Spiraling Further Into Complexity

Just when I thought I was settling in – sections and scenes were getting longer, and an actual story was materializing – I hit a patch of about 30 pages that were just as silly and chaotic as the book started.

There’s a scene written from the POV of a heroin addict, complete with colloquial slang and purposely misspelled words. It’s a pretty funny scene - that is, until one of the narrator’s buddies dies when he shoots up some Drano-laced dope and bleeds to death from the inside out. Rather disturbing. Another “scene” was an essay written by the novel’s main character Hal Incandenza about the differences between Steve McGarrett of Hawaii Five-O and (in Hal’s opinion) the far superior Frank Furillo of Hill Street Blues. And then, there's an essay about the rise and fall of video phones. Sound boring? Not in the least – it's a perfect example of DFW’s brilliant and hilarious knack for tongue-in-cheek and deadpan in something that is supposed to be serious. If you want to don a pair of specs and kill a half hour, you can actually read this section here. I’d highly recommend it!

How does any of that connect to the story as a whole? Your guess is as good as mine.

Finally, the funniest scene in the book (171 pages down, 15.8% of the novel) so far: A drug-addicted transvestite steals a woman’s purse that contains her “Jarvik IX Exterior Artificial Heart.” When the woman screams ‘Stop her! She stole my heart!’ nearby police officers “were publicly heard to passively quip ‘Happens all the time.’”

By the way, here’s a story from the NY Times about a memorial to DFW held in NYC last week.