Category: the-art-of-narrative

Dispatches from the Abyss III
Infinite Jest: The Blessing at the Heart of Addiction Various threads of the novel come together when Hal Incandenza—whom I’ve been thinking of as the protagonist, despite the massive cast, and the many scenes where he isn’t present—tries to go to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, and winds up instead at a Men’s group, where men are holding ...
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Dispatches from the Abyss II
Halfway through Infinite Jest I’m beginning to think I understand the title, which hasn’t appeared in the first 500 pages of text. But in addition to text, this novel has footnotes (footnotes! In a novel?), or more accurately endnotes, in an even smaller font than the already small font of the text; in addition to 981 ...
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Dispatches from the Abyss I
Reading Infinite Jest Despite my admiration for David Foster Wallace as a writer, I figured I would never read Infinite Jest. I’d read collections of his stories and essays, and didn’t think I could take his intensity at such length (1079 pp. in my paperback). I’m a ploddingly slow reader, and figured a book like that ...
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Beer Sodden Part II (Professional Class): The Mystery of Charles Bukowski
Run with the Hunted: A Charles Bukowski Reader by Charles Bukowski. HarperPerennial. 512 pp. $16.99. In the midst of making my way through the novels of Marilynne Robinson, heavy with the taint of Midwestern Protestantism (I enjoyed those books, I really did. Sometimes I wanted to throw them on the floor and stomp on them, but ...
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The Utopian Theology of Guy Davenport
The Jules Verne Steam Balloon, The Bicycle Rider, Wo es war, woll Ich warden, The Ringdove Sign. Stories by Guy Davenport from The Death of Picasso: New and Selected Writing. Shoemaker & Hoard. 379 pp. $16.00. When I was a student at Duke University in the late Sixties, we sometimes got together to argue about who ...
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