If one thing is clear about this book so far, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s that DFW has a way with words. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not often that an author can use just a mere sentence to convey an entire story or event, but DFW can do that. Often. Multiple times per page.<\/p>\n
OCTOBER \u00e2\u20ac\u201c YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT<\/p>\n
He cranks the condo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s AC way down at night and still most mornings wakes up soaked, fetally curled, entombed in that kind of psychic darkness where you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re dreading whatever you think of.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
DFW are you in my head<\/em>. This is my normal sleeping pattern. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m always too warm, I wake up sweaty, and my brain just won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t shut up. How does he know this<\/em>.<\/p>\n
We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re introduced here to Hal\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s older brother, Orin, who lives in Phoenix. (He was the one on the phone earlier.) It seems that no matter what, he always sleeps in the same manner out here in the desert:<\/p>\n
Home with the team, no matter how high the AC or how thin the sheet, Orin wakes with his own impression sweated darkly into the bed beneath him, slowly drying all day to a white salty outline just slightly off from the week\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s other faint dried outlines, so his fetal-shaped fossilized image is fanned out across his side of the bed like a deck of cards, just overlapping, like an acid trail or timed exposure.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I get the sense that DFW is also a man who will satisfy my favorite writing technique: showing, not telling. I have demanded it of every author in the Mark Reads series, most especially Stephenie Meyer. Granted, Infinite Jest<\/em> is a different kind of book, a varied and utterly ambitious type of novel that begs for an author to simply go all-out. (I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t mean to suggest they are the same, but this reminds me of my favorite Harry Potter<\/em> book, Order of the Phoenix<\/em>, which had Rowling\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s best writing because I felt she was unrestrained.) But I have to admit that, even if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve been wildly erratic in posting about this book, I am very glad to be doing something that is not<\/em> YA fiction.<\/p>\n
Onwards to Orin. I love the way DFW utilizes the weather to provide us with both scenery and a hint towards Orin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mental state:<\/p>\n
He has a mustache of sweat. A bright beach ball floats and bumps against one side of the pool. The sun like a sneaky keyhole view of hell. No one else out here. The complex is a ring with a pool and deck and Jacuzzi in the center. Heat shimmers off the deck like fumes from fuel. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s that mirage thing where the extremem heat makes the dry deck look wet with fuel. Orin can hear cartridge-viewers going from behind closed windows, that aerobics show every morning, and also someone playing an organ, and the older woman who won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t ever smile back at him in the apartment next to his doing operatic scales, muffled by drapes and sun curtains- and double panes. The Jacuzzi chugs and foams.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
There are two wonderfully subtle things at work here that we will probably never see again, but I can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t help but point them out. First of all, heat. I grew up in Riverside, California. Go ahead and Google that. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in the Inland Empire, also know fondly as the Armpit of California. (Do you get that I absolutely hate it there? Well, then, allow me to further drill this heavy-handed message into your skull<\/em>.) It was an arid, boring place to spend my formative years. But it taught me to tolerate the heat. It was pretty standard that there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d be a week or two during July or August where the average daily temperature was just around 110 degrees Fahrenheit. And when it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s that hot out, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s quiet<\/em> outside. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not something you think about or realize or can even conceive of until you experience it.<\/p>\n
Some of my relatives on my mom\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s side lived in Arizona. One lived in Phoenix, the other in Yuma. I had the expressed luxury of visiting both places in the dead of summer and let me tell: Arizona is a FUCKING DESERT<\/em>. I have never (and hope to never) experience heat like that ever again in my life. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve come close to it with yearly trips to Coachella when I used to work for Buzznet, but Palm Springs and Indio in April never quite reached anything close enough. Is it ok if I call that sort of heat oppressive? Because you feel like all your agency and free will and joy has been sucked right out of you. The first time I went to Yuma in the first week of August, it was 127. I mean\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6unless you yourself have felt that before, can you even comprehend such a number? You can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t. And you are blessed because of it.<\/p>\n
Secondary to this, DFW also paints an accurate portrait of life in a suburban apartment complex with this section. I lived in a house most of my life, but after I ran away from home when I was sixteen, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s been apartments since then. I like smaller complexes these days; here in Oakland, there are only twelve units total and it can be rather friendly most of the time, and I actually feel like I know who lives near me. But generally, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve found that I ended up in places that seemed to be teaming with Strangers, as if they were some bacterial life form bred in the laboratory and then released on places like MacArthur Park or Lynwood or Bellflower or Downey. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m sure plenty of you can regale me with stories like Orin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s neighbor as well. In my current building, there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a woman who has really loud sex, but only at (approximately) three in the morning OR three in the afternoon. Is she on some weird, ritualistic schedule? Who knows! Or there was the guy who lived across the hall from me when I lived in downtown Los Angeles who had a propensity for playing 311\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Amber\u00e2\u20ac\u009d whenever he was getting high. And only<\/em> that song.<\/p>\n
I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m off on a tangent again. Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s go back to Orin and appreciate the note he received from \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Subject,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d who I assume is a from a girl?<\/p>\n
The note from last night\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Subject is on violet bond once folded and with a circle of darker violet dead-center where the subject\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s perfume-spritzer had hit it. The only interesting thing about the script, but also depressing, is that every single circle\u00e2\u20ac\u201do\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s, d\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s, p\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s, the #s 6 and 8\u00e2\u20ac\u201dis darkened in, while the I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s are dotted not with circle but with tiny Valentine hearts, which are not darkened in.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
WHO WROTE THIS. Oh my god, that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6kind of irritating? Right? Right???<\/em><\/p>\n
We learn more of Orin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s life; it seems he is a punter for New Orleans and he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s staying here in Phoenix with the rest of his team, who have just returned from Chicago. Orin flashes back to a moment before they left for this most recent trip, to when he watched a bird fall dead, straight away, into the Jacuzzi in front of him. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a bad sign to him, and it suggests that there might have been something prophetic to Orin about this. DFW mentions that Orin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s left side is larger than the right and that he doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t move the left side once while he is outside. Obviously, this could just mean that Orin punts on the left side and he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s resting, but was he hurt in Chicago? Possibly? I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m probably just reading too much into this.<\/p>\n
Orin himself is\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6a bit strange. And I mean that with affection, since I am quite strange myself. Orin takes showers in the hottest water possible, and DFW reveals it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s because of the giant sewer roaches that come out of the shower here in Phoenix. Orin believes that the hotter the water is, the less likely it is that roaches will come out of the drain like they have before. I also liked this bit of imagery when DFW describes Orin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s trap technique:<\/p>\n
Now he keeps big glass tumblers in the bathroom and when he turns on the light and sees a roach he puts a glass down over it, trapping it. After a couple days the glass is all steamed up and the roach has asphyxiated messlessly and Orin discards both the roach and the Tumblr in separate sealed Ziplocs in the dumpster complex\u00c2\u00a0 by the golf course up the street.<\/p>\n
The yellow tile floor of the bathroom is sometimes a little obstacle course of glasses with huge roaches dying inside, stoically, just sitting there, the glasses gradually steaming up with roach-dioxide.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like killing bugs myself. (That has nothing to do with being vegan, by the way. I have never liked killing them, even when I was a child.) So I imagine that I would do something this obsessive myself if faced with the same situation. But with Orin, his fear of roaches approaches something closer to a phobia, I think. We learn that there were parts of Boston by the bay that he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d refused to go near as a child because of the roaches. But even worse than that was his time spent in New Orleands:<\/p>\n
The parishes around N.O. had been having a spate or outbreak of a certain Latin-origin breed of sinister tropical flying<\/em> roaches, that were small and timid but could fucking fly<\/em>, and that kept being found swarming on New Orleans infants, at night, in their cribs, especially infants in like tenements or squalor, and that reportedly fed on the mucus in the babies\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 eyes, some sort of optical-mucus\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthe stuff of fucking nightmares, mobile flying roaches that wanted to get at your eyes, as an infant\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand were reportedly blinding them\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
THANK YOU. THANK YOU FOR THIS WONDERFUL IMAGE THAT IS NOW IN MY HEAD, DFW. Not content to create this sort of nightmare fuel once, he continues, describing Orin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s experience earlier this year with flooding that sent \u00e2\u20ac\u0153over a dozen nightmarish dead bodies,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d along with some flying roaches, tumbling down a hillside to rest against his team\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s mailbox. And now he\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s in Arizona, but he didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t escape the roaches. The roaches are still there and they terrify him in ways that no one else seems capable of understanding.<\/p>\n
What I am most intrigued by is Orin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nightmare and how it relates to his mother. It seems that the Incandenza family is made of individuals who all have strikingly different ways of coping with the world and vocalizing themselves. It all goes back to tennis for Orin, and I get the feeling that, unlike Hal, he doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t play the sport anymore. (To escape his family?) In Orin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s nightmare, his mother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s face seems to plant itself on his like a mask or\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6well, I guess it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s more like a helmet than a mask, according to Orin. In his sleep, according to the note left behind, Orin actually grabbed the girl in bed with him by the head.<\/p>\n
Why is he having dreams like this? And what does it have to do with the dead bird or the very long-winded next section about a boy named Fenton who suffers from schizophrenia?<\/p>\n
Despite that I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve only gotten through nine or ten pages, I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m going to stop here. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122m nearly at 2,000 words already, even if I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve only read one section. I really like that I have the chance to finally talk about things that are\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6well, not super fucking depressing<\/em> for once. There\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a lot here in this section with Orin, too, and I figured that it might be fair to devote an entire review just to his character. The next section will be a whole lot longer, I hope, unless something else particularly fascinating inspires me. Anyway, this is our introduction to Orin Incandenza. And it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a damn fine one at that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If one thing is clear about this book so far, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s that DFW has a way with words. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not often that an author can use just a mere sentence to convey an entire story or event, but DFW can … Continue reading