I SEE YOU!
What are these things? Photo-sketches, I guess.
I’m going to ramble about a book for a little bit. A few days ago I started reading Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace’s madhouse of a semi-satirical epic. I’ve heard nothing but praise for this book, but frankly I’m not enjoying the experience of reading it. I’m something like a hundred pages and several multi-page endnotes into a thousand page commitment, and so far I’ll be damned if I could say with any confidence who anybody is or what is happening. It’s not that the prose is opaque, it’s more that the segments about wildly different and unrelated characters jump threads from one to another with seemingly arbitrary whimsy, and each of these threads consists mainly of incredibly long-winded rambling descriptive passages that just give you nothing to hang anything on.
World-building in a novel is a plus for me, and this one certainly has that. It may be that nothing much concrete has happened because there is a lot of world-building groundwork to lay. I’m giving it the benefit of good recommendations and plowing forward in the hope that this is what is going on. But another annoyance here is that the world-building is largely satirical, which almost automatically makes me less than interested. It’s not that I can’t appreciate the cleverness of satire, it’s that satire tends to counter my ability to intellectually invest in any of the characters or arguments the book might advance. It’s as though the pose of disdain required for satire causes me to take the author himself less than seriously, and I guess mockery comes easily, and suggests shallowness.
Not that I think this book is callow. From all I’ve heard it is profound and moving. I just haven’t come across the profundity yet, and I’m very far from moved. It is really a chore to pick up again. This is definately a case, I think, of an author’s style working against his intelligence as far as my engagement with the piece is concerned.
Thomas Pynchon is another one who I’ve been unable to penetrate as a result of the fog of his style. I’ve got two of his books lined up to try tackling again after DFWs. I must be feeling masochistic.
An interesting side-note to this: When I’m reading a book that is either amazing or confounding, I’ll usually Google around looking for people’s opinions to see if they help me figure out where I stand in relation to the piece. It’s usually eye-opening, there are usually facts or observations I did not know of that deepen my understanding. So, though it’s early for it, I did this for Infinite Jest and found a couple of blogs that people set up to journal their reading of this book.
A little later, unrelated to this book, I came across a couple of blogs journaling readings of the equally challenging idiosyncratic comic book epic Cerebus by Dave Sim.
The idea of blogging your way through a reading of a large, difficult book is interesting. Sort of like a critical seminar of one. I imagine it must really help to assemble a lasting understanding.
Look for posts in the same categories: Oddversational