authors under the influence

[David Casseres]

On 10/16/06, Will Layman <WillLayman at comcast.net> wrote:
> ... I just could not disagree
> more with David assertion: "no nutritional content.  Nothing to think
> about, no change in your weather, let alone your life.  It's empty."
> I well understand people getting frustrated with the details, the
> length, the endnotes, but JEST is just packed with "real" concerns --
> addiction, family dysfunction, sibling rivalry.  When you push past
> all the hi-jinks it is a much more conventional, character-driven
> novel than, say, GR.  And, in fact, that was Wallace's intent.  If
> you read his essay about television and literature in the first essay
> collection, it's clear that he wanted to write something that would
> kind of transcend the cleverer-than-thou po-mo, Look How Self-
> Conscious-I-Am "Lost in the Funhouse" type thing he had been writing
> up to that point.  JEST is an attempt, I think, to write the post-
> modern classic that destroy post-modernism by, you know, actually
> CARING.

But you know, he wound up writing a treatise against marijuana whose
intellectual content is firmly rooted in 1950's propaganda of the most
ignorant kind.  And a portrait of 12-step recovery that has me
screaming for something, anything, to get me high enough to escape
that infernal drone of disinformation. And as for family dysfunction
and sibling rivalry, can I please, please just re-read Faulkner and
Shakespeare instead?  OK, you've answered my complaint about "no
nutritional content," and I'm saying Empty Calories.

> I think Hal's story is actually pretty heart-breaking.

It is moving.  I give it that, at least if we strip away all the
phoney baloney about his marijuana "addiction."