It's still great - a droll, heartbreaking, technically prodigious masterpiece - but it's less fun this time around. It's just so difficult physically to read - often long long page(s) long paragraphs, intricately constructed sentence syntax interrupted by often-random brief footnotes, but occasionally chapter-length footnotes that advance the play and do key work narratively. Syntax already mentioned - Wallace worshipped syntax and deploys it hilariously and ironically and strategically, but you often feel like you're diagramming a sentence as you're reading it. His vocabulary (natch) is intense and technical and super-specific and (sometimes) created on the spot.
It's... alot.
The plot - revoling around tennis prodigy/genius/depressive/substance-abuser Hal Incandenza and his friends at a tennis academy/high school in Boston, a substance-abuse halfway house down the road and hill from there, separatists from Quebec planning terrorism, and a back-story involving a movie Hal's father made which kills anyone who watches it - is agonizingly drawn out. But the prose - Wallace's empathy for his characters, his humanity and wit - is always rewarding. If you have the wherewithal to read it all. Certainly a middleclass intoxicated brainy young white man's book. Don't know how anyone else could care.
Bookmarked the father-song tennis lesson in the 300 page area - sort of insufferable.
Got through the Eschaton wargame extended scene, which was also annoying but easier to follow.
4/7/2026 - Still annoying but still gamely plowing through it. Extended history of TV-advertising tedious. What is is about it that's so unusual? Such brilliant thought and comedy is interwined with the most banal activities and trumped-up dramatic situation.
Shared qualities (in Stefano Ercolino’s phrasing) of the Maximalist novel, aka the “systems novel” or the “Mega-Novel”: length, encyclopedism, exuberance, polyphony, paranoia, ethical commitment, and hybrid realism. In other words, they’re long, dense, and ambitious, told from numerous points of view, interested in morality, awash in conspiratorial machinations, and framed in a narrative filled with over-the-top characters and unlikely scenarios.
May 3, 2026: finished re-reading after two months (and reading five other novels durring the process so I wouldn't hang myself).
Amazing, exhausting, depressing, uplifting, hilarious, bleak. Two thirds of the way through (around page 600?), I slipped into a higher gear and read it much more easily, fluent with the characters and the settings, the diction, what passes for "plot". By the final pages, I was experiencing a touch of almost post-coital tristresse that it would soon be over. But was still relieved. And then had to go re-read the very first chapter, as that is the final "plot" moment - Hal is rendered speechless externally but alive internally.
I got much more out of it this time then I remember from previous readings/attempts - I followed it, I took my time, I read a ten-page online summary online that kept me (in retrospect) less at sea with the whole thing.
important terms: anti-confluential, annular, anhedonia
p. 157-169 - Inc Sr.'s (?) terribly long monolog to his son.
572 - annular fusion, annular chemotheraphy (a cancer that kills cancer)
685 - son raped by father
694-695 - hip, cynical, anhedonia, Weltschmerz, "the Great White Shark of pain," "It" - psychotic depression
765 - the Moms to Mario - disassociation, fear of one's own emotions
900 - Hamlet doubts everything/anything (is real) but the ghost
972 - Orin's death by roaches - like my dream-poem about Michael
973 - "the truth will set you free but not until it's done with you" - one of the AA old-timers (the Crocodiles) to Gatel
1026 - footnote listing Inc Sr.'s film title - favorite one about plotlessness
1053 - footnote, Hal on loneliness
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