I’ve had the book sitting on my shelf for the past 7 years. I decided to bear down and finish it over the holidays.
I agree with a lot of the criticisms about the novel – it’s bloated, gratuitous, turgid, at times even downright boring. To me, it seems to be more interested in expressing than being understood. The most challenging novel I’ve finished, definitely.
But this is the first time I think I actually got characters afflicted by mental illness or addiction. I have come across plenty of stories handled by skilled writers who were able to elicit empathy for their characters but DFW did it in such a way that I could almost feel their pain and anguish. Below is a poignant passage regarding depression:
“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”
I’m enriched by the experience of reading the novel. Heartbreaking that DFW never got over his own terror of the flames.
by ariessc_