#32: The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt

In 1416, somewhere in southern Germany, an Italian scholar found a manuscript in the library of a monastery. Stephen Greenblatt makes a case that this find was a major inflection point (or “swerve”) in the history of western civilization. It’s a provocative claim, and for all I know it may be true. The scholar was Poggio Bracciolini, and he had come north with his employer, Pope John XXIII, to a church conference to decide who deserved to be Pope—there were three contenders. Poggio’s guy lost, which gave this busy administrator some free time to indulge his hobby—looking for ancient manuscripts in monastic libraries.

The “lost masterpiece” trope is irresistable—well, it is to me, and I suspect it is to a lot of people. I remember an episode from the novel Lost Horizon where someone plays an unknown work by Chopin on the piano. I remember Henry James’ The Aspern Papers where the protagonist is trying to lay hands on a lost manuscript by a famous deceased author. I avidly consume news about actual lost or withheld manuscripts by the likes of Kafka and Salinger.

In the case of The Swerve, not only is a manuscript found after being lost for over a thousand years, that manuscript turns out to be the wedge that drives open the Renaissance. Or at least one of the wedges. The manuscript is De rerum natura—On the Nature of Things—written by the Roman poet Lucretius in the first century BC. Lucretius was an adherent of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Epicurean philosophy starts with an hypothesis about the natural world:

[E]verything that has ever existed and everything that will ever exist is put together out of indestructable building blocks, irreduceably small in size, unimaginably vast in number. The Greeks had a word for these invisible building blocks, things that, as they conceived them, could not be divided any further: atoms.

From this hypothesis come some rather radical notions: if the universe is made out of physical stuff, then where are the gods who control the affairs of men, and where exactly do we go after we die? (Lucretius didn’t actually deny the existence of gods, he just denied that they had any interest in or influence on the affairs of men.) Epicurean philosophy is materialist—there is no point in accumulating karma points during our time on earth, because there is no heaven or hell where our account can be told. To quote Peggy Lee, “if that’s all there is, my friend, then let’s keep dancing/Let’s break out booze and have a ball.“ The highest good is pleasure, not in the sense of indulgence, but in the sense of avoiding pain: both for ourselves and for others.

The early Church fathers found Epicureanism much more threatening than pagan religions, because they feared that without the carrot of heaven and the stick of hell, people would be inclined to dispense with order and authority:

Christian polemicists had to find a way to turn the current of mockery against Epicurus and his followers. Ridiculing the pagan pantheon did not work in this case, since Epicureanism eloquently dismantled the whole sacrificial worship of the gods and dismissed the ancient stories. What had to be done was to refashion the account of the founder Epicurus so that he appeared no longer as an apostle of moderation in the service of reasonable pleasure but instead as a Falstaffian figure of riotous excess. He was a fool, a pig, a madman. And his principal Roman disciple, Lucretius, had to be comparably made over.

But it was not enough to blacken the reputations of Epicurus and Lucretius, to repeat endlessly that they were stupid, swinishly self-indulgent, insane, and, finally, suicidal. It was not enough even, by this means, to suppress the reading of their works, to humiliate anyone who might express interest in them, to discourage copies from ever being made. Even more than the theory that the world consisted only of atoms and void, the main problem was the core ethical idea: that the highest good is the pursuit of pleasure and the diminution of pain. What had to be undertaken was the difficult project of making what appeared simply sane and natural—the ordinary impulses of all sentient creatures—seem like the enemy of the truth.

This is why today the word “Epicure” today connotes “a person who is self-indulgent in their fondness for sensuous luxury.” Give the early Church fathers their due—they understood PR.

But this single acorn that Poggio Bracciolini planted in the fertile soil of early 15th-century Florence grew into a stout and flourishing tree. Among its fruits were Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Giordano Bruno, and Montaigne, among others. I’m reminded of Black Sea, by Neal Ascherson, only instead of charting an inspired course through the geography of a particular region, Greenblatt charts his course through time. It’s his talent to make the people and events that he connects to Lucretius seem essential and inevitable, a central narrative of western civilization. The skeptic in me wonders whether other, equally talented writers might not be able to detect other such sequences and make equivalent claims for them. But Greenblatt has an ace in the hole, that singular lynchpin, the last suriviving copy of a masterwork lost for a thousand years.

#31: The Bayou Trilogy, by Daniel Woodrell

This volume contains three early Daniel Woodrell novels, featuring police inspector Rene Shade contending with the criminal goings on in his home town of Saint Bruno. Saint Bruno is a made-up town—a medium-sized city on the lower Mississippi. The closest real-world analog might be Baton Rouge.

Shade has deep roots in Saint Bruno:

Shade had lived in this same building for most of his life, here at the corner of Lafitte and Perry, and learned the hard lessons of the world on these hard bricked streets, within spitting distance of home. This was Frogtown, where the sideburns were longer, the fuses shorter, the skirts higher, and the expectations lower, and he loved it.

All the cops and criminals in St. Bruno grew up together. It’s like a thirties crime melodrama, where the priest and the hoodlum are brothers. How did Rene come out on the right side of the law? Shade is too modest and Woodrell too subtle to claim that it was an ethical choice. Which somehow just makes it all seem that much more noble. It’s a Bogart thing—you don’t ever say why you’re doing the right thing, you just do it.

The outcomes of all three novels are foregone—a crime is committed, and a chain of events is set in motion, with retribution at the end of the chain. In the first two novels, Under the Bright Lights and Muscle for the Wing, Shade is the agent of retribution. In the third, The Ones You Do, Shade’s father, Francis X. Shade, is the one who reluctantly sets things in motion after his wife runs off with a mobster’s money. Francis X. understands that he will be held responsible no matter what he does, so he whacks the mobster upside the head with a bottle of Maker’s Mark just as he’s about to open his safe and discover the missing money, and heads for Saint Bruno. We know how it will end, but what’s pretty cool about everything that comes before is that neither Francis X. nor the mobster, one Lunch Pumphrey, really seems to worry much about that denouement. (“Lunch Pumphrey was called Lunch because if he had a chance to he’d eat yours for you.”) Instead, we see how they live and think, and what we as readers feel is not so much suspense as just a sense of time ticking down. Pumprey is a stone cold killer but his malevolence is just one side of his personality, which has evolved over time into a kind of dispassionate professionalism, and his three-day journey to follow Francis X. to Saint Bruno is actually kind of comical, in an Elmore Leonard sort of way. While stranded overnight in Natchez waiting for his car to be repaired, he meets up with a couple from Iowa, who, as it turns out, are casing him while he is casing them. They are one step too slow and wind up in the trunk of their car at the bottom of the Mississippi.

Daniel Woodrell is my first repeat author in this blog; The Bayou Trilogy is less remarkable than Winter’s Bone, but pretty damn entertaining nevertheless. Since Woodrell has been called a “back-country Shakespeare,” we can see the short novels in The Bayou Trilogy as his answer to the bard’s Henry VI plays—a trio of early works that show the author mastering his craft, each a little bit better than the one before.

#30: No Mercy: A Journey Into the Heart of the Congo, by Redmond O’Hanlon

Just what was Redmond O’Hanlon doing in the Congo? He’s not an explorer—the missionaries and the corporate resource scouts had been all over the remote northern jungles of the Republic of the Congo well before him. He’s not a scientist, though he feels duty bound to ID just about every bird species he encounters, infallibly giving us a couple of sentences describing plumage and behavior. (The hammerkop, with and its huge ungainly nest did make an impression.) In fact, O’Hanlon is curiously lax when it comes to justifying his expedition. He claims to be searching for a dinosaur that has been sighted in a remote lake—a kind of African Loch Ness monster. But he never really does anything with this pretext—neither exploits its farcical potential nor pretends to take it seriously. The lake in question, we later find, is essentially a wide, shallow pond which is in the process of drying up.

If nothing else, of course, he’s gathering material for this book, and the result is a strange mixture of ignorance and incompetence on the one hand, and empathy and insight on the other. There’s a kind of brinksmanship at work, as though O’Hanlon were flaunting his amateurism, demonstrating that the purest motive is no motive at all. How terribly British.

No Mercy is the third book O’Hanlon has written of this type—the first was Into the Heart of Borneo, the second, In Trouble Again, about an expedition to the Amazon jungle. After No Mercy, he wrote one more book—about spending time on a fishing trawler in the North Atlantic—and has been silent since. His modus operandi is to recruit a fellow academic as a companion and then set off for the most inhospitable place possible. I read the Borneo book almost 20 years ago and liked it—I don’t remember a great deal, except that his companion was the poet James Fenton, and that Fenton was reading Anna Karenina as they waded through the swamps of Borneo. This time his companion is an American zoologist named Lary Shaffer. Shaffer is reading Martin Chuzzlewit as they wade through the swamps of Africa. Hmm…

O’Hanlon essentially disregards the history, anthropology, and politics of central Africa. Everything we learn from this book is anecdotal, incidental. Fortunately, the incidents are often astonishing, and O’Hanlon is a good enough writer to capture them in their profound weirdness. O’Hanlon is sort of a myopic writer—he’s good on things that happen within 10 feet of him, not so good on the larger context.

He hires a sort of entourage to squire him around the jungle. The main guide is a man named Marcellin Agnagna, who is both a biologist with an advanced degree (obtained in Cuba) and a native son of the remote country that O’Hanlon and his party traverse. The rest of the posse is composed mostly of Marcellin’s siblings, cousins, and associates (all men). O’Hanlon is a big, rich fish that Marcellin has landed, and it’s appropriate that he share this bounty with his kin.

O’Hanlon devotes many pages to his observations of Marcellin and family. As they make their way first up river from the capital and then through remote outposts and into the jungle, we read about how the members of this crew are constantly searching for young women to have sex with. There may be some insights into the ways and means of Africa in these observations, but mostly they read like a letter home from a shy young university freshman describing dormitory shenanigans. He is also fascinated by the Africans’ obsession with sorcery—he is at times amazed by their superstitiousness, but then manages to acquire his own “fetish” at one point and keeps it on his person at all times. This fetish is a small fur pouch containing what O’Hanlon assumes is part of a human finger.

O’Hanlon writes about his companions as though they were characters in a novel—because he is not in Africa to accomplish or discover anything, his companions are his work, and he depicts them with a novelist’s eye: there is Nze, the great lover, and Manou the sensitive lad with self-esteem issues. But most of all there is Marcellin who is by turns erudite, haughty, whimsical, frightened, and angry. It’s amazing to consider that this is a real person and not just a character in a book—I can even google him and see what he looks like. (He is only ever mentioned online in connection with the mythical dinosaur, the Mokèlé-mbèmbé.) I wonder what kind of book Marcellin himself would write about the months he spent squiring Redmond O’Hanlon around the jungle? Marcellin would seem to have much more at stake than O’Hanlon. O’Hanlon has to worry about keeping good notes, and not running out of supplies or money. Marcellin has to worry about keeping his extended family employed and fed, about his career as a government official and academic, and about keeping the crazy white man alive.

O’Hanlon adopts a baby gorilla in the final part of the book, and in his role as surrogate momma he lets the gorilla cling to him 24 hours a day. O’Hanlon’s clothes are perpetually soiled with gorilla shit as he makes his way back out to the outposts of civilization. Clearly, O’Hanlon is as close to losing his mind by this point as are most of his companions.

No Mercy reminds me of one of those documentaries about a project gone off the tracks—Lost in La Mancha, for example. Except that Redmond O’Hanlon is both the perpetrator of the disaster that we are witnessing, and the witness who is capturing this disaster for us. Depending on which Redmond O’Hanlon you are talking about, the book is either a fiasco or a skillful depiction of a fiasco. Either way, I was ready for this book to end well before it did.

#29: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, by George Meredith

The past is another country, and after stepping off the train in England in 1859, it took me about 150 pages to get my bearings in The Ordeal of Richard Feverel. Dickens is easier, because his writing is so visual, and he gives us a careful portrait of each character. Meredith is ironic and allusive; The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is almost more Milton than Dickens—metaphors and allusion are frequently extended and elliptical:

You are amazons, ladies, at Saragossa, and a thousand citadels—wherever there is strife, and Time is to be taken by the throat. Then shall few men match your sublime fury. But what if you see a vulture, visible only to yourselves, hovering over the house you are gaily led by the torch to inhabit? Will you not crouch and be cowards?

Without context, I realize, this is incomprehensible. With context—that is, in the course of reading this book, it was pretty close to incomprehensible. Amazons? Saragossa? He’s saying that sometimes women are bold, and sometimes not. There may be more to it than that—I’m not sure. It’s a kind of “mock epic,” where the trials and tribulations of modern men and women are presented as through in a Homeric epic—the contrast is supposed to be humorous. You can still amuse modern audiences by presenting mundane affairs in exalted language, provided your epic is one that is familiar to your readers, such as the Bible. Shakespeare would probably work too. Beyond that, you wouldn't have much of an audience.

Anyway, after 100 pages or so I was able to tune in the signal more or less, and found the book somewhat engaging. Richard Feverel is the son of Sir Austin Feverel, a wealthy landowner. Soon after Richard is born, Sir Austin’s best friend and wife take up together:

A languishing, inexperienced woman, whose husband in mental and in moral stature is more than the ordinary height above her, and who, now that her first romantic admiration of his lofty bearing has worn off, and her fretful little refinements of taste and sentiment are not instinctively responded to, is thrown into no wholesome household collision with a fluent man, fluent in prose and rhyme. Lady Feverel, when she first entered on her duties at Raynham, was jealous of her husband’s friend. By degrees she tolerated him. In time he touched his guitar in her chamber, and they played Rizzio and Mary together.

A rather disdainful appraisal. The reference is to a David Rizzio, a presumed lover of Mary, Queen of Scots (thank you, wikipedia). Sir Austin banishes the pair, and raises his son alone, according to a strict educational program. Richard thrives, but eventually falls in love with a young girl of the neighborhood without family or money, and marries her without consulting his father. Sir Austin reacts as he did to the earlier betrayal—he adopts a mask of indifference, neither reproaching his son nor cutting off his generous allowance, but refusing to see either his son or his new daughter-in-law.

Richard comes to London without his wife to seek an audience with his father. Months pass during which Richard sees neither his father nor his wife. Meredith’s true subject is the relations between people, how when we are offended or hurt, we isolate ourselves, thereby weakening ourselves and leaving ourselves vulnerable to intrigue and misunderstanding.

To me, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel seemed very uneven. There was much that I found tiresome—like the exalted rhetoric, or the extended passages featuring a wise but uneducated older woman who spouts homely wisdom in dialect (“Ha! ha! say that little women ain’t got art ekal to the cuningest of ‘em.”). But other parts were terrific—my favorite was a long chapter in which Richard, hanging out in London waiting for something to happen, is made the victim of a plot intent on shipwrecking his marriage before Sir Austin can make up his mind whether to give it his blessing. Richard is introduced to a courtesan who has been instructed to seduce him. Richard is under the impression that he is helping to rehabilitate her. She lets him believe this, of course, but she also begins to half believe it herself. One of the themes running through The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is masks—how we become the role that we play. For Sir Austin Feverel, the mask of aloof indifference he assumes when his son hurts his feelings proves damaging for both himself and his son. For the courtesan it is the reverse—her mask of repentance brings her to a kind of moral rebirth, even as her prey ultimately falls into her hands.

The long chapter that culminates with Richard’s seduction begins “Was ever hero in this fashion wooed”? Twenty pages later, when the deed has been accomplished, the chapter ends with the line “Was ever hero in this fashion won?” While I don’t really have the education Meredith would like his audience to have, I have read Shakespeare, and upon reading that line I remembered Richard III, and the scene where that earlier Richard exulted after seducing (verbally) his brother’s widow just days after murdering that very brother:

Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?

Was ever woman in this humour won?

Still, it is a very different kind of seduction, with none of the sardonic cunning of the earlier work. In fact, it is a rather weepy affair for both parties.

In the end, all parties are reconciled after all possible anguish is wrung out of them.

This is the third Victorian novel I have written about in this blog—the first two were The Pickwick Papers and Middlemarch. I have not really been completely won over by any of them. Perhaps I have yet to find the Victorian novelist that I can really relate to. or maybe this period just isn’t my period, period.

#28: Leaving the Atocha Station, by Ben Lerner

This book describes a year in the life of Adam Gordon, a young American poet living in Madrid on a fellowship, who is supposed to be “composing a long and research-driven poem … about the literary response to the [Spanish] Civil War.” We quickly discover that Adam is a thoroughly feckless fellow who spends his days smoking hash and then taking tranquilizers to cope with the resulting panic attacks. Early on, Adam’s Spanish isn’t very good, and so he relies on a kind of personal performance art based on guessing and acting to keep things moving along:

I wanted to know what she had been crying about and I managed to communicate that desire mainly by repeating the words for “fire” and “before.” She paused for a long moment and then began to speak; something about a home, but whether she meant a household or the literal structure, I couldn’t tell; I heard the names of streets and months; a list of things I thought were books or songs; hard times or hard weather, epoch, uncle, change, an analogy involving summer, something about buying and/or crashing a red car. I formed several possible stories out of her speech, formed them at once, so it was less like I failed to understand than that I understood in chords, understood in a plurality of worlds. … I kept quiet, modeling my face on the San Leocadio.

I suspect that anyone who is approaching a certain threshold in foreign language competence will do something similar—you can’t keep asking “What?” and you can’t just stare blankly. So you improvise.

Adam begins a relationship with Isabel, the woman who has unburdened her soul to him. As they begin an affair, he exploits and exaggerates his linguistic difficulties by speaking in vague, oracular platitudes and playing the part of a detached genius. This actually works for a while. To heighten the pathos, he tells her that his mother has died. At the same time, Adam takes up with Theresa, a poet and translator who is helping him make inroads into the Madrid literary world. Adam has a harder time reading Theresa, who may or may not be on to Adam’s game, but who at least seems to accept that there is some sort of game going on.

Adam visits Granada with Isabel, and Barcelona with Theresa. Spain, women, booze—this might almost be Hemingway territory—except that the hero is trying to muster his courage to do poetry readings, instead of blowing up fascist fortifications.

I guess it isn’t hard to make fun of Adam Gordon, and there certainly isn’t a great deal at stake here beyond his self-respect. The reader is expecting to see him ultimately exposed, shamed, chastized. But while there are dicey moments, he never quite tips over. His work begins to attract attention, as Theresa works furiously to translate his poetry into Spanish. Adam may think his success is just a result of luck and bluffing, but we begin to realize that Adam’s friends in the literary world are not being duped and are not acting out of pity—they see value in his work, even if Adam himself advances no such claim on his own behalf.

And we see it too, because it is Adam’s voice that we hear in Leaving the Atocha Station, a voice that is quick, funny, acute, and occasionally profound:

My research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where “poem” is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality’s unavailability.

Never has existentialism been quite so much fun.

#27: Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace

It took me almost three months to read this 1078-page behemoth. It’s the size of a lunchbox. I have written elsewhere in this blog about my predeliction for big books—to quote myself: “I love books that are worlds unto themselves, places were I can go to live for a while. That have their own rules, customs, and logic.” That description fits Infinite Jest very well, and yet it is a hard book to love.

Infinite Jest is about a lot of things, but more than anything it is about drugs and alcohol—“substances”—and the way they damage lives. It is encyclopaedic in its depiction of the misery, degredation, and delusion attendant on substance abuse, positively mediaeval in its relentless focus on the varieties of human suffering. There is also a fair amount of humor along the way, and even a bit of speculative near-future dystopian stuff, but we never stray far from the spectacle of people destroying themselves.

When we think of sin and suffering in the world, we often think of evil, yet we do not witness any deliberate evil in Infinite Jest. Most of the losers in this book harm nobody but themselves, except accidentally—they abdicate all moral responsibilities, empty themselves out, become zombies. Like the crack-addicted mother who carries her dead infant around in a bundle for weeks. It’s been a long time since I read William Burrough’s Naked Lunch, but I have a hunch there might be some interesting parallels between that book and this one. A particular phrase from Naked Lunch kept occurring to me as I read Infinite Jest—“the algebra of need.” It’s the peculiar kind of savagery that possesses a person who becomes enslaved to a substance. The negation of all moral sense. I suppose that is a kind of evil, just not the sadistic, malevolent kind.

Normal life brings both pleasure and misery by turns, but when this balance is disturbed by substances, the result is that all pleasure becomes concentrated in the experience of the substance, and is thereby vacuumed out of everyday life. Wallace obviously knew quite a bit about depression, and writes about it in a manner that is terrifying and vivid. In one passage he makes a distinction between the garden-variety anhedonia and a more profound type of depression:

Hal isn’t old enough yet to know that … numb emptiness isn’t the worst kind of depression. That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. … It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self…

This amazing description goes on for several pages.

Have I written anything to this point that would actually make you want to read Infinite Jest? Perhaps not. But when I say it is a difficult book to love I do not mean to say that it is a difficult book to be engrossed and amazed by. Like a Hieronymous Bosch painting it is a vast canvas filled with incident, color, and character. There are two main spheres of action—the first is the Enfield Tennis Academy, founded by James O. Incandenza, a man of many talents who ultimate takes his own life by sticking his head in a microwave oven. If you’re wondering how one could do that, we learn that the secret is to remove the glass from the door. (You have to be impressed by a mind that can come up with such things—and then be glad that it isn’t yours.) Incandenza starts out as a tennis prodigy, becomes a scientist specializing in optics, founds a tennis academy, and then in his final years becomes an avant-garde filmmaker. One of his films, also named Infinite Jest, can effectively lobotomize anyone who sees it, apparently by overloading their neural circuitry with pleasure. Once someone has seen even a few frames of this film, they become permanantly vegetative—unable to speak, move or dress themselves. It is the ultimate substance, and thus do we discover the moral of our story. It’s spelled out on the back cover: “Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to dominate our lives, about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people, and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.” Fair enough in a way, but I think this moral is a bit of a Macguffin, because the book doesn’t really have much else to say about entertainment and its dangers. Entertainment may deplete meaning and richness from our lives, but not like drugs can. It’s just not a convincing comparison.

Two of James Incandenza’s three sons attend the academy he founded and one of them—Hal Incandenza—is for lack of a better candidate the “main” character of the Incandenza/tennis part of the book. He’s a very good tennis player but needs to smoke a little dope every day to maintain his equilibrium. Hal’s a decent enough fellow, but he’s mostly just a pair of eyes through which we view his world, and his thoughts are perhaps not much different from Wallace’s. He’s kind of a depressed dude, though with a ridiculously high IQ.

The other main sphere is action is the “Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House” where we encounter a large cast of characters attempting to resuscitate their lives. There is Randy Lenz, the recovering coke addict who relieves his feelings of powerlessness by torturing animals. And Kate Gompert, whose dependency on marijuana has left her subject to the “bad” kind of depression—the great white shark kind. (Gompert is not the only Ennet House resident who is there because of marijuana—Wallace posits that if you’re the right sort of person, any mind-altering substance, no matter how seemingly minor-league, can take you down.)

The hero of the Ennet House crowd is one Don Gately, who has made enough of a recovery to become a resident employee, responsible for verifying everyone’s comings and goings. Gately also serves as cook, and his special meat loaf (covered in corn flakes, for crispyness), is perhaps the least of the inmates’ trials. A former burglar and Demerol addict, Gately has had the misfortune to tie a gag into the mouth of someone he came across in a house he was burgling, who just happens to have a headcold, and who suffocates as a result. There is a wealth of wonderful and fascinating detail about Gateley’s upbringing and career in Infinite Jest, and if Wallace had wanted himself a tidy little success, he could have quarried himself a nice little 250-page Gately novel.

If I were to re-read Infinite Jest I’m sure I would discover all sorts of profound things—but I’m probably never going to re-read it. it’s a great book, but a harsh one. I get the sense that Wallace was waging a kind of war against his own wit and ebullience as he wrote Infinite Jest—nobody was ever going to accuse him of peddling entertainment. Thus we get 100 pages of footnotes to serve as a kind of ballast, to make the book less of a joy and more of a labor. Wallace was quoted as saying the footnotes were intended to “slow the reader down.” Mission accomplished. I hated the footnotes, which were usually just bits of text that could easily have been incorporated into the body of the novel—or discarded completely.

Maybe this war against entertainment is just a trick—an illusion, like a mime walking against the wind. In any case, there is a certain amount of reassurance to be found in the pages of Infinite Jest—flowers among the rubble. There are noble characters like Michael Pemulis, a working-class scholarship student at the tennis academy who incriminates himself (and therefore faces expulsion) to save Hal. And there is the third Incandenza brother—Mario, born with numerous birth defects who, after apprenticing under his father, manages to become a documentary filmmaker (of a sort), and is the conscience of the Incandenza family.

Finally, there is the aforementioned Don Gately, who despite an endless series of setbacks and disasters is able to persevere in his recovery and is perhaps even falling in love with a fellow recovering addict as the book draws to a close. (Recovering addicts are required to avoid intimate relationships for one year after cleaning up, because romance will distract them from the relentless focus and determination required to stay sober.) Gately is not supposed to be very bright, but as he looks back on the ruins of his first 30 years of life, he begins to understand how he might be able to make a go of things without substances. Of course, Gately is lying in a hospital with a gunshot wound as he reviews his life, and while there are no clear indications either way, I feel pretty sure he is about to die of his wound. Because that’s what kind of book this is, folks.

Here is a passage that captures some of the essential flavor of Infinite Jest for me. Two pages from the end of the novel, as one last character’s life ends in a characteristically gruesome and revolting auto-de-fé, Wallace (or more precisely, Gately) has a few thoughts to share about Linda McCartney:

…somebody had taken an old disk of McCartney and the Wings—as in the historical Beatles’s McCartney—taken it and run it through a Kurtzweil remixer and removed every track on the songs except the tracks of poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney singing backup and playing tambourine. … Poor old Mrs. Linda McCartney just fucking could not sing, and having her shaky off-key little voice flushed from the cover of the whole slick multitrack corporate sound and pumped up to solo was to Gately unspeakably depressing—her voice sounding so lost, trying to hide and bury itself inside the pro backups’ voices. Gately imagined Mrs. Linda McCartney…imagined her standing there lost in the sea of her husband’s pro noise, feeling low esteem and whispering off-key, not knowing quite when to shake her tanbourine: [the] depressing CD was past cruel, it was somehow sadistic-seeming, like drilling a peephole in the wall of a handicapped bathroom.

Ladies and gentlemen, Infinite Jest.

#26: Maphead, by Ken Jennings

I read this book because I, myself, am a maphead—like the author, who gained fame by winning for 20-some-odd straight weeks on Jeopardy, I’ve had a keen passion for maps since I was a kid. When I was in the third grade, I wallpapered my bedroom with National Geographic maps, which I loved in a way that is hard to recall, much less explain.

In the early part of the book, Jennings posits a connection between love of maps and a more general spatial orientation, a love of space or places.

The word “topophilia,” from the Greek for “love of place,” was popularized by the geographer Yi-Fu Tuan… When I first read about the concept, I experienced a jolt of recognition and validation, like a patient finally getting a diagnosis for an obscure malady. I had felt this weirdly intense connection to landscape my whole life, but it was a relief to finally have a fancy Greek name to hang on it.

This connection holds true for me, as well. One unremarkable day many years ago I discovered a new way to bicycle home from where I was working, and I remember the sense of exultation I experienced as a result of navigating through new, previously unseen places, even though they were places composed of the same suburban streets, houses, and stores that I had passed on other, more familiar routes.

So I am a person with heightened spatial awareness, and how far that may go toward explaining myself, to myself or to anyone else, I can’t say. I would be embarrassed to say how much time I fritter away inventing idle games with Google maps. Here’s one: I start from a familiar location, and then hold down one of the arrow keys for a period of time—say 60 seconds. While I’m holding down the key, I avoid looking at the screen, on which terrain is scrolling steadily away. Then when the time is up I zoom in and pretend that I have been dropped at that point on the map, perhaps after a long drive, blindfolded. With some money and credit cards in my wallet, how would I get from that place back home? Have I landed near a road or town, or am I in a roadless forest deep in the mountains? Or, worst case, in the water. Perhaps close enough to swim to shore?

The first part of Maphead is about people who love maps and what loving maps says about the way their minds work. The second part delves into the history of maps and the world of map collectors. The book began to flatten a bit for me in the second part—it was unremarkable, workmanlike expository journalism. Waiting-room prose. The third part was my least favorite—it deals with map and GPS hobbyists, people who participate in elaborate and complex mapping games. For example, some people play a game that combines scavenger hunting with maps. Someone creates a kind of puzzle and then disseminates it to the players, who interpret clues and follow along in their road atlases. Despite my own peculiar mapping daydreams, this sort of activity strikes me as being acutely dull. Activities for individuals lacking a capacity for boredom. But I guess it’s a bit high-handed to denounce an activity that scratches someone else’s itch just because it doesn’t happen to scratch mine.