(Ed. Note - not the most timely review, have I ever insisted on timeliness? Hardly. I'm pretty sure I just threw out a review of The Longest Yard...even if that wasn't old it wouldn't deserve a review...)
I won’t lie; it took me five months to finish IJ. I went ten hours on an airplane back and forth from San Francisco without it even in my possession. I had all but given up until I noticed a copy in the bookshelf of the friend I went to visit. I realized I must have been wrong if he had read it twice. What’s worse: I didn’t even know who DFW was before he died. I totally jumped on the bandwagon. Worse still: I have a degree in English literature and had no idea what was going on since the mid nineties. I’m now obsessed.
In short, IJ is a book about a tennis academy and a drug and alcohol rehab center just outside of Boston. Further, it’s about a universal need to find meaning in life through addiction. The addiction itself is less important than the purpose it serves. It doesn’t matter if it’s Demerol, tennis, AA/NA meetings, or killing neighborhood cats and dogs; it all ends bad.
It took me three hundred pages to realize that the setting for the book is a fictionalized version of the same hospital adjacent to the same hill (leveled off in the book to build the tennis academy) that I had been walking past twice a day on my way to the train for two years. This is where (page 300 or so) it became real for me; and this is where, if you are picking up this book for the first time, you should promise yourself to reach before giving up. I had seen the addicts he writes about lining up for their doses first thing in the morning. I had walked down the same Warren St to Comm Ave as the escapees.
In reality, I have no idea what IJ is about--you won’t either your first time through. I have my theories. I know they’re better than some of my friends’ who’ve read it, and on par with others.’ I know this is a review and not a masters’ thesis, so I’ll try not to ruin anything. I will ask a series of questions you won’t quite understand until you finish the book, and invite you to comment (adamepeters at g---- dot com):
What is JvD’s real deformity? Do you believe the story? I don’t.
Why does the Entertainment do what it does?
Who spiked the two top tennis players with the DMZ at the end of the book? If you think it was Pemulis, explain. I don’t buy it.
What’s the deal with Stice and the window? Is there a correlation with the bed on the ceiling? The objects on the cafeteria walls? I have no idea.
Where does the occult begin? Where does it end? Why does it only come to the surface when it does? Is this a mistake?
What’s the childhood fungus memory all about?
Where do Marathe’s loyalties really lie?
How does Oedipus fit in with the Moms, Wayne, Hal, Orin? I know it does; I just can’t make it work.
I could go on, but I won’t.
If you haven’t read IJ, and you’re still reading this, you probably should. It’s not quite like anything else. It’s as readable as it is dense and difficult, as colloquial as it is academic. You’ll get fatigued without getting bored. It will taunt you as you cart all 1,079 pages of it around and, if you’re lucky, get through six pages on your way to work. Then you’ll read something that really messes with your head, something you’ll still be thinking about months after you’ve finished the book. It will inspire you to reach page six hundred. Then seven hundred. Before long you’ll be faking an illness so you can leave work early and spend twelve hours getting through the last two hundred pages. You’ll be tired the next morning. It’ll be worth it, though. Let me know what you think (if, of course, you can decode my email address above).