Infinite Jest
2009 07 05 | journal
Reading Infinite Jest for a book club.
There it is. Barely out of the bookstore but still in its shipping wrapper.
Not having delved very far in as yet (owing to slow shipping), I am still already struck by the floating conversation ... the in and out, the ebb and flux. It puts me in mind of parts of the film version of Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs, where we do not hear all of the conversations we can see are going on, because we don't have to hear them. We hear only what we need to hear. We need to know there are people talking, but we don't need to be directly party to every morsel of text. This first part of IJ feels not entirely dissimilar. We need to know things are being said, and who is present to say them, but we don't necessarily need to know every last bit. It is also a natural thing, when oozing in and out of concentration, not to hear every word that's said in your dancespace; and, unlike any other book I've read in my life, this portion of the book reflects that - reflects intermittent hearing.
I have been highlighting like a demon, struck by words and phrases (and I feel like a Guess Who song saying that) ... words I know, words I don't and needed to look up, words I had to call my mother to define for me (because her French is fluent and mine is ... not) ... and wonderfully evocative bites of text like: "slept like a graven image", "rickety alphabet of exposed plumbing", "carbonated silence", "inclined together in soft conference"; and, as others have pointed out, "my chest bumps like a dryer with shoes in it".
They keep telling you to trust the author. I do.