I started reading Infinite Jest at the beginning of Infinite Summer and I have no idea where those people are, but I'm on page 789 (nice ordered feel to that number). the first time reading this book, I really kind of tore through it because I was reading it for a class; and also I think that unless you are entirely familiar with the style, it's hard to get past it on the first read. like, I would just sit there agog at the ten tiny-type pages of filmography for James O. Incandenza, or the way one sentence seemed to wrap around itself, or the general impression the text can give you of a very smart spider making highly intricate webs.

this is not a flawless book; I don't think it represents the best of what DFW could do. there are certain parts that I hold in a certain holy regard but there are other parts that make me scratch my head. I think my issues probably aren't too different from the ones other readers have come up with: that the hysterical-realist style of it interferes with the message. because this is not a book that just wants to impress you (although I think it does), it wants to put forth certain ideas about human pain and the possibility of empathy and the difficulty of real communication - and I'm having trouble seeing that all taking place in the same universe where characters are born without skulls and die in comical ways. there's a scene where a character drinks some kind of blue deadly fluid and keels over, then someone tries to give that person CPR and ingests the deadly fluid and keels over, then another person finds that person and tries to give that person CPR and etc etc until the little kids who don't know CPR wander out into the room and see their family dead. and then, a few hundred pages later, there's a scene where a sibling of a character I really like is very brutally abused by his father. I'm not sure how to balance these incidents against each other.

I keep thinking of a quote I read somewhere, of DFW handing the manuscript to someone and saying it's "not very good." while I wouldn't exactly put it that way, I think I can see ways in which he would be disappointed. it's very clear that the issues that the characters in this novel struggle with - the Incandenzas being the central set of characters, in my opinion - are the author's issues, as well, and he's not overcoming them in the writing of this novel. mainly the "pretense that overt eccentricity was the same as openness." this right after an absolutely hilarious scene at the Thanksgiving table chez Incandenzas, where each is spouting off in their own way, being aggressively odd and show-offy, much like um let's say some talented authors we know.

so but if DFW'd really gotten over this issue and managed to locate something as simple and real as the maxims of Boston AA - sayings like "One Day At a Time," etc - then why is this book written with such show-offy verbal fireworks? does DFW just lose sight of this message he wants to deliver about humanity when he's inventing characters like Lateral Alice Moore, who can only walk sideways? is DFW asking me to change my sensibilities every other page - some things are just funny gags, right, and some things are really fucking gut-level sad? how am I supposed to know how to read all this?

one of my favorite sections this time around that didn't hit me with full force is the section near the beginning where DFW lists all the things you can learn from hanging around Ennet House - this is one of the sections which rings with very real pain that you can tell is probably the real reason DFW wanted to write this book. but in other scenes, like the Eschaton scene (which is actually really hilarious), he's going back to what he knows he's good at: concocting a very convoluted scene around an intellectual idea ("the map is not the territory") and loading it with slapstick moments. he's really, really fucking good at it; but it's not risky in the way that the Ennet House sections are. there's another DFW interview quote where he's talking about "dying for the reader"; I think he's only half doing it here, in IJ.

the other thing I can't quite get around is the structure. I think it's fascinating the way DFW has chosen to set this up, as a fractal or "something made of glass that's been dropped and shattered"; and I think it's masterful the way he's woven things so that you get the feeling of story if not the actual chronological narrative. sometimes I think that what makes this book so thick is not detail but an overload of plot; there are so many plots in this book that it's possible you couldn't name them all without making a book this thick yourself.

which produces this feeling of everything being very calibrated, which would be absurd I guess if DFW hadn't set this in a hysterical-realist mode. but it bothers me how everything is completely in the same mode; even Mario who's supposed to be utterly different from the rest of his family has the same kind of ironic speech they all have, only slowed down a little and in shorter bursts. DFW made every single character talk exactly like him; there's no attempt to make any character even slightly different, only at a different position on the DFW-gradient. this kind of bothers me. because this is supposed to be about real people, isn't it? I sort of worry that DFW ended up in the same trap he described in an interview, to paraphrase: "sure, the world's a dark place now, but do we really need novels that just tell us how dark it is?" (obviously, I have ingested these interviews to an obsessive degree.) in other words, I worry that he's just created something that proves in its form the point it's trying to resist: that we are all intellectually distancing ourselves from each other, unable to communicate genuinely, and obsessed with the idea that openness is just being extremely eccentric. it's so weird that DFW would write that in the book and then not even try to get out of that trap himself.

but I haven't read the ending, yet, which includes my favorite scene, the ghost of Himself visiting Gately. I really think DFW should have considered seriously taking out the whole E.T.A./Incandenza plotline and just writing about Ennet House and Gately. those are the themes and characters that make up the soul of the book; Hal's kind of an intellectual point more than a person, and Gately's really a human being. but the book wouldn't have gotten half the buzz it did if it didn't have all this "prescient" stuff about media and corporate takeovers and etc etc. which is really funny and sharp but not at all what IJ should really be about. in my opinion.

the pale king has been portrayed in articles as DFW's attempt to overcome these perceived weaknesses, and I think I agree with that depiction, based on the few excerpts I've read. I want to read the full thing really really bad. but I wonder, if DFW'd started out by writing books like the pale king, without all the intellectual gamesmanship, if he'd have seen even a quarter of the success he did. I'm trying to foresee what kind of balance he struck in the unfinished book, which we all get to read next year; it's probably still as intellectual as IJ, but in a less overt way where the complex formulas are replaced by complex interior monologue that reflects the intricacy of our own thoughts (see any of the stories in Oblivion). this kind of writing could probably have been successful in its own right, because I think it's focused on the key human issues that literature is so good at exploring. I have been extremely preoccupied with the moral dimensions of art lately, because it doesn't matter how good of a writer you are, if you're coming from some moral place that doesn't cohere (even American Psycho, I would argue, comes from a coherent moral place), you haven't got a good piece of art. DFW was still trying to find that place. even though IJ has its heart in the right place, its brain is still floating somewhere outside itself, still at a distance.

THE PALE KING

I just slept eleven hours and then gorged myself on all the new DFW-related material on the New Yorker website. reading posthumous stuff is becoming a routine experience, one I know well enough to distinguish the various stages - a burst of excitement, and then subsequent melancholy on realizing that there won't be new material forever. I mean, there won't be anything forever, but there is always that weird brush with infinity after reading something posthumous. you do get the sensation on reading a new piece that DFW has once again gotten completely outside of himself and what's already been written. it's the same thing as hearing a new Radiohead album - you just think, this person can do anything. I can think of a few artists who just recreate the last thing they did, and it's like The Last Thing I Did 2.0.

what I am amazed by anew is DFW's total mysteriousness about what he was working on - you don't realize how many gaps there are in your knowledge until you read an article like this one, which stitches together his life and fills in a bunch of holes. like, he made a comment in some article about taking an accounting class way back in the late nineties or something, but that's almost all he said about it. there were bits and pieces for years, but their subjects were so diverse - that one about the kid who has to put his lips on every part of his body (I love this one), the "evil child" piece in Harper's, and "Good People" in the New Yorker, which I was astounded to find out was part of this larger work - that I really didn't think there was any single project being worked on. I think the speculation in the DFW community was that it would involve a series of portraits of children (which may have been another project in the works, but not the big one). turns out he was just really really good at keeping quiet about that stuff.

anyway. this is the most important part, the excerpt from the novel, The Pale King. I'm going to be reading it many times over the next few weeks, but I'm struck, on a superficial level, by the lack of quotation marks and how the dialogue is just streamlined with the rest of the text - just another one of those things that seems so intuitively right and simple and makes me wonder why the hell I didn't think of it - and, though this echoes Gately in IJ, the discrepancy between the hyper-verbal interior state of the ghost versus the relatively pedestrian comprehension of the protagonist (when he hears a word he doesn't know DFW writes him as inventing a string of simple words that it sounds like to him, like "bone after tea").

the deeper and more far-reaching things about boredom, its difficulties and possibilities as the subject of a novel, I probably won't be able to comment on until I read the whole thing (which I have no doubt will come out in some form), but I will reiterate my astonishment that DFW seemed to reinvent himself with every work, and not only on a stylistic level but in his philosophy of life and writing. I am as obsessed with his career arc as I am with the writing itself.