Word: novels
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...declare an end to the year of the literary gotcha? Because I?m fresh out of outrage. Yes, I cared that James Frey exaggerated or fabricated parts of his memoir A Million Little Pieces. I sort of cared that Kaavya Viswanathan borrowed bits of her young adult novel (the title of which is too long to bother typing) from other young adult novels. I even sort of tried to care that J.T. Leroy, the author of assorted literary works that almost nobody besides Courtney Love had read, was himself fabricated by a San Francisco couple looking for attention...
...facts, uncovered by an Oxford University student and printed in various British newspapers, are these. In 1977 the romance writer Lucilla Andrews published No Time for Romance, a memoir of her experiences as a nurse in a London hospital during the Second World War. In 2001 McEwan published his novel Atonement, the heroine of which also spends some time as a nurse during the war. There are some inevitable similarities in their stories. There are also a few sentences in Atonement that echo No Time for Romance a bit too closely...
...possible, barely, to reduce the novel to a finite plot description. Hal Incandenza is a gifted, troubled student at a high-level Boston-area tennis academy founded by his late father. Down the road is a drug-rehab center inhabited by an assortment of seedy and desperate characters, notably one Don Gately, a cheerful Demerol addict "with a massive and almost perfectly square head he used to amuse his friends when drunk by letting them open and close elevator doors on." Then there's a film clip so entertaining you die if you watch it, and a cell of wheelchair...
...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 and White Teeth. For a moment there, it felt as though novels simply had to get longer and longer to encompass the world's galloping complexity...
...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...