Here's my take on
Slate's Audio Book Club Discussion of The Thick Book. The discussion occurred last March and was initially recommended to me by Mr. Ashdale (Thanks!). Taking part in the discussion were
Troy Patterson,
Katie Roiphe, and
James Surowiecki. I don't know these people but they seem to be experienced literary critics.
Here's some of the highlights of what they variously said about Infinite Jest
(I'm for the most part not going to identify who said what. Their words are in note form in black. My comments are bracketted in red):
- Hard to get your handle on the nature of the plot - quite deliberate and frustrating
- Intersections of plot are not explicit
- No resolution - re - the Infinite Jest film in the novel, re - Hal's psychosis
- Not a traditional novel
- No attempt to resolve mesmerizing plots
- Reading book is like getting hit by bus
- DFW enjoys giving us a hard time - yet I couldn't stop reading
- Arresting images, beautifully nuanced passages about human consciousness
- The book is a mess - is not "saved"
- After 500 pages were cut from the original DFW said "everything that's there was meant to be there."
- Never get narrative pay-off - never know who characters are until much later in the book
- incredible passages, language, humour
- DFW's obsessive compulsive gift is taking things apart - the world apart - and analyzing it in a way that is so brilliant that a normal sane person couldn't do - something destructive - taking apart and not stopping
- His level is so far above what normal people would think about
- In his non-fiction his gift is more luminously on display in a consistent way: in A Supposedly Fun Thing he turns something banal into an amazing piece of art
- DFW was like the substance abuse characters he developed: addicted to thinking
- DFW's "analysis paralisis"
- He wrestled with human relationships - not able to fully be able to accept his own goodness or the goodness of others
- Wish there was much more of Mario - favourite character
(?- this seems strange to me. OK Mario was a key character but to me not all that interesting. I thought Mario was the most obvious of characters - your token disabled character - no where even close to Gately - who the critics don't talk about til much later.)- For DFW human relationships are incredible arduous - non-existant and cartoonish, almost gimmicky
(hmm- and yet the characters are so human - maybe they are right: characters couldn't fully connect to one another.)- DFW not good with romantic love - but good with patrimony and fraternity- Fellowship among recovering addicts is real and sustaining
- When he talks about character's being in "the zone" in tennis scenes, he is hyper-perceptive - but his writing is also about "perceptions", perceptions of the world and as a result uses lots of lenses and screens.
- Some people want tennis stuff cut out
- One of the three critics says: "for me that's some of the best stuff in the book."
(me too! For me there is no book without the tennis "stuff"; through tennis DFW gets into the heart of ideas like talent and addiction.)- Wallace in his interviews talked about a soft spot for gags
- In terms of substance, Wallace is trying to get to something that is real, trying to get to emotion - and yet he seems affraid of sentiment: it almost always has to be kind of refracted in some complicated way
- His book Oblivion is very, very bleak: lots of suicide in it
- Pay-off isn't quite dazzling enough in insight to actually justify the work he puts me through
(this comes up quite a few times: the work DFW puts the reader through)- (They talk about Mario some more and as they do so I wonder if they really understand the book; maybe I don't understand it; but I usually felt like skipping the Mario parts because all along I felt Mario wasn't central to understanding the story, the plot and the riddle of the book. At this point I look at the time remaining in the one hour segment and wonder if they're going to be able to spend enough time on Gately and Hal.)- JOI's microwave suicide is gimmicky - yet AA and tennis passages are brilliant - and yet still you wonder if it's worth it
(I went through this process myself when I referred to the playwright who gave up on reading the book - I was wondering if it was all going to be worth it (I think this idea is fascinating because now the reader is basically talking in existential terms but through the process of book reading; the idea of "if it's worth it" of course also applies to life: is writing this blog post worth it, is writing IJ worth it, is life worth it? What is the "it"? Well... to go back to an earlier comment, the "it" can be the effort, the pain; DFW makes the reading hard, life is hard, cruel, painful.))- Book inspires fractally incoherent thinking
- Has all of the post-modern apparatus but doesn't believe that individual has disappeared
- The AA stuff is "pretty" earnest -
(? Pretty earnest? Is that the best they can say. I say the AA stuff is fantastic and about as authentic as it gets.) - he (DFW) thinks their is a person underneath it all.
- Three critics agree that they don't want to read too much of DFW's suicide into Infinite Jest. They don't want to read the book through what happened to him.
(I say - Why not? It's not a stretch at all to do this given how many mentions there are of Suicide in this book)- The idea that DFW thought that his head would explode (New Yorker article) - why he always wore a headband - you do feel a little bit of that in this book (that DFW's head is going to explode)
- Katie tries to get everybody more positive about IJ by talking about how vivid DFW's portrait of Kate Gompert's depression was.
- Want to tread carefully in this territory (connection between IJ and DFW's suicide); a little easy to be glib about it.
- New Yorker piece implied too strong a correlation - argued a little too much for a biographical reading of his work - I don't want to read this book through the lens of DFW's depression
- I think that this is an incredibly sad book
(I agree: a sad and brilliant (incandescent) book - beautifulsad)- Gately has a journey and changes his life
(the three critics are now trying to find the positives in a book that they have had little good to say)- From the 1996 Salon interview, DFW says of IJ: "I think this is about a
particular kind of sadness."
(Hmm - particular? Like what wasting talent? Or unfullfilled love?: Gately and Joelle? Hal and his Dad? DFW and...? Or just the plain old sadness that comes out of chemical imbalance?)- The book is haunted by over-analysis and lack of connection; an amazing sense of loneliness
- Inside of Hal there is pretty much nothing at all
- The afterlife of DFW - in danger of Sylvia Plath phenomenon - of his suicide eclipsing his work
(I don't know - does Zidane's headbutt eclipse his career?)- Idea of him as a doomed person does strike a chord
- When alive DFW embodied artistic purity
- Katie: I don't see artistic purity - I see extreme showiness: "Look at me - look at how talented I am"
(I kind of wondered about this too throughout my reading. But I still think he was an artistic purist. And I don't think the book was all ego. What I wondered was if the big theme in the book was about talent. Perhaps DFW's own talent. But more about DFW thinking about talent in general through his own experience with it. I think it's clear, quite clear, that he knew he had talent - I think he also knew that his talent caused him pain and confusion - and what he wanted to do was explore it: what talent meant, how to develop it, what were the pitfalls, what were the inevitabilities (addiction, depression). Having said all that I think that DFW's "showiness" is trumped by his artistic vision. I think his vision for the book was beyond talent and about aspiring to something greater than your own talent and power - aspiring to the great glory of literature, The Beyond, to the magic of the universe, to the afterlife and maybe even an outstretched hand to the idea of some kind of God (string theory?). I mean Gately, what a figure to find in a post-modern novel: he is so Christ-like: he battles (evil) addiction. He abides. We know Gately as the football player who "coulda been a contender" (Brando references earlier in novel) but my goodness does Gately ever redeem all of his sins. He fights to the death. Ironically he fought the Nucks to the death and then he fights addiction to his death. He is prepared to accept his own death to achieve something higher - a goodness. And you all know my first take on the last line of the book - I think DFW has put Gately on the shores of Dante's Purgatory - a place that acknowledges his sins, that will ask him to reflect on those sins and then eventually reward him with what he deserves - getting spirited out of that nihilistic beach setting - and into a sunnier place, sunnier even than that Pharm-Grade Sunshine. And who knows - maybe he will even get the girl - get Joelle. What a picture of love that was that DFW painted huh? - between Joelle and Gately? Love, yeah, that too. So, I would order it like this in terms of where DFW is coming from: 1.Trying to achieve high art (I want to look at some key aspects later - like all of the Freudian Stuff (Avril-John Wayne-Hal), The Shakespearian stuff, the Dostoevsky stuff, the possible Dante stuff and think I will finally need to read Joyce's Ulysses.) 2. The Power of the Human Spirit (Salvation)/ The Afterlife 3. Love 4. Talent 5. DFW Showing off & joking/jesting/trying to "entertain" his audience (with his talent).)- But it is a pure book in that it is not compromising
- Physically a very hard book to read
- Wallace's non-fiction is going to live forever
- His sensibility was more analytic than narative
- As a journalist in a class with not too many people
- What's maddening about this book is that if you took out the best passages - it matches the best of anyone - the problem is having to go in there and go through everything else.
- Feels like Ulysses
- Katie: only men write like this - like they want to build something (What do you think he's trying to prove with this book?); There is a "look at me, look at me," quality to this book. That 's why I'm not getting the purity from the novel somehow.
- In the 1993 Review of Contemporary Fiction interview DFW talks about his weaknesses as a writer: "...grossly sentimental affection for gags...I have a problem with concision: communicating things in a brisk way that doesn't call attention to itself..."
- He admits to wanting to be liked: communicating to the reader: "Hey, look at me, hey look at what a good writer I am, like me."
- Endearing: his self-consciousness, total awareness of who he is...
- never allows him to create a story we can care about or get immersed in, or that bothers to resolve itself
(there's that word again - resolve - it's funny - I deliberately stayed away from criticism of the book until I finished reading it - but - and I'm sure it's in a few of my posts - but I started to worry long before its end that the book might not resolve itself. I don't know why I worried (I've never minded a Euro-film that ended without resolution). Maybe the book was such a big investment of time and energy (unlike a relatively short 2 hour French film) and I wanted something tangible back from it - like the weak-assed critics who did this Slate Audio Book Club (they keep talking about resolution).)
- Gets hostile toward the reader. Was hard on reader.
- It's about a work of art that is destructive and harms you - does destroy the reader; when you want someone to love you so much you end up hating them?
(But did he try to destroy the reader? My feeling was one of being really challenged. Like the book was a game, a puzzle, a riddle to be figured out. It's this frame of mind that took my down that path of Dante vis-a-vis the ending. I'll probably be completely wrong about that. But I figure that if a book can keep you thinking like that after you're done reading it - that is a great thing. (I guess one criticism that springs to mind just now is that if the book is challenging like a game - it is not a game for everyone - and it is therefore not very accessible and maybe even intellectually elitest(?).))
- Many ways book doesn't succeed but does succeed in a fundamental way - it's about 1. perception; 2. substance abuse; 3. ways of philosophies: it changes the way you think - in a good way; the way he engages human consciousness refreshes my understanding of it. (For what it's worth this Novel That Doesn't Resolve Itself has changed the way I speak, the way I write, the way I see the world, the way I live my life (remember my post about starting to give more on the street?))
- Epigram - talent is its own expectation
- A lot of passages incredibly hyper-real
- Radical disorientation - see things others don't see
- Long sections of the book that have nothing to do with any of the major characters
- Number of characters who are grotesque: Wallace is saying: they're still human beings - amazing number of physical and pschological deformities
- Long parts of plot that have nothing to do with the plot are part of his refusal of story-telling - willful desire to BEDEVIL the reader (or challenge him - like a game?)
- What do you have at the end of this book? What does it add up to? (Well you have exactly what you have: Gately "conscious" on a cold, rainy beach and - if you're smart enough to have figured out that story ends at the beginning - you have Hal doing an incoherent admissions interview. And it is up to you - the reader, the determined reader who had the ability to endure the long journey - to figure out these two things at the end. What I figure is that Gately has died, but is alive again in another realm and that Hal did not make the Show but is about to embark on a more enjoyable university career.)
- All agree that there are miraculous and amazing parts - but the fact that DFW doesn't try to create unity to this book - is a betrayl. The end is a betrayl because he resolves nothing.
(Betrayl? These people are thinking small. Funny that they use the word unity because string theory is known as a complex theory in the world of physics that UNITES other theories and is also known as the Theory of Everything.)
-Chose to use fragmented narrative but you hope in the end you're going to come out of the fragments with some larger thing - Ulysses comes together for example.
- Do you think it's not a novel and perhaps some kind of other prose experience that needs its own name? (I had in the middle of my reading wondered too if it was in fact a novel but to me now that I have finished and reflected on it and come to love it - IJ is most definitely a novel and great novel.)
- Have to work incredibly hard to get anything out of the book - but it's just not there. (These critics complained the whole time about how hard they had to work at IJ. Maybe I did too in a way - but the pay-off is so great - for me anyway.)
- He refuses closure (He wanted to refuse closure? I don't think so. Or did he want to remain open to the possibilities of art, life and the universe (String Theory? Or even God? Or that they are in the end the same thing? Einsteinian view?)
- Doesn't want you to enjoy it that much. (Or he wants to challenge you? Challenges are often not enjoyable.)
- Refuses a certain kind of narrative pleasure
-Katie feels cheated (whine, whine, whine): you want these plot lines to amount to something, or come together in some way that is satisfying - but it doesn't have to be a neat perfect ending.
-Some sense that he didn't just stop (these people don't get it - he doesn't just stop - he deliberately leaves something for the reader - something even harder that getting through the thousand pages - he leaves a riddle for us to solve - which makes his "entertainment" infinitely more challenging and human and considerate and liberating than The Entertainment - which is just supposed to trap us, put us in a cage, sew open our eyeballs and kill us.)
-Gately does have a journey but Hal has nothing.
(Hal's journey is about to begin at university while Gately's - I think - is continuing toward ultimate salvation.)- Structurally the book is webbed
(I think this is Troy Patterson speaking and this is good. This gets closer to string theory or the Theory of Everything) and I don't know if that's going to lead to narrative satisfaction but maybe the novel is it's own species of thing.
(I like that - own species of thing; still a novel though.)-Katie: ideal thing is - and this is very rare - you come out looking at things differently - and very few even very good books do that, have that power
(this was my experience with the book and author as I mentioned above; very powerful experience)- Overwritten quality
- Continued doubts about human interaction
-Rabbit Run more my style
- DFW interested in filling the thing all the way to the top and putting everything into it that he knew and thought
- The non-fiction - where's that guy?
- IJ is a book you can pick it open it in the middle and start reading it
- Good insomniac book - little perfect chunks
- Parts of him were in every character
- A+ for effort...
