AtD mention in IJ article

[gp]

That writer is ridiculous...  if anything long books now appear "self
indulgent and stuntish" because that's all that IJ was.  And that
Novel of the Future just keeps on stuntin' with its Jest Fests and
sloppy language.  I wonder if this writer has read either... or, since
AtD is pretty new, whether he / she (Lev?) has actually picked up a
book weighing in at over five hundred pages.  He/She obviously doesn't
have a lot of experience with long books if size alone gives them the
ability to write them off.

On 11/27/06, Ya Sam <takoitov at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Ten Years Beyond Infinite
> Revolutionary or unreadable? The long, strange afterlife of David Foster
> Wallace's Infinite Jest
> By LEV GROSSMAN
>
> "Wallace's publisher is celebrating the anniversary with a special $10
> paperback edition and a series of "Jest Fest" readings and panels. But it
> might be just as appropriate to deliver a eulogy for Infinite Jest--not to
> praise it but to bury it. After all, it did not win (nor was it a runner-up
> for) the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize or any other major award.
> It was hailed as the Novel of the Future, and in fact it kicked off a
> temporary revival of the maxi-novel, books like Cryptonomicon and The
> Corrections and Underworld and White Teeth. For a moment there, it felt as
> though novels simply had to get longer and longer to encompass the world's
> galloping complexity and interconnectedness. Then the fad faded. Now Thomas
> Pynchon's Against the Day (1,085 pages) just seems self-indulgent and
> stuntish.
>
> But it's a mistake to lump Infinite Jest in with its successors. Think of it
> instead in terms of its forebears. Think of it as a Dickens novel. It's a
> book about two socially disparate groups--the tennis players and the drug
> addicts--and the various plot strands that bind them together. Granted,
> Wallace's plot strands are way more confusing than Dickens', and Wallace
> leaves his story lines dangling in a way that Dickens never did. But Dickens
> was a synthesizer, writing in an attempt to knit the world together.
> Infinite Jest holds up a mirror to the world's brokenness."
>
>
> http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1562956,00.html
>
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