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Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace
by David Foster Wallace
Drew's review
bookshelves: big-and-supposedly-difficult, time-magazine-top-100, postmodern-toasties
May 07, 12
bookshelves: big-and-supposedly-difficult, time-magazine-top-100, postmodern-toasties
Read in March, 2008
Update 5/7...Man, I don't know if I can write this. Here is one thought I don't think I've seen before: a rationale for the cloud design on the cover:
(p. 509) "And also the overenhanced blue of the wallpaper's sky, which the wallpaper scheme was fluffy cumuli arrayed patternlessly against an overenhancedly blue sky, incredibly disorienting wallpaper . . . No one's sure what C.T.'s choice of wallpaper is supposed to communicate, especially to parents who come with prospective kids in tow to scout out E.T.A., but Hal loathes sky-and-cloud wallpaper because it makes him feel high-altitude and disoriented and sometimes plummeting."
(p. 347) "You are at a fork in the road that Boston AA calls your Bottom, though the term is misleading, because everybody here agrees it's more like someplace very high and unsupported: you're on the edge of something tall and leaning way out forward . . ."
Coincidence?
Review soon.
Update 4/15: So it's common knowledge among people who've had a certain reaction to Infinite Jest that the book is supposedly structured like a Sierpinski Gasket. What I haven't seen, and badly want to, is a gigantic diagram of a Sierpinski Gasket with details or scenes or characters from IJ written into their proper (or at least a plausible) place. Has anyone done this?
Edit: Reading this for the fifth time starting tonight (April is the cruelest month). More substantial review, and probably some sort of ongoing status-update-related thing, coming at some point pretty soon.
Old review, because I still sort of like it:
If you're looking for a big, smart, well-written, sad-but-funny book about addiction, tennis, depression, film, the Quebecois separatist movement, loneliness, entertainment, therapy, drugs, hospitals, politics, America as seen by other countries, America as seen by its own lunatic fringe, the environment, the future, Oedipal complexes, thinly veiled Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky references, preternaturally smart high schoolers, Boston, and the 20th century as seen through a brick, then you will like Infinite Jest.
(p. 509) "And also the overenhanced blue of the wallpaper's sky, which the wallpaper scheme was fluffy cumuli arrayed patternlessly against an overenhancedly blue sky, incredibly disorienting wallpaper . . . No one's sure what C.T.'s choice of wallpaper is supposed to communicate, especially to parents who come with prospective kids in tow to scout out E.T.A., but Hal loathes sky-and-cloud wallpaper because it makes him feel high-altitude and disoriented and sometimes plummeting."
(p. 347) "You are at a fork in the road that Boston AA calls your Bottom, though the term is misleading, because everybody here agrees it's more like someplace very high and unsupported: you're on the edge of something tall and leaning way out forward . . ."
Coincidence?
Review soon.
Update 4/15: So it's common knowledge among people who've had a certain reaction to Infinite Jest that the book is supposedly structured like a Sierpinski Gasket. What I haven't seen, and badly want to, is a gigantic diagram of a Sierpinski Gasket with details or scenes or characters from IJ written into their proper (or at least a plausible) place. Has anyone done this?
Edit: Reading this for the fifth time starting tonight (April is the cruelest month). More substantial review, and probably some sort of ongoing status-update-related thing, coming at some point pretty soon.
Old review, because I still sort of like it:
If you're looking for a big, smart, well-written, sad-but-funny book about addiction, tennis, depression, film, the Quebecois separatist movement, loneliness, entertainment, therapy, drugs, hospitals, politics, America as seen by other countries, America as seen by its own lunatic fringe, the environment, the future, Oedipal complexes, thinly veiled Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky references, preternaturally smart high schoolers, Boston, and the 20th century as seen through a brick, then you will like Infinite Jest.
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Quotes Drew Liked
“Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Est" ("They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier").”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
Reading Progress
| 04/14/2012 | page 190 |
|
18.0% |
""Madame Psychosis is one of only two people Mario would love to talk to but would be scared to try." Who's the other one?" |
| 04/17/2012 | page 506 |
|
47.0% | "Not that I'd ever suggest trying to make a film out of IJ, but some of the scenes in here would be so good on film. E.g. Roy Tony convincing Erdedy to give him a hug." |
| 04/23/2012 | page 652 |
|
60.0% | 2 comments |
| 04/25/2012 | page 783 |
|
73.0% | ""The ingenious layer to the lie was that the guy thought the thirty days' grace was for Pemulis . . . the thirty days was actually for me, and Mike let me stand there with my Unit out and not say anything while he sold the urologist land and magazine subscriptions and Ginsu knives. He did it for me, and I'm not even the one they want."" |
| 04/27/2012 | page 933 |
|
86.0% | ""No man put his tongue on D. W. Gately and lived"" |
Comments (showing 1-21 of 21) (21 new)
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Haha yep. First time I read it was spring of my sophomore year in college (about 6 months before Wallace eliminated his map for keeps), then I read it again the next year during a particularly dark time. Then I had to read it again for my senior thesis. And it wasn't like it was getting any less good, so I've been reading it once a year since then.
Yeah, it's going slower than expected because I'm also reading Mason & Dixon, not to mention The Thin Red Line, which itself is no slouch, heft-wise, though quite a bit easier on the brain.
Mason & Dixon is great. It'd have to have a terrible ending for me not to give it 5 stars. Looking forward to writing the review, too, although I always end up feeling differently when it comes time to actually buckle down and write it.
i've heard dfw say that it was the intended shape of the book, but because of the cuts, it kinda lost that layout. but yeah, i haven't seen any structural plotting of the book anywhere. maybe double check on Wallace1
Yeah, I heard the same thing re the Siepinski Gasket. I listened to a radio interview with Wallace and a droning literary critic (I can't remember his name) from around the time the book came out, and Wallace said that his editor forced him to omit certain sections that would have made the book just that little bit more obscenely long, and so it ended up looking like a somewhat warped and slanted kind of super triangle. But still, I think a diagram could still be very useful in interpreting the book, despite the hours and hours upon hours and hours it would take to do well.
Sean wrote: "Wallace said that his editor forced him to omit certain sections that would have made the book just that little bit more obscenely long."Here is a report on the first draft of IJ from critic Steven Moore. His summary, "And so but it should be obvious by now that not only did Wallace make very few cuts—about 40 pages[. . .]—he wound up adding a considerable amount of new material."
So, Triangulators should have sufficient material to work out their hypothesis. And claims of massive cuts to IJ might be suspicioned. Were there to have been massive cuts we might expect to find them among DFW's archive and left-behinds?
I'll have to take a look at the Steven Moore thing. Apparently there is something similar to what I'm looking for in Elegant Complexity; anybody happen to be able to confirm or deny?
Not to sound like a douchebag, but I picked up on the connection between those two paragraphs my first time through, and figured those were the reasons for the cover design of this and one of the earlier editions of the book. Definitely can't be a coincidence. I think it's a great description of the horror of an addict's self-realization, and a further parallel between the ETA kids and their adult counterparts at Ennet House.
Yeah, I saw that quote, but I didn't see the p.509 one in your review, which I thought was equally important, so I put it in. You guys will know this: what was the cover Wallace originally wanted instead of the clouds, the one that got shot down because it was too 'busy'?
The cover of the film Metropolis. I'm glad he didn't go with it, too. The bright blue sky and cumulus clouds is perfect.
Picked up an incredible link to the Sierpinski Gasket on BirdBrian's review, just below, which sheds light on the dizzying fractal of the character threads: http://images.fastcompany.com/upload/...
Oh, I like those (I do way too many of them myself. But they're fun).