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A review by savaging
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
3.0
Two months and ten days trapped in the brain of David Foster Wallace. I'm still reeling. My roommate says: "I thought you didn't believe in obscenity." I answer: "Well but -- this book!"
Ten conclusions:
1. At least Mario Incandenza exists.
2. Ha ha -- three stars - what does that even mean?! You think you can just average out all the loving and the hating into a 'meh'?
3. Here's a line: "Nothing in even Poor Tony’s grim life-experience prepared him for the experience of time with a shape and an odor, squatting."
4. It's like that 'Powers of Ten' film that yanks you between orders of magnitude, the subatomic to the galactic. So it's a big book, but big in both directions: it moves as microscopically as it does expansively.
5. Nobody can write like this.
6. I mean I'm the first to say fuck plot, but I'm not sure you can just fuck plot like that, DFW. And no, I'm not just going to take all the clues and sew them together into my own speculative ending because the world is more surprising than that. No, get out of my brain, there aren't any inevitable patterns here. Shut up, DFW, I finished the book, ok? I gave you two months and ten days, you don't get anymore.
7. Why would I be surprised that someone writing about incomprehensible violence would be more than a little mean to his readers?
8. No, there's something I have words about, sharp words formed into sentences: Racism is here, not just within the characters, but knitted deep into the book itself. Every character who's a person of color is violent and unknowable -- mysterious, but in a flatly stereotypical way.
9. And misogyny: every female character is either hubba-hubba or ew gross. Over 1,000 pages and dozens of characters and the book only passes the Bechdel test (two female characters, with names, talk to each other about something other than a man) around page 300 when Molly Notkin and Joelle Van Dyne share three lines about apple juice.
So we can only concluded women are present and making noises by the fact that so many of the male characters are annoyed by them. I thought the book might pass the Bechdel test again around page 700, because two named female characters are walking together and one, we are told, won't shut up. But the description of the scene remains abstract, protecting us from the direct lady-words of this "hideous, despair-producing, slutty and yammering newcomer." Whew, if you're a woman in a DFW novel, best to keep your mouth shut.
10. But at least Mario Incandenza exists.
Ten conclusions:
1. At least Mario Incandenza exists.
2. Ha ha -- three stars - what does that even mean?! You think you can just average out all the loving and the hating into a 'meh'?
3. Here's a line: "Nothing in even Poor Tony’s grim life-experience prepared him for the experience of time with a shape and an odor, squatting."
4. It's like that 'Powers of Ten' film that yanks you between orders of magnitude, the subatomic to the galactic. So it's a big book, but big in both directions: it moves as microscopically as it does expansively.
5. Nobody can write like this.
6. I mean I'm the first to say fuck plot, but I'm not sure you can just fuck plot like that, DFW. And no, I'm not just going to take all the clues and sew them together into my own speculative ending because the world is more surprising than that. No, get out of my brain, there aren't any inevitable patterns here. Shut up, DFW, I finished the book, ok? I gave you two months and ten days, you don't get anymore.
7. Why would I be surprised that someone writing about incomprehensible violence would be more than a little mean to his readers?
8. No, there's something I have words about, sharp words formed into sentences: Racism is here, not just within the characters, but knitted deep into the book itself. Every character who's a person of color is violent and unknowable -- mysterious, but in a flatly stereotypical way.
9. And misogyny: every female character is either hubba-hubba or ew gross. Over 1,000 pages and dozens of characters and the book only passes the Bechdel test (two female characters, with names, talk to each other about something other than a man) around page 300 when Molly Notkin and Joelle Van Dyne share three lines about apple juice.
So we can only concluded women are present and making noises by the fact that so many of the male characters are annoyed by them. I thought the book might pass the Bechdel test again around page 700, because two named female characters are walking together and one, we are told, won't shut up. But the description of the scene remains abstract, protecting us from the direct lady-words of this "hideous, despair-producing, slutty and yammering newcomer." Whew, if you're a woman in a DFW novel, best to keep your mouth shut.
10. But at least Mario Incandenza exists.