Breathing Room

I started The Executioner’s Song, by Norman Mailer on Sunday: what a change of pace. Literally.

Dave Eggers is not kidding when he writes that “it’s the fastest 1,000 pages you’ll ever know” in the novel’s foreword.

I’m over 120 pages into the novel in just 2 days of reading, and let me tell you, that in itself is such a relief. Infinite Jest was a brilliant novel, but reading it often felt like being suffocated by the words on the page. Wallace’s paragraphs can be, well, foreboding, and they have a tendency of being several-page-long blocks of black and mind-numbingly detailed text.

The Story

This all started because, as it turns out, I’m a sucker for well-written forewords.

I was in a Barnes & Noble (so sue me), and I glimpsed a copy of Sir David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a novel I’d caught wind of as an English-loving bachelor pursuing a Bachelor’s in English. But feelings of intimidation had caused me to place it on the back burner of my literary list, at least until after graduation. I’d graduated in December of 2011 (age 23). Nine months passed, and I’d gotten married in August of 2012 (still 23). Another nine gestational months passed before — no longer a bachelor and having obtained my bachelor’s — I reencountered Wallace’s Jest in a Barnes & Noble that fateful day in May of 2013 (now 24 years old).

So I picked up the novel and read the foreword, written by author Dave Eggers.