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.
Off-the-cuff writings about, and sometimes reviews of, books and video games from a nerd's boxes of backlog. Warning: this is not a spoiler-free blog!
Showing posts with label Miriam Toews. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Miriam Toews. Show all posts
Monday, September 23, 2013
Wednesday, July 3, 2013
Breaks in voice
As I make my way through the collection of short stories based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's ideas, I'm struck by how different the writers' voices are.
True, Miriam Toews' contribution is a one act play (and a very Canadian piece of drama at that), but even with the other short stories there's a definite difference between them despite the goal of the collection being writing the stories that FSF could have written.
John Beckman's "Clear Channel" and Tom Lombardi's "The Bear" standout from this latest bunch.
Beckman's story is liable to catch the attention of anyone interested in the perspective of an allegedly crazy person. His is also the least FSF-like that's been read yet. There's no real concern with social class, there's nothing to do about the bohemian/the buttoned down, and no one is heading for any roaring parties. Instead it's just a girl who can tune into radio channels in her brain and her alleged uncle driving to some sort of place where all of the nation's radio waves converge.
Possible influences of Marian Engel's Bear abound in Lombardi's piece. About a bear who is strangely attracted (sexually?) to a woman camping with her boyfriend, this bear is also able to speak to humans. It also, allegedly, knows what it means for two humans to love each other and claims that Gary (the boyfriend) bears no love to Lois (the girlfriend). Its ending is strange and open-ended, much as the ending of "Returned" is.
True, Miriam Toews' contribution is a one act play (and a very Canadian piece of drama at that), but even with the other short stories there's a definite difference between them despite the goal of the collection being writing the stories that FSF could have written.
John Beckman's "Clear Channel" and Tom Lombardi's "The Bear" standout from this latest bunch.
Beckman's story is liable to catch the attention of anyone interested in the perspective of an allegedly crazy person. His is also the least FSF-like that's been read yet. There's no real concern with social class, there's nothing to do about the bohemian/the buttoned down, and no one is heading for any roaring parties. Instead it's just a girl who can tune into radio channels in her brain and her alleged uncle driving to some sort of place where all of the nation's radio waves converge.
Possible influences of Marian Engel's Bear abound in Lombardi's piece. About a bear who is strangely attracted (sexually?) to a woman camping with her boyfriend, this bear is also able to speak to humans. It also, allegedly, knows what it means for two humans to love each other and claims that Gary (the boyfriend) bears no love to Lois (the girlfriend). Its ending is strange and open-ended, much as the ending of "Returned" is.
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