A real book "not worth the paper it's written on" simply falls out of print and is not reviewed; it does not generate twenty more pages of overpretentious literary diatribe decades later. Readers are advised to skip this article.
Well, duh (1996)
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Re: Well, duh (1996)
#12I resent the length of my time the author spent, verbosely and banally, telling me that he resents the length of his time Wallace spent through banal verbosity in Infinite Jest.
Re: Well, duh (1996)
#13A real book "not worth the paper it's written on" simply falls out of print and is not reviewed; it does not generate twenty more pages of overpretentious literary diatribe decades later. Readers are advised to skip this article.
The article is a contemporary review.
Re: Well, duh (1996)
#14I was intrigued by this comment, read the review, and posted it:
“Infinite Jest is one of my fave books — but it’s still fun to read this vicious @LRB review from 1996.”
Tony O’Shaughnessy
Re: Well, duh (1996)
#15A real book "not worth the paper it's written on" simply falls out of print and is not reviewed; it does not generate twenty more pages of overpretentious literary diatribe decades later. Readers are advised to skip this article.
Popularity is a poor proxy for quality.
Re: Well, duh (1996)
#16A real book "not worth the paper it's written on" simply falls out of print and is not reviewed; it does not generate twenty more pages of overpretentious literary diatribe decades later. Readers are advised to skip this article.
The article is a contemporary review.
That's exactly the point of the comment you're replying to.
Re: Well, duh (1996)
#17I do not like author X. A very, very long article about it. The end.
Re: Well, duh (1996)
#18I had a ton of fun reading Infinite Jest, it took me two months of reading daily but after a while I couldn't wait to get home from work to read it (I didn't have a kid yet mind you). There are many things about it that are dissatisfying, frustrating even maddening. But there are so many points of brilliance it makes the whole thing worth it. The ambitiousness, audacity and shortcomings are part of it. I felt similar…
> Was it a great book? No. But there is about a 50 page section in the middle that makes the whole damn thing worth it.
Could you not read just the good part?
Re: Well, duh (1996)
#19They totally missed the mark on this one:
"What’s meant to distinguish Infinite Jest (the book) from various artefacts that precede it is the conflation of entertainment with drug addiction, and this notion is, I think, fundamentally flawed."
It's now pretty clear entertainment can be neurologically addictive, as evidenced by the social media companies and their abilities to predict improved engagement.
On top of that, we've now got an attention + an opioid addiction.
If anything, DFW was just very early at predicting the medium term state, complete with national secession movements.
Not bad for a 'verbose' fiction writer.
Re: Well, duh (1996)
#20Seems the author is oftentimes taking whats meant to be a purposefully sardonic reflection of American culture to be an actual direct attempt at humor by DFW. A good example of this is his point that the "level of humor" in the book is low because of a reference to "butt products". The joke isn't, "butts, haha", the joke is the satire that yea, that would be true... I mean, have you seen Instagram? Or SuperBowl ads?
"both, most importantly, work up an elaborate – and elaborately digressive – plot which deliberately ends as unsatisfactorily as possible."
I've only read about DFW's work, I haven't actually read them yet. But the quote above, in addition to your first sentence, sounds exactly like what DFW would be attempting to demonstrate an unspoken life parallel, or that it's about the journey not the destination, but even so, once the destination is reached the journey is pointless and forgotten.
There's definitely an unrealized expectation at the base of this review.