getting deep into a novel [which is a rare thing for me indeed] and then finding out that the author committed suicide at a young age is becoming a real problem.
the crunch of genius.
i’m only a couple hundred pages into INFINITE JEST and it is quickly becoming one of my favourite novels. it seems i’ve read only novels so far into 2012, most of them being unimpressive [charles dickens and e l doctorow, for SHAME] but my most recent finish, EAST OF EDEN was spectacularly beautiful – sweeping gestures of sorrow. deepening understand of the human psyche. a brilliant downer.
now i fear IJ will turn into this. having been written in 1996, it appears to lay out the entire history of reality television before it has even happened. a constant precursor to our lives of entertainment, our entertainment lives. IJ has been tagged, incorrectly, as a ‘difficult’ book. verbose and lengthy, absolutely. the perfect molotov cocktease of high brow and low brow. i don’t play tennis, but i get it. i’m lucky i’m from quebec and know the history of the FLQ because he’s teasing us! from the superfuture past, wallace is playing us for goats and we can all laugh at ourselves. at our obsession with ourselves and our love for playing the voyeur into the most meaningless conversations that happen.
the fact that reality tv is not real is also not real. i could go on to try and wrestle baudrillard into this post but who needs him? how do we choose to define our lives, either on or off the page. you could add another 2000 pages to IJ and it still would fully encapsulate our love of the banal, our increasing surveillance of other people’s lives. our number one zero.
i don’t know what i was thinking about adding IJ as a new year’s resolution – it didn’t need to be. its far too pleasurable to be considered something to be overcome. only now i see the perqs of having a kindle cos GURRRRRL THAT THING IS HEAVY.
