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 Never-Ending Joke

As a quick aside, before I begin:

I’ve been struggling with the idea of this blog because I’m the type of person who would prefer not to say anything (at least in writing) unless I actually have something to say. And what is there to say about a novel until you’ve finished it? There’s a lot of nonsense on the internet and the blogosphere, and I’d prefer not to contribute to it if I can help it. However, I also realize that part of the appeal of following a blog is its regularity, its continuity. I admit that I overestimated my ability to read quickly and the time I had available to read, and I will do my best to post more often, even if I’ve not finished a novel. (Although, I will say that the reading is more important to me as a personal pursuit than the posting is, so if one thing falls through the cracks, I’m sorry to say: it’ll be this blog.)

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I can only start this long-awaited post by saying: holy shit.

And then by promising to be more articulate for the remainder of the post.

But seriously, after almost two-and-a-half months (72 days, to be exact), I’ve finally completed the most challenging book I’ve ever read in my entire life, bar none: Infinite Jest. Over a thousand pages of  hyper-erudite, absurdly intellectual, and (needless to say) verbose work, including just shy of a hundred pages of “Notes and Errata” in the novel’s distant caboose — making this the first novel I’ve ever read which required me to use two bookmarks simultaneously — constantly flipping back and forth to endnotes that are (in typical Wallace fashion) sometimes longer than the chapters in which I’m already lost, making it impossible to know exactly how far I am in the novel, really, and how much more there is still to read.

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.