I
There's this book I love. It's called Wonder Boys, and it's by Michael Chabon. It appeals to my sensibilities in that it's simple--it's the story of a guy with a problem that he needs to overcome in order to move forward and be functional, and it all takes place over the course of a weekend. It has focus. It is tight. And I like it that way, for that reason.
In the novel, the main character is writing a novel which has grown completely beyond his control. It's a sprawling, overgrown tangle of plots and subplots and sub-subplots that he's been churning out, page by page, for years. In the novel, the manuscript is called Wonder Boys. In real life, the manuscript was called Fountain City, and was the book Chabon was writing as a follow up to his debut novel, Mysteries of Pittsburgh. He worked diligently on Fountain City for five years, watching it grow outward in all directions, until finally he made a choice:
"What was it about? This, unfortunately, is what I could never quite figure out--the great river of the West my large, well-equipped expedition never managed to find. It was a novel about utopian dreamers, ecological activists, an Israeli spy, a gargantuan Florida real estate deal, the education of an architect, the perfect baseball park, Paris, French cooking, and the crazy and ongoing dream of rebuilding the Great Temple of Jerusalem. It was about loss--lost paradises, lost cities, the loss of the Temple, the loss of a brother to AIDS; and the concomitant dream of Restoration or Rebuilding. It was also, naturally, a love story. The action was divided between Paris and the fictitious town of Fountain City, Florida. But I could never get those two halves to stick together convincingly, and I knew just enough about most of the above-mentioned subjects to be able to persuade the reader that they didn't all belong in the same book together. So, at the beginning of 1993, after sixty-two months of more or less steady work and four drafts, each longer than the previous one, I dumped it."
Neither novel--the fictitious book inside a book Wonder Boys or the very real Fountain City--could sustain itself and both imploded. (Actually, one was smothered in its sleep and the other scattered to the wind in a flurry of pages like a flock of startled pigeons.) They were too big and too messy and collapsed under their own weight, as anything big and sloppy will eventually do. At one point in Wonder Boys (this is the real novel, now, not the fake one in Wonder Boys called Wonder Boys), the only character to actually read the manuscript besides its author describes it as "spread out" and goes on to say:
"Okay, not spread out, then, but jammed too full. Like that thing with the Indian ruin? Okay, first you have the Indians come, right, they build the thing, the die out, it falls apart, hundreds of years go by, it gets buried, in the fifties some scientist finds it and digs it out, he kills himself--all that goes on and on and on, for, like forty pages, and, I don't know... It doesn't really seem to have anything to do with your characters. I mean, it's beautiful writing, amazingly beautiful, but..."
She's exasperated. The words go on and on but the reader feels like she's going nowhere. Grady Tripp takes a while to absorb this info and eventually his choice is made for him when the manuscript is destroyed; Michael Chabon is a little quicker on the uptake--he had by this point realized his novel was not working, and couldn't work, and killed it, and so Fountain City became Wonder Boys, a novel that is the opposite of Fountain City in all the right ways.
II
So there's this book I'm reading. It's called Infinite Jest, and it's by David Foster Wallace. It's very long and it has the famous endnotes that work to drag it out even further, kind of like the wavering feedback at the end of a Smashing Pumpkins song. I find myself reading, more and more, in a state of utter exasperation, holding the book up like a face in my hands and asking it, "Is this really necessary? Do I need to know this? What's important here and what isn't?" It's a sprawling book. Page space is handed out liberally to all topics, with no consideration given (seemingly) to their relevance to the story. 400+ pages in, I still don't know what the story is. There are characters I would identify as "main" characters, but what they want and where they are going remains unexamined. Meanwhile, there are pages and pages devoted to, for example, deep description of a made-up game the tennis players play on their day off. I mean deep description. I'm talking twenty pages. With rules and formulas and the history of the game and a list of who's playing and description of what they're doing. I don't mind reading it, but at the end of the twenty pages I feel like only 2% of the information will actually come to bear, is actually worth knowing. Is important.
Is it important, or isn't it? When you constantly have to ask it seems to make no difference.
I find myself skimming large sections because I feel I have the gist of it and it probably means nothing anyway. I skip over endnotes because they annoy the shit out of me. Take, for example, this one:
From the text: "Everybody's supposed to wear some sort of hat--Avril Incandenza positively towers in the same steeple-crowned witch's hat she teaches all her classes in every 10/31, and Pemulis wears the complex yachting cap and naval braid, and pale and blotchy Struck a toque with a kind of flitty aigrette, and Hal a black preacher's hat with a stern round downturned brim, etc. etc." Here, to me, the "etc. etc." functions more or less as a "blah blah blah," indicating that the rest is unimportant and indeed the material that's there doesn't seem all that important itself. However, the sentence ends with endnote 148 which, when you now leave the page you're reading and flip to the end you find, goes on: "Troeltsch wears an InterLace Sports baseball cap, and Keith Freer a two-horned operatic Viking helmet along with his leather vest, and Fran Unwin..." Blah blah blah, this goes on for a fourth of the page, and in 9-point font. Is this important?
The more I read Infinite Jest the more I feel like it is a book where nothing was cut, nothing was edited out. This is a writer writing. The writing is amazingly beautiful, as Hannah said about Wonder Boys, but what is the relevance to the characters? More and more, Infinite Jest feels like the novel that Michael Chabon wisely abandoned, a sprawling, overgrown tangle too disparate to organize into anything meaningful. It is the polar opposite of Wonder Boys: big, loose, utterly unfocused, and totally enamored with writing over storytelling. It reads like a completely undisciplined bit of noodling.
III
Ultimately, this is all more about me than about either Wonder Boys or Infinite Jest, Michael Chabon or David Foster Wallace. DFW is considered a genius and Infinite Jest his greatest achievement while Wonder Boys is generally seen as cute or charming but not really all that ambitious or groundbreaking (those words are saved for Chabon's later work). So you can't help but conclude that that pretty much defines my tastes and my aesthetic as someone who writes. I regret that a little bit because I want to be smart, or at least I want to be what other people consider to be smart, and I am clearly not, or at least not in the same way, because here I am saying saying what is smarter, what takes more skill: telling a satisfying story about a character I feel genuine tenderness for in 300 pages, or sketching a lot of people saying and doing very clever things in 1000 pages.
I remember Steve once saying he read Infinite Jest because he wanted to see how you write a 1000-page novel and when he had finished he realized that all you have to do is not stop. I don't know if he was down on the book or up on it, but that seems about right to me too. David Foster Wallace just couldn't (or wouldn't) stop. Thankfully, for me anyway, Michael Chabon knew when to say, enough is enough.
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}