infinite summer

A bunch of literate young bloggers are reading David Foster Wallace's magnum opus, Infinite Jest, and blogging about it on A Supposedly Fun Blog.  There's a particular frisson to diving into really massive novel, and it's fun to watch a bunch of smart bloggers chattering up their courage, as though this novel, like the addictions it chronicles, can only be confronted with a support group. 

(A review of Wallace's book, written when I was young and foolish, is here.)

While the novel is sloppy in the way that Shakespeare is sloppy, I'd still put it alongside DeLillo's Underworld as a definitive all-consuming novel of 1990s America.  In response to a post wondering why Wallace's French is so careless (the wheelchair-bound Québec-seperatist terrorists are called Les assassins des fauteuils rollent, where roulant would be more correct) I offered this comment:

To me the sloppiness of his errors is of a piece with the frantic tone of the book, which I suspect was also the tone of Wallace’s depression. I bet many people on this thread can identify with the plight of a very smart, fast-learning guy, driven from a very young age, for whom the ideal of intellectual curiosity becomes a consumptive craving. You end up with vertigo in the face of the infinity of things you could learn, facts you could still get right or wrong, the impossibility of ever deciding what’s important. Of course the book’s full of holes. It’s trying to be infinite, and there’s not much time.

Comments

[Miss Bliss]

"It’s trying to be infinite, and there’s not much time." Now THAT is just spectacular. I miss you.

xoxo

[Miss Bliss]

OH...and you should check that link to the blog because it appears to be a link to PDF of a transit thing. Sorry didn't read enough of it to get a better name for it than that...LOL.

[Peter]

I haven't read this novel. But I'm glad for novels that take a great swath of time or place or personality or all three and don't go in too much for minimalism, tight plots, attention to craft, the "world in a grain of sand" notion, and show don't tell.

[Peter]

Oh. Look what I got in my email just now as I was writing the above:

http://www.abebooks.com/books/Newsletters/long-novels.shtml?cm_mmc=nl-_-nl-_-cme_longn-_-online