Greg Carlisle

This is a great undertaking on the part of Greg Carlisle. I see folks rating it low because it is "nothing more than a recapitulation of plot." Though it is understandable that readers who take pride in their incredible abilities to parse a text like Infinite Jest would be inclined to disregard a book whose aim is to help others (we feeble readers), Carlisle, in my opinion, does much more than simply restate in fewer words each episode--he follows the text very closely and includes much thematic and character cross-referencing, and includes his own insights on the inexhaustible topics of the missing year and the circulation of the fateful film cartridge. In contrast to another companion text by two professors that has a précis chapter that really does simply regurgitate what's clearly on the page for the attentive reader--though they make no qualms about their aims--Carlisle wrings out as much as he can from the text. It is in fashion to demand dense and/or mind-blowing material around IJ, as if anything about the text should reach to the heights of the text, but what Carlisle has given us is what could be called "An Anatomy of Infinite Jest" for the common reader who wants to gain an appreciation for the complexity of DFW's most demanding and satisfying efforts. My only caveat to this book would be that you don't use it until after you've read IJ first on your own efforts, despite its marketing as a guide for first-time readers. Or use it as a way to gain propulsion and then set it aside, sort of like what folks do with the online annotations for J R. Bravo for the time and effort put into this book, Mr. Carlisle.… (més)

Carlisle's comparable book on Infinite Jest is indispensable if you're doing more than cursory reading of that novel. This book too provides lots of insights into the stories in the collection it considers. You have to approach a story collection a bit differently than you do a novel, I think, and Carlisle does a nice job of pulling threads from all the stories together to show how the stories are working with similar material in spite of their apparent diversity of subject matter.

I suspect that work was well under way on this book before The Pale King was released, and yet a book analyzing TPK will be a huge undertaking. So I can understand what I presume was an impulse to relate the story collection to the more recently published novel (and there are clear thematic ties and in some cases even common source material between the two), but it did feel at times a little tacked on.

In any case, it's a great read for those baffled by the stories in Wallace's story collection or for the Wallace curious or completists, and I'll be among the first in line for the similar reference that I hope Carlisle puts together for TPK.… (més)

Great companion to "Infinite Jest" -- really helps one get a handle on the scope, themes and layout of the book. Of course, given that DFW hanged himself almost exactly a week ago today, I'm feeling a little subdued/depressed on all matters DFW.

Infinite Jest, which I read last year, is for me one of those "life-changing" books. Elegant Complexity helps elucidate the book's goings-on, most of which registered for me on an emotional level as opposed to intellectual-. IJ is about a tennis academy, drug-rehab house, multi-international terrorist cabal known as the "A.F.R." (an acronym of the French words for "Wheelchair Assassins"), the mass corporate subsidization of western-calender time (following the collapse of network television), avant-garde film theory, societal waste disposal, and hyper-sized, feral babies who roam certain parts of this land, to name its (i.e., IJ's) central themes.

More importantly, IJ is hauntingly human. That's really the service Elegant Complexity performs best, in giving the reader a guide to the utterly astounding interdependencies in the story.

"Infinite Jest" is divided into "chapters marked by 28 centered, shadowed circles [they appear to be phases of the moon] that appear in the main text of the novel (pp. 3-981). Another centered, shadowed circle is placed before the notes and errata (pp. 983-1079).....Within each chapter of the novel, a triple line-space designates division of the text into "subchapters" or "sections," of which there are 192, frequently introduced by a heading." ("Elegant Complexity," pg 17)

To make matters more confusing, "Infinite Jest," which was published in 1996, purports to take place in a future where time isn't kept numerically but is instead "sponsored" by a corporation that pays to have its name serve as the marker for that year. Thus, Chapter One opens in "Year of Glad" (yes, that "Glad" corp, the "flaccid receptacle" company whose shill, Tom Bosley, was the same actor who Dad on "Happy Days" [Get it? Glad = Happy Days? Who said corporate ad people don't have a sense of humor?]), but most of the novel's action takes place in November of "Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment."

There is also Year of the Whopper (2002), Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar (2004), Year of the Perdue Wonderchicken (2005), and I could go on but I won't.

Let me just say that "Elegant Complexity" did a fine job of helping this reader organize the hilarious and hilariously sad scenes of "Infinite Jest," and now that of its author, too (I'm very sad to report), into something like a story, with a beginning, a middle and (now) an end.… (més)

IJ just about did me in. I had so much trouble with the chronology, I gave up several times. (Gee, what a surprise; I bet I'm the first reader ever, to have had his problem).

Greg Carlisle's book is mostly a dry, emotionless re-hashing of some key passages (He reminds us a couple times that his guide is, LOL, "spoiler free"), followed by some very useful but very terse, reminders of character/plot/theme.

The real value of this guide, is its structure. Mr. Carlisle has painstakingly broken down DFW's book into actual chapters AND sub-chapters. At the end are about a dozen of pages of chronologies, character relationships, institutional staffing lists, literary criticism references. These are alone worth the purchase of this book.

My anterior singulate cortex will be forever grateful to Greg Carlisle.… (més)