Ouch. That's Hot.

Just finished reading Chuck Klosterman’s Eating The Dinosaur.  Twice.

It’s not that the prose was so poetic that I had to roll it around my tongue a little longer.  It’s not that the thoughts were so pithy that I had to cud-chew it another time to get it down.  There was no necessary reason to start back on page one after running my nose through the index.  (A good index, perhaps the only index ever where the film Dazed and Confused is followed by an entry for the indomitable dc Talk.)  No real reason at all, expect that it sat there, bashful and forlorn, on the back of the toilet.  And I was feeling lonely for old friends.

Klosterman and I go way back, having spent lots of quality time in both Akron and the Dakotas discussing the same records, reading the same magazines, and catching the same bands.  This relationship would be much more interesting if we’d ever met.  As far as I know, our circles never crossed, though there’s probably very few Kevin Bacon Degrees between us.

Despite these gaps of a few years and a few miles, I’m sure he would have fit right in, dueling with lubricated wits against my coterie of friendly savants.  These were mighty men of great wisdom.  Titans who once ruled over the whims of popular opinion, before the current age, before the Strokes heard Television and unleashed the Tyranny of the Hipster upon us all.

I miss those all-nighters in 24-hour diners analyzing the misheard mutterings of rockstars.  Eating The Dinosaur could have been plucked from any of those conversations:  Spinning theories going nowhere, but making the journey a more interesting place to be.

The cover of this cheese-ball, spooky-font, mass-market paperback shouted it loud: “The most influential science fiction novel of the 20th century!”

I call bullshit.

If you were so good, I woulda heard of you.  I’ve read my Wells, my Asimov, hunkered down with Herbert, done some galactic hitch-hiking, and even went through a phase of hiding away from lovely summer days with Spock and Kirk’s paperbacked adventures. They continued to go where no man has gone before.  It seemed safer to stay inside.

But now that WE‘s been read,  I was wrong.

Zamyatin rails against the inevitable abuses of the future utopian “One State” decades before Orwell and Huxley got a crack at it.  And he does so in Russian.  How’s that for cred?  (Ain’t no regime as cold as the Soviet regime.)  If your inner Tea Partier has run out of Rand, read this book before taking that third trip through Fountain Shrugged.  Like  Ayn, Zamyatin spends most of his time championing the individual.  Unlike Ayn, he manages to create two-dimensional characters in the process.  (I suppose that going for 3-D might have muddied the rhetorical waters too much.)  After a few snippy remarks at the homogenizing evils of Christianity, he even ties in a thread of the Moulin-Rouge Bohemian in his revolutionary solution:  Freedom, Beauty, Truth, Love!

And that’s where I hoped it would end.  Darn Russo-Pessimism had to get in the way.   But no spoilers here.  Go forth, mighty self-sufficient one, and read it for yourself.

But what to do with it all?  I once saw an interview with the author whence he noted the improbability that those who reviewed his book had read it.  “Do the math,” he said, “there’s too many pages to read it all in that amount of time.”  So true.  It 0nly took me a decade of false starts and a few months of dedication.  Nothing that would happen by an end-of-the-day-Friday sort of deadline.

With other books, I’ve made it a point to look Google-up the words and references I don’t know as I go, tightening my mind’s grasp on our language, to more firmly bear-hug and french-kiss this great English tongue of ours, in American.  Well, that wasn’t really in the cards for this one.  If there was ever a time to let oblique references and literary obfuscation wash over me like a dip under the Niagara, it was now.

So yeah, it’s big.  And full of good stuff.  Diamonds a-plenty.  In plenty of rough.  The shear quantity of rough parts I found troubling, though I suppose his editor did not.

On the up side, I really enjoyed the whole Salinger/Glass family thing.  I happily latched on to Hal as an updated Holden Caulfield beset by East Coast prep-school privilege and brimming with potential, yet unsure of how to proceed with no real dreams and/or direction to point his way save the expectations of his uniquely gifted family.  But I had nothing but head-scratching for the whole Quebecois Separatist subplot,  though it was funny and the accent was outrageous.  That being said, after a thousand pages, I was getting pretty curious as to how the whole ridiculous attack of the wheelchair-bound assassins was going to play out, to see what sort of mini-eschaton was about unfold on the courts of the Academy.  To see how DFW was going to tie it all together.  But then?  Well…  nothing.

Argh.

I’m not big on plot.  My knee-jerk reaction to the best-novel-ever question is On The Road.  But there were some pot-boiler, page-turner twists in there that ought to be going unambiguously Somewhere.  Sure, you can cut up the book and re-string some scenes together in a more chronologically consistent order.  You can make some educated guesses as to what lies behind the many veils of ambiguity.  You can fill in the narrative gaps about the short-term fate of our wonderboy, Inc.  But why-oh-why-oh-why does Mr. Wallace feel justified in cranking out dozen-page-long drug-mumbled rambles plucked right from the brains of addle-minded minor characters without giving us just a little proper satisfaction as to how the thing turns out?  Yeah?  Not saying I need to be spoon-fed Readi-Whip and Cheez-Whiz to be kept happy, but a wee bit of payoff would have been polite.  Is it too much to ask?  Dan Brown wouldn’t do this to me.

Despite this (point-missing, I know) grumble, INFJ is certainly a thing of beauty with much to ponder.  Ponderous Exhibit #1 being addiction.  Nary a character escaped the grip of some compulsion or another, chemical or otherwise.  But mostly chemical.

Addiction, in INFJ, is the unspoken tie that binds every last man, woman and child in the near North American future.  Your fix could be as simple as TV, or over-training for tennis, or as terrifying as multi-day blackouts at the mercy of an alphabet soup of grade-A pharmaceuticals.  At the root, it’s not so different.

DFW delves deep into 12-step insight, including the concept of learning to separate Identifying and Comparing.  The idea is that when listening to a fellow addict’s tale of woe, regardless of how horrible it may be — and DFW has a flair for the surreal and gratuitous grotesque, disturbingly — the important thing to remember is the common shared humanity between you and the speaker, to look at this fellow suffering human being as being like you, with the same feelings and fears, the same shames and weaknesses, and the same longings for escape.  Don’t compare, don’t judge, don’t rank, just understand how they felt, how you’ve felt, how much we’ve all got in common.

Despite the hyperbole, there’s a lot of  stop-and-look-in-the-mirror stuff in there.  In other words, there’s plenty for any honest person to Identify with, as long as you can remember not to Compare.

So, now that I’ve read it?  I’d like to read it all over again.  I missed too much linguistic trickery the first time, and the words were too luxurious,  too sweetly decadent, not to be enjoyed a second time.  Eventually.

For instance, most of the story takes place in the fictitious just-outside-of-Boston town of Enfield, Massachusetts.  However, there really was an Enfield, Massachusettes.  It’s now at the bottom of a lake, washed-over and drowned-out in the name of progress, just like the book’s experialist territories formerly of USA.  There’s a lot more where that came from.  A lot more.

I must admit that I had pinned my hopes on a more transcendent experience through this journey of a thousand pages, to catch a view of some new Xanadu now that I’ve climbed to the top of this mighty pulp mountain.  INFJ is too realistic for that.  Like the character of Don Gately, on occasion we find moments of enlightenment, but most days we must struggle to do the redemptive work before us.  As the adage says: “One day at a time.”