Am I too lazy to read David Foster Wallace’s big-ass novel? Too pissed? Too parental?

Ten or twelve years ago a friend mentioned he was reading this book Infinite Jest. Other people in the room said “oh, The Big Book.” I hadn’t read it. As far as I can remember, that friend, and every friend since who has mentioned it, talked about it’s length and how it had lots of footnotes. “Footnotes? In a novel? That sounds annoying. I think I would skip them.” “No, they’re, like, part of it. You should read it.” I still haven’t.

This fall I started reading some nonfiction by the book’s author, though, David Foster Wallace. I read most of three collections of his stuff. I skipped a fair bit in the first collection, essays on novels I haven’t read yet and don’t plan to any time in the foreseeable future. When his writing’s good, it’s great. I like his characterizations of people, and I find his essays thought provoking and intelligent without having to make the words and sentences very dense.

I will say, sometimes the rhetorical questions and the general position gets a bit tiring. I think sometimes it’s tiring because tiresome, and other times because it’s a kind of moral work. There’s some Kierkegaard quote - I’m not sure I have this exactly right and I’m not proud to admit I’m too lazy to google it - something to the effect of trying to live as if floating on many thousands of fathoms of water. The intellectual side of this is thinking through complicated positions - or maybe overly simplified positions that hide actually existing complexity - to pull them apart. The emotional side is living with uncertainty and a sense of one’s finitude and smallness.

I think in analogies and the only one I can think of is a moment in high school at a bonfire in a friend’s backyard late at night. I remember laying on my back in the grass and looking at the full moon and thinking about how nothing that happened in my life would have any appreciable effect on the moon’s surface and how it was likely that if the moon did change it would be well after my lifetime. I felt something similar one of the times I was at Niagara Falls. We got into town late and wanted to see the falls right away and walked there from our hotel and right as we arrived, around midnight, the lights went off making the falls too dark to see across and making the roar of all that falling water seem much louder. Standing there, I felt small. Not in a bad way, I actually think it’s a healthy thing, and I think that feeling is relatively accurate, it’s just not something I’m always aware of, and it can be tiring to be aware of. I think we, or at least I, swell in self-perception much of the time, like the way caricature artists magnify facial features. We, or at least I, inhabit a perceptual caricature of the universe. There’s nothing wrong with that either. I think Wallace’s work, and often in the breaks and the rhetorical questions and the footnotes, tends to move toward something like that sense of smallness as expressed in that Kierkegaard quote I can’t quote remember (though I can see the image in my mind even if I can’t see the words exactly), or at least it moves toward something that feels similar to the Kierkegaard quote (and image). I like all of that. It’s just a bit tiring and isn’t all of and the only thing I want. Which is fine. No author is all of and the only thing I want.

I got this hot pepper relish at the farmers market a few weeks ago, it’s incredibly spicy to me, well beyond hot salsa and tobasco, and it’s delicious, and sweet too, and I enjoy it a lot and eat it often. But not all the time. I want other tastes. Taste may sound reductive, I don’t think this Wallace thing is just taste, it’s an intellectual activity and a moral position, a way of seeing the human world, and while there are a lot of great things to say about it, it’s taxing, and I’m taxed enough by my life sometimes that I don’t want to read if the reading’s going to be more of that being taxed. Similarly, at the end of the day my wife and I are tired enough that if we’re going to do anything at all we often end with watching a brief bit of comedy on youtube and in those moments we like stuff that is funny and enjoyable but doesn’t make us work much.

Wallace’s footnotes and all that are work. They are in content often, for the reasons I said, Kieregaard’s water and all that and they are also work, umm, attentionally, in that they shift focus from the main text to the note and back, and sometimes there are notes to notes to notes, and part of what he’s doing as a writer, I think, is creating this sort of ‘look at the background and the foreground at the same time’ sort of effect, expanding the things that the reader keeps in focus at the same time. It’s a lot to keep in the brain. And if I don’t manage it then when I come back to the main text I have to remember where I was, re-tie the severed line of the story and argument, and that too is work. I enjoy it and I’d like to think it makes me smarter but, yeah, work, and man sometimes I don’t wanna work. It’s not all work, at least not in this way anyway. There are times when his prose carries the reader along, buoyant prose if you will, the places he carries are interesting and richly described, like the way he brings journalists and technicians to life in his own journalistic writing, but those buoyant passages always come back to places where the stream of the prose gets broken up by the rocks of his footnotes and it’s back to work, carrying the kayak rather than being shot down the river by the current. He’s a skilled enough writer that this is clearly a deliberate choice. I appreciate the artistry and the results - it’s not bad to work, it’s great really, in the big picture - but that’s why I needed a break sometimes as I read. Part of this is also that I’m reading collections of what were written as standalone pieces, articles and essays that were not conceived and meant to be read in one go all the way through cover to cover in a collection.

I will also say, I’ve found his short fiction hit or miss. I think I’ve read four of his short stories. I read a very short story of his that was pretty good and only pretty good. It had something about post-industrial society or de-industrialization in the title and something in the story was about people in unhappy relationships, I think. It left me pretty flat. He has a very sad and suspenseful short story about a young boy climbing up to jump off a diving board and realizing at the top that he was afraid of jumping. I like that one a lot. Then I read another that had way too much detail on a fictional product being focus-grouped and I quit five pages in because I was board, despite the mysterious figure climbing the exterior of the building in which the focus group was happening. I just didn’t care about anything happening in the story. It wasn’t entertaining or interesting and it didn’t make me do any work beyond keeping reading despite boredom. Then I skipped to a short story in which something appalling happens to a small child and for no good reason I could see, it was just like “here’s something appalling” like showing someone a picture of a dog biting someone’s face or something. Some of the language was well crafted, but a well-composed and shot picture of a dog biting someone’s face is still something I don’t want to see. I especially don’t want to see it unexpectedly while engaged in a leisure activity, which is what reading is for me. I know I’ve written about how Wallace makes the reader work and maybe it’s morally good for readers or whatever, but that’s still leisure at the end of the day. When I used to rock climb a lot I would sometimes be sore afterward and would have bleeding scraped up hands because my climbing partners would push me to climb harder than I thought I could, but if one my climbing partners had been like “oh by the way let me show you a graphic video of me throwing up yesterday” I’d have been pissed because that’s a different and needless sort of discomfort irrelevant to the discomfort that comes with pushing myself hard in climbing. I thought this horrifying little story of Wallace’s was like that.

I was really upset when I read it and I was really mad. I wished then for a moment that he hadn’t died so I could write him hatemail for this ugly uselessly upsetting story, and then for a moment I was glad he was dead, and then I decided I was going to put down the book and read something else for a while. I would have been into this story when I was a bleak young man. The darkness of the story would have struck me as Realness. (“I read bleak because that’s how I feel on the inside.”) I am now an aging man with children so I feel a kind of heaviness and exhaustion that is bleaker than anything I could have imagined fifteen years ago, and also, I love my kids like crazy and I often hang out with other kids too, more than I hang out with adults, so I just think people who write pointless stories about bad shit happening to children are assholes. (I’m not against depictions of appalling stuff, by the way. I recently read Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked Into Doors and Paula Spencer and both books had be in tears on multiple occasions while I read them. I don’t regret reading them, and while I don’t know that I would reread them, I’m glad I read them. I regret reading this Wallace story. And no I won’t name it. Don’t read it or try to figure out what story it is. If you start reading his short stories and you get to a story with a kid, and it’s not the diving board story, just stop reading. You can probably even tell from the title, but for real, don’t even bother.) I suppose you could say it’s my children’s fault, blunting the edge of my appetite for the Realness. My kids have changed me, made me old and soft, maaaaan.

So I hesitate about reading The Big Book because I worry it will be like his short fiction, from what I’ve read of it. The other reason, here too I guess you could blame my kids because they’re so tiring (but really? you should blame my job, and the forces that conspired to make me not be independently wealthy) is that if it’s got that same basic quality as the nonfiction such that Wallace is going to take me wonderful places in a boat at great speed but periodically stop and make me get out and insist that I help carry it for the next choppy bit, even if I think I will ultimately enjoy it, or at least most of it, and think it’s good for me, I’m not really sure I’m willing to put with that. I might be just too lazy.