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Fewer Words

Daryl L. L. Houston10 Comments

I read something recently (I forget where, though I suspect either a comment to a blog post or perhaps even a tweet, which, this latter, would be pretty fitting) about how Wallace could be saying a lot of what he says with a whole lot fewer words. The idea, I guess, is that the sort of prose Wallace gives us in Infinite Jest is in a way masturbatory and hostile to the reader. I remember feeling this way about books I was forced to read in high school. It’s related to the “I’ll never use this algebra stuff again anyway” attitude I also had in high school. It arises out of a sort of pragmatism, I guess: For the person wanting simply to say that he read the book, all those words do rather hinder progress.

The thing about literary fiction is that it has mannerisms, and these mannerisms are often what make it worth reading. A Dan Brown book and a John Grisham book are more or less interchangeable in terms of the prose framework across which the often riveting (I’m not throwing stones here) plots are strung. It’s the style, the tics and quirks and fluidity or herky-jerkiness of the prose (and a thousand other things) that make literary fiction fun to read. It’s not about efficiency.

Saying that an author like Wallace is using too many words is like saying that — well, let’s just go with a big obvious but simple example here — DaVinci should have rendered the Mona Lisa as a stick figure. Surely no one will doubt that that modified painting I’m imagining would in a general sense convey the idea “woman” (or “person,” at least), but all of the nuance, all of what makes the picture art rather than just a picture would be leached out of it.

Behind already??

Heather Wardell1 Comment

I was ahead after my first reading session, and I think I somehow figured I was WAY ahead. Now, I’m behind.

I just spent 15 minutes bookmarking each ‘spoiler line’ page in my Treo, so that should help me stay at an appropriate pace… when I pass a bookmark I’ll know I’ve done what I need to by that date.

I don’t mind getting a bit ahead, but I don’t want to be so far ahead that I inadvertently post spoilers. (As a natural speed reader, I’m hyper-cautious about discussing books with people who’re still reading.) Of course, I also don’t want to be behind, because then (like now) I can’t read the posts here for fear of getting spoiled myself.

So I will get caught up over the weekend and be ready to post something insightful (with any luck) on Monday!

In the meantime, I am certain that my colleagues’ lovely long posts over the last few days are brilliant. I will read them on Monday and then know for sure. 🙂

Heather, who vows NOT to get behind again!

Infinite Spam

Daryl L. L. Houston6 Comments

I sort of hate to write a post about this (I’m feeling like maybe I’m a little too prolific), but my comments on wordpress.com blogs seem to get automatically flagged as spam for some reason (even, in some cases, on this very blog; maybe I am too prolific after all). So writing a post is an end-run around that and a way to weigh in via trackback on a post over at A Supposedly Fun Blog that sucked my comment into a spam black hole.

The post in question makes note of the misspelling of “roulants” as “rollents”  in references to the Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents. It turns out that there are all sorts of French language errors in the book. In the post, Matthew speculates that this error is another attempt to disorient the reader. I don’t know how charitable it is to suggest that Wallace wanted to disorient anybody. Lay a bunch of information on them to force active reading, sure. But disorientation seems like such a malicious thing, and I don’t think there’s malice in Wallace’s work.

My vanished reply to his post went as follows:

Some suggest that the bad French is intentional, chalked up in some cases to the fact that much of it comes to us via term papers, etc., written by teenagers with dubious French language acumen. In long note 304 (in which we read about the origins of the AFR), we’re also led to question the authority or lucidity of the person who has written the paper Struck is cribbing from. So it could be a mistake, but given how squishy authority and lucidity in that note are, it could also very well be intentional.

Some notes on the second milestone

James Martin4 Comments

In th readings for the second milestone (63-94), we learn, in a fairly straightforward fashion, a lot of backstory pertaining to Hal’s father, Dr James Orin Incandenza, as well as some details about Hal’s grandfather.

This is the first chapter in the book that I found challenging, both because of the the length of DWF’s sentences and because of the length of his footnotes, one of which contains the entire filmograhy of Dr. Incandenza, running to almost nine full pages and containing, depending upon how you count it, listings for almost 80 films.  Some of these entries are funny in the extreme, especially if you’ve ever suffered through too much really bad avant garde cinema.

Structurally, the details of Dr. Incandenza’s filmic output reveal many details about his own troubled life and, especially, his troubled relationship with his wife and, to a lesser extent, his son Hal.  Also notable, as I’ve been told to watch out for Hamlet references (and as I am something of a Hamlet freak), is that the production company for many of the films, especially the later ones, is “Poor Yorick Entertainment Unlimited” (990), which is, of course, a reference to the court jester whose skull Hamlet famously addresses in the speech from which Infinite Jest takes its title–a speech, not inconsequentially, about death and the purpose of life, given the fact of it.

Pages 68-78 comprise an interesting chapter about a Katherine Ann “Kate” Gompert, an attempted suicide now confined in the psych wing of some hospital. The cause of her attempt seems to be a combination of depression and pot withdrawal.  We see the chapter in limited omniscient (or maybe free-indirect?) POV from her doctor’s perspective. It’s a really great scene, as we get inside the head of the doctor (actually a resident) trying very hard to keep the clinically correct outward emotional affect, even as he seems to also become genuinely concerned (and maybe a little out of his depth) during this consultation. So, here, the communication theme appears again. There seem to be moments of genuine understanding here, when the doctor goes off script and Kate reaches out, attempting to be understood. I’m not sure the doctor ever gets named. Kate, mentions another doctor, Dr. Garton (a previous shrink?).

We get a really good chapter introducing Gerhardt Schtitt and his relationship with Mario Incandenza (79-85).  I like this one for a lot of reasons. First off, it’s one of the few places so far where DFW gets overtly philosophical, admiring–while also admitting the possible issues with–Schtitt’s pro-fascist upbringing (82), as it creates a sense of belonging and shared purpose, something DFW thinks is sorely missing from modern life (and that Schtitt thinks is missing from American life).  It also lets him philosophize more about tennis as a battle not between player and player or even player and objective rules but one between player and self.  Stylistically, it’s great because DFW switches, abruptly, from a free indirect POV (hovering in and out of both characters minds) to direct authorial intrusion (e.g. “This should not be rendered in exposition like this, but Mario Incandenza as a severely limited range of verbatim recall” [82]).

We also get into the really fascinating and strange chapter about Marathe, a wheelchair bound Quebecois separatist and member of an elite group of similarly injured assassins.  The origins of the injury itself are explained in detail in perhaps the longest footnote so far (Note 39, which leads to note 304, which tells the story of James Albrecht Lockley Struck, Jr. as he is plagiarizing an essay on Marathe’s group of assassins and the Quebecois separatists in general.  The story is eight pages long with several footnotes on it as well).

The tape (which Steeply calls “the entertainment”) which we now know has killed–or, at least, frozen, Medusa-style–the medical attache, his wife, and many others who entered the room and inadvertently looked at it, is mentioned.  Steeply wants to know if Marathe’s crew had anything to do with it, which he denies.  They speculate that it might have been personally motivated, which leads me to suspect that it might have been James Incandenza’s work, an effort to get even with the medical attache for sleeping with his wife.  But we’ll see.  It gets a little confusing there.

Fragmented Into Beauty

Daryl L. L. Houston8 Comments

Well there’s no getting away from mentioning note 24 this week. I skimmed it the first time I read the book because it seemed extra and annoying and probably extra annoying. End notes with footnotes of their own. A text within a text. Plots (or not) described within the text within the text. A tiny bit of plot among the players in Incandenza’s films (if you watch last names, you’ll see evidence of marriage and, presumably, divorce). Untitled. Unfinished. UNRELEASED. My feeling is that you don’t have to read most of these too carefully on a first dip into the book. It’s the kind of note that it might be instructive to read after you finish and on subsequent readings, and I find it more funny than annoying every time I’ve read it since that first.

I don’t have a lot to say about Kate Gompert. This section is hard to read after Wallace’s death. I have the impression that there’s something of a kinship between this section and the Erdedy section. Maybe it’s how they deal with something that is, or could be, treated as a very big cliche. Or it might be how they seem to try to deal with that cliche very honestly, how they’re pretty much devoid of some of the absurdity that occurs elsewhere in the book (feral hamsters and infants, anyone?). I’m not sure. But without going back and doing a side-by-side close reading of the two, I have an amorphous sense that the two are cousins.

From page 68:

We sort of play. But it’s all hypothetical, somehow. Even the ‘we’ is theory: I never get quite to see the distant opponent, for all the apparatus of the game.

I just dig that dream and its concluding sentences.

From pages 81 – 82:

[Schtitt] knew real tennis was really about not the blend of statistical order and expansive potential that the game’s technicians revered, but in fact the opposite — not-order, limit, the places where things broke down, fragmented into beauty…

And Schtitt… nevertheless seemed to know what Hopman and van der Meer and Bollettieri seemed not to know: that locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but — perversely — of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate…. as a Cantorian continuum of infinities of possible move and response… beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent.

I think that any time Wallace starts writing about infinity, it’s probably pretty important, given the title of the novel and the title of the film(s) that it references (didn’t catch that if you didn’t read note 24). This passage is kind of wonderful, and I have trouble not thinking of it as something of an artistic statement. Wallace’s work takes you in a million possibly chaotic directions. Understanding that his work can’t be forced into a template is, I think, a key to enjoying it. Your job as reader is to supply containment where he doesn’t and yet to let the work bounce about within your own sense of its containment, producing whatever associations it produces for you, which then feed back into your reading of the work. Reading Wallace is more like playing a match of tennis (I suppose that’s pretty trite of me) than sitting back in your special chair in front of the TV drooling into the tray strapped to your chin. It’s about engagement rather than passive entertainment.

I’ve always found the Steeply/Marathe scenes a little tedious and sometimes confusing.

Here’s a Question

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

What do you know about Wallace and his life (and his death) that influences your participation in Infinite Summer? Annie Lowrey over at A Supposedly Fun Blog made me think to ask:

This [reading has been far more poignant than others] in part because I know, I think, a bit too much about DFW for comfort now. I read the D.T. Max and the Rolling Stone pieces on him, and many other outpourings. I wish I hadn’t, at least in the context of reading IJ.

It’s a great post, and the bloggers over there seem to be off to a solid start all around. I don’t especially need more to read about Infinite Summer and its subject, but into my feed reader they go. (Disclaimer: If their blog turns out better than ours, we’re totally going to stagger, my zombie compatriots and I*, arms outstretched, and eat their brains.)

I’ve blogged already about what baggage I bring to the project. What about you? Is Wallace’s death a big factor in your signing on? Are there things you’ve learned about his life (e.g. that he was depressed for a long time, that he was a near-great young tennis player, etc.) that were factors? Given any such factors, can you bring yourself to avoid succumbing to the intentional fallacy? (And should you?)

Just curious.

* I actually have not gotten pledges from any other Infinite Zombies bloggers to do this. Also, this is not a cutesy attempt to use notes the way Wallace does. I find that kind of irritating. But I was inside a parenthesis and a bracket just didn’t feel right.

Some notes on the first milestone

James Martin9 Comments

I have to admit, pulling my thoughts together in order to create a decent first blog post about Infinite Jest has been harder than I had anticipated.  I’ve been beneffitting greatly from Daryl‘s observations and some of the posts and comments over at the mothership.  But, in a way, the wealth of good and informative posts only makes things harder, as anything I might be clever enough to say has likely already been said, and more cleverly.

I’ve found myself taking more than the usual amount of notes for this thing.  And I’ve been trying to stay ahead of the the reading schedule, both because I know that I’ll sooner-or-later fall behind (likely right after the students in my summer class turns in their second round of papers) and because getting a little deeper into the book ads some perspective.

[Here be spoilers: I’ll be discussing pages 3-63, below.]

What to say about the first sixty-three pages?  First off, it’s not pulling teeth. DWF keeps things lively with shifting points of view, a huge cast of characters, and a good dose of (generally dark) humor.

The first chapter (“Year of Glad,” 3-17) is one of discrepancies, the first being the distance between Hal’s academic performance, which is outstanding, and his performance on academic tests, which is described by one of the deans in the interview that is the gist of this chapter as “subnormal” (6). The second, and probably more significant, is the discrepancy between Hal’s point of view and that of everyone else in the chapter–or as much as we can surmise of it, since we see their reactions only through his eyes. Internally, Hal seems on the verge of a panic attach of some sort, but he also seems quite well versed in how to manage his own anxiety.

It is only after the deans dismiss his two handlers, Uncle Chuck (whose full name, we later learn, is Dr. Chuck Tavis, [half?] brother-in-law of Hal’s late father, James O. Incandenza, and his successor as director of the Enfield Tennis Academy) and Avery deLint, one of the “prorectors” at the ETA, that the silent Hal finally speaks and the distance between his point of view and every other is revealed, albeit with a good dose of comedy, like Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen skit gone mad, as the deans seem to try to outdo one another in their descriptions of Hal’s behavior:

‘But the sounds he made.’
‘Undescribable.’
‘Like an animal.’
‘Subanimalistic noises and sounds.’
‘Nor let’s not forget the gestures.’
[. . .]
‘Like some sort of animal with something in its mouth.’
[. . .]
‘A writing animal with a knife in its eye.’ (14)

Stylistically, one of the most interesting and enjoyable things about the first chapter is how close we are to Hal’s view of things.  His view is idiosyncratic and finely focused on visual details of the room and his experience of it (and reflections triggered by the same). But, for all that, it isn’t too hard to follow Hal’s thoughts.  What is challenging is DWF’s penchant for giving characters multiple names and nicknames, referring to them by whatever one pleases him, or the character doing the describing, as is common both in the real world and in Russian fiction.  Uncle Chuck is, at various points, “Charles,” and “C.T.” (even before we know his last name).  The same is similar for almost every other character. I find myself drawing lists of characters to keep this all sorted out.  The business with the names adds realism and a bit of mystery, and is clue enough that the author expects us to keep track of things.

(I’ve been using the term “chapter” here, to describe the divisions of the text, but just what counts as a chapter is also a judgement call. Some “chapters,” like the first one, start off with a little circular symbol and a title.  Other have just white space and a title. There are many places where the narrative shifts and the only typographical indication of it is additional white space. I’ve seen a few different numbering schemes for these. So I’ll stick with page numbers, for clarity.)

I think the main takeaway from these opening chapters is to acquaint us with some of the vast cast of characters (the vastness of which also, like the penchant for nicknames, invites a comparison with Russian novels), whose story lines will surely converge and intertwine as time goes on. It also serves to introduce us to some of the range of styles and points of view to expect from DFW.

The second chapter (17-27), where we are introduced to Erdedy, is a case in point.  Here, we move from the chaos and first person point of view of the opening chapter to a third-person point of view centered on Erdedy and following his thoughts in stream-of-consciousness fashion, following his anxieties as he prepares for yet another “one more last time” (19) marijuana binge. This chapter is a stunning and stunningly accurate portrait of anxiety, and it could easily stand on its own as a short story.

If I had any reservations about the novel, this chapter sent them packing. Erdedy’s contemplation (or, really, refusal to contemplate) the bug in his stereo system brings to mind Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Though not physically a bug, sitting almost without motion in his own protective armor, how much does Erdedy already resemble one?  Like Hal, Erdedy also finds himself trapped in lines of anticipation and expectation. And, like Hal, his consciousness is finely focussed, at times to the point of distraction, on the world around him and the thoughts it sparks. DWF clearly has a metaphorical turn of mind, which means we’re in for a lot of fun unpacking what he offers us and making connections between the various characters, events, and symbols in this novel.

Quick note: Reminds me of ‘Magnolia’

Scott Porch3 Comments

I’ll have a longer post about the first 63 pages later — I’m working this afternoon — but my snap observation is that the opening reminds me a lot of the opening of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” (1999).

I first noticed it in the section about the burglary victim with the head cold; that whole bit had the tragi-comic efficiency and off-kilter feel of the opening scene of “Magnolia,” in which the narrator tells a series of stories with neat, ironic outcomes — the first of which was a robbery-cum-murder by three vagrants.  And then it occurred to me that the beginnings of both “Magnolia” and Infinite Jest set up a series of narratives that do not obviously interlock but that you expect will over time, and both introduce an exceptional, troubled boy.

Anderson’s film followed Infinite Jest by two years, so I wonder if he had read the book.

Trapped

Daryl L. L. Houston2 Comments

Let’s begin.

When I first read Infinite Jest, I didn’t care too much about the Erdedy section. I suppose I found it tiresome and repetitive and too re-hashy of the whole addiction denial/relapse cycle. But every time I reread it, I see a little more truth in it. Even for as light-weight a something-shy-of-an-addict to various mostly-harmless things (as innocuous as, say, rigid routine and no more harmful than alcohol) as I am, there’s a certain truth even for me to the compulsive repetitiveness and desperation of it. Erdedy’s life is an intensification of the whole hugging-the-porcelain-god-and-promising-never-to-drink-again (and doing it every weekend) thing that so many go through during especially their younger days. It rings really true for me during recent reads, and it has morphed from a minor, kind of irritating episode to a key and true description of an authentic sort of human behavior that’s probably more pervasive than any one person, on his own island of addiction to and shame of substance/behavior/thing X, is inclined generally to suspect.

For the wallace-l mailing list, I provided an introduction of pages 17 – 39 of the book at the beginning of a group read that wrapped up in the last few weeks (which I didn’t finish, getting only to page 80-something). Because there tend not to be any spoiler rules for that list (most of the vocal members having read the book and most of Wallace’s work many times), my intro contained plenty of information that could be construed as spoilage and thus can’t really be used here. One pretty safe passage from my intro follows.

There’s a lot of bug talk in the Erdedy section, as in fact there is throughout the book (Orin’s phobia in the next section [and other things redacted]). I’ve always thought there was something sort of Kafka-Metamorphic in the first section, what with Hal thrown to the floor unable to communicate with the heads around him, his arms waggling as he makes sub-mammalian sounds. CT stabs his phone antenna like an insect, I think, in the first section. And here Erdedy contemplates a bug in his home and sees in the bug something of himself. He’s trapped in the geometry of his home (lots of angles cast by shadows, at least one triangle and one parallelogram mentioned specifically) and in the defensive shell of his rationalizations and promises as the bug (and it’s hard really to think of a chitinous bug as anything but its shell) is trapped in its shell in the girder. Erdedy makes basically a bunker of his home to “vacate” to/in, and this is just the beginning of a whole bunch of being trapped in the book [with certain details redacted here]. And then of course there is Hal’s entrapment within himself.

In one of a series of Bookworm interviews hosted by Michael Silverblatt, that interviewer brings up the notion of the double-bind in Infinite Jest. Wallace I think first explores these in the antinomies that appear in Broom of the System. Erdedy provides a prime example (a wallace-l member pointed this out during my portion of the group read). For instance, Erdedy desperately wants to use the phone to call his source but is afraid to because if the line is busy when his source for the pot calls, he’ll miss the call he’s waiting for. And he has an impulse to watch TV but winds up flipping around a lot because he worries that if he settles on one thing, he’ll miss something that’s even better on another channel. And at the end, he’s essentially crucified in mid-air, reaching for the door on one side and the phone on the other and utterly unable to move or even think. The recurrent double-bind theme seems to me to be very much tied into the addiction theme, the notion that you can cling with such need to something that you know will do you harm and that you’ll regret.

Isn’t the professional conversationalist section just a riot? This episode will pop up again in a slightly different form in an unrelated (beyond the fact of its occurrence in both places) long end note before too long. This kind of humor abounds in Infinite Jest, and if you like it, you might want to go and read The Broom of the System too. In this section, Hal’s dad contends that he (Hal) doesn’t speak, and it corresponds to the first section in which he actually can’t communicate to the deans. Yet it’s clear that Hal can talk in this section and that time has passed between the two sections (with the first occurring a number of years later).

I love this:

In the eighth American-educational grade, Bruce Green fell dreadfully in love with a classmate who had the unlikely name of Mildred Bonk. The name was unlikely because if ever an eighth-grader looked like a Daphne Christianson or a Kimberly St.-Simone or something like that, it was Mildred Bonk. She was the kind of fatally pretty and nubile wraithlike figure who glides through the sweaty junior-high corridors of every nocturnal emitter’s dreamscape. Hair that Green had heard described by an over-wrought teacher as ‘flaxen’; a body which the fickle angel of puberty — the same angel who didn’t even seem to know Bruce Green’s zip code — had visited, kissed, and already left, back in sixth; legs which not even orange Keds with purple-glitter-encrusted laces could make unserious. Shy, iridescent, coltish, pelvically anfractuous, amply busted, given to diffident movements of hand brushing flaxen hair from front of dear creamy forehead, movements which drove Bruce Green up a private tree. A vision in a sundress and silly shoes. Mildred L. Bonk.

Hal and Erdedy like to get high in private. For Hal, the secrecy is part of the addiction. I don’t think there’s really any shame for him. This little bit of privacy is the one thing he can control within his regimented life at the tennis academy. For Erdedy, it has always seemed to me to be about shame. We’ll see lots of flavors and degrees of addiction from here on out.

So far, we have a weather-protection bubble called the Lung and a campus in the shape of a heart (cardoid). Later we’ll see a Brain building. I don’t remember whether there are more things like this later in the book, but I’m going to keep my eyes peeled.

Have you been keeping tabs on point of view? On page 61, we revisit the first person singular for the first time (I think, after a quick re-scan) since page 17. And what a doozie of a section. It tumbles and spirals, and I think one does well to read it aloud. How important it is to the middle and later parts of the book I can’t recall. It’s a section I always forget about but love when I rediscover it.

Wow, I didn’t even touch on Orin or Gately or Mario, but I’m tapped out from writing and maybe you’re tapped out from reading what I’ve put down so far. I reckon I need a nice pat summary, though. So I’ll circle back to my title. Trapped. Hal is “in here.” In where? In the chitonous shell that his insectile movements suggests he seems to inhabit Gregor-Samsa-like (uh, no, not literally)? In his head? Has he retreated into that ultimate privacy of solipsism? Well, he’s clearly trapped somewhere. And what about Erdedy, with all the angles and boxes of his house, the bug sequestered in its girder much as Erdedy sequesters himself inert in his home? Or the attache, slave to his client and to his nightly routine, or his wife, thrall to the attache’s demands? What about Wardine, stuck in what is clearly a horrific situation? Or The Moms, agoraphobic since the death of Hal’s father? Or Orin, “entombed in that kind of psychic darkness where you’re dreading whatever you think of” (p. 42) or the roaches he traps and his nightmare about being trapped underwater with his own mom’s disembodied head attached to his own? And DuPlessis, whom Gately literally binds and gags, eventually accidentally killing him, and Gately’s own slavery to his addiction? And addiction — well, it is its own sort of trap or cage, after all, isn’t it?

Tenth-Anniversary Edition

Daryl L. L. Houston5 Comments

I’ve always had the same first-edition paperback printing of Infinite Jest. So holy has the thing seemed to me that I’ve dog-eared only a few pages and hadn’t, until the past week, made a mark in the book. My sister-in-law and my wife are (at least for now) participating in infinitesummer. The sister-in-law is no problem, since she lives all the way on the other side of the country, and there’s no chance of her using my copy of the book. But it occurred to me that there could be contention for my revered copy of the book between my wife and me. She scoffed at the idea, saying that we’d just read at different times. The thing about that is that my evenings are more or less consumed by it. She would basically pull back a nub if she tried to take the book from me most evenings. Further, I’ve at last started taking notes in my old beat-up copy. I’m kind of secretive about whatever I scribble in books, mostly because most of it turns out, after the fact, to seem either obvious or just stupid, however insightful it seemed at the time of its scribbling. So I have this dilemma wherein my wife wants to read the book, but I’ve started making asinine (and, thank my lucky stars, mostly illegible) notes in the margins, and of course I want her to keep thinking I’m as smart as I am dashing, so I have to shield her from reading these notes. Uh, and there’s also the whole contention thing.

Yadda yadda yadda, I bought the tenth-anniversary edition, and it arrived today. I don’t like it. The cover seems wrong (I’ve lived with this other for ten or 11 years, recall). The pages are thin and smell like the ink of cheaply-printed books. The font seems not quite as crisp and the kerning seems maybe ever so slightly narrower (I could definitely be wrong on this last thing). It’s just not the same book I grew to love (however much it actually is, in all significant ways, the same book). My original copy is something of a Velveteen Rabbit to this newer edition’s — what? I forget — stupid boat or stuffed asshole lion or something? I’ll gladly hand this imposter over to my wife.

The foreword, though, seems ok. I am not especially a fan of Dave Eggers. I read A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius years ago. I forget exactly what I thought about it. I think maybe I thought Eggers thought he was very cute or very deserving of something, whether it be of acclaim or of pity or of who knows what. I think I mostly enjoyed the book but felt tired after reading it, and not the kind of tired you feel after reading something sprawling and big and ambitious, as if you’ve just finished running an exhausting but satisfying marathon, but the kind of tired that leaves you feeling kind of Thank. God. He. Finally. Shut. The. Fuck. Up. I think Eggers probably does a lot of good work and is probably ultimately a good guy. My point is that I’m not a fan boy (as I am with Wallace, I’ll admit), that I bring to the table with respect to his introduction to the tenth-anniversary edition something closer to guarded disdain than admiration.

But I think he gets some things really pretty well right in his intro. For example:

[W]hile much of his work is challenging, his tone, in whatever form he’s exploring, is rigorously unpretentious. A Wallace reader gets the impression of being in a room with a very talkative and brilliant uncle or cousin who, just when he’s about to push it too far, to try our patience with too much detail, has the good sense to throw in a good lowbrow joke.

I think that’s more true of his essays than of his fiction, for what it’s worth, but it’s still relevant to Wallace’s whole work. And (though I think it’s far more true of, say, the Gaddis of JR than of Wallace):

This book is like a spaceship with no recognizable components, no rivets or bolts, no entry points, no way to take it apart. It is very shiny, and it has no discernible flaws. If you could somehow smash it into smaller pieces, there would certainly be no way to put it back together again.

There’s more in the intro that’s worth reading. Eggers closes by talking about what a “normal, and regular, and ordinary” guy Wallace was (“is” at the time of printing; this is no eulogy [well, etymologically it is, but chronologically and culturally it isn’t]) and how Infinite Jest is a “not-normal achievement, a thing that will outlast him [oh dear — ed.] and you and me, but will help future people understand us — how we felt, how we lived, what we gave to each other and why.” It’s hard not to get behind that once you’ve read enough of Wallace’s stuff. So I’m no fan of this incarnation of the book, and I’m no fan of Eggers, but I think his introduction does at least a small service to Wallace and his work, and I’m glad to have bought the edition (to hand off to my wife, having read the intro).