depth first search

I’ve been really enjoying reading Infinite Jest over the summer, as one small participant in a somewhat larger coalition. I must admit that one of the side effects of reading this book is a renewed interest in vocabulary. Another is that, after lugging around this brick of a novel, I have a keen interest in buying a Kindle, though at this point, I’m sort of enjoying the new definition in my biceps.

One question I’ve been mulling over while reading is why exactly I like this book. Let me be clear — there are a lot of obvious things not to like about this book. The heft is one. The disjointed structure another. The sometimes excessive amount of wordplay. The occasionally meaningless end notes (and the corresponding work required to flip back and forth between the pages of this massive tome).

Aside: To illustrate the structural and mechanical problems of flipping to end notes and back, here is a photograph of my much abused bookmarks.

What I like about the book is not really quite as solid or easily identifiable as the flaws. For awhile I suspected that my enjoyment came from the novel triggering some kind of status reflex along the lines of “Look at this big impressive novel I’m reading. I must be so smart.” Really, for me, it comes down to the little narrative gems, like DFW’s description of two student athletes eating dinner.

Petropolis Kahn and Eliot Kownspan eat with such horrible P.O.W.ish gusto that nobody else will sit with them — they’re by themselves at a small table behind Schacht and Struck, utensils glittering amid a kind of fine mist or spray.

Or this short hysterical scene where younger students uncover an unplugged, leftover fridge deep under E.T.A.

‘Nobody could be so low. Who would go off and leave a full fridge?’
‘Happy to back way, way off,’ says Carl Whale, his light receding.
‘Not even Pearson could be that low, leaving food in an unplugged fridge.’
…
‘Such a smell I’m smelling!’
‘There’s mayonnaise!He left mayonnaise in there.’
‘Why the bulge in the top of the lid?’
‘The ballooning carton of orange juice!’
‘Nothing could live in that, rodent or otherwise.’
‘So why’s that sandwich-meat moving?’
‘Maggots?’
‘Maggots!’
‘Shut it! Sleeps! Kick it shut!’
‘This right here is exactly as close as I’m ever getting to that fridge ever again, Chu.’
…
‘This is Death. Woe unto those that gazeth on Death. The Bible.’

But even in between these little gems, in the meat and heft, the narrative always seems just easy enough to read that you don’t even realize how much of the novel’s world you are absorbing, as if it sort of slips in through osmosis and entrenches itself in your metabolic pathways as you lug the physical weight of the book around.

And the plot and characters are there, spanning the whole spectrum from agents of geopolitical intrigue to individual substance abusers. The in-between world is both fantastic and fantastical,  and somehow, even when I feel lost, I never am.