful about their chances of slogging all the way through it are finding it to be doable and maybe even likable.

Watching as people discover that reward in spite of (or because of) some of the difficulty helps me relive the wonderment of my own first reading (which wonderment I had sort of lost sight of). And in a weird way, it makes me proud. What exactly I’m proud of I can’t say. I suppose there’s a temptation, as an early appreciator, to feel like something of a pioneer, but that’s not the target (at least not the main one) of my pride. I can’t really be proud of the book, since it’s not something I had a hand in creating. And it’s presumptuous and a little silly to say that I’m proud of Wallace (though I guess I am). So I can’t put my finger on it. But every time I witness one of these little discoveries, I get a little catch in my chest, a little thrill, sometimes even a little shiver, and it makes me really glad to be playing along.

Approach

Daryl L. L. Houston4 Comments

I’m struggling a little bit with my approach to blogging about Infinite Jest. The part of me that has read the book a few times is inclined to try to be something of a cheerleader and to drop wisdom (ugh) and helpful reminders and clues about things that wind up being important later, and so on. But another part of me thinks that’s ultimately self-indulgent and potentially obnoxiously didactic. So I’m sort of thinking now that it might be nice simply to point out things I like in the book, to be 100% cheerleader and advocate and 0% armchair critic or seasoned veteran reader of Wallace’s work. I’m also perpetually worried about the whole spoiler thing. Sometimes it’s hard to talk about things early in the book without pointing to events or themes hashed out later in the book. It’s like trying to walk backwards through a crowded room without bumping into people or knocking lamps off of tables. If my co-bloggers (or others who may be paying attention) have any suggestions for what might be a useful approach from the one of us who has read the book before, I’m all ears.

Front Matter

Daryl L. L. Houston2 Comments

Do you read front matter in books? I do so compulsively. The standard disclaimer that appears with all the Library of Congress mumbo jumbo tends to read (as it does in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men) something like this:

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

Which of course is complete bullshit.

The front matter of his 1989 short-story collection Girl with Curious Hair spices the disclaimer up a bit:

These stories are 100 percent fiction. Some of them project the names of “real” public figures onto made-up characters in made-up circumstances. Where the names of corporate, media, or political figures are used here, those names are meant only to denote figures, images, the stuff of collective dreams; they do not denote, or pretend to private information about, actual 3-D persons, living, dead, or otherwise.

Essay collections are a little different in that they typically don’t require disclaimers about fictionalizing real people, but that’s not to say that they can’t have entertaining front matter. In his essay collection entitled Consider the Lobster, Wallace gives us this:

The following pieces were originally published in edited, heavily edited, or (in at least one instance) bowdlerized form in the following books and periodicals. N.B.: In those cases where the fact that the author was writing for a particular organ is important to the essay itself — i.e., where the commissioning magazine’s name keeps popping up in ways that can’t now be changed without screwing up the whole piece — the entry is marked with an asterisk. A single case in which the essay was written to be delivered as a speech, plus another one where the original article appeared bipseudonymously and now for odd and hard-to-explain reasons doesn’t quite work if the “we” and “your correspondents” thing gets singularized, are further tagged with what I think are called daggers.

A list of publications follows, complete with the aforementioned asterisks and daggers. Infinite Jest goes as follows:

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any apparent similarity to real persons is not intended by the author and is either a coincidence or the product of your own troubled imagination.

Where the names of real places, corporations, institutions, and public figures are projected onto made-up stuff, they are intended to denote only made-up stuff, not anything presently real.

Besides Closed Meetings for alcoholics only, Alcoholics Anonymous in Boston, Massachusetts also has Open Meetings, where pretty much anybody who’s interested can come and listen, take notes, pester people with questions, etc. A lot of people at these Open Meetings spoke with me and were extremely patient and garrulous and generous and helpful. The best way I can think of to show my appreciation to these men and women is to decline to thank them by name.

After riffing just a little bit on the standard disclaimer, he goes into that unguarded, earnest expression of gratitude complete with what is sort of a trademark serial-“and” clause that has a way, probably because it is sort of child-like, of conveying innocence and I think sincerity and honesty, which (honesty) is one of the things I most like about Wallace’s work.

So, front matter. It’s usually not worth a read but is occasionally funny, informative (in a “here, let me open up the back of the shop for you a little bit” sort of way), or even endearing.

Perspective

Daryl L. L. Houston1 Comment

It must have been Christmas of 1998 that I got my hands on Infinite Jest. It was late in my college career, and I had been steeped for a few years in reading dead old white guys. By this time, I suppose I had more or less committed to studying Milton and the dramatists of the 17th century. When I opened my Christmas gift from my sister, I saw a big big book with blue sky and clouds on the cover and a picture of a scruffy, sort of pursed-lipped, bandanaed guy on the back. My sister told me that she figured I had read plenty of dead guys and it was time I read some guys who were still living (now, just a few months shy of the anniversary of Wallace’s death, boy does that sting). She later confessed to me that she had bought it for herself but couldn’t get into it and figured it might be up my alley. After all, it seemed to be about tennis, and I had been an avid if mostly ungifted tennis player in high school.

I read the book in ten days over Christmas break, growing bedsore as I turned page after page after page. It was just that compelling, a fact that becomes significant as you wind your way deeper and deeper into the book and its central theme of addiction (the back cover of the book mentions addiction, so let’s don’t count that as a spoiler). For the decade-plus that I’ve lived with this book, I’ve continued to be hit by how the cycles and rationalizations of addiction and need described in Infinite Jest bear on my own life. Certain early sections capital-R Resonate with me — even though I don’t feel sufficiently entitled or tried-by-fire enough to feel such resonance — as has much of Wallace’s work since Infinite Jest. It’s been long enough since I’ve read all the way through to the end that I wonder if there might not be later sections that strike more of a chord with me now than when I was younger.

When I read Wallace’s Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, I thought there was just a real earnestness about the work. Much of it I’m sure I didn’t get. Good lord, I can’t say that I identified with all of the hideous men. Yet in many of them, there’s a kernel of unvarnished, private truth, things one thinks and hates himself for thinking and doesn’t necessarily say aloud (even within what counts as “aloud” in his own head). I could recognize little bits of myself in little bits of plenty of Wallace’s writing, and I figured he was really honest at his best. And that was something I appreciated.

I got drunk once after reading BIWHM and wrote Wallace a very short note thanking him for being honest. I didn’t expect a reply, but I sort of wanted one. I hoped that by being direct and brief and by not fawning, I would entice him to open up a to-be-canonized correspondence with me wherein he gave me insight into what scraps of fiction I would one day send his way for critique, and of course it would all be memorialized not only because of his benevolence in mentoring me but because of my own meteoric rise to acclaim in literary fiction and my own earnestness and erudition and sort of rebellious approach to letters. Of course I didn’t really really expect a reply. And I didn’t get one at first. But six months later, he wrote me a post-card. He didn’t invite me to lay my head in the lap of his excellence, but by golly it was a connection, and one he really didn’t have to bother to make. His bothering to write me back made me a fan not just of the work or the author as author but of the man as a person, however little evidence of his goodness as a person I had. To learn after his death that he responded in similar fashion to many many people only made me admire him more.

So, this is the perspective from which I write. I’m a big fan of Wallace’s work. I’m not a scholar by any means, and much (most) of what may pass for scholarship (if anything does) in the posts I’ll write owes a big debt to my experiences on the wallace-l email discussion list, of which I’ve been a mostly quiet member for six or seven years now. I still mourn Wallace’s recent death with real sadness approaching the sort that one typically reserves for close friends or family. I find it easy to forgive whatever’s bad or inexplicably difficult within his work because of how good the really good is. This is not to say that I’m a lock-stepping flag-waver for Wallace’s work. A lot of it seems almost impenetrable or just weird or even boring. But when he’s good, I think he’s just about beyond compare.

I started rereading Infinite Jest a month or two after Wallace’s death but stopped less than 100 pages in, maybe because something else came up, maybe because it was just a little too soon yet (I’m not sure which; I’m not trying to be dramatic). Now I’m feeling really up for it again. I lose track of how many times I’ve started reading the book. It’s a half dozen easily. I’ve finished it either two or three times, making this either my third or fourth full reading. I can hardly wait to dive in. Aw, heck: I’m 70 pages in already; I can hardly wait to keep going.