Infinite August: In which you will now address me as The Darkness (1)

I'm recording my experience reading INFINITE JEST along with the Infinite Summer project. There are no spoilers for the book in this post.

I spent most of this month not reading INFINITE JEST. It's not the book's fault: I had a lot of other reading to get through for various and sundry, and that has been my passage through the book, all chutes and laddery. I had a decent lead from taking the book on vacation and I didn't think about it much, just caught up posts from Infinite Summer and occasionally admired my bookmark-stuffed copy.

Then I hit the landmark I should have seen coming: I reached a passage that took me from "Well, I'm having a really good time, even if I don't get the hype" to "...wow, that resonated with me on a level I didn't expect." It was part of a long conversation, almost a tossed-off explanation of something, over the page-600 mark(2); I was reading it on Commerce Street in the West Village, standing in line for a Fringe show, and I looked up from the page and the world looked different.

I don't even think I could explain to you what that felt like, in which case, why am I writing a whole entry about it? Well, this is why: I can remember the first time I read some books that would become my favorites. Mostly, I can remember how I felt when I finished. But I can't think of another book in recent memory where a particular passage clanked like a bolt being turned in a lock. It was like someone had highlighted the entire section and, for good measure, written in the margins Hey Ellen!!! Straighten up, this is for you! All along this book was poking around for the chink in my intellectual armor, and when its aim was true the blow knocked me backward.

Even with all this messy metaphor and sorry simile, I don't know if INFINITE JEST will become one of my favorite books. I still have just under 300 pages to go, and even then, there will at some point have to be a re-reading. What I know is that after I hit that "wow" point, I didn't want to put the book down any more. I began to invent excuses to take it along as a back-up book on outings that did not require one; I lugged it to all sorts of inappropriate places; I got a little Linus-and-the-blanket about it, frankly. I still can't focus on it exclusively (3) but I'm going to try and carve out some longer blocks for reading it, because I just have to.

That said, I haven't completely lost perspective. I still understand how people could get massively frustrated with this book and quit before hitting that "wow" moment. It's all well and good if you reach the "wow" marker on page 248 (4) but there's no guarantee you ever will. What matters as I move into the last month of my Infinite Summer is that DFW served an ace, and I got to watch.

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Obligatory DFW/IJ footnotes:
(1) No one in my civilian life would take this request seriously.
(2) To throw a bone to those who have finished the book, it is completely unrelated to the Big Event that happens between p.600 and p.700, whose narration I found quite confusing. I don't doubt that it was intentional, but I had to read it over twice to be sure that what had just happened, had just happened.
(3) If you're new here, I talked about crowding the book in at length in this post.
(4) Happened to someone I know, and even that is a fair piece in. For those who have read, it's the phone call between Hal and Orin when Orin asks for help on his interview with Steeply.