I took the hurricane of two weeks ago as an excuse to start reading Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace. I’m 287 pages in as of this afternoon – this is not a book to read in bits and pieces, but even a single sustained push for a few hours won’t get you very far. A marathon of a book, but I expected that. Like Neil Gaiman said in his intro to The Kindly Ones: Great Art is the kind you can use to stun a burglar.
I didn’t expect David Foster Wallace to read so much like Neal Stephenson. I didn’t expect this book to be science fiction. I didn’t expect to find myself urging on, loving, and being anxious about the no-doubt horrid fate of a cast of tennis pros, burglars, recovering addicts, drug dealers, radio personalities, child prodigies, wheelchair assassins, football stars, and fine artists. I didn’t expect the face in the floor. I didn’t expect compassion and fate and mortality to emerge out of the sheer quantity of damage on display. I didn’t expect footnotes within footnotes, crossreferencing footnotes, to transform this book into a kind of hypertext narrative.
As I make notes & write mad disconnected scenes for my next book, I’m trying to let the sheer quantity of invention, the combination of sense-of-wonder and gut-feel-of-humanity, bleed through. I’m playing with form, including lists, and letting time stretch. At the same time, I plan to avoid the “You Could Stun A Burglar With This”-length. For now.