Infinity, from the Florida Educational Technology Clearinghouse
I am sorry I read any criticism about the novel. I thought it would enlighten me to see what others had to say and it didn’t, except for one very cool set of notes I found on the intertubes. Other than that, I was depressed to find that Wallace said he was aiming square at an audience of, what? thirty-somethings? (They’d be forty-somethings now) Which makes me feel like I’ve been listening to an ironic nonsensical short story being read on “This American Life” to an audience of chuckling privileged wannabe hipsters. That isn’t how I was feeling when I read the book. But once you think something it’s hard to un-think it.
So, the book…there are some very funny and some very moving passages in this novel. The Eschaton game is excruciatingly funny, as is the filmography footnote. I mean, apres-garde... The descriptions of jonesing out and the world seen through the eyes of Don Gately are wonderful and heartfelt.
And the sheer monumental-ness of the novel must be acknowledged. The encyclopedic compendium thing, obsessive attention to every detail, rendering of people’s apprehensions and misapprehensions, sci-fi alternative reality, the footnotes to endnotes…That’s just plain fun.
Inevitably I have to write about the Wallace’s frustration of the reader’s expectations. As a lover of William Gaddis and Flann O’Brien and Gilbert Sorrentino and Don DeLillo and the Oulipo crowd and all, I am used to being set up for a pratfall by the author. I like it. Really. But.
Wallace sets up a chase scene in the final quarter of the novel and then abandons it. If he is playing with me, I can buy it, but he never even winks at me. And by doing so (or not doing so) he is asking me to…what? Continue the story in my mind? No. At that point, worn out by reading some ten or thirty tedious footnotes about the chemical constituents of mood-altering drugs and a nasty overdose scene, and knowing the novel was about to be over, knowing about 100 pages earlier that all the threads could not be drawn up, knowing that ol’ Don Gately was going to be okay and not caring all that much about the Incandenza family, I was done. The novel stopped. The novelist stopped writing. Is that enough?
Nevertheless, I’m glad I read it. Wallace was a great, genius writer. I’d like to ask him a thing or two.
