If IJ is indeed like a puzzle then it has yet to yield any sort of solution. Having now struggled through almost half the book I feel it’s an appropriate time to ask why and expect an answer. Yes there are interesting themes but where are they leading and why are footnotes and daunting vocabulary necessary to articulate them? Again there are some great segments, but the rest often seems by and large unnecessary. Wallace is undeniably clever—but so what? Just out of curiosity: am I alone in my discontent?

Anyways—a few thoughts:

I’ve found that insofar of the different competing storylines (although I suppose they become less and less competitive as the book continues and the different stories begin to merge together) the one involving the philosophizing of Marathe and Steeply perched atop the rock shelf on the cliff to be by far the most rewarding. While the other stories articulate ideas or concepts primarily through actions, Marathe and Steeply skip the presentation and delve into –often- the same concepts and ideas in their dialogue. I liked the story (and subsequent conversation about the story between the two) about the masochistic mouse who presses the button created to stimulate pleasure in his brain repeatedly, so many times in fact that he ends up killing himself having successfully neglected basic bodily necessities (water, rest) in order to pursue his pleasure addiction. There has been a lot of mention concerning the pleasure (the danger of pleasure/pleasure addiction) but in my opinion none more forceful than this one.

The descriptions of life as an aspiring professional tennis player, especially the accounts of the unaffiliated-Fresno-kid (pretty funny) and Eric Clipperton (really not so funny at all), when juxtaposed next to the various vignettes about substance (that is, drugs and alcohol) addiction, seems to strongly suggest that for these young athletes playing tennis is an addiction forced upon them, whether knowingly or unknowingly, and often with terrible consequences. (Actually I think they’re probably more addicted to success in tennis than tennis itself, making it to the Show, etc.).

Despite whatever disdain I may harbor for Wallace and IJ, I really find episodes like the one about the unaffiliated-Fresno-kid’s undeniably entertaining. Bits like this make me empathize with Hesse’s disillusioned character Goldmund who articulates the despair of living in a world rank with horror and suffering: “…everyday I try to pick flowers growing in the midst of hell”. (For me it is as if this little tale was flower, a gem, lodged in the flesh of the unsightly beast that is this book).
In this regard Wallace shares a number of stylistic similarities with John Irving—he takes what many people would immediately categorize as disparaging scenarios and twists them with a little taste of absurd, a pinch of ridiculous, whatever, just enough to provoke a reaction of simultaneous laughter and sympathy (schadenfreude? Interestingly enough a few pages earlier Marathe seems to go on a bit of a tirade about what appears to be the oft unrecognized proclivity of American’s to shadenfreude). (On a bit of a side note: I’ve mentioned how Wallace tends to create these situations that prompt conflicting emotions in previous posts, and I’ve noticed that I often describe them as ‘tragic’, but having just been required to read excerpts on tragedy from Poetics, it makes me wonder whether these situations in which for the most part innocent people meet unfortunate fates are in fact ‘tragic’—if they were truly tragic, would we the audience be able to derive even a morsel of pleasure from them?)