DF Wallace

[Paul DiFilippo]

Not belonging to the DFW-list--and now with no intention of 
joining _ever_--I thought I'd post this here, because of past
interest.  Anyone wishing to repost to the DFW-list is welcome to.
HOW I SPENT MY LATE-SPRING VACATION TRYING TO READ INFINITE JEST
So here I am on Block Island, Rhode Island--"the Bermuda of the 
North"--with IJ my only reading material.  I settle in.  Five days
and a mere 300 pages later, I give up.  Why?  Well it's not because
of any TRP ripoffs--as with DFW's earlier BROOM--but only because 
the book is so damn _empty_.  As a satire--its main mode--it pales
next to George Saunder's CIVALWARLAND IN BAD DECLINE, which 
accomplishes everything DFW is trying to do in a tenth of the space,
and with genuine pathos.  As a skewering of jargon and psychobabble
and tech-talk, any Mark Leyner piece of 500 words easily
transcends it.  But the worst affliction is its fascistic--yes,
fascistic--domination of the reader through extreme and meaningless
specificity of details.  Now, haven't we always agreed that the 
reading experience is a _collaboration_ between writer and reader?
The reader is supposed to use his/her imagination to supply the
images hinted at/sketched in by the writer, it being generally
assumed that concise writing simply cannot replicate _every_
sensual/historical detail any fictional character would really
encounter.  But DFW, by supplying such essentially banal and worthless
details as the type of sheets on a character's bed, seeks to remove
any readerly contribution, forcing his godlike (if only he were!)
images on the reader in an assault that reminded me of Alex
getting his eyes clamped open in CLOCKWORK ORANGE.  As one of DFW's
own characters says, upon the point of suicide, "she was collecting
details like empty seashells."
To 
To contrast, consider Harold Brodkey's "Innocence"--sixty pages of
detail about a single sexual encounter--yet full of meaning.
POSTSCRIPT:  I finally found a used bookstore on Block Island and
picked up a good old Ross MacDonald--TROUBLE FOLLOWS ME (1946)--and
almost immediately read this sentence:  "The first stages of
drunkenness are delicate, illusive and altruisitc, like the first
stages of love."  Seems to me this is what the first 300 pages of
IJ could be boiled down to.

--
DiFi&Newton/2 Poplar/Prov., RI 02906/Vox: 401-751-0139
"I have almost nothing in common with myself"--Franz Kafka
"I do the best imitation of myself."  Ben Folds Five