Sex, Power And Magic In Rhode Island Edition

The Witches Of Eastwick
by John Updike

[Please note that this review does include spoilers.]

The Witches Of Eastwick is my introduction to John Updike. (It was a coin toss between this and Rabbit, Run and Rabbit lost.) Without ever having read anything by Updike I knew that there was an aura about him that his critics loved to point out and it was that he was misogynistic. So I figured I would start off with a book that centers around women and see if that criticism about him was somewhat true or partially reactionary or unfounded (as much as can be gleaned from reading one book). I will get to that in a couple of minutes.

First, I must say that the fatal flaw in The Witches Of Eastwick is that it is uneven. The collective praise for Updike’s prose is grounded in reality because when he is on, he is capable of writing simply brilliant scenes with jaw-dropping ease. For example, this passage describing Jane Smart, the cello-playing witch:

“Jane Smart was practicing Bach’s Second Suite for unaccompanied cello, in D Minor, the little black sixteenth-notes of the prelude going up and down and then up again with the sharps and flats like a man slightly raising his voice in conversation, old Bach setting his infallible tonal suspense engine in operation again, and abruptly Jane began to resent it, these notes, so black and certain and masculine, the fingering getting trickier with each sliding transposition of the theme and he not caring, this dead square-faced old Lutheran with his wig and his Lord and his genius and two wives and seventeen children, not caring how the tips of her fingers hurt, or how her obedient spirit was pushed back and forth, up and down, by these military notes just to give him a voice after death, a bully’s immortality; abruptly she rebelled, put down the bow, poured herself a little dry vermouth, and went to the phone. Sukie would be back from work by now, throwing some peanut butter and jelly at her poor children before heading out to the evening’s idiotic civic meeting.”

This passage says so much about Jane Smart. Of the three witches, she is most prone to see things in the strictest of black and white as it pertains to men and their affairs with them, which in turn makes her very prone to lashing out. “Not caring how the tips of her fingers hurt.” “How her obedient spirit was pushed.” “Just to give him a voice after death.” “Abruptly she rebelled.” Another thing in this passage that is important to note is the reference to her children, and notice how little they comprise of it. This is important to note because all three witches are actually quite mean to their children–not out of pre-meditated malice but out of selfishness. All three witches have children but they are all almost entirely ignored by their mothers, women who are mostly occupied by having affairs with various men in their neighborhood and by their Thursday night dinners with each other. The children’s names are rarely ever mentioned, either in dialogue between the women, or in narration. Again, what this says about Updike’s view of women is something I will hold off expanding on until the end of this review.

But in between the great prose that arrives from time to time you essentially have a story that is kind of uninteresting. Furthermore, the ending is kind of maddening–not because it doesn’t make sense or anything like that–because what the witches do to Jenny is way too severe. And it does not make sense as to why Sukie and Alexandra are on board with Jane’s plan.

The Witches Of Eastwick follows the aforementioned Jane Smart along with Sukie Rougemont, and Alexandra Spofford in their small Rhode Island town during the early ’70′s. This coven has affairs with various married men in the town and their overall routine is suddenly interrupted when Darryl Van Horne moves into an old mansion in town. All three women have typically different reactions to this news–news that a single man with no family from Manhattan will be moving into their hamlet: Alexandra, the oldest woman of the group, has subconsciously grouped her own self-image problems that are caused by the inertia of age into putting up a facade that she is completely uninterested in getting to know him–so much so that she pretends to be angry over the thought of the new occupant disrupting the living conditions of the egrets that have been living on the long-abandoned property; Sukie, being that she is the town gossip by trade (she works at the local paper and writes a comings-and-goings type local color column) is naturally curious about discovering everything there is to know about Darryl; and Jane, who, as an artist, is initially offended when she hears that Darryl has numerous pianos that are being moved into the house (a kind of implied theme of Bohemianism vs. bourgeoisie).

Darryl is very rich and has an odd charm about him in so much as he is loud, hairy, and whenever he talks for longer than a few minutes he has to wipe away the spit that builds up at the ends of his lips. But like many men who are rich and exude confidence Darryl is able to attract women in spite of his flaws or annoyances. After meeting each of the women individually, he invites them all to his house–specifically, to join him in taking a bath in a bathroom that would have made Caligula blush. (Slate bathtub, exotic lights, marble accents, a control panel built in to the tub that controlled the lights and the stereo–things that would be seen as very cool nowadays, let alone over thirty years ago.) The four of them wind up having orgies in the bathroom on a regular basis. Things between Darryl and the coven are further complicated when one of the men that Sukie had had an affair with (Clyde Gabriel) kills his wife, then hangs himself.

After the murder-suicide is discovered, Clyde’s children come back home to Eastwick to take care of the affairs of their parents (organizing the house so that it can be sold, etc.). Jenny, who up until then was living in Chicago and working at Michael Reese Hospital, and Chris, who is your prototypical drifting, half-hearted, directionless guy, are eventually asked to Darryl’s place. Chris appears unimpressed with everything and is mostly a wallflower.

Darryl becomes interested in Jenny because of her experiences working in a lab and amongst doctors at the hospital. He employs Jenny to help him because one of his many side projects is that he is trying to make synthetic polymers and locating the interface (because he’s sure it exists) between solar and electrical energy and he believes she can be of use to him in this respect.

Eventually, to the dismay of the coven (“She stole him. She made fools of us,” Jane declares), Darryl marries Jenny and the witches–driven mostly by the will of Jane–combine their powers and give Jenny cancer. Jenny eventually dies due to the cancer, Darryl and Chris hook up and go back to New York, and the women each conjure up their own perfect man and leave town with them. And I will use this is as the basis for delving into the book’s use of sexuality, and what I gleaned of Updike’s view of women from its use.

First of all, it is very easy to glean some level of misogyny in the ending: the fact that when everything starts to fall apart with the witches, they each create a “perfect man” and leave with him. Obviously, on the surface, this does not look or feel modern. But the key, I think, lies with Jane Smart and her acting as kind of a microcosm of the sexual revolution from a purely male point of view. Jane is easily the most polarizing character in the book, especially from a female perspective. What I mean is: during the orgies, Jane is the only one who performs the sexual act of, um, swallowing with Darryl–the act that causes most women to use the ‘whore’ label the most. And because she does this there is definitely an air about her wherein she is expected to rank highest of the three on Darryl’s unofficial scale. And the fact that Jane is the one who is most adamant in punishing Jenny seems to reinforce this: Jane willingly performed the act that most women find disgusting and she received nothing in return.

Which leads me to the sexual revolution part of this analogy. Casual sex is immensely complicated–emotions are oftentimes checked and voices are mostly muted in exchange for very temporary freedom. Things are always boiling beneath the surface; nothing in casual sex comes for free (it is free in so much as someone is being used for free). Look at the sexual revolution of the ’60′s. It was freeing but it also complicated everything to the point of frustration (if not for the participants, then for their children) once it hit the mainstream. And by setting The Witches Of Eastwick in the early ’70′s and by having three women fall for one man, Updike tries to poke holes in the notion that women can act sexually like men to the point of actually trying to re-wire their nature. Does he succeed? Kind of. From the outside, the women look independent and confident, but they are still affected by Darryl’s decision to marry Jenny, and Sukie and Alexandra still go along with the plan to harm her in retaliation. Even when the women have their affairs they convince themselves that they are helping the men out because their wives are so unbearable.

(An aside: this is one of the things that I found fascinating as Sex And The City rolled into its last couple seasons–fans of the show (who were mostly women) found Samantha to be independent and Carrie to be the one that most women wanted to be like overall. Isn’t it ironic that the character that most women wished that they were more like, Carrie, was probably the most shallow of the four girls? She was co-dependent on Big, spent money recklessly, had the lowest amount of ambition compared to the other three women, and mostly attracted emotionally distant guys without ever questioning what about her attracted them to her. And isn’t it ironic that the only way the writers were able to humanize Samantha–which they later tried to undermine in the movie–was to give her cancer and a monogamous relationship? Bottom line: when women try to be like men sexually–which is a fundamentally flawed concept anyway because even men who act like alpha-bachelors ultimately feel disillusioned and wind up marrying someone to feel somewhat complete–it is usually rife with contradictions. Updike might not have taken the perfect tack with this story per se, but it is definitely worth noting that the attempt is not off-base.)

Like I said before, this book has its fair share of flaws but Updike’s writing style and his stretches of fantastic prose is enough for me to check out more of his books down the line.

The Wanting Seed
by Anthony Burgess

In The Wanting Seed, Anthony Burgess creates a world in which overpopulation has a hand in the following: babies are turned into phosphorus pentoxide; homosexuality is outright advertised by the government (complete with posters that say “It’s Sapiens to be Homo”); women are not only discouraged from getting pregnant but are also looked at with collective contempt by men; wars are fabricated so that portions of the population can be killed; food rationing becomes so tight that cannibal groups begin to form.

Now, one would certainly be excused, based on that paragraph, for thinking that this book is really dark. It is dark, but it is totally accessible. Burgess, who is best known for A Clockwork Orange–a modern masterpiece^[1] that perfectly expands on a very dark subject matter that also has a mainstream accessibility to it–published The Wanting Seed, remarkably, the same year as the now-infamous novel about Alex and his droogs.

The Wanting Seed primarily revolves around Tristram Foxe–a history teacher who seems to have a handle on how societies work and how they are cyclical by nature, Beatrice-Joanna Foxe–Tristram’s wife who wants nothing more than to have children, and Derek Foxe–Tristram’s brother, and Beatrice-Joanna’s adulterous lover (which, needless to say, would be very scandalous if Derek were found to be having sex with a woman, considering that he works at the Ministry of Infertility and is a homosexual in front of everyone else).

The story begins with Beatrice-Joanna saying goodbye to her unborn child before it is made into phosphorus pentoxide (it is never explicitly described, but in this society the doctor’s apparently are very careless with pregnant women and allow the child to die rather than resorting to something more direct, like abortion or, you know, delivery). At the same time as this is happening, Tristram is teaching his class. Here is how Burgess describes him as a teacher, prefacing the description with a quote from Tristram’s class:

“‘-The gradual subsumption of the two main opposing political ideologies under essentially theologico-mythical concepts.’ Tristram was not a good teacher. He went too fast for his pupils, used words they found hard to spell, tended to mumble. Obediently the class tried to take down his words in their notebooks.”

From here, the novel delivers the reader to two very important plot points–Beatrice Joanna’s affair with Derek results in her being pregnant, and Tristram’s explanation of socio-political cycles to his class. Both events seem somewhat mutually exclusive but they are tied together quite strongly because both events serve as catalysts (directly, in Beatrice-Joanna’s case; somewhat indirectly, in Tristram’s case) for the trajectories of the book.

Having an affair with someone who is publicly homosexual has its own crosses to bear, but having an affair with someone who is not only publicly homosexual but also about to be promoted to a very high position in a government that is trying to rid the country of new babies is whole other set of problems. What, exactly, is Beatrice-Joanna to do in this circumstance?

Meanwhile, you have Tristram addressing his class on political ideologies, first Pelagianism (the Pelphase):

“‘Pelagius was of the race that at one time inhabited Western Province. He was what, in the old religious days, used to be called a monk. [...] He denied the doctrine of Original Sin and said that man was capable of working out his own salvation. [...] What you have to remember is that this all suggests human perfectibility. Pelagianism was thus seen to be at the heart of liberalism and its derived doctrines, especially Socialism and Communism.’”

Then Augustinianism (the Gusphase):

“‘Augustine, on the other hand, had insisted on man’s inherent sinfulness and his need for redemption through divine grace. This was seen to be at the bottom of Conservatism and other laissez-faire and non-progressive political beliefs. [...] The old Conservatives expected no good out of man. Man was regarded as naturally acquisitive, wanting more and more and more possessions for himself, an unco-operative and selfish creature, not much concerned about the progress of the community. Sin is really only another word for selfishness, gentlemen. Remember that. [...] If you expect the worst from a person, you can’t ever be disappointed. Only the disappointed resort to violence. The pessimist, which is another way of saying the Augustinian, takes a sort of gloomy pleasure in observing the depths to which human behaviour can sink. The more sin he sees, the more his belief in Original Sin is confirmed. Everyone likes to have his deepest convictions confirmed: that is one of the most abiding of human satisfactions.’”

Finally, the intermediate phase (the Interphase):

“‘Disappointment [after realizing that the Pelphase cannot work as promised] opens up a vista of chaos. There is irrationality, there is panic. When the reason goes, the brute steps in. Brutality! [...] Beatings-up. Secret police. Torture in brightly lighted cellars. Condemnation without trial. Finger-nails pulled out with pincers. The rack. The cold-water treatment. The gouging-out of eyes. The firing-squad in the cold dawn. And all this because of disappointment. The Interphase.’”

What happens from here is that Tristram loses his promotion to a younger gay man (“It’s a matter of arithmetic, not of eugenics or social status”), finds out that Beatrice-Joanna has been impregnated by his brother by way of a heterosexual government official who wants to bring Derek down, and begins to drink. He eventually, as per the “guidelines” of the Interphase, is picked up by the police during a time when the police just like to capture people. He escapes from prison with the help of an inmate and goes off looking for his wife. But not before he is tricked into joining the army and ordered to fight in a war, apparently against the Chinese. Beatrice-Joanna, on the other hand, escapes to her sister’s house in the country and eventually gives birth to twins. She is eventually found by the man who informed Tristram of his wife’s affair in the first place.

As the story progresses, so too do the cycles. The societal ones keep chugging away; the military moves at a pace that is the default template for seemingly all futuristic writing (going from background arm of the government to a growing and powerful organism that creates wars arbitrarily); and, quite literally, the female cycle: where at first you were almost outright prevented from having children and looked at with scorn for even having kids, now Beatrice-Joanna is able to walk the twins in their stroller along the sea at the end of the book.

The Wanting Seed is, at his core, a journey story. At a point, Tristram realizes that his fury and anger at Beatrice-Joanna is misguided; he needs to find her. Likewise, Beatrice-Joanna, realizes that Tristram is ultimately who she loves in spite of how Derek’s personality seems to match hers better. The book ends with an epilogue that should really surprise no one w/r/t to Tristram and Beatrice-Joanna. But before that there is a terrific scene when Tristram, after escaping from the “war,” goes to the War Office to let them know that he survived what had happened. He winds up meeting with a Major Berkeley and Tristram threatens to go public with what he knows. What follows is some terrific back-and-forth between the two about war, the War Office, civilian contractors, the dead soldiers. I will not say too much about it because I do not want to spoil anything but the Major, at one point, says “waste not, want not” w/r/t one of their topics. Which, in its context, is quite perfect because it continues the cyclical theme of overpopulation in the book perfectly.

Bottom line: if you are at all interested in starting to read anything by Anthony Burgess I could not dissuade you from starting with A Clockwork Orange first; it is a really phenomenal book all the way through. The Wanting Seed, though, is an excellent place to start too. Its intelligence still resonates today and it is a small, very overlooked gem from one of the best writers of the twentieth century.

[1] For what it’s worth, and not to take too much away from Stanley Kubrick’s faithful screen adaptation, but Burgess’ novel is better than the movie if only because his ending is much more humanizing and fully fleshed out than Kubrick’s abrupt and darker ending.

The Crying Of Lot 49
by Thomas Pynchon

The Crying Of Lot 49, to me, shares a strong similarity to Some Like It Hot–the movie that stars Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon–in that both have attached to it a very implicit air of importance and groundbreaking-ness. Some Like It Hot is practically universally agreed upon by AFI and most film critics as being the greatest cinematic comedy ever written. Likewise, The Crying Of Lot 49 seems to be universally seen as one of the most important and greatest post-modern novels written. And I can agree with both of those opinions. But only to a point.

The problem with Lot 49 and Some Like It Hot is that they are great in the respective artistic spheres for their time. What I mean is this: I wholeheartedly understand that because Billy Wilder (the writer/director of the movie) influenced so many directors and writers it is easy to give him a huge nod with regards to his masterpiece Some Like It Hot. That said, can anyone–anyone at all–who is under the age of fifty really truly say with a straight face that Some Like It Hot is fundamentally and completely funnier than Airplane! (or even Major League)? “But they are two vastly different movies,” you’ll say if comparing Some Like It Hot to Airplane! and, yes, you are right. But comedies should be funny, no? How many times will someone laugh out loud to Some Like It Hot nowadays? Three times? Five? Would it even make it to ten?

What I am trying to say here is that the primary culprit working against a movie like Some Like It Hot is time. And the same goes for The Crying Of Lot 49.

If I were a teenager growing up in the ’60′s or ’70′s I am sure that the odds would be higher that I would like this book. (Likewise, to play my own devil’s advocate here, future generations of kids will no doubt wonder just how in the hell could my generation possibly find Pulp Fiction or The Corrections at all interesting.)

That said, The Crying Of Lot 49 is all about the quest for knowledge, conspiracy theories, and entropy. The book opens with Oedipa Maas finding out that she has been tasked with executing the will of her former lover and über-wealthy tycoon Pierce Inverarity. Along the way she has run-ins with Dr. Hilarius (a man who, amongst other things, gives LSD to housewives and later admits to having been a Nazi doctor at a concentration camp), a band called The Paranoids (a Beatles-type band), Metzger (a lawyer assigned to helping her execute Inverarity’s will, Oedipa also has an affair with him), John Nefastis (a scientist obssessed with Maxwell’s demon), and Genghis Cohen (a highly-regarded philatelist who helps Oedipa with Pierce’s stamp collection).

The bulk of the book is spent following Oedipa as she tries to track down what exactly the Trystero is. She stumbles upon this one night when she and Metzger are at The Scope, a club frequented by Yoyodyne employees, a huge defense contractor for the military in the area. While in the ladies’ room Oedipa notices the following written near a drawing of a muted horn:

“Interested in sophisticated fun? You, hubby, girl friends. The more the merrier. Get in touch with Kirby, through WASTE only, Box 7391, L.A.”

The book then follows a play-within-a-play format when Oedipa watches a play called The Courier’s Tragedy which puts into some context the history between Tristero and Thurn And Taxis, the latter being a real mail distribution company throughout Europe for many centuries.

I will not reveal anymore of the novel on the off chance anyone is interested in reading it. Ultimately, my biggest hangup with this novel is that it does not have a good flow to it–which is a big problem for me considering that this book is only 152 pages long. I think I understand the whole scope of the novel (I will certainly leave open the possibility that I am reading it wrong; the ending is anything but concrete) but I do not think Pynchon did a good job of arriving at the points that he arrived at. Or, maybe more specifically, I think this novel might be a little too dated. Maybe if I had not read either of David Foster Wallace novels I would think different of this one.

But mostly, like Some Like It Hot, this novel is something that I can respect but from an arm’s length. Who knows, maybe I will think differently of Lot 49 in ten years. But, for now, I think of it more as a relic; something that acted as a prelude and building block for many indescribably creative writers, but, ultimately, something that has been surpassed by its students.

The Broom Of The System
by David Foster Wallace

[Please note that this review does include spoilers.]

Look at this painting.

It is “The Slave Market With Disappearing Bust Of Voltaire” by Salvador Dali. Your eyes will most likely land on the bust of Voltaire that sits almost squarely in the middle of the painting and exists due to the negative space that is created prominently by the Pilgrim-looking women, and the open sky that the hole in the wall provides. This painting fits the definition of surrealism to a T: everything seems oddly out of place–extremely detailed elements (the head piece on the woman in the foreground, the interior walls) intermixed with blurry or uneven elements (the slaves up against the wall, the left hand on the table of the woman in the foreground), and, most importantly, the psychological nature of the overall piece. Why is there a bust of Voltaire prominently involved in a painting about a slave market? Was this born out of commentary or an opinion by Dali on Voltaire’s writing and/or philosophy? Why is the base of Voltaire’s statue cracked while the other base is unblemished? Is the woman in the foreground a slave, or a passive observant? What is the overall story of the piece–is it simply a commentary railing against slavery, or is it a more developed commentary railing against (at the time) modern European policy?

The long answer is multi-splintered; the short answer is that I suppose everything you see about it is correct and that is that. If you think it is about slaves or the undermining of Voltaire’s work or how the cracked ceiling allows the world’s evils to subsist you are technically not incorrect. The main thing though is the context, the storyteller. If anyone other than Dali had painted this piece, would we care as much? Would we spend less or more extra time looking for more meaning to it? Maybe, maybe not. The point is that most of us would give a Dali painting an extra viewing simply because it is Dali who is the creator. If anything, he earned our trust with “The Persistence Of Memory.”

But this is an artistic metaphor to explain why we pick and choose which (and whose) context to follow. And I bring this up because, to me, this idea is central to David Foster Wallace’s debut novel.

The Broom Of The System may be the most coldly logical, surreal, and meta-referential book I have ever read. I am sure too that to most people this book simply falls into the “Post-modern” category but I am emphatically positive that that label will do this book no justice. It is not simply post-modern (though I have a problem with that label anyway), but rather almost like something that transcends a dream. Not unlike a painting about slave trades and Voltaire.

Reading this book is a little like a combination of the feelings you would have in the following situations: seeing a Salvador Dali painting for the first time, hearing your friend tell someone a story and you know that they are telling it completely wrong (possibly even blatantly making up parts of it) but you do not want to interject, and having a dream wherein everyone around you is either much faster or more intelligent than you are. Like entering a room with people you have known for years but there is an overwhelming cloud of distrust that looms of everyone. I will expand on this shortly but first a summary of the novel.

The Broom Of The System takes place in an alternate Ohio–one in which much of the state was purposely destroyed to make room for a man-made Great Ohio Desert (G.O.D.), a suburb that was designed specifically in mind to mirror the likeness of Jayne Mansfield’s profile (thus, the cover of the book), and one in which the city’s phone infrastructure is so wonky that calls are routinely routed incorrectly. (The phone system is so badly mangled that Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, the main female character of the novel and an operator at her boyfriend’s publishing firm, routinely has to tell people who are calling for businesses like Bambi’s Den Of Discipline that, sorry, please hold while I xfer you.) Lenore works at the publishing firm Frequent & Vigorous and her boyfriend is Rick Vigorous, a man so consumed with Lenore that his jealousy is practically off the charts.

The book starts in 1981 with a teenaged Lenore spending a weekend in her sister’s dorm at Amherst. Lenore, her sister, and her sister’s friends are all deciding whether to go to a mixer or not when they are interrupted by two frat guys, Andy “Wang Dang” Lang and Biff Diggerence, who are looking for all of the girls to sign their butts as part of some frat-related bet or scavenger hunt-type thing. “Wang Dang” and Biff eventually refuse to leave until they have received their signatures and the situation reaches a boiling point in which Lenore becomes so frustrated that she forces her way in between them and leaves.

From here, the rest of the novel pretty much takes place in 1990 with a couple of exceptions; most notably, the brilliant flashback to 1972 in which the transcripts are provided for the meeting that took place between all parties to approve the construction of the Great Ohio Desert. (“…Gentlemen may I present Mr. Ed Roy Yancey, of Industrial Desert Design, Dallas. They did Kuwait.”) The overall scope of the novel can be summarized as such: Lenore’s great-grandmother Lenore and twenty five of her friends escaped from their nursing home, which may or may not have something to do with her father’s baby food company. Lenore’s father Stonecipher owns Stonecipheco and they have developed such things as food that will help babies read and speak way earlier than normal. Stonecipheco is also feeling a lot of heat from rival Gerber as Gerber inked a sponsorship deal with a world famous Russian gymnast. While searching for her great-grandmother, Lenore finds that her bird, Vlad The Impaler, can suddenly speak (again, possibly because of Stonecipheco because of the formulas they are working on) and becomes a celebrity on a nationally televised evangelist show. Additionally, Lenore and Rick Vigorous take a trip to Amherst to visit Lenore’s brother LaVache as he may know the whereabouts of Lenore, the great-grandmother. While at Amherst (Rick’s alma mater), Rick runs into “Wang Dang” Lang and discovers that not only does Lang know who Lenore (his girlfriend, not the great-grandmother) is from their meeting when Lenore was a teenager, but that Lang is married to Mindy Metalman–a woman who was friends with Lenore’s sister and whom Lenore met when she stayed there in 1981 but, more importantly, grew up next door to Rick and who, when she was thirteen and Rick was much older, was the first object of lust for Rick. (Rick would watch her outside from inside his house and still has a crystal-clear memory of her outside one day in the summer wearing a white bikini playing near a sprinkler.)

And now, to bring everything back around, this is why I wrote at the beginning that this novel may be the most coldly logical and surreal thing I have read. Because in between all of what is contained in the last paragraph (which does not really scratch the surface, by the way), you have interspersed throughout the novel the stories that Rick tells Lenore–the submitted stories he receives as part of his job as editor, Lenore likes to hear them while cuddling after sex–as well as excerpts from a story about Monroe Fieldbinder (presumably written by Rick himself), and an ending in which a character is looking to mimic the ending from the book McTeague. You would be excused if you have not heard of McTeague before–it was published in 1899 and its place in American literary canon is mostly at cult level–but the end of the novel involves a murder in Death Valley in which the moment before a character dies he handcuffs himself to his murderer so that the murderer will then die in the desert too.

The stories that Rick tells Lenore throughout The Broom Of The System all wreak of literal references too. For instance, both Rick and Lenore see a Dr. Jay separately for therapy. Except that Rick, because of his jealousy and desire to have Lenore in every respect, is able to obtain all pertinent information from Dr. Jay about Lenore and her sessions with him. And Dr. Jay, in his sessions with both of them, always refers to their problems as being hygiene-based. That said, one of the stories Rick recalls to Lenore one night is about a therapist who hates big cities because a crime was committed against him in a big city and this in turn causes him to convince every one of his patients (regardless of what the issues are) to move out of the city and into a rural home in the woods. Except that the doctor is doing all of this because he owns all of the rural homes in the woods that he is sending his patients to. He is blatantly swindling them. The story ends with a really cruel twist of fate but then again almost all of Rick’s stories do.

Which begs the question: is the narrator of Broom Of The System trustworthy? What is real and what is made up for the sole purpose of making a contextual point within a surreal example?

I also mentioned earlier that this book is coldly logical. I do not know if that is the best description to use here but it will have to suffice. Because, how else can you describe a book that uses such an array of oddities–a great-grandmother who can only live in an environment that is exactly 98.7 degrees, a man-made desert being constructed for the sake of giving people a reminder that they need to wander alone from time to time, a man consumed by jealousy towards his beautiful girlfriend somehow stumbles upon a man who knew her when she was almost the same age as said jealous man’s first lustful encounter, a brother who has a synthetic leg that stores marijuana–yet it somehow all ties together rationally, even if the reader (along with the last woman being spoken to at the end) are left wondering what is the truth and what is a lie.

Wallace may be toying with us all throughout the novel but in the end it does not really matter. It is all about the context; what you want to see, what you want to hear, and what you want to say to others. Again, it is cold logic wrapped up in a surreal suit and all that is missing is the bust of Voltaire.

Infinite Jest
by David Foster Wallace

I will be the first to admit that when David Foster Wallace killed himself on September 12th of last year I only vaguely knew of his name. And if you were to have asked me then if I had heard of Infinite Jest I would have most likely said probably not.

After reading the obituaries of Wallace I became intrigued, not just because he was only 34 years old when Infinite Jest was published in 1996 (which, by all accounts, was proclaimed a towering masterpiece) but because so many people wrote about how his writing style was so polished and so unbelievably smart. Wanting to judge for myself, I picked up Consider The Lobster–a compilation of essays and articles he had written–and within twenty pages I knew first-hand what the praise was all about and why some people were utterly torn apart at the news of Wallace’s suicide. The first essay is about the AVN awards show in Las Vegas (AVN stands for Adult Video News, also known as “the porn awards”) and it was unlike anything that I read before. It was engaging, thoroughly truthful, smart, and written with a voice of someone who, above anything else, wanted to get to the heart of this awards show^[1]. The essay is almost fifty pages long and I was never once wishing it would end already. A later essay in the collection is about the politics of dictionary writing and is filled with footnotes and interpolations that never once made me run for the hills. I knew right then and there that if someone could write a large essay about descriptive writing vs. proscriptive writing and my attention never waivered that that person was worth investing in. I purchased Infinite Jest almost immediately after finishing Consider The Lobster.

Infinite Jest, Wallace’s second and, ultimately, last novel, is a towering piece of work^[2] that explores (sometimes in tedious detail) why we seek out the pleasures that we do and what this says about who we are and the culture that we are a part of. What separates those people, as is so adeptly and profoundly asked late in the novel, who are the stars of a TV sitcom and the rest of the non-speaking extras, relegated to sitting in the background and having to like pretend to talk and be emotive, all while actually doing and saying nothing? What, fundamentally, is the difference between the budding teenage tennis player who plasters his wall w/ posters of tennis pros and dreams of making it to The Show, and the man who takes painstakingly careful steps to acquire marijuana, calling in sick at work for a week, then painstakingly incorporates himself into an obsessive-compulsive routine in which to get high? The two are not as dissimilar as one may think.

*INTERPOLATION
IT IS DISCUSSED WHY BOOKS THAT ARE OVER 1,000 PAGES
LONG ARE SEEN AS DAUNTING TO MOST READERS, AND
TWO EXAMPLES AS TO WHY THIS INSTINCT MAY BE FOUNDED
IN GENUINE CONCERN. IT IS ALSO DISCUSSED WHY 1,000 PAGE BOOKS
ARE SOMETIMES SEEN AS PRETENTIOUS AND SELF-IMPORTANT, OR
SOMETHING THAT FALLS INTO THE REALM OF THE BOORISH ENGLISH
LIT-TYPES WHO STEREOTYPICALLY WEAR SWEATER VESTS AND THE LIKE.

Reading a book that lies in the one thousand page range can be daunting. The very fact that the book in question is that large presupposes to the prospective reader that the author has a lot to say and that the author will hold back nothing in the way of being as descriptive as possible, sometimes to the detriment of the readers’ enjoyment of said book. The themes are most likely complex and indicative of the kinds of things that our brain likes to register as Important or Real or Socially Challenging. There is also a chance that the book is so well-constructed and well-written as to be “life-changing.”

War And Peace is not simply about the events leading up the War of 1812 and Russian society within the Napoleonic Era. It is about the infallability in trying to figure out why things happen; it is about the desire to understand history in spite of our tendencies to ultimately give way to manufactured half-truths; it is about searching for the meaning of life; it is about why countries go to war; it is about the irony of Russia’s upper class slowly but surely trading in their heritage while they allowed the French language (and army) to infiltrate their society. But, mostly, it is an outlet for Tolstoy to wonder aloud how little we know about the actions of men, be it the man who belongs to the military or the man who belongs to history. The following quote (which arrives at almost exactly at the midpoint of the book) best sums up one of Tolstoy’s major themes throughout War And Peace:

“…When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it?

“Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur. And the botanist who finds that the apple falls because the cellular tissue decays and so forth is equally right with the child who stands under the tree and says the apple fell because he wanted to eat it and prayed for it. Equally right or wrong is he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and he who says that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because the last navy struck it for the last time with his mattock. In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.

“Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.”

Additionally, Atlas Shrugged is not merely a commentary on Capitalism or why Rand’s greatest fear is that the American way of life is slowly becoming Communist in its outlook and execution, which is further compounded by the fact that we are blind to it (in her view). Atlas Shrugged is a sweeping, didactic story that Rand wrote as a means of furthering–and clarifying–her Objectivist philosophy in one final swoop (she would never write fiction again after this book). The book covers every conceivable angle of a world wherein people come to see money as the root of all evil, where people find banks and companies to be vile, where innovators are expected to sacrifice themselves in the name of a good that the public arbitrarily decides, where people simply take ingenuity for granted because its inventors–its motive power source–are treated with contempt. This world is turned on its head when John Galt, Rand’s ultimate manifestation of Objectivism, goes from innovator to innovator and convinces them to just give up, to stop being slaves to a public that treats them like Zeus treated Prometheus. The following quote is from John Galt’s radio speech:

“[...] You have heard it said that this is an age of moral crisis. You have said it yourself, half in fear, half in hope that the words had no meaning. You have cried that man’s sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster.

“In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils, which you held as the cause of your plight. You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty.

“You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins; it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection.

“You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, and you have wished it, and I—I am the man who has granted you your wish.

“Your ideal had an implacable enemy, which your code of morality was designed to destroy. I have withdrawn that enemy. I have taken it out of your way and out of your reach. I have removed the source of all those evils you were sacrificing one by one. I have ended your battle. I have stopped your motor. I have deprived your world of man’s mind [...]“

Needless to say, whittling down either of these novels into a 400-500 page book would be quite a task.

On top of all of this, you have the prospective audience. Like the arthouse movie of questionable repute that nonetheless receives rave reviews from the underground voices or the sprawling mainstream movie that seems like it would be too much to sit still for over three hours through, a 1,000 page book has an inherent flaw that most people cannot get over: it is going to have sections that are destined to be boring. It is hard for a 300 page book to hold our undivided attention let alone one that exceeds the 1,000 page barrier. Which leads me to my last point: 1,000 page books have a natural reputation as being stuffy or pretentious. While I was reading War And Peace, Atlas Shrugged, and Infinite Jest, I am sure there were people on the train who thought to themselves, “Look at this guy; he probably thinks he’s sooo smart.” And, at the end of the day, there is no counter-attack to this. People are going to think what they will. Somebody thinking that I’m a pretentious snot for reading War And Peace is, at the end of the day, no different than myself thinking that the person who thinks Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed is an important album is a grade-A tool. Everything comes full circle I guess.

So, with that said, Infinite Jest is not merely about tennis, addiction, and a movie that turns its viewers into people who become monomaniacal in their desire to only want to keep viewing said movie. Infinite Jest is about addiction and its many, many splinterings: why do people succumb to addiction; what causes addiction; what causes people to seek out normal pleasure; what causes people to seek out harmful pleasure; are “normal” and “harmful” pleasures mutually exclusive; should something like Alcoholics Anonymous be required for everyone to go to (even stone-cold sober people); why do cliches about overcoming addiction work; by virtue of the fact that cliches about addiction hold weight, does this then make the person who’s trying to overcome an addiction feel more or less insane; why does suicide (or, to use the book’s own idiom: eliminating your map) become a viable option for some people; why are people blind to the notion that non-drug-related addictions are just as harmful as drug-related addictions.

Infinite Jest is also primarily about tennis which, on the surface, seems like an odd foundation to build upon alongside the themes of addiction, pleasure, familial dysfunction, and other tertiary oddities such as Subsidized Time^[3] the Quebecois secessionist group The Wheelchair Assassins, and everything else involved within the O.N.A.N. (Organization of North American Nations) world that Wallace has created. Tennis actually provides the perfect contrast to drug addiction and Wallace is more than capable of writing about tennis as he was a highly-ranked junior player when he was younger growing up in Philo, Illinois.

Tennis and drug use are both very solitary acts, regardless of how many other friends of yours are in the same room. Tennis is a sport that offers you no caddy, no in-game access to your coach, no roar of the crowd to soak in after a point has been won (the official will kindly remind everyone to be quiet once you are about to serve or return a serve), no access to call a timeout unless you are hurt or sick. You are on an island with nothing but your racquet, and your ability to return shots that are hit at you at roughly 80 m.p.h., and you must make sure that, at the end of the day, your serves and your return shots fall inside the in-bounds boundaries of the court–and above the net–more times than your opponent. And, unlike a golfer or a batter in the batter’s box or a football kicker waiting to kick, the tennis player must constantly move in between return shots because to not move is to concede defeat by giving up all available angles for which your opponent will choose to hit against you, forcing you to over-exert yourself but ultimately failing because you were not constantly moving back to the mid-point of the baseline after each shot. Tennis is all about angles and opportunities to exploit angles. So, too, is drug use.

Drug use (be it marijuana, cocaine, alcohol, amphetamines, or prescription drugs and/or whatever) almost always starts as an escape that is disguised–inwardly and/or outwardly–as an accidental pleasure. So, too, does serious sports-participation. It is not that there is a one-to-one correlation here <em>fundamentally</em> but, abstractly, the alternate universe that Wallace constructs here sort of posits seemingly surreal disparities as things that are not always mutually exclusive. Exhibit A: the Wheelchair Assassins.

The Wheelchair Assassins^[4] are a Quebecois separatist group that seeks to take revenge on the O.N.A.N. government that in effect green-lit the policy of launching waste^[5] into the former Quebec province. The name ‘Wheelchair Assassins’ stems from the fact that a few decades ago (pre-O.N.A.N.) many Quebecois teenage and early-’20′s males (female participants were rare) would engage in a game wherein two groups of people lined up on opposite sides of a train track and the goal was to jump across the tracks at the last possible minute before a train vroomed by and either A) killed you or B) took off your legs. Thus, many Quebecois males lost their legs as a result. Fast-forward some years later and you have these militant, separatist Wheelchair Assassins looking to take their revenge on everyone by getting hold of a movie^[6] that the late James Orin Incandenza made called Infinite Jest. This movie, once the viewer watched it, would cause a person to become essentially paralyzed and want only to re-watch the movie over and over again. The A.F.R. planned to locate the master copy of this Entertainment and broadcast it to everyone, thus, effectively gaining back control of their motherland again.

*INTERPOLATION
IN WHICH IT IS EXPLAINED IN SOME DETAIL WHO THE INCANDENZAS ARE

One set of main characters in the book, the Incandenza family, require some separate explanation. The Incandenzas are James Orin Incandenza (father), Avril (mother), Orin (oldest son), Hal (middle son), and Mario (youngest son). James–who goes by the nicknames Himself, JOI, The Sad Stork, and The Mad Stork–founded the Enfield Tennis Academy, which serves as one of two main settings in the novel. All three of his sons have been a part of the E.T.A.; Orin has already graduated but did not follow his tennis career through, instead opting to become an NFL punter; Hal and Mario are still enrolled at the E.T.A., Hal as a highly-ranked player and Mario as a jack-of-all-trades-type A/V helper and assistant at the academy. Mario’s Macrocephaly (i.e.-a deformity in which his head is abnormally large) prevents him from playing tennis and his presence in the book is, in some ways, like Prince Myshkin in The Idiot, though not anywhere near as tragic or wraught with situations in which his kind-heartedness ultimately results in the people around him being ensnared in larger and more complex problems. Other than that, though, they’re practically identical…

Himself is also an avant-garde filmmaker and his works include such titles as Fun With Teeth, Various Small Flames, The Machine In The Ghost: Annular Holography For Fun And Prophet, The American Century As Seen Through A Brick, Blood Sister: One Tough Nun, and Baby Pictures Of Famous Dictators. Himself also created Infinite Jest, which, when viewed, causes the viewer to only want to watch the movie over and over again. James Incandenza eventually commits suicide (in The Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar) by rigging his microwave so that he’s allowed put his head in it while it’s running.

Avril–also known as The Moms–is a Canadian-born woman who, along with her stepbrother Charles Tavis, run E.T.A. after Himself’s suicide. Avril seems to be the only person in the family who can communicate effectively with everyone but ultimately, like the rest of the family, is detached. The kids seem comfortable talking to her (mostly because Himself is normally detached when he’s not drinking but then becomes weirder to be around when he is drinking) and, because of her strict grammatical usage, the scenes involving her interacting with anyone are usually fun to read but you still ultimately feel cold when you think about how she interacts with people. She is intelligent and to-the-point but she also seems devoid of exuberance. Avril is also having an affair with John “Not Related” Wayne^[7], one of the top-ranked tennis players at E.T.A.

Orin is kind of the de facto stenographer of the book as it pertains to the history of the Incandenza family. For whatever reason, he seems to be the only one of the three sons who remembers most of his childhood and growing up w/ the Moms and Himself. Throughout the book, Orin reminds Hal of things that happened in their lives. Orin is also the only person in the book who wasn’t on good terms w/ the Moms and Himself. Before Himself committed suicide, Orin’s relationship with his father was strained when Orin started to date Joelle Van Dyne (a.k.a. The Prettiest Girl of All Time, a.k.a. P.G.O.A.T.), the woman who Himself would eventually start to use in his movies and who is prominently featured in the craze-inducing Infinite Jest.

Hal is the first Incandenza we meet as the book starts off with him and Charles Tavis and E.T.A. coach Aubrey deLint at a university in Arizona, interviewing with a couple of Deans regarding Hal’s possible acceptance into this universtity via a tennis scholarship. Hal is the psuedo-protoganist of the novel in that he is a central character but his very essence is untrustworthy because he can’t seem to remember anything about his childhood and, when a majority of the scenes that take place at E.T.A., Hal usually becomes a background character to Ortho “The Darkness” Stice, Michael Pemulis, Trevor “The Axhandle” Axford, and the other E.T.A. students. A fascinating side to Hal, though, is that he enjoys smoking pot, but he’s mostly addicted to the secrecy of smoking pot more than the actual lighting up and inhaling of pot. He goes to semi-ridiculous lengths to step aside from his friends, pack the weed and numerous toiletries (to conceal all evidence) along for the journey, go to his secret spot, and then, finally, smokes pot. Hal kind of represents the type of person who has no real discernible idea who he is or what his identity is. The fact that he goes through such laborious steps just to smoke pot (and, that he doesn’t consistently crave it like a normal addict would) seems indicative of someone who is, at the end of the day, trying like mad to figure out who he is but, ultimately, suppressing the desire to like actually go down the road of self-discovery.

Mario may or may not be C.T.’s son and not Himself’s, neither possibility is ever concretely verified though. When Himself became a film auteur, Mario followed him around and helped him out in every possible capacity that was asked of or volunteered. Himself was very fascinated with technology behind and manipulation of lenses and rasters and the effects that could be applied to both. Consequently, Mario became interested in many of the same things that Himself did with film. Mario even did a re-creation of a Himself film about the O.N.A.N. government, except Mario used puppets instead of actors, which is played every Interdependence Day^[8] at the E.T.A.

So, on the surface, the very idea of the Wheelchair Assassins is absurd. If they want to get back at their government why don’t they just revolt against them? Their main problem is with Alberta, the home of pre-O.N.A.N. government in Canada, why not just focus on them? Why try to bring everyone down, Americans included? Besides searching for the master copy of Infinite Jest, the A.F.R. also engage in such things like erecting temporary road-length mirrors along certain New New England interstates so that the drivers wouldn’t realize until the very last minute that they were driving off the road and to their deaths. Why is there a consumption of time and energy even amongst nihilists?

Infinite Jest has more questions than definitive answers, unfortunately. Or maybe not unfortunately. For all of the frustration that the novel can lay on your lap^[9], it is ultimately something that can probably best be described as awe-inspiring. “Mental workout” was the term I used to try to explain to a co-worker when trying to sum up this book succinctly. When I finished the book I needed at least twenty four hours to digest the ending, as I was becoming afraid that I had missed every point leading up to it. The following day at work I asked a co-worker who had read the book a few years ago if what I thought the book ultimately meant was in any way similar to how he thought of the book and how it ended and here is how the conversation went:

‘Q.’
‘Oh, man… it’s been like four years since I’ve read it.’
‘Q.’
[Long pause]
‘Yes, I think so… Yes, I remember that now.’
‘Q.’
[Rolls finger through his hair, pauses]
‘No, I think you’re right. I totally didn’t see the ending coming either.’

So, at the end of the day, is this book worth reading? I honestly have no clue. I completely understand those who are completely mesmerized by it and I would completely understand those who would either give up after 100 pages or, upon completion of reading it, launch into the angriest of diatribes bemoaning the time wasted upon this Piece of Crap. I fall into the Mesmerized category. This is a book that will abstractly always haunt me because it threw me off so many different tracks and I was never able to finger exactly which direction the book was going to go into. I’m totally confident that I will need to re-read this book at least 3 more times before I die so that I can chip away and chip away at its meaning and one day Get It completely. This may be the irony in all of this, considering the title of the book and of the Entertainment in the book (though I don’t think I’ll ever wind up like the medical attaché). I will leave you with three things to chew on w/r/t to this novel and to David Foster Wallace in general.

First, in the foreword to the edition that I bought that was written by Dave Eggers, Eggers ends his foreword with the following sentence: “So he [Wallace] is normal, and regular, and ordinary, and this is his extraordinary, and irregular, and not-normal achievement, a thing that will outlast him and you and me, but will help future people understand us–how we felt, how we lived, what we gave to each other and why.”

Second, just read this excerpt from the novel itself and parse it and soak it in: “[Himself's movie] The American Century As Seen Through A Brick‘s main and famous key image is of a piano-string vibrating–a high D, it looks like–vibrating, and making a very sweet unadorned solo sound indeed, and then a little thumb comes into the frame, a blunt moist pale and yet dingy thumb, with disreputable stuff crusted in one of the nail-corners, small and unlined, clearly an infantile thumb, and as it touches the piano string the high sweet sound immediately dies. And the silence that follows is excruciating. Later in the film, after much mordant and didactic panoramic brick-following, we’re back at the piano-string, and the thumb is removed, and the high sweet sound recommences, extremely pure and solo, and yet now somehow, as the volume increases, now with something rotten about it underneath, there’s something sick-sweet and overripe and potentially putrid about the one clear high D as its volume increases and increases, the sound getting purer and louder and more dysphoric until after a surprisingly few seconds we find ourselves right in the middle of the pure undampered sound longing and even maybe praying for the return of the natal thumb, to shut it up.“

Finally, for as long as this review is, it has not really scratched the surface of what Infinite Jest means nor contains. I have not really even touched on any of the scenes regarding abuse and drug addiction^[10]. But if you’ve made it this far along without running for the hills, you may be game for trying to tackle David Foster Wallace’s writing. If not Infinite Jest then perhaps his non-fiction essays and articles. The next review on this site will be his 1997 compilation A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.

[1] One of my favorite excerpts from this essay, which is titled “Big Red Sun,” and which perfectly sums up Wallace’s adept ability and describing something objectively yet humorously is:

“The adult industry is vulgar. Would anyone disagree? One of the AVN Awards’ categories is “Best Anal Themed Feature“; another is “Best Overall Marketing Campaign-Company Image.” Irresistible, a 1983 winner in several categories, has been spelled Irresistable in Adult Video News for fifteen straight years. The industry’s not only vulgar, it’s predictably vulgar. All the clichés are true. The typical porn producer really is the ugly little man with a bad toupee and a pinkie-ring the size of a Rolaids. The typical porn director really is the guy who uses the word class as a noun to mean refinement. The typical porn starlet really is the lady in Lycra eveningwear with tattoos all down her arms who’s both smoking and chewing gum while telling journalists how grateful she is to Wadcutter Productions Ltd. for footing her breast-enlargement bill. And meaning it. The whole AVN Awards weekend comprises what Mr. Dick Filth calls an Irony-Free Zone.

“But of course we should keep in mind that vulgar has many dictionary definitions and that only a couple of these have to do w/ lewdness or bad taste. At root, vulgar just means popular on a mass scale. It is the semantic opposite of pretentious or snobby. It is humility with a comb-over. It is Nielsen ratings and Barnum’s axiom and the real bottom line. It is big, big business.”