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MoBoReMo 1: Infinite Jest
Only took me...how long have I been working on this one? Now that I've finally reached the end of DFW's copious footnotes, I can share my Deep Thoughts on it. This will be rather random.
Y'all please excuse me if there are some apostrophes missing in this. I'm using the Eee, whose keyboard is mostly fine but the ' key takes more elbow grease than others.
First of all, I would like to point out, now that David Foster Wallace has "eliminated his own map" (using the novel's slang) and therefore cannot hear me, that using voluminous footnotes is no substitute for a coherent plot with an actual resolution. The novel is full of fascinating characterization, but the story never really ended. What happened to Don Gately? Did he ever get to see Joelle van Dyne's face? How did Hal fare in his Hope withdrawal? (Maybe I should try reading the beginning again, come to think of it.) Did Randy Lenz get arrested? Did the AFR ever find the cartridge? Did Orin escape in one piece? (Actually I don't care all that much about Orin, but his was one of many sub-plots that never got resolved.) Was Kate Gompert found and safely returned to Ennet House? Did Marathe close the deal with OUS and get palliative care for his wife? And WTF is up with Avril?
Throughout the book, I kept waiting to see part of the story told from Avril's point of view. I mean, there are dozens of marginal and sometimes wholly unnecessary characters who get a chance to speak for themselves, and I assumed that Avril, being the fantastically neurotic matriarch of the wacky Incandenza family, might get a chance to have her say. Admittedly, her story was, between the scenes with Mario, the exposition from Hal, and the footnotes with Marlon Bain, pretty much told. But I would have liked to hear something in her voice. The book makes it fairly obvious that her son Mario was actually fathered by her step-brother Charles Tavis, rather than by her husband, James Incandenza, but I also wonder about the other two sons.
And perhaps I'm missing the point of the book in making these complaints--I admit that, having read most of the book on the Metro while I was either half-asleep or annoyed at having to deal with mass transit crowds, I probably didn't pay as close attention as a thorough appreciation of IJ requires. But, you know, it's a great deal longer than any other book on my Kindle, I spent more time reading it than just about any other book in the past year except for Mists of Avalon, and after reading that much book, I don't think it's too much to ask that the author give us a conclusion. All this is not to say the novel wasn't worth my time; I wouldn't bother asking all these questions if I didn't care about the characters.
The scope of the novel feels like DFW wrote it the way he did partly to show what an author can get away with in this medium. There is a lot of material which, for the purposes of an efficiently told story, doesn't need to be there. Some characters could be reduced down to bit players and not given time to show 3 dimensions, and a few others could be cut out entirely without taking anything away from the main narrative. When you're writing a novel rather than a screenplay, this extraneous bulk is doable. A movie requires a scheduled chunk of time with its audience's undivided attention, and so it cannot go on for longer than three hours or so, but a book is a very different medium from a movie theater. A book can go on the subway, and in the DMV, and the grocery store, and anywhere else where the consumer doesn't need to be paying attention to something else at the very moment. A book can be put down and opened up at a moment's notice. Thus, a book can take up a lot more of the reader's time, which means a novel can ponder and meander and sprawl. IJ indulges in a great deal of depth but a lot more breadth. It's extremely adept at exploring, but the voyage doesn't bring anything home.
But anyway: there's Avril, and then there's Don Gately. While Avril is Dean of Academic Affairs at the elite Enfield Tennis Academy, which her late husband founded and her sons attend, Don Gately is an alum staffer at Ennet House, a rehab facility for alcoholics and narcotics addicts, just down the hill from the bastion of privilege that is Enfield. Gately had a drinking problem by age 11, which he picked up from his barely functional mother, and he dropped out of high school after she suffered a cirrhotic hemorrhage which left her a vegetable. Gately is haunted by the memory of the Quebecer he killed inadvertently by suffocation--he broke into the guy's house, was surprised to find him at home and sick in bed with a vicious head cold, and left him gagged, not understanding through the mucus-laden Quebecois French that the homeowner literally couldn't breathe through his nose--but his friends at Ennet House don't know that. What is better known about Gately is that he once beat a nightclub bouncer to unconsciousness, and then used the unconscious body to beat up the other bouncer at the same club. Don isn't normally inclined toward violence, but once he gets started, he's out of control, though perhaps this tendency is a result of watching his mother get beaten up on a pretty much daily basis by her live-in boyfriend for several years.
He used to be the hired muscle for a bookkeeper, not because he enjoyed beating people up, but because bettors always knew he could. In fact, his partner-in-thuggery normally did the preliminary digit-breaking when clients failed to cough up, and their boss only had Gately beat up a bettor when they needed to make an example of someone, didn't expect ever to collect the debt, and didn't really want to do business with him in the future. Gately didn't like to use his fists in his job, but once the fists came into play, he generally left bettors too messed up to be able to repay anything.
This is perhaps the central feature of Gately's self-image: he hangs out with bullies and thugs, but he doesn't conduct himself the way they do. He takes a job as a bookie's debt-collector because he needs to pay for his drinking and drug habits, not because he enjoys hurting people. He becomes involved with a particular woman for a while because she liked that he took her home when she was passed-out drunk but didn't rape her; she's frequently vulnerable like that and apparently most men she encountered were not above taking advantage.
So, with that characterization in mind, there's a bit late in the book, when Don's in the hospital with a bullet wound, that I enjoy, in which he observes his young, fresh-faced M.D.:
"He radiated the bustling cheer they teach MDs to radiate at you. He had a child's haircut, complete with spit-curl, and his thin neck swam in the collar of his white MD-coat, and his coat's pens' pocket-protector and the owlish glasses he kept pushing up, together with the little neck, gave Gately the sudden insight that most MDs and ADAs and PD/POs and shrinks, the fearsomest authority figures in a drug addict's life, that these guys came from the pencil-necked ranks of the same weak-chinned wienie kids that drug addicts used to despise and revile and bully, as kids."
This insight on Gately's part is not quite as unsettling as it might be on the part of one of his childhood friends, the ones who used to gang up on and push around the weak-chinned wienie kids. It's appropriate that a guy like Gately would make this connection; he has the psychological space to make this connection. Earlier in the novel we learn that Gately was the kid who ran with the bullies, but neither participated nor attempted to stop them when they preyed on the violin-toting pencil-neck boys from the North Shore. The narration suggests that Gately was able to stay out of the violence because his mother's SO never got violent towards him, only his mother. The narration makes a show, furthermore, of asking whether Gately was a better person than his friends for taking the neither-help-nor-hinder stance to their bullying, or worse. And it's all very insightful and ambiguous to ask us that question, but really, does the author actually wonder whether his character Gately wasn't at least a marginally more decent kid than his vicious friends? I think the conclusion we're supposed to draw from the contrast is obvious, which means the sudden epiphany of the bullied children eventually becoming the men with power doesn't have nearly as much potential to make Gately shit his psychological pants as it might do for one of the guys who as children took their sense of powerlessness out on smaller and weaker kids and who as adults are not above putting their cocks in drunk-unconscious women. Gately might honestly ask himself if he was any better than those other boys, but I don't think DFW entertained such relativism for a second.
Y'all please excuse me if there are some apostrophes missing in this. I'm using the Eee, whose keyboard is mostly fine but the ' key takes more elbow grease than others.
First of all, I would like to point out, now that David Foster Wallace has "eliminated his own map" (using the novel's slang) and therefore cannot hear me, that using voluminous footnotes is no substitute for a coherent plot with an actual resolution. The novel is full of fascinating characterization, but the story never really ended. What happened to Don Gately? Did he ever get to see Joelle van Dyne's face? How did Hal fare in his Hope withdrawal? (Maybe I should try reading the beginning again, come to think of it.) Did Randy Lenz get arrested? Did the AFR ever find the cartridge? Did Orin escape in one piece? (Actually I don't care all that much about Orin, but his was one of many sub-plots that never got resolved.) Was Kate Gompert found and safely returned to Ennet House? Did Marathe close the deal with OUS and get palliative care for his wife? And WTF is up with Avril?
Throughout the book, I kept waiting to see part of the story told from Avril's point of view. I mean, there are dozens of marginal and sometimes wholly unnecessary characters who get a chance to speak for themselves, and I assumed that Avril, being the fantastically neurotic matriarch of the wacky Incandenza family, might get a chance to have her say. Admittedly, her story was, between the scenes with Mario, the exposition from Hal, and the footnotes with Marlon Bain, pretty much told. But I would have liked to hear something in her voice. The book makes it fairly obvious that her son Mario was actually fathered by her step-brother Charles Tavis, rather than by her husband, James Incandenza, but I also wonder about the other two sons.
And perhaps I'm missing the point of the book in making these complaints--I admit that, having read most of the book on the Metro while I was either half-asleep or annoyed at having to deal with mass transit crowds, I probably didn't pay as close attention as a thorough appreciation of IJ requires. But, you know, it's a great deal longer than any other book on my Kindle, I spent more time reading it than just about any other book in the past year except for Mists of Avalon, and after reading that much book, I don't think it's too much to ask that the author give us a conclusion. All this is not to say the novel wasn't worth my time; I wouldn't bother asking all these questions if I didn't care about the characters.
The scope of the novel feels like DFW wrote it the way he did partly to show what an author can get away with in this medium. There is a lot of material which, for the purposes of an efficiently told story, doesn't need to be there. Some characters could be reduced down to bit players and not given time to show 3 dimensions, and a few others could be cut out entirely without taking anything away from the main narrative. When you're writing a novel rather than a screenplay, this extraneous bulk is doable. A movie requires a scheduled chunk of time with its audience's undivided attention, and so it cannot go on for longer than three hours or so, but a book is a very different medium from a movie theater. A book can go on the subway, and in the DMV, and the grocery store, and anywhere else where the consumer doesn't need to be paying attention to something else at the very moment. A book can be put down and opened up at a moment's notice. Thus, a book can take up a lot more of the reader's time, which means a novel can ponder and meander and sprawl. IJ indulges in a great deal of depth but a lot more breadth. It's extremely adept at exploring, but the voyage doesn't bring anything home.
But anyway: there's Avril, and then there's Don Gately. While Avril is Dean of Academic Affairs at the elite Enfield Tennis Academy, which her late husband founded and her sons attend, Don Gately is an alum staffer at Ennet House, a rehab facility for alcoholics and narcotics addicts, just down the hill from the bastion of privilege that is Enfield. Gately had a drinking problem by age 11, which he picked up from his barely functional mother, and he dropped out of high school after she suffered a cirrhotic hemorrhage which left her a vegetable. Gately is haunted by the memory of the Quebecer he killed inadvertently by suffocation--he broke into the guy's house, was surprised to find him at home and sick in bed with a vicious head cold, and left him gagged, not understanding through the mucus-laden Quebecois French that the homeowner literally couldn't breathe through his nose--but his friends at Ennet House don't know that. What is better known about Gately is that he once beat a nightclub bouncer to unconsciousness, and then used the unconscious body to beat up the other bouncer at the same club. Don isn't normally inclined toward violence, but once he gets started, he's out of control, though perhaps this tendency is a result of watching his mother get beaten up on a pretty much daily basis by her live-in boyfriend for several years.
He used to be the hired muscle for a bookkeeper, not because he enjoyed beating people up, but because bettors always knew he could. In fact, his partner-in-thuggery normally did the preliminary digit-breaking when clients failed to cough up, and their boss only had Gately beat up a bettor when they needed to make an example of someone, didn't expect ever to collect the debt, and didn't really want to do business with him in the future. Gately didn't like to use his fists in his job, but once the fists came into play, he generally left bettors too messed up to be able to repay anything.
This is perhaps the central feature of Gately's self-image: he hangs out with bullies and thugs, but he doesn't conduct himself the way they do. He takes a job as a bookie's debt-collector because he needs to pay for his drinking and drug habits, not because he enjoys hurting people. He becomes involved with a particular woman for a while because she liked that he took her home when she was passed-out drunk but didn't rape her; she's frequently vulnerable like that and apparently most men she encountered were not above taking advantage.
So, with that characterization in mind, there's a bit late in the book, when Don's in the hospital with a bullet wound, that I enjoy, in which he observes his young, fresh-faced M.D.:
"He radiated the bustling cheer they teach MDs to radiate at you. He had a child's haircut, complete with spit-curl, and his thin neck swam in the collar of his white MD-coat, and his coat's pens' pocket-protector and the owlish glasses he kept pushing up, together with the little neck, gave Gately the sudden insight that most MDs and ADAs and PD/POs and shrinks, the fearsomest authority figures in a drug addict's life, that these guys came from the pencil-necked ranks of the same weak-chinned wienie kids that drug addicts used to despise and revile and bully, as kids."
This insight on Gately's part is not quite as unsettling as it might be on the part of one of his childhood friends, the ones who used to gang up on and push around the weak-chinned wienie kids. It's appropriate that a guy like Gately would make this connection; he has the psychological space to make this connection. Earlier in the novel we learn that Gately was the kid who ran with the bullies, but neither participated nor attempted to stop them when they preyed on the violin-toting pencil-neck boys from the North Shore. The narration suggests that Gately was able to stay out of the violence because his mother's SO never got violent towards him, only his mother. The narration makes a show, furthermore, of asking whether Gately was a better person than his friends for taking the neither-help-nor-hinder stance to their bullying, or worse. And it's all very insightful and ambiguous to ask us that question, but really, does the author actually wonder whether his character Gately wasn't at least a marginally more decent kid than his vicious friends? I think the conclusion we're supposed to draw from the contrast is obvious, which means the sudden epiphany of the bullied children eventually becoming the men with power doesn't have nearly as much potential to make Gately shit his psychological pants as it might do for one of the guys who as children took their sense of powerlessness out on smaller and weaker kids and who as adults are not above putting their cocks in drunk-unconscious women. Gately might honestly ask himself if he was any better than those other boys, but I don't think DFW entertained such relativism for a second.