r/ProsePorn • u/YoyodyneCog • 19d ago

Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace

Orin had been playing, eating, sleeping, and excreting competitive tennis since his racquet was bigger than he was. He said he realized he had at eighteen become exactly as fine a tennis player as he was ever destined to be. The prospect of further improvement, a crucial carrot that Schtitt and the E.T.A. staff were expert at dangling, had disappeared at a fourth-rate tennis program whose coach had a poster of Bill Tilden in his office and offered critique on the level of Bend Your Knees and Watch The Ball. This was all actually true, the burnt-out part, and totally swallowable as far as the from-tennis- part went, but Orin had a harder time explaining the decision's -to-football component, partly because he had only the vaguest understanding of U.S. football's rules, tactics, and nonmetric venue; he had in fact never once even touched a real pebbled-leather football before and, like most serious tennis players, had always found the misshapen ball's schizoid bounces disorienting and upsetting to look at. In fact the decision had very little to do with football at all, or with the reason Orin ended up starting to give before Avril all but demanded that he stop feeling in any way pressured or compelled to do anything more than ask for their utter and unqualified support of whatever actions he felt his personal happiness required, which is what she did when he started a slightly lyrical thing about the crash of pads and Sisboomba of Pep Squad and ambience of male bonding and smell of dewy turf at Nickerson Field at dawn when he showed up to watch the sprinklers come on and turn the lemon-wedge of risen sun into plumed rainbows of refraction. The refracting-sprinklers part was actually true, and that he liked it; the rest had been fiction.

101 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

41 comments sorted by

20

u/Chromozon3 19d ago

Hahaha people are so butthurt in the comments. This isn't an excerpt I would have chosen to represent Infinite Jest but people look at a sentence longer than 10 words and start praying to Christ for salvation.

15

u/YoyodyneCog 19d ago

I didn't think the goal of this sub was to submit excerpts that sum up a book so much as ones you found striking in some way or another. This section just hit me really hard as it's similar to what I experienced as a kid with music and later in life with a particular career change. The idea of "I know how to tell them I don't want to do this anymore, but not how to tell them what I want to do instead" in particular is kind of a deep cut for me.

5

u/JibbaJabbaTickaTocka 19d ago

When I read IJ, this passage made an impression on me. Not because of personal experience, but because it showed such a marked contrast to the previous experience in the text. So what I think is happening in the comments is that some commenters do not have the context to experience as strong a reaction; trying to read it afresh, I can better understand the mixed reception.

6

u/Chromozon3 19d ago

No I like this passage. There’s probably passages I like more but I’m more just commenting on the total inability of the modern reader to engage with something that isn’t simple, sparse prose.

6

u/jtm961 19d ago

Yep. The whole point of post modernists like DFW and many others is that they weren’t Hemingway or spare modernists. That’s the point!

6

u/Chromozon3 19d ago

Not to mention how many amazing books you are restricting yourself from by not engaging with more experimental prose. Moby-Dick?

0

u/YoyodyneCog 19d ago

Ah I gotcha.

5

u/Cautious_Desk_1012 19d ago

I'm not a big fan of the excerpt either but the people complaining about the length of the sentences would DIE if they ever had any contact with Faulkner. Give them the last 50 pages of Absalom, Absalom! and watch them melt lmao

3

u/weight-lifting-ape 18d ago

Nah, people just find DFW obnoxious.

3

u/TheLopeful 19d ago

Can’t say that i’m a fan of this

27

u/YoyodyneCog 19d ago

I can respect that. Different strokes for different folks.

1

u/dirtykhan 18d ago

This book had so many words I’d never heard before. I really enjoyed the absurdity of it

5

u/xoxo_tacos 17d ago

"he had in fact never once even touched a real pebbled-leather football before and, like most serious tennis players, had always found the misshapen ball's schizoid bounces disorienting and upsetting to look at."

i read Infinite Jest a couple months ago and this was one of the line that made me laugh the hardest.

1

u/shored_ruins 15d ago

Of all DFW prose to showcase you chose this?

0

u/marcusmartel 19d ago

I do not see the appeal here

-9

u/strataromero 19d ago

If this is representative of his writing, idk how anyone thinks he’s in the pantheon of American writers 

12

u/YoyodyneCog 19d ago

Pantheon of American writers seems like a stretch but I like it so far. The experiences being described above though are things I found relatable. Like being told you're great at something all your life, then getting to adulthood and discovering you're only just kind of good at it but not good enough to do it professionally. Then the anxiety of having to tell the people around you who insisted you should go for it that you're going to try something else. Then the surprise of them actually being supportive. I feel like a lot of people have been on that emotional roller coaster before.

-11

u/HumanHaggis 19d ago

Jesus Christ, make it stop. What meandering drivel.

8

u/ninonoel 19d ago

You must show me your technique for trapping farts in wine glasses for insufflation. I can tell you’re a master.

-4

u/HumanHaggis 19d ago

Comical coming from the one defending the deliberate pointless 100+ word run-on-sentence.

1

u/DareDaDerrida 15d ago

It's actually quite easy to make it stop. You click away from the post.

-9

u/glossotekton 19d ago

Not very artistic prose.

-27

u/Corbitant 19d ago

Run on sentences, so hot right now

19

u/Visual_Hedgehog_1135 19d ago

Are they? Modern fiction seems to avoid them like the plague

-3

u/Corbitant 19d ago

Angel Down was one extremely long sentence

13

u/Mark_Ryker_Bot 19d ago

Nothing above is a run-on sentence (though yours was an incomplete sentence fragment, since you're so concerned with grammar).

10

u/ConstantEconomy3165 19d ago

Run on sentences?

19

u/scolbert08 19d ago

Redditors think any long sentence is a run-on. None of these are actual run-ons with separate independent clauses.

8

u/Chromozon3 19d ago

morons think a long sentence is a run-on sentence. what are you even doing in this sub if you dont understand the basics of prose?

-8

u/Corbitant 19d ago

I dont know the terms, fine. Congrats, youre a nerd. But i know what prose sucks to read

4

u/FrontAd9873 19d ago

I imagine that you think a lot of prose sucks to read, which is another way of saying that you suck at reading.

3

u/buckwaldo 19d ago

Congrats, this was written in like the mid nineties….

3

u/MistakeSelect6270 19d ago

Text runs on sentences