I have a question.

There seems to be a lot of earnest and admirable study of this book going on and then reflected in the multiplicity of threads.

Has anybody read the book? By that I mean: read one sentence after another, pausing perhaps as necessary for it to sink in, but not dwelling on each word; looked at what is happening next and how the events work themselves out; considered how a character remains steadfast in challenging circumstances or how a character develops as the character is exposed to more of life its own self.

Or if it is to be accepted as a Menippean satire, has anybody read it for the entertainment that it is?

Et cetera?

If I do read it, and my reading of The Broom in the System makes that less likely, that is how I will read it. I'll remain curious about what the delvers of the deep find, but my take will be on the book as a piece.

Robert

I read it more or less in the way that you are describing. I thought it was a rollicking good time. I enjoy listening to the delvers though. They have definitely deepened the experience of reading the book for me.

If I understand what you have written, I read it that way. But, like you am curious (and, me but not necessarily you, often astounded) to see what the delvers unearth.

Reading it the way you and I refer to, it was still a great book. The characters, even the most unlikeable among them (I'm thinking especially of Randy Lenz - is he the poisoner?) became amazingly believable and something like intimate friends. The characters were that finely tuned and true. They are the greatest strength of the novel, in my opinion. Everything else is gravy. The overarching story was great even if it left me hanging a bit. The stories within the story were even better. Each major character (and there are quite a few) has a story and the stories all come together, as they do in good novels.

Thank you, guys. Portland is so civilized. I've wanted to visit there ever since I had a girlfriend from Tigard, but it is not likely in my travelless old age.

I may have overstated my case in my last clause. I did read the beginning of the book years ago. There was a description of an addict or alcoholic waiting that was so right that I thought the book demanded reading, but it had, at the time, insufficient momentum to keep me at it. That is to say, there may be bits and pieces that would stand on their own for me, but my reading of it would generally be of it as a piece.

Thanks,

Robert

The Tiny Ewell and Tony characters are what first drew me into the book. Starting with Hal at the college was a little rough, even if the writing was clever and fun to read.

Was that Tiny he's remembering, or Geoff Day? I figured out who it was at the time I read the book but now I've forgotten... I agree, that scene where he's waiting and rationalizing is unbelievable. I've never been addicted to serious substances but I have known people who were and it was quite sad for me to read because I had heard such rationalizations...

It was Geoff Day too, now that you mention it! The three were so vividly different people and yet so vividly the same in their addiction. And those vividly different yet vividly the same people kept multiplying.

6:
If I'm not mistaken, I think you're both talking about Erdedy, when he's waiting for the dealer and going over his whole pot-binge routine, right?

1:
I definitely didn't like "analyze" the book when I first read it. I just really enjoyed it as I was going. Only later did I scrutinize it a certain amount. I think it stands up to either priority.

Erdedy was a bit broader for me - though that doesn't make him any less vividly portrayed. Geoff Day, Tiny Ewell and Tony (last name forgotten) were, more or less, people I have known and he just nailed them; the way they talk and think, their quirks.

The first time I read it I read it like the rest here, not really looking for anything or analyzing or digging deeper, but just being sped along by the style of prose I had never encountered before and was becoming increasingly WOWED by. I did put it down for four days to take a break at some point I remember, but I was really just enamoured by his prose and when he wrote of familiar, all too real stuff, I often found myself reading those passages aloud to my wife, and we lol'd together.

Only after the first read did looking at it from different angles (both macro and microscopically) obsessively come into play.

10:
"style of prose I had never encountered before"

Enrique, I'm curious if you had a similar experience as I did (anybody else weigh in too, obviously). It's definitely true that Wallace's prose is original as far as fiction goes--there are imitators now, but I never saw anybody write like him before he did. What was most striking to me, though, is how close his prose is to the way my "brain voice" sounds if I become conscious of it. After I started tracking down commentary on Wallace, I found that other people had said this too.

Yes yes yes yes re. "brain voice". Bingo!

11: Ummmm, except smarter than me?

is the level of versimiltude the same for the female characters? i don't think so but am not female

Regarding the OP - that's the way I read it, for fun without thinking too deeply. And that was fine until I hit the end, really it was a fun read pretty much the whole way through for me. But, once I hit the end, there was nothing left to do but re-think everything, the book structure kind of demands it. (plus some posts on LT really opened my eyes as to a lot of the stuff I had missed.) So, now I feel a need to read again...

#10-13 - I'm wondering about that. Murr used the term "talky" in his review, and that's accurate, I think, and not particularly original. Also, his tone I felt was irreverent in way I've come across elsewhere - like Neil Stephenson's books from the 1990's. <unsupported political-ish commentary> I think that was sort of 1990's thing - a post WWW sense of limitless technology with an optimism that was available only when global warming was still at least somewhat in doubt (and before W came along) - and disasters could still be local and fun - yes, in a literary sense, fun </unsupported political-ish commentary>

That doesn't mean his adaptation was original, and it certainly doesn't mean that the overall accomplishment wasn't original.

>15 dchaikin: doesn't the talkiness have resonances in a lot of contemporary writers, with greater or lesser fun quotients? Z. Smith, Franzen, Eggers, even Sedaris? I usually think they're not doing it as well as they think they are and in that sense appreciate the way Wallace uses "like" etc. in a sort of intentionally artificial way. But it does pigeonhole the book stylistically kind of.Certainly you'd place it between 1995 and 2000 if you had to guess, although some of that would be technological cues.

I'm just reading it as it comes too but also finding the gurus helpful. I have to say that the death of the Antitoi brothers stopped me for about a month, especially coming as closely as it did on the heels of the Eschaton. What I've learned so far is to avoid giving myself totally to laughter. I usually find myself smacked in the face pretty soon. As to the talkiness, it seems to come and go. Anyway, I'm back on board and ready to appreciate the discussion.

But it's not just talky, it's also idiosyncratic. The "And but so" stuff at the beginning of sentences is not how anyone I've ever met talks. The "like," however, is.

>18 anna_in_pdx: Oh, that's so funny. I think the "and but so" is so insightfully true to life (I personally have been known to bust out "yeah no" or even "yeah no it's" before starting a proper sentence), whereas the "like" sometimes works and sometimes feels shoehorned in--again, part of the reason I feel like Wallace sometimes gets too clever for his own good; everyone says "like" in real life, but there's some kind of virtuosity imperative, some need to demonstrate the exquisite sensitivity of his ear, that causes Wallace to pop it in in sort of possible but tertiary locations, if that makes sense, and not always in the more usual ones. I wish it was easier to find examples at a moment's notice. A similar situation is Zadie Smith's "eyeano" for "I don't know" in On Beauty, which grinds my gears. If you're going to go phonetic, I don't know what a good approximation would be ("Auhno"?), but eyeano just sounds sort of goofy to me.

But I sort of prefer the idea re Wallace that it's a, like, verfremdungseffekt thing, as I believe was suggested by Sutpen in one of these threads, rather than a failure of craft.

18:
That's funny. Before I read IJ, I knew that "and but so" was sort of a talisman among Wallace diehards. The sort of thing they print on teeshirts, you know. And I didn't really get it. It didn't sound like anything I'd heard someone actually say. It seemed more like a caricature, and not a particularly clever one. So I read the book, and got to sort of like "and but so," and then the next two days after I finished, I literally heard two separate people say those exact words. Not alluding to Wallace or anything, just sort of revving the motor the way everybody does in casual conversation. Since I finished I've heard people say "and but so" and things like it pretty regularly.

The conclusion I came to was that Wallace had picked up on this really common thing that nobody ever notices because it's right in front of our noses or something like that. And it looked weird in print because it just kind of passes in one ear and out the other.

19 and 20: Gee, that's weird! I am going to be looking for this now. People who have read IJ should not count though.

"And but so" didn't/doesn't look weird to me. I'm thinking about 2010, not 1994 or whenever he did his writing of IJ, but it sounds like the language on some of the lesser community college papers my wife used to get - that sort of lazy grammar that students actually use when texting and e-mailing, and forget(?) to correct in their papers.

>22 dchaikin: Absolutely! As to the "like" in inappropriate places, I was teaching when high school students around here were trying to teach themselves to say "like" in order to be cool. That's how it sounds to me. (And, >19 MeditationesMartini:, "everybody says 'like' in real life" --- not me, at least, not "like" like that. But then, I'm old.)

>23 LizzieD: I'm 29. I wonder where the upper ranges of the phenomenon are. I guess Zappa was making fun of "valley girls" using it in 1982 . . . . those teens would be ~40-45 now. I wonder when/how it became widely established?

24:
Good question. I'm 23, so I definitely say it. So do most of my friends, to varying degrees. To be honest, I'm a little surprised to hear that it was getting used back in 1982. I always thought of it as a more recent phenomenon.

I tend to do a lot of thinking while I'm talking. Or maybe I just don't handle the talking and thinking tasks as efficiently as other people I know. But, basically I have to either rely on a lot of filler words or include a lot of pauses. The pauses don't bother me, but they do seems to make some people uncomfortable.

>24 MeditationesMartini: I can give only anecdotal evidence from my own rather isolated province (southeastern N.C.). I first heard it in the mid to late 80's, but it's still going strong although I notice now that the less socially adept kids use "like" to excess. You make me curious though; how much have you trimmed it from your conversation now that you're in the professional world? (I didn't mean to highjack the thread, but I do find this interesting!)

>26 LizzieD: one of the first sacrosanct creeds of the linguist is that nobody really knows what they do in a real-language situation (because as soon as you start thinking about it, you're changing it, like in quantum physics), but I don't notice any suppression in my own speech in professional situations. Maybe there's the discourse-particle "like", that for me is just part of idiomatic speech, meaning something like "allow me to pause for a second, while still signalling to you that I control the floor" or " let me suggest this following word or phrase while also distancing myself from it", as in "He's, like, 32." These I keep regardless of register--but then there are also set phrases that might carry a casual affect, which I would avoid. For instance, I'm pretty sure my usual way of framing the reported speech of a third party would be "so he/she's like" in casual conversation, but if it were the report of a task assigned by a boss, say (as opposed to casual conversation in a work setting, which I think for me is much like casual conversation anywhere except with less swearing), I would stay away from "she's like" and go with "she says" or "she wants us to", because the former would carry a suggestion of scorn, disapproval maybe? At least surprise.

I find the Scottish post-sentential "like" infiltrating my speech lately, but again only in casual contexts, as a kind of "am I understanding you correctly?" E.g. "So he just never showed up, like?"

>27 MeditationesMartini: Thank you kindly! (Did I mention that this fascinates me?) I'm relieved to know that "say" continues to exist in your vocabulary. Do you have any sense of where your "post-sentential 'like'" came from? Is it the next new thing, like? I've just asked you to ignore the creed again, haven't I? I'll go quietly.

>28 LizzieD: I hope it's the next new thing SO MUCH

>29 MeditationesMartini: oh..... I thought that you hoped that it's like the next new thing.
(Sorry. I am well and truly through with this!)