NP - Infinite Jest

[Mark Kohut]

I like Matthew, too and I am one who stopped out of reading some BIG novels due to work overload and life pressures (including GR back in the dark ages)------BUT I am firmly of the camp that we should take the time with (the right) big books.......The world is hugely hard to get right....
So, size matters. 

Here's one major problem as I see it: How do we feel the big books relatively whole, positive or less than?  We have to have some sense of the cumulative themes as they come together---or don't. (see the plisters
on whether Aginst the Day works as a whole or doesn't. I had more time than when I first tried to read GR (or Proust for that matter) and/but I did feel it build to its ending(s).....

Others feel there is much that is extraneous in Atd, as I did about IJ, say. 

Just sayin'...

--- On Wed, 9/23/09, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>
> Subject: NP - Infinite Jest
> To: "P-list" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Wednesday, September 23, 2009, 2:37 PM
> Matthew Yglesias, one of my favorite
> political bloggers just finished IJ:
> 
> http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/09/infinite-jest.php
> 
> After working at it on-and-off all summer long, I’m
> finally done with
> Infinite Jest and I feel . . . well, I don’t quite know
> how I feel. I
> was determined not to let reading this difficult book
> become a
> “difficult” process and just resolved to read a page
> then turn the
> page then read the next page (modified, as necessary, for
> footnotes
> and such) and not spend too much time worrying about
> whether or not I
> was understanding everything that’s going on.
> Consequently, I enjoyed
> myself reading the book—it’s funny, clever, etc., has
> some great set
> pieces, blah blah. Also some weak points. But by the end
> this has
> added up to . . . what, exactly? I don’t really know. A
> sprawling
> meditation on addiction and the over-entertained American,
> I guess.
> 
> But in a fundamental sense it struck me as very
> unsatisfying. Not just
> in terms of the weird ending, but in terms of definitely
> not feeling
> like I got more out of reading it than I could have gotten
> out of
> reading three books that were one third the length. That in
> turn is
> really making me glad that I was made to read Anna Karenina
> and Moby
> Dick in high school. I really loved both those giant
> honking books,
> but does it really make sense for a busy person in the
> modern world
> who maybe doesn’t care to dedicate all that much time to
> classic
> novels to read them? Seems like it might make more sense to
> read some
> short Tolstoy like “Family Happiness” and “Hadji
> Murat” and then move
> on to other things.
> 
> Adding new possible ways to entertain ourselves naturally
> starts to
> squeeze out the viability of some old ways. And maybe the
> long novel
> is among the squeezed. Which seems in some ways regrettable
> (which I
> take it is part of the point of Infinite Jest) but at the
> same time to
> really be a feature of the world.
> 
>