The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.

I just finished a big book.



It's been a while since I attempted to read such a big book. And wary as I was that it would significantly cut into my book a week stats I decided the only way to attempt it would be at the beginning of the season - when all bets were off - so it would be illustrated clearly how much of my year it felled.
I started January 1st. Finished April 4th. Three months. But that's not exactly accurate either. I took about 3-4 weeks in the middle, for a breather, while I bumped up my average with short story collections.

I had a feeling I would like this book.

I first encountered his name in a weekend supplement in the Guardian last year, immediately after he died. It was a reprinting of an address he'd given to a graduating class in Kenyon, Ohio. In it he'd managed to say things that struck me as true. Things that despite having being said before, again and again, he made fresh and insightful and challenging.



After the first 200 pages or so I went on a David Foster Wallace kick. Reading his journalism and a couple of essays. Trying to find out a little of the story of DFW. I knew he had taken his own life, and as the main themes of the book presented themselves; addiction, entertainment, desperation, tennis & depression, I wanted to be able to ... validate them, tag them up, organise them internally... I avoided finding out too much about his life until I had finished; concerned that it would taint my enjoyment of his writing.

The book is an enjoyable - if not easy - read. This much is foretold in Dave Eggers' forward.

The prose is at times ecstatic, wildly engaging, and fast-paced, and at others turgidly slow, mundane and repetitive. I am convinced this is as planned.

One of the recurring themes is the pursuit of false happiness - the 20th century western self-belief that it is a right and an attainable fixed goalpost.

This is a conversation from the book between 13 year old tennis academy student LaMont Chu and Lyle - functioning as the academies resident wiseman, down in the sauna.

‘You burn to have your photograph in a magazine.’ ‘I’m afraid so.’ ‘Why again exactly, now?’ ‘I guess to be felt about as I feel about those players with their pictures in magazines.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Why? I guess to give my life some sort of kind of meaning, Lyle.’ ‘And how would this do this again?’ ‘Lyle, I don’t know. I do not know. It just does. Would. Why else would I burn like this, clip secret pictures, not take risks, not sleep or pee?’ ‘You feel these men with their photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning.’ ‘I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?’ ‘The meaning they feel, you mean. From the fame.’ ‘Lyle, don’t they ?’ Lyle sucks his cheeks. It’s not like he’s condescending or stringing you along. He’s thinking as hard as you. It’s like he’s you in the top of a clean pond. It’s part of the attention. One side of his cheeks almost caves in, thinking. ‘LaMont, perhaps they did at first. The first photograph, the first magazine, the gratified surge, the seeing themselves as others see them, the hagiography of image, perhaps. Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After the first surge, they care only that their photographs seem awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing you burn to escape, what they call their privacy is being violated. Something changes. After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.’ ‘Is this supposed to be good news? This is awful news.’ ‘LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true?’ ‘Okey-dokey.’ ‘The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.’ ‘Maybe I ought to be getting back.’ ‘LaMont, the world is very old. You have been snared by something untrue. You are deluded. But this is good news. You have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal. You assume that there is a flip-side to your painful envy of Michael Chang: namely Michael Chang’s enjoyable feeling of being-envied-by-LaMont-Chu. No such animal.’ ‘Animal?’ ‘You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.’ ‘This is good news?’ ‘It is the truth. To be envied, admired, is not a feeling. Nor is fame a feeling. There are feelings associated with fame, but few of them are any more enjoyable than the feelings associated with envy of fame.’ ‘The burning doesn’t go away?’ ‘What fire dies when you feed it? It is not fame itself they wish to deny you here. Trust them. There is much fear in fame. Terrible and heavy fear to be pulled and held, carried. Perhaps they want only to keep it off you until you weigh enough to pull it toward yourself.’ ‘Would I sound ungrateful if I said this doesn’t make me feel very much better at all?’ ‘La-Mont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.’ ‘So I’m stuck in the cage from either side. Fame or tortured envy of fame. There’s no way out.’ ‘You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage. And I believe I see a drop on your temple, right…there….’ Etc.

These little vignettes are dropped throughout the book by central and non-central characters alike; each being treated just the same. Perhaps what makes them so powerful is having slogged through the hundreds of pages before-hand. That they reach out from the page and shine.

The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that’s really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It’s like there’s some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn’t happy. The worst-feeling thing that happened today was at lunch when Michael Pemulis told Mario he had an idea for setting up a Dial-a-Prayer telephone service for atheists in which the atheist dials the number and the line just rings and rings and no one answers. It was a joke and a good one, and Mario got it; what was unpleasant was that Mario was the only one at the big table whose laugh was a happy laugh; everybody else sort of looked down like they were laughing at somebody with a disability. The whole issue was far above Mario’s head… And Hal was for once no help, because Hal seemed even more uncomfortable and embarrassed than the fellows at lunch, and when Mario brought up real stuff Hal called him Booboo and acted like he’d wet himself and Hal was going to be very patient about helping him change.

Large sections of the book occur in a recovery home for addicted alcoholics and drug-abusers. There are endless AA meetings and descriptions of the process towards recovery or lapse. It is sobering to be installed in a hard plastic chair in the back row of these meetings, without voice, uncomfortably adjusting your seat as characters describe their rock bottoms. There is a symmetry and inevitability about most, which DFW gives you the ability to identify with.

Knowing that DFW himself struggled with these very same problems and eventually succumbed to them is troubling. There is the inevitable analysation of his entire life and works as a precursor to the one event that ended both. I found myself guilty, looking for clues. What happened? What changed?



In that Kenyon College speech I first read I had been impressed by his ability to cut through the self-defensive automatic irony and cynicism that seems to be the mainstay of modern writers.

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

If you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude - but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance.
Read the rest here.

He wrote of death and suicide and depression from the inside-out. And it was a shock to read such heartfelt thoughts from someone who had clearly reached for them all his life. There is horror in the book. There are atrocities of thought and action and there are pages of despicable violence from which you are not permitted to turn away. But there is also joy, passion and love, even in the dark.










I'll end with a comment borrowed from infinitesummer
“I’m glad I read it. I would never dream of recommending it to anyone.”