Category: David Foster Wallace

I’m sure Rob Horning isn’t the first participant in the Infinite Summer race to crash into the wall, but his crack-up makes for more interesting reading than others’:

It’s not that I don’t read long books—I’ll happily plod along through Trollope’s triple deckers, and in graduate school I worked mainly on the novels of Samuel Richardson,whose Clarissa clocks in at 1,500 pages in the Penguin edition. I just don’t have patience for long, incoherent books. Infinite Jest seemed like pointless jigsaw puzzle; unlike Pynchon’s books, in which their seems to be so much interconnection between the various threads and so many resonating levels of meaning criss-crossing through the text that it’s almost overwhelming but always compelling you to work at holding it together in your mind, Wallace’s book just seems to dump a bunch of confusing stuff in your lap and hope that you are too disoriented to recognize that it’s not interesting.

Horning feels a little guilty for stopping short (“the book succeeded in making me feel like a failure”), but he needn’t. I tend to make a good-faith effort to finish what I start, but that’s largely a sensibility instilled in me as a reviewer, where I’m ethically and contractually obligated to get to the end of what I’m assigned. So I give up less often than most people, but I still do at times—Geraldine Brooks‘ People of the Book and Kim Deitch‘s Alias the Cat being two recent ones I’ve abandoned. And I’ve shipwrecked at least twice on big important bricks like JR and Gravity’s Rainbow.

George Mason University professor Tyler Cowen figures this is a perfectly fine state of affairs. He tells the Washington Times that he finishes only about 10 to 20 percent of the books he starts:

“If I’m reading a truly, actively bad book, I’ll throw it out,” he says. His wife will protest, but he points out that he’s doing a public service: “If I don’t throw it out, someone else might read it.” If that person is one of the many committed to finishing a book once started, he’s actually doing harm.

The disappointing part of Horning’s giving up on Infinite Jest is that he’s in many ways the book’s ideal reader—somebody attuned to David Foster Wallace‘s gamesmanship and who was willing to meet the novel’s complexities halfway. I suspect that part of the problem here, and what’s going to ruin more Infinite Summer participants like Horning, is that it’s a time-bound experience. It’s not that the “75 pages a week” mandate is especially onerous, even considering Infinite Jest‘s dense pages. But it reframes the experience, making the novel something that needs to be finished instead of read. For reviewers and academics, this hardly counts as a problem; for everybody else, though, it turns the book into a reminder of a school assignment, a mad hustle to cram for a test that’s never going to be delivered anyway.

Many of the details in D.T. Max‘s New Yorker story about David Foster Wallace are sad and familiar, especially for anybody who’s read David Lipsky‘s equally thorough piece in Rolling Stone last October. But Max’s article does bring news of a manuscript that Wallace had been working on for years before his suicide, “The Pale King,” an exploration of the nature of boredom, set in an IRS office. (The Wallace fan site The Howling Fantods is gathering up materials related to the unfinished work, which Little, Brown plans to publish next year.)

Though Max’s version of events doesn’t differ notably from Lipsky’s, it wouldn’t be fair to the New Yorker piece to simply scan it for tidbits about “The Pale King.” Lipsky did an excellent job of tracking Wallace’s emotional despair, while Max does an excellent job of tracking Wallace’s rhetorical despair—his obsession with finding a way to make his fiction work as a powerful moral force. To that end, he spent his final years trying to strip away the barnacles of irony and metafictional trickery from his work, writing more nonfiction and clearing pomo gunk from “The Pale King.” As Max describes it, he wasn’t wholly successful on that front. Wallace wrote a smirking introduction to the book that poked holes at those acrobatics, but at the same time engaged in them:

[Wallace writes in the introduction,] “The very last thing this book is is some kind of clever metafictional titty-pincher.” He also writes, “I find these sorts of cute, self-referential paradoxes irksome, too—at least now that I’m over 30 I do.” And yet there he was, writing about “David Wallace” in long, recursive sentences with footnotes.

It will be interesting to see how the final product looks after his editors are done with it. Will it echo the sprawl of the hundreds of thousands of words Wallace applied to the novel, or will it be reshaped into the more straightforward narrative he hoped it would be? Which version would do right by Wallace’s vision?

The Smoking Gun has acquired it:

Wallace, who left behind a suicide note, had a “history of depression with two prior suicide attempts,” his wife told a coroner’s investigator. Wallace, best known for his 1996 novel “Infinite Jest,” had last seen his psychiatrist two weeks before his death, and been prescribed several drugs. The report also notes that Wallace had previously undergone 12 electroshock therapy treatments.