Infinite Jest...

I was listening this morning to a oldish Bloggingheads.tv episode between the Conors, Clarke and Friedersdorf. There's some interesting stuff in there, particularly Clarke's argument about eliminating summer vacation, which I'm not a 100% sure what I think of, though Friedersdorf's response was uncharacteristicly irrelevent.

Really though, the bit that I want to comment on came right at the beginning where Conor Clarke was talking about his issue with David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. His complaint, essentially, was that he is not a fan of books that try to be overly difficult and disorienting at the expense of being readable and enjoyable, and I don't think that that's wrong. However, I do think that he kin da' misses the point.

The main character in the book (or at least the character which I think the gist of the book is organized around), Hal Incandenza, is introduced in the beginning of the book as, at least to my interpretation, as having lost his mind in a fairly peculiar way. Throughout the book we see him slowly slipping, for various reasons, in to increasingly obsessive, monomaniacal, recursive thinking. Simply put, I think that it is Hal's insanity that the narrative is really meant to mimic and convey to the reader not just in words, but by actually approximating that insanity in them. In that sense, the thing that Conor finds somewhat grating is a key element of the book. Now, that's not to say that you can't find it grating as well, but I think it's worthwhile to understand that there is a reason why the book is written as insanely as it is.