My rage at Culvert seems judgmental to me now and perhaps also a little excessive, but I can tell (since these are my own words) that the anger also stems from my resentment towards my adolescent peers who thought that the source of all the problems in the world came from authority and that everything would be solved if we could simply do whatever we wanted.

[Tales of the Long Bow, by G.K. Chesterton]
[Babel Tower, by A.S. Byatt]

Also from “The Unobtrusive Traffic of Captain Pierce”:

The over-powering charm which pigs exercise upon us at a certain time of life; when we hear their trotters in our dreams and their little curly tails twine about us like the tendrils of the vine—

Prepare yourselves for an incoherent rant. I’ve been reading Babel Tower and Babbletower, the latter of which is the book-within-a-book inside the former. Culvert, the “visionary” of a utopia where everyone is free and there are no servants or masters and people can pursue their own pleasures, is the most ridiculous and stupid excuse for a sensualist I’ve ever seen. Why not be honest and say directly, “I want to have sex”? Why does he have to say that he’s emancipating mankind from oppression? I mean, do poverty and wretchedness disappear just because this group of rich, spoiled brats have now decided they will do whatever they want without any regard for the rules? I know Byatt wrote it as a criticism, but oh, did she succeed all too well in making me hopping mad.

Culvert proposes (idiot that he is) that they should engage in dramatic performances that represent their “new social order” on a regular schedule. But what if everyone decides to follow their own desires and refuse to put on any play whatsoever? And why doesn’t he just say, “I want to go watch an orgy every week”? And that whole, “let’s preach universal tolerance, but we want to murder the colonel because he has ‘blood on his hands’” incident was even more infuriating. If they are supposed to follow their instincts and live in perfect harmony, what on earth are they supposed to do if they have a secret homicidal maniac in their midst? After all, the would-be murderer only fulfills his desire by cutting someone’s throat. I am not speaking of murder that comes from anger or malice, but the sheer love of violence that is the one instinct of which these inhabitants of La Tour Bruyarde refuse to speak. (I think they all sink into a pit of sadomasochism later in the book. Serves them right.)

I really despise Culvert. I don’t even hate him. He irritates me like a fly I want to squash but can’t because he’s in a book. I hope he ends up miserable and wretched as a beggar rolling in the blood left on the streets of Paris after the Terror. Let him preach his visions there! I could have cheered when Colonel Grim asked who was going to clean out the latrines in the new utopia. For you see, in all these declarations of freedom, the bathroom really is key. I don’t object to your principles, though I may think them ridiculous. What I really object to is your utter neglect of details, the small things that end up making your life a living hell if they go wrong.

For real comfort, you need order and discipline. And all it requires is an occasional temporary delay in self-gratification. Culvert is a blithering idiot, and I hope his Babbletower collapses on him soon.

(Yes, I do realize that my reaction is the entire point of the book, and possibly of the book-within-a-book as well. I’m not supposed to like Culvert. Still, this is supposed to be tempered by a begrudging half-admiration for the man who is constantly described as “intelligent” and “brilliant”. But there is no such ambiguity on my part. I am a fanatic. I despise Culvert and all other fools like him, and I most decidedly disagree with the assessment that he is “brilliant”. He is simply inventing a whole social theory to justify the fact that he’s obsessed with sex, something which is neither original nor impressive. Self-righteous moron.)

[A Gesture Life, by Chang-rae Lee]

Started reading Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life, which made me feel slightly betrayed, since he’s writing about a Japanese man who “fell in love with a Korean comfort woman during World War II.” It’s all very well to explore controversial issues, but he’s a fellow Korean, and irrationally, I wish he’d show more nationalism. I know, I know, it’s art, and therefore, we durst not argue with whatever the dictates of his artistic conscience demand. (I like the sound of that, “durst not.”) Still…

Also, it may be just me, but I find his writing incredibly dull. There’s an Ishiguro-esque quality to his style, but Ishiguro makes the content of his writing interesting, the nostalgic and wistful descriptions lingering over faded, yet beautiful things. The nostalgic and wistful descriptions here linger over an ordinary middle-class American life, albeit that of a Japanese immigrant. It’s just…tiresome. I think maybe the style itself could potentially be parodic, or at least evocative of modern Japanese writers, but still, I don’t enjoy this story. (Then I feel somewhat guilty, because Chang-rae Lee is probably the only famous Korean-American contemporary writer. But who says Asian-Americans should enjoy Asian-American writing? I didn’t like Native Speaker much either.) What’s odd is that my friends and I have criticized most Asian-American writing for dwelling too much on the “oh, I rebelled against my roots but I can never escape them” theme, but for some reason, this is exactly what I dislike about Chang-rae Lee. Not enough about Korea, or of Korean heritage. I want him to distill the essence of my Korean-American existence, in the exact manner of that cliched phrase. I want to see him muse about speaking the language, about wearing hanbok, about passing by “Koreatown” in Flushing, about sappy “trot” music that the grandparents love singing. I don’t want to hear of a wholly American life, where the man has an American wife and a normal job, all of which is falling apart, but in a typically American way. I want to read about “feeling caught between two worlds” when the writer is a Korean-American, and therefore like me. How silly is that? A shared nationality still allows room for infinite variations.

[The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen]

I’ve finished Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, which I concede is creative and ingenious and innovative, etc., etc., etc., but it was difficult to enjoy. I mean, considering that it’s about a midwestern American family, going through various stages of midlife crises and/or depression, it couldn’t be further detached from the world I live in. I suppose for the critics it captured the essence of being American and suffering the changes in ideas and ideals and ideologies, but as an Asian-American, who has lived on the East Coast all her life (and yes, those nine years in Houston counted as East Coast), it couldn’t be more alien.

One would expect that reading fantasy would, well, be escapist, and yes, it is to a certain degree. On the other hand, all the books I really enjoy are probably closest to me in terms of mental familiarity. Even contemporary mainstream books like The Lovely Bones focus on something I can relate to myself, like family life. The Corrections has very few chances for that kind of connection. I don’t understand these characters very well, and it’s hard to experience their world through their minds. And, well, the fixation on fecal matter and urine may have been thematically important, but was it necessary to describe the smell of rancid urine? I tend to have overly vivid reading experiences, and I nearly threw up on those particular passages. Sheesh.

[The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye, by A.S. Byatt]

I read a collection of fairy tales by A.S. Byatt over the weekend, including The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, which I liked, even though one would think I had very little in common with the protagonist. The way that reading stories sort of forces you outside of stories and yet trying to create a narrative out of your own life…it’s hard to explain, but it “resonated” with me.

[The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro]

I finished The Remains of the Day, the Ishiguro book, and it was really wonderful. I think Ishiguro did continue with his “can you trust the narrator?” tactics, but it was more along the lines of self-delusion in memories, in order to forget what you don’t want to remember. But what really struck me was this sorrow that pervades the entire story, the butler who is desperately trying to convince himself that his life of service to Lord Darlington was worthy of “dignity.” It was rather beautiful, especially at the end, when he finally is able to admit what he refused to admit before and then achieves a kind of peace with himself. I suppose to someone else, it could seem a bit sappy, and perhaps even transparent, but I thought it was so elegantly done. Really beautiful, liked it even more than When We Were Orphans.

It’s true though, not simply for this butler or those of his social standing in England. World War II was horribly devastating, the end of idealism, the huge turning point for Western civilization (and I suppose the rest of the world as well). World War I was pretty awful too, but I think it was World War II that broke the Western world’s original faith in man, that repudiated any belief in humanism. Admittedly, the trend had started before the war (thinking Freud and Darwin, of course), but somehow the sheer brutality of that war made it real. Suddenly, we weren’t anymore the enlightened rational beings that we wanted to be. The advent of our postmodern cynicism, I suppose. But growing up in the world of my parents, who were born during this turning point, I can’t help sharing the old butler’s nostalgia and bewilderment.

[When We Were Orphans, by Kazuo Ishiguro]

What’s cool and disturbing about Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans (another book, which I read during the summer) is that he gradually leads the reader into more and more unbelievable events until we’re forced to doubt the narrator’s ability to tell the truth, or rather, realize the layers of self-delusion and deception that clouds the narrator’s own vision, and consequently our own. Rather nice, considering how we usually trust even first-person narrative to be reliable, and to have that turn completely upside-down is a very upsetting experience.

Flaubert’s Parrot, by Julian Barnes: My first exposure to Julian Barnes, and I’m completely smitten. Initially, the book sounds like the sort of narrative nonfiction that I enjoy reading; the first-person narrator being a sort of companion in the exploration of the life of Flaubert, masquerading as an observer but not as a character or subject of the novel. But of course, Geoffrey Braithwaite is a character in his own right, though he tries to avoid it, and we see him let slip maddening little details, which don’t fully cohere into a complete picture even when he gets drunk and grows unusually candid with the reader. We do piece together the story, Braithwaite’s story, in between his recounting and retelling of Flaubert’s life, but there’s always that lingering uncertainty from receiving a story through apocrypha. Of course, there’s also a peculiar sense of satisfaction in it as well—like constructing an image glimpsed through the cracks or between the bars—which appeals to the postmodernist within me.

It soon becomes clear that Braithwaite’s fascination with Flaubert is more than literary appreciation or enthusiasm; his obsession has a focus on adultery, on that most notorious Flaubertian creation, Emma Bovary, on authenticity, on the two parrots. Asking who is the real Flaubert is really asking who is the real Braithwaite (and perhaps also who was the real Ellen as well). I loved the three different chronologies of Flaubert’s life: one recording his achievements and successes, one recording his tragedies and failures, and one last one made up entirely of quotes from his writing. How chameleon a single individual can be! Our image of them perhaps no more authentic than a parrot’s imitation of their voice.

But all such lofty thoughts aside, the simple fact of his fixation on Flaubert is what makes the book appealing to me. Who knew that Flaubert was such an interesting individual? In corollary, if I’d realized before just how wonderful his prose was, I would have made more effort to finish reading Madame Bovary from where I left off so many years before. (I’ve since been inspired to check it out from the local library.) Also, I had especial sympathy for Braithwaite’s emotional defensiveness of Flaubert, his dissection of the writer’s flaws and his equally careful defense of them. I spend a lot of time criticizing books and authors in writing and in conversation, but I am equally prone to jump to their defense when they are criticized by others. Perhaps it’s because no book I’ve read has been entirely worthless: even those I’ve hated or despised have left their imprint on me and have become touchstones for my opinions and reactions, and of course, the most frivolous novel still provides a few hours of pleasure, if nothing else.

Tooth and Claw, by Jo Walton: What a clever twist on the mannerpunk novel! It seems to be the fashion to write fantasy set during the Regency or Victorian period (or perhaps I’ve just gravitated towards those novels), but I don’t think any author’s gone so far as to write about Victorian dragons before. I’m reminded not so much of Jane Austen but of Charles Dickens (e.g., the casual cruelty of Daverak to his servants and social inferiors, young Avan trying to make his way in the city, the pseudo-industrial setting of a countryside being overtaken by railroads, the seeds of socialist consciousness). Walton cites Trollope for her inspiration, which makes me think that I ought to read Framley Parsonage someday. Some particularly interesting twists: Victorian prudishness being biologically enforced by female dragons changing color after they’ve been in close contact with a male, the Old Religion (equivalent to the Catholic Church, I suppose) being a vehicle of socialist reform, body size as equal measure of prosperity as wealth, and of course, that beginning scene that I’ve heard mentioned in every review of this book, children and other relatives devouring their dead father’s body as part of their inheritance. Strangely, the eating of dragonflesh—should I call it cannibalism?—didn’t shock me that much, partly because the dragons themselves thought it perfectly natural. (A testament to how well Walton thought out this society.)

[Possession: A Romance, by A.S. Byatt]

I’ve spent an entire day on my math homework. Or, rather, eight hours, since I need to subtract the time I spent finishing Possession. That, by the way, was a rather good book, though it made me feel a bit irritable because it had all these ongoing motifs, which I was not bothering to remember. I mean, it was meant to be analyzed, and I wasn’t reading for analysis, just pleasure. Also, it had so many explicit themes that I felt I was grappling with a mass of thorns. Byatt’s reflections on the essentially sterile nature of self-analysis, which pervades a post-Freudian society and more specifically the academic world, as opposed to poetry, self-expression and creativity, were beautifully and rather movingly woven into the story. But I didn’t like all the wrestling with feminism, and how to deal with women’s sexuality, and how this sexuality and creativity poses a threat to the masculine ego, and how, and how, and how, etc., etc., etc. Yuck. I’ve never really seen myself as a girl. When I think of myself, I don’t think, “female,” I think “intelligent human being.” And from an academic point of view, exploring mythological feminine images like the Sphinx or the Morrigan is all very fascinating, but just a tad tiresome after a while, and when you’re reading for pleasure, you really don’t want to care about things like that. Gender is a very minor part of my self-identity! I don’t care that male authors have predominantly male protagonists, because I identify with those male characters! Sheesh.

But just in terms of storyline, Possession was really wonderfully done. Byatt, I believe, actually composed all the poetry she “quotes” herself (unless Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte really do exist…though I’m pretty sure they don’t.) I’m rather impressed with her command of Victorian language. I really would like to write like that, capitalizing random nouns and sticking in dashes instead of commas.

Nevertheless, there’s just a hint of smugness in all of contemporary “literary” writing, something left over from the modernists, I think. “Let’s see how many allusions to high-brow intellectual thought we can embed in one sentence,” that kind of thing. When T.S. Eliot does it, I feel awed and humbled, but when Byatt does it, I feel rather irritated. Probably because when I read The Waste Land, I was reading it for self-edification, but when I read Possession, it’s simply and only for wasting time. Biased, aren’t I? Nevertheless, there is this impression of seals jumping through hoops. I mean, Ursula K. Le Guin manages to be as profound, if not more, with a much simpler, much less convoluted, much less referential writing style. The point should be to communicate the theme to the reader in a subtle and carefully crafted way, not to impress the reader with your excellent education. Of course, I am impressed. But it does make me feel a bit irritated.

The Lions of Al-Rassan, by Guy Gavriel Kay: About two years ago, Sai compiled a beautiful, haunting fan soundtrack for this book, and to this day, it’s probably the second most-played playlist on my iPod. I’d been meaning to pick up this book ever since, although I wasn’t sure what to expect since I had mixed feelings about the Fionavar Tapestry (Kay’s four-volume, classic high fantasy series), which I thought had excellent prose, interesting plot points, and really boring characters.

Well, I finally got around to reading The Lions of Al-Rassan, after buying a used copy at a local bookstore, and I can attest that it most definitely does not have boring characters. Granted, the main female protagonist, Jehane, isn’t particularly compelling (I mostly ignored her except for the moments when her know-it-all attitude grated on my nerves), but the story isn’t really about Jehane at all. She just happens to be the principal witness, so to speak, of the momentous meeting between Ammar ibn Khairan (”the man who killed the last khalif of Al-Rassan”) and Rodrigo Belmonte (”Scourge of Al-Rassan”). Although they come from opposing kingdoms and belong to different faiths, their friendship becomes the stuff of legends and ultimately, of tragedy. I kept going back and reading the scenes about the two of them together.

“Are you in love with this man?” she’d asked her husband once in Fezana that winter—more than half jealous, if truth were told.

“I suppose I am, in a way,” Rodrigo had replied after a moment. “Isn’t it odd?”

The line seems a little trivial out of context, but what does it mean, after all, to be in love? Ammar and Rodrigo are both great men, but they discover, probably for the first time, their only true equal in each other. Kay describes them as fighting together as fluidly as if they were two bodies controlled by one mind. How bewildering, how amazing to realize that you are not alone but have a counterpart in another human being…and how tragic to know that this one person—perhaps the only person—capable of knowing you entirely must inevitably end up as your enemy. For this book is tragic and ended up breaking my heart as surely as the music originally did. Perhaps it’s the theme common to so many great fantasy novels: the ending of an age, the passing of the ephemeral present into history. This book is about the fall of Al-Rassan, which will never live again except in memory, and I think it’s that awareness that makes Ammar’s poetry so compelling. Another layer of tragedy right there: after all, one could say that the decline of Al-Rassan began with Ammar’s assassination of the khalif and continued with his assassination of Almalik.

What Ammar says to Rodrigo who asks him to join the Jaddites in their Reconquest of the peninsula:

“What would I have you do? What you cannot do, I suppose. Go home. Breed horses, raise your sons, love your wife. [...] Teach your people to…understand a garden, the reason for a fountain, music.”

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl: My college roommate recommended this book to me because she knew I was fond of intertextual references and allusions in my fiction. (I usually like clever books, even when they are too clever.) Anyway, the New York Times review made the character sound a little like Nancy Drew (perky, too smart for her own good, crime-solving, with gang of less-clever sidekicks who willingly tag along—please note that I’ve never actually read Nancy Drew and am stereotyping). But I started reading the book anyway since I generally trust my roommate’s judgment, and much to my surprise, Blue van Meer (the book is written from her first-person perspective) is actually very morose and is prone to overextended analogies and theorizing. A voice that I could very much sympathize with. The textual references were not nearly as impressive as I’d been led to believe. Every chapter is titled after a literary work, and Blue obsessively uses parenthetical citations for nearly any assertion she presents (very good academic habit, in my opinion), but the actual references themselves are mostly incidental and not necessary to understanding the book itself. They’re more to convey character than actual thematic meaning, i.e. not meant to be intimidating.

As much as I liked Blue herself, I found myself getting increasingly irritated with her in the latter half of the book. Why on earth did she continue hanging out with the Bluebloods when it was clear that she didn’t fit in with them and that they didn’t like her? The fascination of Hannah Schneider is one excuse, but Blue spends so much time analyzing how fake Hannah was, for all her fascinating ways, so I kept wondering why did Blue continue even when she knew better. Actually, that’s my problem with the whole book: Blue knew better, admitted she knew better, and yet still wound up in a situation that could only make her unhappy. (Was it just hindsight that made it seem that she should have known better? Was it adolescence?) In any case, the Bluebloods were intolerable. As for the explanation that Blue arrives at…well, it felt too overblown to be believable. Oh, it holds together very well because Pessl carefully sets up clues throughout the book to make the Nightwatchmen conspiracy theory watertight. But the tone of the book was so much about, well, ordinary high school life with an idiosyncratic twist on all the usual conventions, so the whole political radicalism kind of hit me from left field. Perhaps it was meant to leave that impression; maybe you weren’t supposed to completely believe Blue. But I closed the book feeling really dissatisfied, although I’d quite enjoyed the first half of the book, especially when it focused on her relationship with her father. Anyway, that general dissatisfaction also may be why I completely failed to sympathize with Blue over the clear psychological trauma that she must have received on discovering Hannah’s corpse.

(Oh, and Blue might be attending Harvard, but Pessl clearly has never gone to school there. Wish she bothered to do a little more research on that aspect of the book, since she clearly did a lot of research on everything else.)

Criticisms aside, I still think it’s an impressive first novel, and I liked Blue, even if I got frustrated by her. Which in itself is probably a testament to how much the novel engaged me.

Three Kingdoms, vol 1, by Luo Guanzhong (trans. Moss Roberts): Almost six years ago, I read the abridged one-volume translation by Moss Roberts and thought it was the most amazing epic I’d ever read. I finally got around to purchasing the full four-volume translation, by the same translator, and finished the first volume this summer. Many of the chapters that had been skipped in the abridged version were in this first volume, it seems, since I remember the scene where Cao Cao and Liu Bei drink tea together in the capital (Cao Cao makes his little speech about the heroes of the age) happening fairly “quickly” after Liu Bei gains renown in helping quell the Yellow Turban rebellion, while here, there are chapters and chapters of constant political and military maneuvering, as alliances are made and broken every ten pages. Hard to keep track of, but fun to read about. I was surprised to find how often Liu Bei runs away or pragmatically switches sides because the author of Three Kingdoms is supposed to be biased in favor of Shu but despite this bias, Liu Bei comes off as no more virtuous than Cao Cao. I mean, the author does insert moralizing statements on why Liu Bei is good and Cao Cao isn’t, but when it comes to actual actions, the bias is not apparent at all. Actually, more of the moralizing statements (and awkward justifications for why Liu Bei is a paragon of all Confucian virtues) come from later commentators, who are mentioned in the footnotes, rather than from the author himself. The footnotes are worth reading; Moss Roberts often includes some of the more elaborate interpretations from well-known commentaries, which I found very entertaining.

Zhuge Liang doesn’t appear in this volume at all; he’s introduced early on in the next volume. But despite his absence, there’s a lot of excitement in this first volume. Since the three kingdoms haven’t been established yet, there’s a lot of backstabbing going on. Plus, it’s nice to get more backstory for all of the characters; I didn’t pay that much attention to Wu when reading the abridged volume (being too enamored of Zhuge Liang, of course), so this time, I’m doing a more careful job of keeping track of all the characters.

The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco (trans. William Weaver): I received this book as a graduation gift from the post-doc who supervised my senior thesis. It’s been on my reading list for a while, especially after I read and enjoyed Foucault’s Pendulum. Eco won me over right away by drawing parallels between his protagonist, the Franciscan monk and ex-inquisitor, William of Baskerville, and Sherlock Holmes, what with the physical description, the style of deductive reasoning, and the tendency to slip into periods of lassitude while intaking certain herbs. And of course, Adso, the first-person narrator, sounds rather like Watson, not only in name but in their admiration of their respective detective companions. The solution to the crimes was a little disappointing, although I do think as a nemesis, Jorge is similar to Moriarty in that he only really dirties his own hands at the very end. That final confrontation with both William and Jorge loathing each other as much as they admired each other rather reminded me of the Holmes-Moriarty dynamic. I was surprised though because I had suspected Jorge at times through the novel and had discarded the possibility as being too obvious. In any case, The Name of the Rose isn’t a very satisfying mystery, but it’s still a brilliant book. I liked the intentional anachronistic moments—William’s justification of democracy through theological arguments, the “quotations” in Adso’s writing that would of course only be apparent to a modern reader—and I also thought Eco was very clever in the whole layout of the library. I managed to get through the untranslated Latin without too much trouble as well, although I hope I didn’t miss anything essential in some of the longer passages. I was surprised to discover how much it had in common with Foucault’s Pendulum: in fact, I would say that it is even more “metafictional” than Foucault’s Pendulum, being after all, about books. I could also identify with William, even in his less strictly Holmesian aspect: in the end, for me, the central question of the book was whether it was possible to be both a person of faith and a rationalist…and whether it was even possible to be just one without the other, as paradoxical as that seems. William’s belief in the importance of making knowledge accessible, his desperation to save the forbidden book and the rest of the library (to the point of allowing Jorge to die), and most of all, his crisis of faith after the library has burned down. The whole story tied together well, what with all the philosophical discussions about laughter and comedy, the masses versus the educated elite, heresy as the other side of holy mysticism, the theological question of poverty…I suppose I found the theological arguments in the book easier to read through because of my own Catholic background, although I still found some of the political in-fighting between the orders and the Pope a little difficult to get through.

A tangent: William Weaver seems to be responsible for translating both Eco and Calvino. I wonder if he’s some sort of master translator for contemporary Italian authors.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by J.K. Rowling: I don’t consider Rowling to be a great author, which may be why I was able to enjoy this last book so much without feeling any disappointment. People have been complaining about the epilogue, the treatment of Slytherins, and various “out-of-character” scenes, but I was actually surprised by how well-written the rest of the book was. I liked the quest for the Horcruxes, the temptation of the Deathly Hallows, Dumbledore’s backstory, and most of all, the way Harry ended up defeating Voldemort. I probably have a much higher tolerance for derivative adventure fantasy than I do for derivative boarding-school stories, but I think she’s also improved in her writing. The pacing was a little rushed sometimes, but at no point did it stall, which I thought was a relief. The only real complaint I have is that I completely missed the fact that Lupin and Tonks were dead until Harry saw Lupin’s spirit when using the Resurrection Stone. Surely it’s not asking too much to devote more than a sentence to a supporting character’s death. Also, Neville is awesome.

Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace: Wallace is one of those authors who walk perilously close to the line of being a little too clever, which is probably why he gets slapped with the label of being pretentious from those who are fed up with postmodernist (post-postmodernist?) literature. Of course, since Wallace was the first postmodern author I’ve ever read, I think he’s quite brilliant, so I didn’t exactly bring an objective perspective to this novel: I went in prepared to like the book. I also rather like Wallace’s stylistic flourishes (excesses?)—his love of footnotes, his verbose and overly technical jargon, the way his narrative streams-of-consciousness skip and start and circle back (much the way minds actually think)—and authorial voice. But my bias aside, I really do think that Wallace shouldn’t be dismissed as pretentious because he (1) is clearly self-aware of exactly what he’s doing to a microscopic level, (2) has a brilliant and absurd sense of humor, and (3) writes emotion sincerely, despite knowing that it isn’t fashionable anymore to be genuinely emotional.

Infinite Jest is strangely epic in scope, although its subject matter is really (yet again) the spectrum of dysfunctional and neurotic individuals in modern America. It’s told chronologically out-of-order and jumps around from place to place and from character to character, although it seems to focus primarily on Hal Incandenza (junior tennis champion and lexical prodigy) and Don Gately (recovering narcotics addict). Both live in Enfield, which is located on the outskirts of Boston, and having just spent the last four years in Cambridge, the whole setting felt disturbingly familiar. The characters are often walking through neighborhoods that I’ve physically visited; I’m so used to simply imagining places in books that it felt almost surreal to be reading about places I actually knew. What’s interesting is that Wallace wrote the book ten years ago and set it in the post-millennial future, which means that the book is roughly taking place around now. The future he imagined is clearly meant to be unrealistic and ridiculous—what with NATO being dismantled and replaced with an Organization of North American Nations (O.N.A.N.), whole U.S. Northeast being forcefully given to Canada to serve as a waste-dumping ground, cable and broadcast TV being replaced by a new system of customizable mass entertainment monopolized by a company called InterLace—but it’s a little disconcerting to realize that some parts ring surprisingly true, including anti-American terrorism and a rather idiotic president who may or may not be a lame duck. (Well at least Bush isn’t a former lounge singer.) Of course, there are some things that have changed in the past ten years that Wallace wasn’t able to predict, such as the degree to which the Internet has taken over our lives.

I’m a little disconcerted by the ending. We never find out what happens chronologically after the first scene of the novel, and Hal was the character I felt the most invested in reading about. Probably because I could relate to the whole experience of attending a high-pressure school. I keep wondering if the ending is supposed to leave you feeling at a loss—it really seems to just cut off, as if someone flipped a switch on the television—or if Wallace just ran out of steam after a thousand pages. Despite how fragmented the narrative is, the novel is incredibly coherent (even the most seemingly inconsequential details turn up again, if you are an attentive reader, which is why I recommend reading the novel in a continuous stretch if possible). And as silly as it sounds, I really did find the novel meaningful, what it said (or what I thought it said) about freedom and compulsion, pleasure versus happiness, addictions. There are accounts of abuse and dysfunctional family relations, not to mention a thousand ways in which people ruin their lives and reach new points of psychological and physical degradation, all of which I find to be repulsive and depressing in most other contemporary American novels but not this one. I never felt mired, so to speak, in the “filth” of the book, perhaps because Wallace treats all of his characters, even the unsympathetic ones, with a sort of honesty that is kinder than compassion. It’s not a cheerful book but still a funny one. I mean, who wouldn’t laugh at the idea of a militant Quebec separatist group called the Wheelchair Assassins?