Word: jesting
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...would be sold for corporate sponsorship, e.g., the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. It was, in short, like something sent from above to test the good faith and resolve of book lovers everywhere. It was David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (Little, Brown; 1,079 pages), and people couldn't decide whether it was a towering masterpiece or a bad joke. Ten years later they still...
Wallace's publisher is celebrating the anniversary with a special $10 paperback edition and a series of "Jest Fest" readings and panels. But it might be just as appropriate to deliver a eulogy for Infinite Jest--not to praise it but to bury it. After all, it did not win (nor was it a runner-up for) the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize or any other major award. It was hailed as the Novel of the Future, and in fact it kicked off a temporary revival of the maxi-novel, books like Cryptonomicon and The Corrections and Underworld...
...mistake to lump Infinite Jest in with its successors. Think of it instead in terms of its forebears. Think of it as a Dickens novel. It's a book about two socially disparate groups--the tennis players and the drug addicts--and the various plot strands that bind them together. Granted, Wallace's plot strands are way more confusing than Dickens', and Wallace leaves his story lines dangling in a way that Dickens never did. But Dickens was a synthesizer, writing in an attempt to knit the world together. Infinite Jest holds up a mirror to the world's brokenness...
Still, this fantasy of sexual liberation between bookshelves is belied by the fact that boredatlamont.com is all talk and no action. No one actually intends to stage a tryst in the café, and many of the solicitations are made in jest on behalf of bystanders who are unaware that their burning desire for sex in Lamont is being broadcast into cyberspace...
...highway. All are wearing shorts, some carry rods and reels. Hundreds of time-rich wanderers are fishing or collecting shells on Eighty Mile Beach in the midday sun, while their well-traveled 4WDs and homes on wheels rest in the caravan park behind the dunes. These gray nomads jest that they are part of the SKI club: Spending the Kids' Inheritance...