Wallace writes about a film that's so entertaining its viewers can't turn away. His book is coming dangerously close to being the same. I'm about 180 pages from the end and if I could I'd just sit and read until it was finished.
As a book of whopping length, one of Infinite Jest's appeals is its vast contents. Because the book has so much going on, it's easy to theorize and postulate about what's coming next. Actually, this same depth through length quality is present in almost all of the books considered "English Classics." The room to speculate combined with broad targets for a reader's hypothetical darts gives a reader a great deal of impetus to keep reading; finding out that you were right (or even just onto something) is incredibly exhilarating.
Though there is a difference between predictability in a story and those that invite such speculation. More often than not those that are predictable fall into the trap of hewing too close to the everyday. Such stories can offer you a perspective you might otherwise be without, but their subject matter is simply dull.
Though a good story doesn't need anything supernatural to lift it out of the everyday, it just needs to be in a different shade of the common experience. Miriam Toews' A Complicated Kindness is a great example of a book about the everyday (in modern "literature" what's more everyday than quirky families and coming of age tales?) that is nonetheless entertaining and insightful.
Infinite Jest is a few more shades off the common and everyday, and is all the more enthralling for it. Once it gets going, anyway. It's kind of like Terry Gilliam's Brazil.
No comments:
Post a Comment