Warwick’s review of Infinite Jest > Likes and Comments

Mission accomplished.

I just hope his army of fans won't be offended if I don't love it. I have a slight prejudice against DFW for reasons unrelated to fiction, but I am trying to put them to one side for the next...er...six months or whatever.

I'm not legion, but the fact that you're giving it a shot is good enough for me.

SEE EVERYONE AUBREY SAYS I'M OK

Pfffft. Indeed I do, for what it's worth.

Congratulations!

Looking forward to your review Warwick.

LOL This is too damn good :)

This is brilliant. I am sure DFW would have approved!

Haha this is undoubtedly the best IJ review I have read so far on GR.

I would have liked this review but you forgot to append Mussolini.

Genius.

I have yet to read Infinite Jest, but read The Pale King a couple of months ago, and can sympathise with many of those points. At least TPK had end-notes so the reader can see where DFW was apparently trying to go. In over 500 pages (plus 1,000 pages of notes) though, he still didn't get there. I loved the ideas, but not the execution.

Thanks so much for the comments, I really appreciate it. Manny, I wish I could read your thoughts on this book!! I'll have to get me a copy of your book I guess.

@Ruby, I wondered if maybe The Pale King would be a tighter, more controlled novel, but I don't think I have the energy to tackle it in the immediate future.

Dear god, I hope not. "Tight and controlled" aren't words I'd use to describe The Pale King!

Haha. It's all in the beard you see.

HAH, I love parts of IJ a lot better than you do, but this is awesome.

I thought Don Gately in particular was a wonderful creation

MOI SAYS: ACQUITTED (love me, love my Gately)


....to be honest I really dislike Hal as a character. And the sexism, the Ebonics, the wheelchair terrorists, &c., bug me. But Gately is awesome.

Warwick wrote: "I wondered if maybe The Pale King would be a tighter, more controlled novel"

AAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAH no.

Well, it's shorter, and more edited, but tighter....no. I really liked a lot of it, tho. But it's more kind of a posthumous assemblage, like Thomas Wolfe's later books, than a novel.

Yeah I can't argue with that (the Gately thing). I thought he was awesome too. He was also the only character you got anything like a full story about.

Warwick wrote: "Yeah I can't argue with that (the Gately thing). I thought he was awesome too. He was also the only character you got anything like a full story about."

Hilariously, in the (awful) DFW biography, the model for Gately apparently didn't like DFW much and thought entering rehab for a pot addiction was wussy. HAH. (And, in the ways of addicts, was wise to DFW observing for material: 'He came here to get a book out of it.' Haaaah.)

Wow, that's really interesting. How come you haven't reviewed IJ, Moira? (Unless I'm missing something)

Warwick wrote: "Wow, that's really interesting. How come you haven't reviewed IJ, Moira? (Unless I'm missing something)"

Yeah, I don't think I ever did....which is weird considering I yak about it enough. The first time I read it through I was just sobering up, and I haven't read it cover to cover in years and years (was going to this past December with the group read, but, uh). A review written by current-day me would probably be a terribly mixed bag of gushing over the addict parts and getting annoyed with all the other parts. Then again, I don't really know how I could 'review' a book with a passage like this. It'd be like reviewing my first sponsor.

The Pale King to me is a superior work because of its editing, and tightness, and his prose had lost lots of its hypermanic cooldudery by that point.

Then again, I don't really know how I could 'review' a book with a passage like this.

Fair enough, although it sounds like you'd have a pretty important take on it all. Your comments on it are always very on-point – thanks.

Warwick wrote: "Then again, I don't really know how I could 'review' a book with a passage like this.

Fair enough, although it sounds like you'd have a pretty important take on it all. Your comments on it are alw..."

Aww, thanks!

Yeah, I probably have enough comments about it scattered around GR I could paste together a long-ass review, heh, but I don't think it's possible to see your own comments all together. OH WELL.

You have presented your case wisely and rather too well, Warwick. I could have been that woman who fainted in the gallery but that lil speech by Mr. Wallace or to be fair, by Mr. Wise brought me back to senses. This is a perfect 2 star review of this book. Well Done!

Haha, thanks Garima! Hope you didn't bump your head when you went over there.

Enter DAVID FOSTER WALLACE in regal bandana. The crowd genuflect.

I'm dying over here. Perfect!

Wonderful and hilarious review, Warwick, which captures a lot of the frustrations over matters of fact that I also felt when reading the book. I respect your perspective, and to a large extent sympathize with it -- all I can offer in defense of the book is that I found the book moving, sublime, etc., and in the face of qualities like these I can't really get myself to care about a misused "q.v.." or whatever. But of course the book encourages the reader to care about the latter by parading them so shamelessly, and by (as you note) separating off its moving material from its show-offy material, so that many passages are made up solely up the latter.

(Incidentally, the whole idea of fussing over a distinction between "cf." and "q.v." that wouldn't even exist in Latin -- which wouldn't care one whit where in a sentence you put your "quod" -- seems massively silly to me. But then, Wallace would surely disagree!)

Your contrast between Wallace and Nabokov and Pynchon is interesting, because in my case it gets at the extent to which simple correctness isn't everything. Both Infinite Jest and Against The Day use a lot of math references, but IJ appeals to me a lot more than ATD a guy who does math, even though the density of errors is much higher in the former than the latter. In, say, the character of Michael Pemulis, I thought Wallace did a good job of depicting what it feels like to have an emotional investment in mathematics (which nicely rounded out a character who might otherwise have come off as just coldly irreverent). By contrast, I found the math-adept characters in ATD unconvincing and uninvolving, although everything they say is -- pedantically, pointlessly -- correct. In other words, with Wallace I get some emotional charge off of the specific subject matter that makes up for the inaccuracies, while I feel like Pynchon treats every esoteric discipline with the same steely indifference -- a paragraph of math might as well be a paragraph of Argentine politics, insofar as both are simply being used as things to be correct about.

Great comment. The fact is that fussing over usage of this kind is not usually my style at all – the only reason I feel compelled to do it with IJ is because Wallace bangs on and on about correctness so much, and because we know from that awful article he wrote that he really meant it. (Actually since q.v. means "which see", I think it genuinely does seem rather nonsensical coming before the term in question – but certainly the rest of it wouldn't otherwise have bothered me at all.)

I think your comments about Against The Day are very well made. It's not a book where Pynchon really shows any interest in character at all (unlike, say, Mason & Dixon or Vineland) – I think I said somewhere in my review of it that I couldn't remember which character was which half the time and it didn't even seem to matter. This is definitely a problem and I get why it might leave you cold a bit. However the reason I vastly prefer ATD to IJ is because Pynchon's sentences blow me away. I will forgive almost anything for a beautiful prose style, and when it comes to the job of putting one word in front of another word then it seems to me Pynchon is incomparably better than Wallace. However this is of course deeply subjective territory.

Thanks again!

Oh, come all Good Readers tasteful,
Even if his words are wasteful,
It's not a crime to ignore him
Nor a folly to adore him.
Just because the author's famous
Doesn't mean we need disclaimers.
There's no need to involve the law
Nor your opinion to withdraw.
Just as long as you buy the book
From the website of Amazon.

The writing style is certainly innovative, but mainly in the sense that he sounds stilted and infelicitous in ways that no one has come up with before.

I love you.

Actually since q.v. means "which see", I think it genuinely does seem rather nonsensical coming before the term in question

Except that the Latin word "quod" can, in Latin, precede its antecedent. I guess what's tripping me up here is the notion that, if you insert a phrase from another language into an English sentence, you must somehow "really mean" the purported English equivalent, even if the equivalence is only approximate. It seems perverse to demand that "quod" obey the same rules as "which" simply because we've declared that it "means 'which'," when that very statement is just an imperfect attempt to convey in English what "quod" does in Latin (where it doesn't obey the same rules as "which").

. . . when it comes to the job of putting one word in front of another word then it seems to me Pynchon is incomparably better than Wallace.

Then this is an unbridgeable gulf in personal taste, I guess, because I feel the opposite way. I've never read a single Pynchon sentence that made me say "wow, that was amazing, I want to copy that down and show it to all my friends"; there must have been at least a hundred such sentences in IJ. I guess I value novelty a lot, and I think Wallace extracts novelty from the English language in much the same way Nabokov does, while Pynchon, in his prose -- as in his references -- seems to be striving for (and achieving) competence, rather than novelty or sublimity.

Yes, I agree with you (on quod, I mean). What I hope I was trying to show was that the disconnect between Wallace's ideas about correctness and his actual usage speak to a certain fundamental defensiveness or overcompensating quality in his style that really turns me off.

As for your views on Pynchon…well…there's no accounting for taste :)

Ian wrote: "Oh, come all Good Readers tasteful,
Even if his words are wasteful,
It's not a crime to ignore him
Nor a folly to adore him.
Just because the author's famous
Doesn't mean we need disclaimers.
There..."

**win**

It seems perverse to demand that "quod" obey the same rules as "which" simply because we've declared that it "means 'which'," when that very statement is just an imperfect attempt to convey in English what "quod" does in Latin (where it doesn't obey the same rules as "which").

Well, it's not so much demanding that 'quod' is 'which,' but that "cf." in English is often a synonym with "see" (yes yes I know technically that's not how it's supposed to be used), while "q.v." is more "see this other thing." The way I remember learning it (which is probably WRONG, since I basically flunked DFW's famous grammar test) is "cf." is drawing two things together, while "q.v." is sending the reader off to look at something else. Here vs. There.

.....well, now I dunno if you can say "q.v. footnote X." //IS CONFUSED

Warwick wrote: "As for your views on Pynchon…well…there's no accounting for taste :) "

I....don't like Pynchon either. //cries Maybe we can make up baseball teams, the orange-and-blues vs. the rainbow'd....

Bravos to you, Warwick. I turned a few pages of IJ and the smell got to me....

Ha. Must say I could kind of see this coming, and am glad of the wholeheartedness of it. That you offer buttressed and reverse-braced arguments make it that much plainer, not the passive-aggressive blow it would be taken for otherwise.. Somehow, "infelicitous" stings worse than either damnation or faint praise would do.
At this point a generation of readers, writers, reviewers hold DFW to be some kind of new standard; what's less problematic is that they are the same people who would certainly have had Pynchon on that dubious pedestal, so not a real loss either way. Harumpf.

I cheer your Harumpf. I am fascinated by trail of followers once a 'serio' work gets approval by the Academy. Nothing ever changes.... few ever think for selves...

I am not sure if I ever made it out of the tunnel under the tennis courts with all the blowing fans and the mechanicals and how they operate, or maybe I left the two dudes standing on the hill overlooking the city or whatever it was they were talking about, but needless to say I quit on the so-called masterpiece one hundred and fifty pages into it or thereabouts. I had no more of me to give. Great great, fucking great, review. I would read anything you wrote. Myself, I stick to the DFW essays and like them very much especially when he goes on and on. Just not the fiction. I cannot cope with it. Thank you for this offering.

Thanks M. I'd like to give his non-fic a try – I can imagine he'd be a great essayist.

A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again is a perfect place to start if you want the best of DFW. Even beginning with the title story would be enough to make you a convert. Thanks for accepting my request on the other matter. Looking forward to seeing more of what you have to say.

M. wrote: "A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again is a perfect place to start if you want the best of DFW. Even beginning with the title story would be enough to make you a convert.

Oh yeah, seconded.

While I haven't surmounted the big Iggy Jiggy yet (I started it and put it down almost immediately because I surmised what I was up against), this review was a delight to read, and made me wonder whether I'll be able to enjoy the book at all. I didn't realize good ol' DFW got so many specifics incorrect... makes me feel a little like the air is out of his sails in the vaunted ship of heroism he's sailing in my mind.

I think I still love him, but this review was very illuminating. Thank you for writing it :)

Thank you! I seem to be in a minority, so don't let me put you off.

Thanks Arghya!

Glad this review resurfaced, Warwick - better than the Sunday papers (actually, that's not such a compliment where I live) but I enjoyed the review for the humour as well as the skillful way you handled it.
I don't know anything about Wallace but some of your points found a general echo in my own reading experience, that feeling of needing to have confidence in the author, to really believe that he has assembled the work, even if it is full of fragments, with full knowledge of what it may contain, that he has selected the fragments carefully, rather than just throwing everything he has at the reader regardless of its quality or relevance, and then asking us to edit it ourselves,
You said, I hope I have given enough examples to show that my aversion to this book is not down to contrariness or disrespect, but just insurmountable problems in my reaction to the writing.
You certainly did, and our reaction to the writing is a big part of what reading, and reviewing, should be about.

Yes Warwick I was also pleased to read this review again. Excellent.

Aww, thank you for that thoughtful response. Fio, I can't even understand the Sunday papers where I live now, so you're already doing better than me!

Haven't read it, doubt I ever will, hated the writing style on the few occasions I glanced at it, agree 100% on the confidence issue and find it easy to believe and very telling when you say he doesn't need the po-mo shit. Thanks for your honesty and thoroughness.