Well, duh (1996)
lrb.co.uk
lrb.co.uk
It's now pretty clear entertainment can be neurologically addictive, as evidenced by the social media companies and their abilities to predict improved engagement.
On top of that, we've now got an attention + an opioid addiction.
If anything, DFW was just very early at predicting the medium term state, complete with national secession movements.
Not bad for a 'verbose' fiction writer.
> As usual these days, Fritz was back at the computer room, staring at data. He had that ask-me-if-I-give-a-shit look Doc had noted before in the newcomers to the groovy world of addictive behavior.
> Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.
That is, "opium" here is references a painkiller; religion is viewed as a way to deaden pain and suffering. It's not about addiction.
Could you not read just the good part?
A good example of this is his point that the "level of humor" in the book is low because of a reference to "butt products". The joke isn't, "butts, haha", the joke is the satire that yea, that would be true... I mean, have you seen Instagram? Or SuperBowl ads?
I've only read about DFW's work, I haven't actually read them yet. But the quote above, in addition to your first sentence, sounds exactly like what DFW would be attempting to demonstrate an unspoken life parallel, or that it's about the journey not the destination, but even so, once the destination is reached the journey is pointless and forgotten.
There's definitely an unrealized expectation at the base of this review.
My favorite book of all time and oddly prescient in many ways.
For instance, I'm aware of at least one startup developing the vid-chat masks Wallace wrote up with a straight face. See also snapchat filters.
about the merit of the book: it is one of the few books that i've read that evoked a visceral reaction in me - i felt manic and strung out (like many of the characters) while reading it. social commentary aside i think that passes bar for worthwhile literature.
>“The moment he recognized what exactly was on one cartridge he had a strong anxious feeling that there was something more entertaining on another cartridge and that he was potentially missing it. He realized that he would have plenty of time to enjoy all the cartridges, and realized intellectually that the feeling of deprived panic over missing something made no sense.”
Use the story title! It's in the guidelines!
Articles like this, it seems to turn out, are part of Dale Peck's schtick, as you'll quickly learn from a Wikipedia page that seems to think these kinds of takedowns are the most notable thing about him:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dale_Peck
I'm always there for a good takedown, and while I like DFW's writing I think Infinite Jest is a rich, slow-moving, and inexplicably unharried target. But I do think it's kind of funny that Peck opens by saying that Infinite Jest is a book without much of a plot, in which not much happens other than a 700 page conversation, and then spends 2 gigantic paragraphs trying to explain all the details of the plot. Which, it turns out later, he actually enjoys, once the puzzle pieces fall into place and reveal the book's underlying simplicity. OK then.
The bit in Infinite Jest written in (attempted) African American vernacular is truly awful, though. Peck is clearly right about that.
Since the submitter was attempting to use representative language from the article, I figure they thought the original title was baity and were trying to follow the guidelines by changing it.
You could literally change the title to "An article about something" and it would be an equally "good" title.
I wouldn't want every, or even any other title to be as vague as "Well, Duh". But one is ok. It's generally good for HN's front page to have a couple that don't give their secrets away. We don't want to spell everything out. It's good for readers to have to work a little.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
If all information on the front page is obvious and straightforward, that's like simple carbohydrates—so quickly metabolized that they turn into sugar-rush discussion in which people react quickly out of reflexive associations. It's good to have some fiber to slow that mechanism down.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
On this topic I certainly agreed with him. I found that section horribly out of tune and out of touch. Also---though maybe I'm forgetting something---I recall it played almost no role in the story or plot. It stuck out as easily the hardest part to get through during my second read.
The criqitue is mostly well-written and there's some issues I agree with, but they get pretty smarmy and smug by the end.
The one weirdness of the review is kind of related to the main weirdness of Infinite Jest - why on earth is it related to Pynchon? I never really understood the similarity. Sure, they're both digressive writers - but so is everyone and their dog since Virginia Wolf. Why did Infinite Jest become the postmodern novel?
I think ultimately, what killed Infinite Jest to me is, on second read, it seemed dated. The driving concern - authenticity - seems to be one that sort of faded in relevance in the late oughts, then merged fairly seamlessly into a sort of teenage angst - a merger that's pretty well enacted by Infinite Jest, to be honest.
It seems like the reviewer dislikes the book because he disagrees with this notion, citing our attachment to entertainment is more of a choice than an addiction. I however find this very profound and will be finishing the book thanks to this review.
> The theory is this: Infinite Jest is Wallace's attempt to both manifest and dramatize a revolutionary fiction style that he called for in his essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." The style is one in which a new sincerity will overturn the ironic detachment that hollowed out contemporary fiction towards the end of the 20th century. Wallace was trying to write an antidote to the cynicism that had pervaded and saddened so much of American culture in his lifetime. He was trying to create an entertainment that would get us talking again.
- http://fictionadvocate.com/2012/09/19/the-infinite-jest-live...
Funnily enough I think DFW would agree, in an interview somewhere (I think it was in Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself) he talks about the surreal experience of seeing all the hype and raves about his book immediately after release, when he knew no one had actually had time to read it.
“Infinite Jest is one of my fave books — but it’s still fun to read this vicious @LRB review from 1996.”
Tony O’Shaughnessy
Few intuitive, sensitive visionaries may understand and comprehend "Ulysses," James Joyce's new and mammoth volume, without going through a course of training or instruction, but the average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it- even from careful perusal, one might properly say study, of it- save bewilderment and a sense of disgust. It should be companioned with a key and a glossary like the Berlitz books. Then the attentive and diligent reader would eventually get some comprehension of Mr. Joyce's message.
http://www.openculture.com/2013/10/the-very-first-reviews-of...
Presumably it works well because it really is extremely time consuming to read those books. The only question is how hard it is to fake having read them (how many details do you have to remember, how many details do other readers remember so that they question you about them).
Thinking about it, perhaps a degree in literature is actually an attempt to fake read all those supposedly important works (you may often only read summaries and learn to bullshit about literature).
“Si no os picaderes más de saber más menear las negras que llevais que la lengua –dijo el otro estudiante–, vos lleváredes el primero en licencias como llevaste cola.”
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de La Mancha
No es tan remotamente complejo como para un inglés entendiendo a Shakespeare.
"Si no te jactases de saber menear la espada que llevas más que de la lengua, serías el primero en licenciarte en vez del último". O similar.
"Infinite Jest" is okay, but needs an editor badly.
Plus this all often leading into scenes that are just relentlessly tragic. Joelle freebasing way too much cocaine in the bathroom at that same party; Poor Tony winding up having a seizure and swallowing his tongue on the T; the viscerally accurate depiction throughout the book of addiction and depression; Joelle’s entire life story; Himself’s slide into madness and suicide while basically no one tried to help; the short bit of Himself talking to his alcoholic father when he was younger; and so on.
In a way it reminds me of the show Bojack Horseman, with the mix of high brow and low brow humor, unflinchingly dark narrative, and deeply flawed characters.
All of which is to say: it’s not always an easy book, but it’s definitely worth at least two reads, one to get the story and another to appreciate all of the interleaving of the various stories throughout the book.
Three other more or less absurd parts of the book that I enjoyed was the (apparently true) concept of different sized arms of tennis players, subsidized time (Year of the Whopper, Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment), and how half a state in the US is turned into a giant landfill that waste is catapulted into.
The two things I remember vividly from reading the book is how funny it is, and how it would take me a page or two in the beginning of each session to get into the rhythm of the language. It's similar to Cormac McCarthy (I currently read Blood Meridian), where the special cadence of the language makes both IJ and BM very pleasurable to read.
https://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-wallace/in...
It's not too often that I see words like 'tentacular' and 'bathos' in the same article as phrases about metaphorical dick-sucking (see above).
More seriously, I've been getting more into literature and literary critique recently, and am a bit surprised about how personally affronted he seems by the book - is this sort of reaction common in literary criticism?
I prefer great authors who were serialized, e.g. dostoevsky. The works are brilliant, but the individual chapters read well, so you rarely feel like you have to just slog through the damned thing.
I think this all the time. If you've made a huge commitment to something that turned out to be worthless, it's tough to admit that to yourself and others. So I'm a bit more skeptical when I hear positive reviews of long books, colleges, investors, religions, marriage, having kids, etc.
The second time I picked up the book, I made it all the way through and thought it was absolutely brilliant. I see this in the same vein as Paul Beatty's _The Sellout_. There's a lot of stream of consciousness, there's a plethora of characters, and you have to really be paying attention to figure out exactly what's going on. These books aren't for everyone, but they're certainly important parts of American Literature.
David Foster Wallace is the embodiment of a particular 20th and 21st century zeitgeist, and one that if you read between the lines, predicts all the ailments we will be facing in the decades ahead.
> The novel has moved some 60,000 copies and racked up a stack of glowing reviews as thick as it is.
As far as I know, it wasn't nominated for a single major literary award that year (at the very least, it didn't win any), and I wouldn't remotely agree that the reviews were "glowing." A quick search finds two at best ambivalent reviews: [^1] [^2]. Though their comments came later, Harold Bloom and James Wood were highly critical of Wallace, the former declaring him to have "no discernible talent." It feels terribly one-sided to mention only the stack of positive reviews. IJ was by no means a universal critical success.
> ... both [The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest], most importantly, work up an elaborate – and elaborately digressive – plot which deliberately ends as unsatisfactorily as possible.
While I can't speak for Broom. which I didn't finish, I can say that my reading of IJ's ending was that it was not at all deliberately unsatisfactory. In fact, I felt it was the opposite: it's beautiful, and it marks the moment when Gately finally gets out of his recursive cycle of addiction. I think it's where the book (whose structure is itself fascinating---a circle and/or a Sierpinski Gasket) ought to have ended, and while some could say it was unsatisfactory for them, I don't think they could claim it was deliberately so.
> There is first of all Hal Incandenza, a teenage tennis prodigy and marijuana addict who during the course of the book plays tennis and gets high a lot, and then tries to stop getting high – that’s his plot.
Isn't there a bit more to Hal's story? What about the struggle the ghost of his dead father makes to connect Hal to the world and to feelings? To exit his head, as it were? What about Hal's finding that same dad dead in the house up the hill from his school dorm? What about his recession into himself and his dislocation from language, his Kafkaesque inversion?
> Then there’s Don Gately, a former housebreaker and narcotics addict who goes straight before the book even opens and merely attempts to stay that way throughout the course of the novel – that’s his plot.
Nothing of his struggles to pray daily to a God he doesn't believe in, simply in an effort to stay sober for another 24 hours? Nothing of his role as a leader and mentor at the Ennet halfway house, or the scenes where he transcends his identity as a witless muscle-for-hire criminal upon whose head friends would close elevator doors for a laugh to connect with and care for his community? (The scene where he, in a joke apron and chef's hat, he makes pasta for the housemates brought me to tears.) Still nothing of his falling in love with Joelle? Nor of his fight in the resident's defense, his hospitalization, and his transition into a vivid memoryscape of his days as a junkie and crook?
> All of which, I suppose, is just a polite way of saying that if the author of Infinite Jest shut off his word-processor and actually went to a wine-and-cheese party he might find out what the word ‘reading’ really means
He wrote it longhand and was a recovering alcoholic/addict. No word processors or wine parties for him.
Yes, I have in certain ways fallen out of love with Infinite Jest, but I still refute the claim that there was nothing there in the first place. There was something in it for me when I read it alone in rural Thailand over a summer in 2013, and there's been something in it for many other readers I know, too. This wasn't just because we were told something was there, but because we found something there.
IJ's not perfect. It deserves critique, and it is certainly flawed. (Parts of it do make me cringe.) But I admire it nonetheless. It took courage to write a novel that strived towards the real---more, I'm afraid, than it required for this LRB review.
[^1]: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/02/13/books/books-of-the-times-...
[^2]: https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/03/news/infinite-jest.html
One of the novels that affected me the most as a teen, and turned out to have even deeper meaning to me than I originally realized, I happened to look up on Amazon a decade or two on, and was startled that some reviewers said things like (paraphrasing) "this book sucks because all the characters are losers!"
...ok dude. :)