Infinite Sadness

Despite its title, and dozens and dozens of instances of utter hilarity, Infinite Jest is actually a very, very morose book. As mentioned before, the book is basically about addiction and recovery. DFW weaves the infinitely, infinitely sad personal stories of numerous characters in various stages of depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and, thankfully, treatment throughout the novel. A long section I read this week (446 pages in, 41.3% of the novel) was a description of a Boston AA meeting - and included the story of an adopted girl whose foster father had repeatedly sexually molested her handicapped foster sister while the adopted girl was in the room. This led her to become a stripper, prostitute and alcoholic at age 16. There's also a vignette about a cocaine-addicted pregnant woman who gives birth to a stillborn baby in a hotel room while she was freebasing. Then, she's in such denial, that she caries the baby's corpse around with her as if it were alive. DFW's prose in these sections is just incredibly heart-wrenching - I literally had to put the book down and stare at the ceiling for a few minutes to "reboot" my brain.

Suicide is also a recurring theme in Infinite Jest. There have been at least three instances of suicide or attempted suicide so far in the novel - including the father of main character Hal, who killed himself by putting his head in a microwave (he cut a hole in the door, filled the space around his neck with foil and pressed 'start.'). Another drug-addicted character named Kate Gompert attempts suicide before admitting herself into the Ennet House. The interesting thing about this episode is that Kate Gompert is a real person. She was also a tennis player, which is how DFW must've know her. I don't know whether she was actually an addict, but I read in another Infinite Jest blog that the real Kate Gompert sued DFW over the use of her name and untrue depiction in the novel. Can't find any confirmation of that on the Web, though.

One other note: When DFW died, many of the published tributes to him pointed to the sadness of and instances of suicide in Infinite Jest as ways of interpreting DFW's own suicide - retrospectively, of course. My initial reaction to this was skepticsm - I tend to believe you can always find a writer in his/her novel at some level, but most fiction isn't intentionally autobiographical and attempts to link a character or theme to the author's personal life is misguided. But, given the details that have emerged about DFW's life (especially in the fantastic Rolling Stone bio mentioned in the last post) about his own struggle with depression and alcoholism, I'm actually starting to think there may be something to the notion that Infinite Jest is a blueprint of reasons for DFW's own suicide. It's an idea that won't be fully formed for me until I finish the novel, but something I will certainly continue to think about....sadly.

Green Is Everywhere - Even In Infinite Jest (sort of...)

To try to maintain some semblance of sanity while I'm reading Infinite Jest, I've also been working my way through a non-fiction book called Hot, Flat and Crowded. The book, written by star NY Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman, is basically a 400-page argument for why America needs to go green - and soon. (Hot = global warming; Flat = Internet has led to globalization, leveled playing field; Crowded = population explosion). Friedman argues that America can again take its place at the head of the world table, a status we've lost due to the Iraq war and Bush, if we lead a worldwide green revolution.

I enjoyed the book - mostly because environmental responsibility (in design, construction and facility management) is one of the "beats" I write about fairly frequently for the magazine I work for. Friedman is very good at relating environmental responsibility to practical benefits - he doesn't just argue that green is "the right thing to do." That argument rarely resonates with skeptics. Green IS the right thing to do, but as IBM has figured out and illustrated in its new ad campaign, going green is way beyond a "feel good strategy." Green actually saves money, it doesn't cost. Friedman argues that it's way past time for America to enact carbon emission legislation (Obama campaigned on a cap-and-trade system), better fuel efficiency standards (China's are tougher than ours right now - what a joke!), and more emphasis (including incentives and tax breaks) on renewable energy and alternative energy R&D.

And but so, there is sort of a connection between Friedman and Infinite Jest - I'm 351 pages in, 32.5% of the novel, by the way. In a conversation between main character Hal and his older brother Orin (which takes place in a 20-page footnote [yes. 20...freakin'...pages]), they frequently reference the Great Concavity. In DFW's parallel world where Canada, the US and Mexico have merged into the ONAN (Organization of North American Nations), the Great Concavity is basically an enormous toxic waste dump. It includes the area north of an imaginary line from Buffalo eastward through Massachusetts' norther border and south of Quebec. There are giant catapults in Boston that launch trash into the Great Concavity, and the area includes "kids the size of Volkswagons shlumpfing around with no skulls, green sunsets and indigo rivers, feral-hamster incursions, and lobsters like monsters in old Japanese films."

Now, I don't think DFW was a staunch environmentalist or anything, but because Infinite Jest is, at its core, a parody, you could make the argument that the Great Concavity is a subtle dig at American wastefulness. That if we continue gorging ourselves resource-inefficiently, nothing short of a three-state sized landfill will be able to accommodate all our waste! Don't forget: Reduce, reuse, recycle! ;)

(One last thing: Here is a fantastic bio of DFW from a recent Rolling Stone.)

Was DFW TOO Smart?

As hard as it is for me, a gigantic fan, to understand, there are as many people who hate DFW's writing as love it. I met one of these people in my recent fiction workshop, and we had a brief argument about DFW's style. She described his writing basically as the meanderings of an egotistical jerk, and she couldn't be persuaded otherwise. I was tempted to throw out something along the lines of "Fine, well then you just stick to your Nicolas Sparks and John Grisham," but held my tongue. :)

At any rate, her opinion is emblematic of the No. 1 knock on DFW - that his writing is complex and blustery, simply for the sake of being complex and blustery, that he's just showing off his extraordinary talent, like an outfielder slowing up to make a diving catch when he could just as easily have made a routine grab. In that same radio interview referenced in the previous post, DFW admitted that over-rendering may have been a valid criticism early in his career, but regarding Infinite Jest, he maintains that every word, every element of style, every character was carefully chosen for a particular reason. That it's not "gratuitiously hard and difficult." That everything means something.

A section I read this week - I'm now 276 pages in, 25.6% of the novel - may be viewed (by DFW haters) as an instance of DFW just showing off. It's almost certainly a section you'd skim if you weren't enjoying the novel as much as I am. The section is a list of "exotic new facts" you'd learn if you were a resident of a substance-recovery program, like Ennet House. While I can't make a convincing argument about how, exactly, this six-page section is critical to the story, I absolutely loved it. Many of the "facts" are downright hysterical. Here's a sampling:

- That females are capable of being just as vulgar about sexual and eliminatory functions as males.
- That no matter how smart you thought you were, you are actually way less smart than that.
- That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person.
- That God - unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both - speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God.
- That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there's a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it's interested in re you.
- That pretty much everybody masturbates. Rather a lot, it turns out.
- That trying to dance sober is a whole different kettle of fish.
- That cats will in fact get violent diarrhea if you feed them milk, contrary to the popular image of cats and milk.

A little silly? Perhaps. But also infinitely fun!

Carefully Controlled Chaos

The structure of this novel is incredibly fascinating. After my last post about how fractured the book had re-gotten, I’ve hit a stretch of another 30 or so pages (206 down, 19.1% of the novel) that are more conventional – continuing the development of actual stories (Hal’s day-to-day existence at the Enfield Tennis Academy, and the stories of the addicts at the nearby Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House [redundancy is intentional]).

So the constantly shifting narrative style has made me curious about the “method” behind DFW’s “madness” (incidentally, the novel’s title is derived from Hamlet – Yorick was “a fellow of infinite jest” – and the novel is bursting with other Hamlet references). And but so, in a 1996 radio interview soon after the book was published, DFW reveals that Infinite Jest is structured like a Sierpinski Gasket (pictured).

I’m certainly no mathlete, but from the best I can tell, a Sierpinski Gasket is a fractal – a geometric shape that can be broken into smaller versions of the same shape ad infinitum. Fractals are used to define highly irregular geometric figures, as well as to bring mathematical order to ostensible chaos.

In Infinite Jest, themes, characters and narrative strains are introduced briefly, then returned to later and expanded, but with bits and pieces of the other narrative strains, characters and themes woven in. This pattern continues for 1,079 pages. And in some way or another, everything is interconnected.

This Sierpinski Gasket business is very briefly mentioned in the introduction of the guide book I’m using, but I paid it no heed then because I didn’t understand it. And I’m still not sure I do, but what I do understand is that it’s just another stark example of DFW’s brilliance. The structure of a novel is usually one of the first choices a writer makes (fiction-writing cliché – think: the movie Wonder Boys: “you’re always telling us that writers make choices..." ), but that usually means deciding if a story will be told in chronological order, or include a flashback here and there, or if it should start out with a few parallel narrative strains that are eventually merged. DFW said "Screw that, I'm using an incredibly complex mathematical proof as my structure." Simply stunning.

PS: Happy Halloween!

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.

How Long is LONG?

I've been taking a fiction-writing class one night a week for the past two months, and last night was my turn to have a story workshopped. It was a great experience, and a lot of fun to work on a short story again. And it got me thinking about what it would take to convert my short story into a novel.

In just over a month, including many re-writes and edits, I wrote a 4,500-word story - about 14 double-spaced, typed pages. As a baseline, the average published novel (if there is such a thing) is around 80,000 words - or approximately 250 words per page for 320 pages. Obviously, the number of pages depends on font type and size, book size, margins, etc.

Infinite Jest, 123 pages (11.4% of the novel) of which I have now conquered, is 1,079 pages, and its page size is much larger and type size smaller than most published work. Amazon's text stats say the novel is 484,001 words - or about EIGHT times as long as a typical novel.

By way of comparison, Stephen King's The Stand, the longest novel I'd ever read before Infinite Jest is 462,138 words. War and Peace is 568,880.

Now, here's the amazing thing: DFW wrote Infinite Jest in only three years - and his first draft, according to this article, was three times longer! That's 40,333 words per month....or about NINE times my meager output. It's just mind-boggling.

The "Other" DFW

I didn't get much time to read this week because of a work trip to Dallas (DFW = Dallas/Fort Worth airport, too). I thought it prudent not to even attempt to lug this massive brick of a book with me onto an airplane. I don't have a scale, but amazon tells me that the hardcover edition (my book is an early softcover edition, presumably from a book club - it has the same size, cover design and pagination as the original hardcover), weighs in at 3.2 pounds. It doesn't sound like much, and mine probably weighs a little less than that, but this is a BOOK. Three pounds! I'm going to have some strong forearms when this is all finished.

Anyway, the trip from the airport to downtown Dallas swings you by Texas Stadium, home of the Cowboys, Jerry Jones, and until recently, Pacman Jones. Also, my hotel downtown was about four blocks from the Joule Hotel where Pacman got in a fight with his own body guard last week. It made me think about what a total imbecile he is...and how funny his ongoing story is to everyone else. Pacman, and Jerry Jones for that matter, have sort of become parodies of themselves - generally perceived as silly jokes to anyone that knows their stories. In the bit of Infinite Jest I got to today, there's a scene where one of the main characters - a punter for the Arizona Cardinals named Orin Incandenza - has to actually don a cardinal costume and "fly" in from the roof of Mile High Stadium prior to a game with the Broncos - whose players are also costumed...as broncos. I'm not sure if DFW has a point to this, other than to be funny, which it is. Perhaps, it's meant to parody how the NFL, and specifically owners like Jerry Jones will do just about anything to grab headlines and win fans.

So, I'm 79 pages in - 7.3% of the novel. It sure hasn't gotten any easier, but it still is a lot of fun!