INFINITE JEST: Questions

WARNING: PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD IN THIS THREAD

Rarely a page goes by in my reading of IJ when I don't write something down in the margins, often a question, which I hope to have answered as I read along further in the text or reference outside resources.

So far, I've yet to have satisfactorily answered why exactly Hal Incandenza and Don Gately were digging up Hal's father's - James O. Incandenza's - head. If you know, or have some theories, do please elaborate.

Also, please, if you get stuck somewhere, confused, get scratchin' yer head and not because of dandruff (which is inevitable in a book this long and dense) do not hesitate or be embarassed (there are no naive or "stupid" questions as far I'm concerned) to ask them here.

Again: Ask Questions and hopefully somebody in the know will answer them or provide a theory-answer since a lot of the questions that will come up may have ambiguous answers.

I think asking questions will really help enlighten us all and keep us moving forward through a book that can be disconcertingly laborious at times, if not downright discouraging.

And A_musing is absolutely spot on calling IJ a work of philosophy, and I've never been able to figure out a book of philosophy w/out asking tons of questions; namely, why? why? why? and how? how? how? So ask away and offer your answers and theories liberally w/out self-consciousness or fear of being deemed a neophyte.

Anyone who answers questions arrogantly or condescendingly will be publicly reprimanded by Le Dictateur 'Frique. Got it? Good.

Big time spoilers to follow, but that kind of goes without saying in a thread like this, I guess.

It seems pretty clear to me that Hal and Don were digging up JOI's head because that's where the copyable master of the film Infinite Jest is located (the AFR is continually disappointed that the versions they're able to turn up are recorded in such a way that they can't be duplicated). The real question, I think, is this: J.N.R. Wayne is described in Hal's memory as "standing guard," and he's wearing a mask. What exactly does this mean? There are two possibilities that I can think of: 1) Wayne, along with Hal and Don, has traveled to JOI's grave to help capture the original copy of IJ in order to keep it out of the hands of the AFR. 2) Wayne is an AFR mole and, probably with the help of the AFR agents who infiltrated Enfield for that tournament, he has captured Hal and Don, and forced them to reveal the location of JOI's grave so that the AFR can recover it and put their plan into action.

One clue: Hal mentions that Wayne "would have won" the Whataburger tournament in the opening section of the novel. So we can assume he did not play. Why not? One reason could be that he revealed his true allegiances, and did not subsequently return to Enfield for obvious reasons. That would suggest option 2 above. If option 1 were true, I don't think there's enough info in the novel to suggest why Wayne would then not have been able to play in the Whataburger. So maybe 2 is the right answer. But then did the AFR get the master copy? And then what did they do with it? I don't particularly see any evidence that the "entertainment attack" ever happened in that opening section. It's all very mysterious...

Of course, the ultimate question is...what happened to Hal? Here's one fascinating theory:
http://dfan.org/jest.txt

This blog has a pretty neatly-tied-together theory that includes a lot of what Sutpen already said, & also includes some ideas about what happened to Hal.

Re the urgency of finding the copyable master: DFW woefully underestimates hackers in general. Nothing can't be copied if there is sufficient motivation, and what is the AFR if not motivated? Then, it's pretty obvious through the whole book that this was a guy who knew squat about computers. As much as I love this book, that drives me nuts. Should I just get over it? Yes I should. I am a bad reader.

No, you're not a bad reader. Remember, he wrote this from '92-'94, just as the PC was becoming universal in usage.

When was "Infinite Jest," the film made by Hal's father, made? Before subsidized time? In the '90s? Hal's father may not have been very computer-literate either.

3:
Wow, I've never seen a theory so fleshed out. That Phoenix, AZ postmark on the first copy of IJ had always bugged me, but for some reason I couldn't get the master copy into Orin's hands. Reading through it once, I can't see any holes. Any objections?

@4 IJ I, II, and III were B.S. IJ IV was in the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad and IJ V was the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar. (They had to be in subsidized time; they were the ones with Joelle and she didn't meet Orin until the very end of pre-subsidized time.) (The book was sitting out next to me. No, I haven't memorized the filmography. Yet.)

I can suspend disbelief easily enough for the copyable-master thing; I probably wouldn't even have noticed it if his computer illiteracy hadn't been so evident in so many other ways throughout the book. Which, ok, being computer illiterate is one thing, but if you're writing a book like this you should be able to recognize that your computer literacy is not up to the task, and do something about it. Why would you let something so easily remediable detract from what is going to end up being your magnum opus?

And I'm probably a bad reader for being so annoyed by this. Maybe it's just that I grew up in the internet age. Maybe also I wouldn't care nearly as much if I didn't love the book so much.

And but anyway that little rant is neither here nor there.

My question doesn't really fit the purpose here - but I'm curious why IJ didn't win any awards? It was on Time Magazine's and Salon's best books of the year in 1996, but that seems to be about it.

IJ wasn't even nominated for a National Book Award.

Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain won the NB Award the year IJ would've been eligible (1997).

The other nominees that year:

Underworld by Don DeLillo
Le Divorce by Diane Johnson
Echo House by Ward Just
The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick

You don't really expect the NBA judges to read something that long, do you?

I think of the National Book Award as a trade award, given to the kind of book that gets favorable reviews in the NY Times Book Review and gets shoved in front of every Barnes and Nobles for a few months. (In other words, one step above Bestseller). Here's the NYTBR review of Infinite Jest: http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/03/news/infinite-jest.html?pagewanted=1

I believe the right word is "clueless".

He got a genius award. He produced a book that will last. That's enough. Most of the awards are rubbish.

Yeah, if you look over the reviews from when IJ was first published, the general critical consensus was something like
"Wow this is really...something. Good? It's good, right?" *glances around to see if anyone agrees*

For a critic it takes some pro-grade cohones to come down firmly on the side of a book like IJ before the shape of mass opinion is evident. Also (and seriously, don't underestimate this), most of those critics did not finish the book. It's a fact. And the NBA judges most likely didn't either. Or not all of them. Think of how much easier it would be to nod knowingly and pronounce it promising...but self indulgent. Or scattered. Or lacking resolution.

11> Jay McInerney reviewing David Foster Wallace?! LO-effing-L!!!

Gee, why doesn't James Frey review Don Delillo's lastest book? How asinine was the NYTBR having a low-caliber, low-Art, has-been-never-was-been (damn right I'm being a snob at the moment - a justifiably indignant snob) reviewing the work of the man who'd just won a "genius" grant and connected the next pomo dot from Ulysses ... The Recognitions ... The Sot Weed Factor ... Gravity's Rainbow ... White Noise ...

McInerney doesn't "get it" (Infinite Jest, that is). Of course he didn't "get it;" of course he liked Girl with Curious Hair better; of course he hasn't a clue having written nothing but a novelty-novel himself, written in the second person (my aren't we clever, Jay and not gimmicky at all!) that today's as dated as big feathered bangs with shoulder pads hand-in-hand with a raybanned Crockett-lookalike in white blazer over pastel t-shirt, stonewashed denim.

What a terrible review. Gee, thanks, A_musing! ;-)

Well, despite McInerney's bloody, pulpy, shapeless remnant of a reputation that Enrique left on the floor over there, I still took a look at the review and found some value there. I agree McInerney didn't seem* get it, but I think that comes across more or less openly in his review. I don't have a problem with his review, but I do have a bit a problem with this being the NY Times review. That's disappointing.

*I said "seem" only because I'm on page 80, so, really, what do I know.

I think the NY Times Book Review editor at the time said, gee, here is a huge, ambitious book by a promising young author who has done some kind of interesting things before, gotten some attention, and sold a few books. Looks like the kid wants to be Pynchon, though, of course, that's already been done and done again. Even though the kid is probably in over his head, let's give him an atta-boy and have him told that by an established big name novelist, the kind of guy he should be thankful picks up his book.

I think the NYTBR viewed this as doing him a favor. Remember, they think of books as an industry, where the goal of every author and publisher is to sell more chopped meat than the next guy, and really couldn't care less about literary merit (unless, of course, that sells books). And a review by Jay McInernay could sell some chopped meat.

The National Book Award, like the Pulitzer, tends toward later lesser works by established authors, not upstarts. Until Faulkner won the Nobel, his biggest award was coming in second for a Mystery Novel award (the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Award); after the Nobel, he gets both a Pulitzer and a National Book Award for A Fable, as well as one award each for his Collected Stories and The Reivers. So DFW is not an anomoly on the awards front.

McInerney has a lot of good lines and his description of the action and actors is accurate and concise. He just didn't appreciate something that is essential in it - the painstaking level of detail that makes it so real despite its surface level absurdities.

Here are two bits I liked a lot:

"this skeleton of satire is fleshed out with several domestically scaled narratives and masses of hyperrealistic quotidian detail. The overall effect is something like a sleek Vonnegut chassis wrapped in layers of post-millennial Zola. Mr. Wallace's earlier fiction revealed him as a student of literary post-modernists like John Barth and Robert Coover, flirting with metafictional tropes and self-referential narratives. Here, despite the ''Gravity's Rainbow''-plus length and haute science flourishes, Mr. Wallace plays it straight -- that is, almost realistically -- and seems to want to convince us of the authenticity of his vision by sheer weight of accumulated detail"

AND

"The mechanics and rituals of the recovering addicts are also represented with mind-numbing fidelity. Central to this narrative is one Don Gately, a recovering burglar and Demerol man, the slogging Leopold Bloom to Hal Incandenza's Stephen Dedalus."

"Accurate and concise?" I'd argue he sacrificed accuracy for concision, and in the process, he's managed to insinuate some unkind things about the book, whether he meant to or not (though I assume he meant to).

--"seems to want to convince us of the authenticity of his vision by sheer weight of accumulated detail"
Use of the phrase "sheer weight" in reference to a work of fiction is rarely complimentary. Seems to me he's implying a lack of finesse.

--"represented with mind-numbing fidelity."
Excuse me, Jay, but I didn't find anything about IJ "mind-numbing," and that's a pretty poor choice of words on your part, given the issues that Wallace is concerned with.

Damn right Sutpen! Your devotion reminds me of a salon's old-timer-rarely-with-us-anymore, ImNotDedalus' devotion to Joyce.

Slick! You rhymes-with-Rick!, didn't your mama ever teach you that if you ain't got something unnice to say about Jay Macky, it's better just not to say it?

EF, just a suggestion, dear leader, lovely leader
*lick lick*

Can you add in big bold letters at the start of Message 1: PLOT SPOILERS AHEAD.
I wish I hadn't looked at this thread now.

:(

Aw sheesh! Apologies Murr. Didn't even consider that. Good suggestion. It's done.

Random question: ATHSCME - anyone recall what this is an acronym for? (see, for example, page 268)

Not sure that ATHSCME is ever clearly defined.

This link provides some clues. http://infinitejest.wallacewiki.com/david-foster-wallace/index.php?title=A

Hm, Library Thing suddenly did not let me post.

I just want to say, I sure wish IJ had a bureaucratic appendix that listed out the acronyms. Even the "MILABBREVS" used in Eschaton. :)

Yeah, the acronym is never filled out in the book. Though a wallace-l member noted earlier this month, while prowling around the Boston Public Library (ie C's final resting place), that there's something called AFSCME, which stands for American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Obviously ATHSCME would need to stand for something pretty different, but it does seem likely that there's some kind of connection.

24: I used to be in that union once upon a time.

Rique - great page, thanks!

So, it's a company that uses really big fans to blow some kind of disgusting air away from a place I haven't quite figured out yet (the concavity/convexity I think - but this isn't a question, I don't want an answer - at least not yet.). And it also makes the fans to blow up the winter tennis domes.

That does help me.

ETA - Sutpen, post #24 - that also helps, thanks! (just saw the post now.)

#24 - that implies it's a government agency, and not a fan maker... ??

Maybe, maybe not. When I say "connection," it could be something as mundane as Wallace seeing the acronym and adapting it because why not.

I sense I am in the minority here but I found the Eschaton sequence often dull and a difficult slog for a bunch of witticisms that would have been more lively in the 80s when I would bet that section of the book was first knocking around DFW's writing notebooks. DFW is a better writer and observer when he has a tight focus on human interactions and thought processes. The wider or longer his focus is, the less I am engaged.

29: I wanted to show that part (Eschaton) to so many people I know who used to play some manner of wargames or other in the 80s or around that time. (Some of them still do, though...)

>29 slickdpdx: I'm reading the Eschaton sequence right now and laughing at a lot of it because of my experience with high school boys in Latin II. As a relief from Caesar, we/they made up a game based loosely on Risk, played on a board of a map of Gaul divided by tribes and placed on a small grid. They used Risk men and about 10 dice so that they were able to make strategic moves. The rules of the game became more and more Byzantine the more they played. If these guys had had access even to a lap-top, I shudder to think what it might have become.

What engaged me about the Eschaton game was the sustained combination of completely different discourses. On the one hand is the discourse of war and diplomacy, a historical discourse, describing how WW3 started, in effect (bitterly satirical). On the other is the description of a game played by children.

The text switches back and forth between these two discourses with such verve and satirical zest, allowing each separate discourse to shed light on the other: (the reasons why people go to) war and diplomacy are seen as inherently childish and ultimately petty; children's games are seen as preparation for 'the real thing' of adult life.

I thought the whole performance was brilliant.

And of course, having finished the Eschaton section, I'm finding nothing to laugh at. Thank you, tcM for your quick, pointed analysis.

I've been pondering DFW's ability to confront/describe so many depressing things about humanity, and the fact that he committed suicide.

I don't know how well I am going to articulate this and I also don't know if you all will find it appropriate, but here goes.

So much of the descriptions in Infinite Jest are what I've called before "fierce satire" in that they deliberately confront and exaggerate all that's hideous, wrong, scary, etc. in human existence.

I guess I think this ability to look at all of man's inhumanity unvarnished contributed to DFW's state of mind and made him suicidal. Although this is a very poor way of stating this.

I have been forcefully reminded of a very powerful essay I read by an Internet essay writer, Arthur Silber. He was discussing author Iris Chang who had spent a lot of energy documenting the rape of Nanking. She killed herself.

Among other things, the essay said,

"I strongly suspect that Chang suffered some of the same torments herself. Kamen notes that Chang "had no filters to block out anything that was being said to her." Chang was fully open to the pain suffered by the people she wrote about; she acknowledged it completely, and allowed it to become completely real. Most people cannot or will not do that."

Do you think there's this quality of being completely open to pain, and allowing it to be completely real, in DFW's story? So much of it is so painful yet we forget that because it's so ludicrous it makes us think of it as funny at the same time.

As I said, I have not expressed myself very well here. Sorry.

The entire Silber essay is here:
http://thesacredmoment.blogspot.com/2004/11/indifference-and-denial-that-kill.ht...

34:
Eek. Touchy subject. I'll just say this: people who suffer from clinical depression, and those who believe them when they describe the kind of suffering they experience, would probably find what you're suggesting reductive/romantic.

In the end, the version I find most plausible is that Wallace was a really smart guy who was uncommonly articulate and when he set out to write IJ, he "wanted to do something really sad" (as he once told Michael Silverblatt on KCRW). Of course the sadness in the book strikes hard--look who wrote it.

Thanks.

Not having really ever having had to cope with clinical depression myself, though my two sons have had bouts with it, I think of it as a different sort of experience that what I was getting at above.

However, I believe you are probably right. I was afraid that this thought process was reductive, which is one of the reasons why I have been hesitant to post on it and why I've had such trouble describing it. Because I don't want to do that, it's facile, obviously. But it keeps coming up in my mind.

Ohh so you were suggesting that maybe, in addition to being depressed, DFW also had this tendency to see too much or too clearly, and that was also a contributing factor to what he ultimately decided to do. I don't know, maybe. That's probably unknowable, but I also don't think that kind of speculation is necessary. Dude was clinically depressed; he didn't need any other reasons.

And yeah, there's no shame in thinking that stuff. The myth of the artist who spins agony into gold is so deeply ingrained in our culture that you can't really forget about it.

It hard to read this book and not think about DFW's suicide - and it's hard to see and experience the dark intensity of this book and not wonder about a link.

It's a romantic (tragic) notion - but I can't help feel that DFW saw things more intense then they really are. I think this intensity is super effective in literature. But, if this is a shadow of how he really saw the world (the "really real")...well, it's beautiful in its passion, but it's also a kind of scary.

If this is really a touchy subject, I hope I haven't disrespected it. I understand the darkness in IJ was intentional and that there's a separation between someone's art and their real life. The extent of that separation does vary...

Quebec terrorist throwdown in the video shop: Tarantino-esque?

I think you've raised a very important point, Anna, I have more to say on this later. (inundated with work dammit here) but I have a quick question for our experts itmt.

Can anybody enlighten me (intentional pun) on DFW's relationship with Buddhism. It strikes me that when Gately is in hospital his decision to forgo pain killers and his way of dealing with the pain - of fencing off the seconds - 'not one second is unendurable'- is the absolute essence of Buddhism as I understand it. Gately effectively is trying to achieve unbinding from his own dukha by focussing on the here and now.

40:
Is blunt violence enough to make something reminiscent of Tarantino? I hope not. I'd need a little more quasi-plagiarism and self-indulgent dialogue before I'd assign that moniker. (Forgive me, fans; the guy's work has its virtues, but they're much more modest than he imagines).

41:
I've read, as far as I know, everything Wallace ever published, and every interview he ever gave, and the only explicit mention of Buddhism that is coming to mind right now is his brief mention of "The Four Noble Truths" in his Kenyon Commencement Speech. He refers to them as the sort of "spiritual type thing" that might serve as a good object of worship, because it gets that attention outside your own self.

It's safe to say Wallace knew something about Buddhism, as an educated, curious person with an interest in philosophy. The Gately episode you're referring to does have a kind of Buddhist tang to it, but it also seems like it was probably a part of the large battery of Recovery Equipment that various detoxes, psych wards, and at least one halfway house must have supplied Wallace with over the course of his life. Or at least that's my best guess at where that concept, applied in that context, probably came from.

42:
Jackie Brown (1997)
From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
Natural Born Killers (1994)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
True Romance (1993)
Reservoir Dogs (1992)

Inifinte Jest published 1996. The obsessions mined in IJ suggest more than the usual interest in film entertainment. DFW tries a lot of different narrative techniques in the book. I think its not unlikely, but that's just me and a flavor that I detected. I realize Tarantino did not invent explicit violence in art. What could be more indulgent than a 1000 page work of fiction with a few hundred end notes?

43: Yes!

No, I don't think blunt force trauma is enough to make that particularly gruesome IJ scene (it does, uh, choke me up thinking about it) Tarantinoesque, but when a dude who got his legs cut off purposely by a train (or dudes in this case) in freaking wheelchairs "ambush" and ice a biped with full ambulatory faculties - when, in essence, they shove a sawed-off razor sharp walking cane thingamabopper killing device (forget exactly what the fuck it was) down said victim's throat all the way into his gastrointestinal interior...over the top violence as such, much, much more than blunt force trauma, is very Tarantinoesque, imo, regardless of whether or not Quentin's fabulous flicks are any good.

Was it a sharpened broomstick in a house of mirrors VIDEOSTORE run by Canuckian sibling clerks that were candidates for a northern Deliverance? I think it was!

Haha, ok, obviously there's something to it if inquiring minds are agreeing here. I still don't see it*, but carry on.

re: "indulgent" in 44, however--> It seems a little counter to the ethics expressed in IJ to begrudge (via derogatory connotations of "indulgent," especially vis a vis Tarantino, and how that word is often used to describe him) the book its end notes, which, after all, are really just an attempt at mimesis, or even its length. Isn't part of the point that real, worthwhile stuff ought to require some effort to enjoy? That instant gratification is developing into a paralyzing force that's starting to border on real evil? It's a torch Wallace grabbed from Gaddis, and it seems like a worthwhile one to me. It would be hypocritical if the book were written otherwise.

*Oh, and Enrique-- note that I said "blunt violence," ie, "violence, bluntly expressed." At any rate, see above.

I may be flogging a dead horse that wasn't that interesting in the first place, but I was curious if anyone else caught this whiff and I just googled wallace and tarantino and came up with this interesting bit at points 3 and 4: http://infinitesummer.org/archives/813

also this interesting comment from something DFW wrote after watching Lynch on the set of Mulholland Drive: "Quentin Tarantino is interested in watching somebody's ear getting cut off; David Lynch is interested in the ear"

of course, you know what they say about an infininty of monkeys, which is what the web is, and i may be just another monkey...

>43 pyrocow: excellent reference, pyrocow, thank you.

48:
I think it's interesting. And, having jogged my memory on some of Wallace's opinions about Tarantino, I think there are actually two directions you could take this...and, unfortunately both involve spoilers for those who haven't finished the book, or haven't spent some time trying to puzzle out the stuff that happens, as Wallace once said, "beyond the right frame" of the novel. So...SPOILERS...

((Cred where cred's due: a lot of the basic thinking here is based on Chris Hager's IJ thesis.)) Note that Lucien Antitois' death sits right at the center of the main text (I'm not counting the endnotes, because the reader ideally experiences them interspersed with everything else). If you imagine the book plotted as a parabolic curve on a coordinate plane, you can also imagine the stuff that is understood to happen, but does not appear in the text, as being the reflection of that curve over the appropriate axis. Lucien's death occurs at the peak of the curve (since it's at the center of the text). What would the reflection of that point represent, narratively speaking? Hal's complete loss of speech is a good bet. We never see when it happens. And remember what happens when the mute Lucien dies: he rockets out of his "skin's suit" and manages to sound "a bell-clear and nearly maternal alarmed call-to-arms in all the world’s well-known tongues." Suddenly he's *multi*-lingual. Works out pretty nicely, huh? Not bad for a book so often accused of bagginess and digression.

Ok, so why would Wallace emulate a filmmaker whose oeuvre is sort of incompatible with the values at the core of his book in such a crucial and momentous scene? I see at least two possibilities: 1) You could use the scene's importance as evidence that any perceived Tarantino influence in the scene is being imposed by readers. 2) You could see that kind of emulation as a stylistic manifestation of one of the real antagonists in IJ (ie hip, empty entertainment...or, you know, that kind of entertainment as a manifestation (sorry) of the consequences of feeding the addictive impulse) that results in a kind of unavoidable ejaculation of this poor guy's soul, shooting out to sound the alarm, on the narrative level, against the coming AFR attack; and on the stylistic level, against the stuff that Tarantino and his brethren stand for.

I'll stop there for now. Anybody?

You and pyrocow are blowing my mind. Great stuff!

What do you make of the sunbather character?

Thanks from me too. I had just typed my question about Lucien's death when I saw your post, Sutpen, and am now reading the thinking that led to it. Thanks, guys.

guuuuuuuuuuys I am on page one and this book seems great! keep the conversation going!

The group's not really focused on IJ anymore, but I'm always interested in talking about it. Anybody still reading should definitely feel free to post in any of the IJ threads.

Infinite Jest is the greatest novel ever written.

True or False?

Discuss.

False.

Natter, natter, natter.

Robert

Eslaf.

Rettar, rettar, rettar.

reteP

Hahahahaha! Nice one, PorMan.

YEAH! Take THAT treboR!

euqeerFeuqirnE

Rettar spelled backwards is ratteR.

Robert

Murr spelt backwards is Rrum.

hic

Vivian Darkbloom spelt backwards is, oh, oh, oh - oh Henri. Get us outta this mess willya.

Dam Mista D. you sho iz pikkie.

60> Did you say Rrum, Murr?

Hope this helps us get out of this, PorMan!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g874H2GBPlA

And if that don't do it damnit, then this certainly will (or won't) either!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FER-zs0Wxs&feature=related

Of course Infinite Jest isn't the greatest novel ever written. But it's up there, Man amighty.

Is this an Infinite Mess, PorMan, in your finite estimation?

It's still got a shot. Moby-Dick had a better first line, but Infinite Jest has a better first page. Though I'm not sure if young Mr. Incandenza at the university beats Spud Murphy at the job interview. My personal canon may not be the most relevant scale of comparison, though.

And as for the other thread's "pointillism of the pen", Henry James, now as always, can eat it. This has a better claim to "pointillism of the pen" than anything of James', as well as a better claim to "hysteric realism" than Zadie Smith.

actually, I see a lot of similarities between DFW's prose and James's: both are fond of very long meandering sentences which try to capture the way thinking mind works. of course their minds work totally differently....

I sort of think of "hysterical realism" as an analogue to "impressionism." It's a term invented by a critic in order to be pejorative, but it strikes me as merely descriptive.

Oh, and as for "greatest novel ever written," I don't know if I'd ever want to pronounce on that designation, but it's certainly one of my favorites.

Back when I had more stuff on my profile, I reported for all of LibraryThing to see that the best novel is Independent People. I have felt strongly about the book for a long time, but I think I first made the claim that it is the best novel over on The Purists belles lettres forum possibly five or so years ago in reply to a fellow's mentioning "Gravity's Rainbow, the best novel by the way..."

Among other things, Laxness keeps his grandiosity in check. You would have to know that he has created a world, but you won't catch him doing it.

Robert

>67 Sutpen: Oh, I agree. I wouldn't throw it out there as a designation for the putative "best novel ever" otherwise.

So we should do Underworld as a group read sometime.

69:
I don't like Underworld nearly as much as I do IJ, but I'd love to read it again--particularly with the kind of commentary this group has proven it can provide.

I'm on page 780. Not too long ago I read about Joelle's dreams of having lots and lots of teeth all the way down here throat. Then, just a bit afterward, about Hal's dream of losing his teeth. So, my question, what with teeth theme?

71:
I don't really have an answer for you, but there used to be a lot more teeth stuff in the book. Wallace's editor convinced him to cut out a whole big dentistry theme.

"Fun with teeth" the film as well. Nto to mention Schact the up and coming dentist. If the editor convinced him to cut more dentistry out, I'm surprised so much stayed in!

73:
Yeah that's something I've wondered about too. The speculative answer I've settled on is that the teeth stuff serves some kind of thematic purpose in the novel and Wallace didn't want to lose it completely, but he allowed his editor to cut out most of it in order to make the book shorter, and also probably because he was convinced that most people wouldn't want to read that much discussion of dentistry.

#72 - that is quite interesting!

Some other dentistry references I'm recalling now - one of the House residents had a dentist father, and didn't one want to be a dental hygienist for children, or something like that - maybe that was the same resident. And dentists are noted in the Lenz section as a good source of some drug for a cocaine filler - and therefore as being popular with addicts/dealers.

he was convinced that most people wouldn't want to read that much discussion of dentistry.

He was not wrong there!
lol

76:
You know, under most circumstances I'd agree with you, but I think I could happily read Wallace discussing more or less any topic you could name.

and I agree with you!

This thread is now closed.

Go here to Infinite Jesters to continue the discussion.