I finished "Infinite Jest" sort of kind of yesterday. [View All]

[vixengrl]

I don't think this is the kind of book one actually finishes. It's more like you've read it to the end, have some very definite ideas, and need a re-read or so before you actually can be said to grasp all that you've read. And then maybe you re-read it once more because you want to, just to be sure.

I come away with some opinions and some questions. I don't know how many other people visiting this forum have tried ths one on, but it's worth it. David Foster Wallace is totally a talent who erased his map too soon. I think his "map" had directions to places worthwhile to know.

I'm going to post some odd ideas I sort of suspect, but I don't want them to be thought of as spoilers, so I'm just going to have them out and if anyone wants to jump on, they can, but if you're still reading it or haven't yet, you don't have to get info you don't want.


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Part of me doesn't think Joelle was really shitting Gately when she said that the real reason she wears the veil is because she's too ridiculously beautiful to actually be seen. It doesn't matter if that's actually true, so much as she believes it is. The involved backstory of Joelle's deformation was told by a third party who got Orin right, and outlined the Kentucky family of one exceptionally pretty personage, but get the name of that person utterly wrong at the end. So if this person doesn't really know Madame Psychosis' real name, can that witness be trusted to have told the actual story?

Or is that person telling a story they heard from someone, somewhere? And I think part of the disfunction of the Van Dyne clan is true, because Joelle is a wreck. But when she was checked into treatment, the idea that a nurse peeked under her veil and fast-tracked her into treatment suggests to me that it wasn't because she was deformed that she was considered a great risk--but because she wasn't Because she was "deluded". She was still physically perfect, but---something inside of her felt deformed. And Orin left her because of her family business, and she felt responsible for both her mother's and JOI's suicides, and that and her father's fatal attraction was enough to think herself a horrific mess, even though she was blameless. And of course, she had to have at least a glimmer of an idea, as a film student herself, what "the Entertainment" was about.

I don't necessarily feel much for Hal, even though he's probably the person who all of this mess was about--Gately is the real hero in a way, because we uncover how his misteps are tied up in the drama of the Quebecois Separatists mission to use the interlace cartridge of "The Entertainment", even though he himself is just a small-time theif and muscle-bound pill-head. Maybe this is because I never knew anyone of Hal's privelege, but I kind of know people like Gately. The bits about Boston AA and the denizens of Ennett House are fascinating.

Some things are beyond credibility for me, though. Marathe is an angaging charater, until he describes how he was saved by the love of his skull-less wife. Then he seems fake, like some point that didn't need to be made. Fine. He is seducing a woman who was chronically depressed and feeling alive for the first time by trying a Substance--and is he promising her a finale by introducing her, and maybe himself, to the pschic immolation of the "entertainment"? If he wants to finance his wife's continued vegetation, shouldn't he also want to be there? And if his accidental companion finds her happiness in Kahlua, why not leave her to it? This part was alive for me, but a little bit, "Fail" also.

Interlace reminds me a lot of Netflix. I think Orin was not as shocked about Hal's recollection of JOI's suicide as he might have been, even if he kept a wide berth of the family's doings. I think Avril was not as big a slut as her sons suspected, but her standoffish passive-aggressive ways let them think the worst. Also, Mario wasn't really so much retarded as disabled, but actually, anytime the author tried to show what Mario was thinking, it actually wasn't uninsightful. Just awkward, like his whole life might have been awkward. And he probably was CT's son. Which was why Avril was so especially solicitous towards him and never talked down to him. Because he was especially her family. And his disabilities felt to her like they were her sin.

JOI never could have made anything like "the Entertainment" except if he were sober. Sobriety was actually his sin. Joelle is conscious of waking the "devil" inside of James Incandenza and letting him do his cinematic worst. His other works appear to have been schlock, although I would love to see Tarantino do something like "Blood Sister". Which has a character with burns from freebasing--but if JOI liked to used Joelle, and she was by then scarred, wouldn't he have used her? The book doesn't allow as much. And wasn't her drug of choice free-base coke? Unless, unless--

She stole her backstory from the other actress JOI used to augment her already horrible tale.

Somehow I kind of want a happy ending where Gately is doing better and Joelle returns to his side. In a traditional story, that could even happen. And Hal regains his voice, and Orin gets his dues paid. Wallace gives us none of this. It's a curiously late 20th century postmodern thing. I liked it, and even though it was awfully long, wanted more. Which might be a side effecdt of entertainment itself, nu?