Your DFW footnotes of the day: A. O. Scott moves the canonization along:
“Infinite Jest” is a masterpiece that’s also a monster — nearly 1,100 pages of mind-blowing inventiveness and disarming sweetness. Its size and complexity make it forbidding and esoteric. The other big books published since by members of Mr. Wallace’s age cohort — “Middlesex,” by Jeffrey Eugenides; “The Corrections,” by Jonathan Franzen; “The Fortress of Solitude,” by Jonathan Lethem; “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” by Michael Chabon — are more accessible, easier to connect with and to give prizes to. They are family chronicles, congenial hybrids of domestic melodrama, immigrant chronicle, magic realism as well as the more traditional kind. Not easy books, necessarily, but not aggressively difficult, either.Fascinating personal reminiscence of the day:
In their different ways, though, these novels and their authors — along with other itchy late- and post-boomer white guys like Richard Powers, Rick Moody and Dave Eggers — stand in Mr. Wallace’s shadow. Not because his version of their generational crisis was better or truer than theirs, but rather because it was purer and more rigorous.
We bonded over our depression. We shared war stories, the way patients on psych wards do. “I’ve eaten tapioca pudding on the fifth floor, too,” he told me. It wasn’t something you would know about him. Though when you read him, you knew that he thought about things in the way that gets you to that fifth floor. We were both taking Nardil; we bonded over this, too. It is one of the MAOI class of anti-depressants that went out of favor long ago, after the new SSRIs came to the scene. But he and I had no luck with other drugs; Nardil was the only thing that did it for us.
