For me, at the end of a full day of Managed Fun, Nigel Ellery’s act is not particularly astounding or side-splitting or entertaining — but neither is it depressing or offensive or despair-fraught. What it is is weird. It’s the same sort of weird feeling that having an elusive word on the tip of your tongue evokes. There’s something crucially key about Luxury Cruises in evidence here: being entertained by someone who clearly dislikes you, and feeling that you deserve the dislike at the same time that you resent it. All six subjects are now lined up doing syncopated Rockette kicks, and the show is approaching its climax, Nigel Ellery at the microphone getting us ready for something that will apparently involve furiously flapping arms and the astounding mesmeric illusion of flight. Because my own dangerous susceptibility makes it important that I not follow Ellery’s hypnotic suggestions too closely or get too deeply involved, I find myself, in my comfortable navy-blue seat, going farther and farther away inside my head, sort of Creatively Visualizing a kind of epiphanic Frank Conroy-type moment of my own, pulling mentally back, seeing the hypnotist and subjects and audience and Celebrity Show Lounge and deck and then whole motorized vessel itself with the eyes of someone not aboard, visualizing the m.v. Nadir at night, right at this moment, steaming north at 21.4 knots, with a strong warm west wind pulling the moon backwards through a skein of clouds, hearing muffled laughter and music and Papas’ throb and the hiss of receding wake and seeing, from the perspective of this nighttime sea, the good old Nadir complexly aglow, angelically white, lit up from within, festive, imperial, palatial… yes, this: like a palace: it would look like a kind of floating palace, majestic and terrible, to any poor soul out here on the ocean at night, alone in a dinghy, or not even in a dinghy but simply and terribly floating, a man overboard, treading water, out of sight of all land. This deep and creative visual trance — N. Ellery’s true and accidental gift to me — lasted all through the next day and night, which period I spent entirely in Cabin 1009, in bed, mostly looking out the spotless porthole, with trays and various rinds all around me, feeling maybe a little bit glassy-eyed but mostly good — good to be on the Nadir and good soon to be off, good that I had survived (in a way) being pampered to death (in a way) — and so I stayed in bed. And even though the tranced stasis caused me to miss the final night’s climactic P.T.S. and the Farewell Midnight Buffet and then Saturday’s docking and a chance to have my After photo taken with Captain G. Panagiotakis, subsequent reentry into the adult demands of landlocked real-world life wasn’t nearly as bad as a week of Absolutely Nothing had led me to fear.
1995
~ ~ ~
The following people helped make various of the foregoing better than they (i.e., various of the foregoing) would have been otherwise and are hereby thanked:
Mary Ann Babbe, Will Blythe, Mark (“Action Boy”) Costello, Will Dana, Richard Ellis, Jonathan (“This Isn’t Nearly as Bad as One Might Have Expected”) Franzen, K. L. Harris, Colin (“Let’s Explore Once Again Why This Doesn’t Quite Work”) Harrison, Jack Hitt, Jay (“I’m Suffering Right Along With You”) Jennings, Steve Jones, Glenn (“The Mollifier”) Kenny, Nora Krug, Michael Martone, Mike Mattil, Bill McBride, Michael Milburn, Steve Moore, Bonnie Nadell, Linda Perla, Michael Pietsch, Erin Poag, Ellen Rosenbush, Greg Sharko, Lee (“What, Aren’t All Page Proofs Set in Tocharian B?”) Smith, David Travers, Paul Tough, Kristin (“The Blunt Machete”) von Ogtrop, Amy (“Just How Much Reader-Annoyance Are You Shooting For Here, Exactly?”) Wallace Havens, Sally F. Wallace, Deborah Wuliger.
About the Author
David Foster Wallace is the author of the novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System, as well as the story collection Girl with Curious Hair. His writings have appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Playboy, Premiere, Tennis, and other magazines. He is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Whiting Award, the Lannan Award for Fiction, the Paris Review Prize for humor, and an O Henry Award. He lives in Bloomington, Illinois.
Praise for David Foster Wallace’s novel
INFINITE
JEST
“The next step in fiction…. Edgy, accurate, and darkly witty…. Think Beckett, think Pynchon, think Gaddis. Think.”
— Sven Birkerts, Atlantic Monthly
“Uproarious…. It shows off Wallace as one of the big talents of his generation, a writer of virtuosic talents who can seemingly do anything.”
— Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“What weird fun Infinite Jest is to read…. Truly remarkable.”
— David Gates, Newsweek
“A virtuoso display…. There is generous intelligence and authentic passion on every page.”
— R. Z. Sheppard, Time
“A blockbuster comedy of substance abuse, family dysfunction, and tennis, set in the postmillennial future…. No other writer now working communicates so dazzlingly what life will feel like the day after tomorrow.”
— Gerald Howard, Elle
“A work of genius…. A grandly ambitious, wickedly comic epic on par with such great, sprawling novels of the 20th century as Ulysses, The Recognitions, and Gravity’s Rainbow.”
— Paul D. Colford, Seattle Times
“Exhilarating, breathtaking…. The book teems with so much life and death, so much hilarity and pain, so much gusto in the face of despair that one cheers for the future of our literature.”
— Dan Cryer, Newsday
“Infinitely readable, even better than its hype…. It shows signs, in fact, of being a genuine work of genius.”
— Will Blythe, Esquire
“Spectacularly good…. It’s as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL or Wittgenstein had gone on Jeopardy!”
— Walter Kirn, New York
“Brilliant…. Wallace’s talent is immense and his imagination limitless.”
— David Eggers, San Francisco Chronicle
“So brilliant you need sunglasses to read it, but it has a heart as well as a brain…. Infinite Jest is both a vast, comic epic and a profound study of the postmodern condition…. Wallace offers huge entertainment.”
— Steven Moore, Review of Contemporary Fiction