Words Fail Me

And but so it wasn’t entirely unselfconsciously that I took my second daily dose of bupropion1 just before I finished reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, with its ending less like an exit through the gift shop and more like finding oneself at an artless dead-end in a museum notorious for being both vast and bereft of adequate signage.  It wasn’t as if the preceding one thousand seventy-eight (but who’s counting?) pages  were a monument to narrative cohesion, either, and were more akin to whetting one’s whistle on the proverbial firehose.  In this way the novel is antipodal to the spare, nigh-Pointillist story “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” most often attributed2 to Hemingway3.

The experience for the novel’s reader qua reader was not unlike listening to Robin Williams4 as he riffed, flooded by a torrent of allusions and impressions and occasional insights which ultimately left one washed out to sea and set adrift with the only hope of rescue, the S.S. I Guess You Had to Be There, receding and vanishing inelectuably over the horizon.  One could argue, pace documentarian Ken Burns with his sentimental slow zooms in on vignetted and sepia toned stills of long dead heroine-addicted mathematical savants, that this sort of improvisation is at the heart of jazz, America’s one truly autochthonous art form5, which also happens to be the one musical genre guaranteed to give me the howling fantods thanks in no small part to the fact that it was played by my father ad nauseum throughout my childhood coupled with the axiomatic truth that a parent’s passions engender one of two reactions in their offspring:  the area of interest is embraced (forming relationship) or wholeheartedly rejected (forming identity.)

Even setting all Oedipal/Electral and it’s-the-notes-he-doesn’t-play pontification aside, the novel’s central conceit if not outright raison d’être seemed to be a relentless campaign to force the reader to shift their attention from theme to character to trivia like a particularly maniacal stereoscopic6 film that pinballs the audience’s focus from background to midground to foreground, wall-eyed to crosseyed and back again, some horrific ocular equivalent of a ThighMaster workout, until the viewer’s poor peepers sting with weariness and their vitreous humor decide it’s time to ask for the check, please, and start worrying about having small change to pay the valet.  All of which leaves the perspicacious reader wondering if, in the end, the author isn’t simply showing off7 or being self-indulgent8.

Still, Infinite Jest is wildly, wildy impressive.

1. Wellbutrin—®GlaxoSmithKline—an antidepressant whose psychochemical mechanism is, to this day, so poorly understood that it is sometimes thought of as banging an open palm against an old cathode ray tube television in hope of improving reception.
2. Apocryphally, no doubt
3. Ernest Hemingway, he of the Fisticuffs School of literary inspiration and, like Wallace himself, of the At His Own Hand School of unnatural death.
4. Whose expiration seemed to blunt the career spanning outrage among fellow comedians that he, chronically if however inadvertentlya, stole jokes from the aforementioned fellow comedians. The blunting of the criticism attributable with some certainty to the circumstance of his own death being (yet another) suicide.
   1. A condition linguist, neurologist, and noted Panglossian Steven Pinker coined “kleptonesia.”
5. Bearing in mind that all art, from comic booksa to jazzb, is predicated on repetition with variation.
   1. Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud.
   2. Once aptly described, presumably by some cat who could really swing, as “four measures of a song, whatever the hell you want for however the hell long you want, and then two measures of the song.”
6. Referred to in vulgate as “3D movies.”
7. Most worrisome for me personally as the novel was strongly recommended by two friends, one of whom has insisted since adolescence that she knows me better than I know myselfa and the other, who has never claimed to know me better than I know myselfb, who was surprised to learn that I hadn’t already read it because he, after finishing it, had leapt to the erroneous conclusion that I had somehow used it, the novel, as some sort template for how I live my own life.  In fairness to both, one of the novel’s lines which resonated most strongly with me was this:  “The dedication and sustained energy that go into true perspicacity and expertise were exhausting even to think about.”
   1. She doesn’t.
   2. He might.
8. See Note 7.