Seven: Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (B)

First – and this will be old news to those among you who read my other blog – I’ve run a few samples from this blog through the rather nifty I Write Like only to discover that I Write Like David Foster Wallace. But mostly when I’m writing about David Foster Wallace; otherwise I write like HP Lovecraft, or occasionally William Gibson. Except when I’m writing about Haruki Murakami, in which instance I write like Cory Doctorow, or occasionally David Foster Wallace. David Foster Wallace, you’ll be pleased to hear, writes like David Foster Wallace; although Bret Easton Ellis writes like HP Lovecraft.

Glad that’s all sorted. OK, a new year – Dairy Products from the American Heartland – and a new person, one Don Gately. But not a new chapter as such. I do wonder whether the difficulty that people have with Infinite Jest is not so much a matter of its length as of basic planning and presentation. Even the greatest writers need a decent editor; DFW, it seems, wanted a secretary.

Anyway, Don Gately. He seems like a bit of a rotter, all things considered. He takes a lot of drugs but then so do several of the characters we’ve encountered so far. Don’s a gifted burglar and, like Mario Incandenza, he has an enormous head, which one might have thought to be something of a professional drawback, especially when attempting to negotiate narrow entrances and/or exits, but apparently not.

The story about the rectally-inserted toothbrushes sounds too much like one of those tiresome urban myths that that was prevalent around the time that e-mail became a standard accoutrement of your average office slave’s working life; around the time that Infinite Jest was published, in fact. You can see it coming, even if the ADA doesn’t. Interesting, though, that the ADA (Assistant District Attorney) receives a brochure created by the ADA (American Dental Association). Deliberate? Meaningful? Not sure.

Gately’s next escapade, though, makes the brushes-up-arses thing look like positively benign. The house he breaks into isn’t empty as he imagines; the owner is in bed with a stinking cold. (Maybe all those dairy products from the heartland have brought him a nasty case of catarrh.) And once again, we have a failure to communicate; first, Guillaume DuPlessis speaks Québec French, then Gately does his best Hollywood gangster voice, until finally

...the honking adenoidal inflection the guy’s grippe gives his speech doesn’t even sound like human speech to Gately... 

which sounds remarkably similar to the deans’ reaction to Hal’s “animal” speech in the first chapter. And pretty soon, DuPlessis chokes on his own snot and the dentally violated A(ssistant) D(istrict) A(ttorney) waits to take his revenge on Gately. Although whether any of this has any bearing on the rest of the plot, we do not know. And yet again, the whole thing may simply be another narrative played out...

...the InterLace Telentertainment thingybob. (So you then man what’s your story?) Hmm, DFW’s geeky enumeration of all the gadget’s features rather remind me of Bret Easton Ellis (him again!) fetishising Bateman’s home entertainment hardwear in American Psycho. Starting to see where the bad blood came from.

But no, keep up, ladies and gentlemen, do try to keep up. We’re back (forwards, maybe?) in Depend Year and we’re back in Enfield Tennis Academy. But this time we’re in the company of Hal’s classmate Jim Troeltsch, who is watching a cartridge – possibly on the machine just described. Now Jim’s not a well boy, and his ailments sounds pretty similar to those suffered by poor old Guillaume DuPlessis; “and the stuff he sneezed out was thick and doughy”. Nice. Where he does touch base with Hal is in the fact that takes lots of drugs, which may be intended to quell his feverish snotting, but don’t appear to do much good in that respect. I get what DFW means by “literally ‘daydreaming’ sick” but does that equate to the next, untitled section, which flips into second-person narrative (which I was pretty much expecting to happen at some point) and it’s all some nameless, unmentionable dread, which is probably like something out of HP Lovecraft, even though – as I think I mentioned – I’ve never read any Lovecraft.

So who is it who’s left lying there, “all ribs and elbows and dilated eyes”? I’m guessing it’s Jim himself. But until someone confirms otherwise, it’s you, just you, only you.

Seven: Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (A)

We’re back with Hal and we’re back with drugs, specifically that high-resin stuff. But Hal uses a one-hitter, as distinct from Erdedy’s bong. As was the case with Erdedy, however, there’s something going on other than the desire to get high. The Hungarian Jimmy Cliff was addicted to the ritual; Hal is “attached to the secrecy” that he can attain beneath the tunnels.

American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.

That’s right, Dave. It’s called writing fiction.

Question: do you need to be interested in the mechanics and lore of marijuana to care about all this? Maybe the same question applies to tennis. Or will it be more like wrestling in the works of John Irving, an obsession of the author’s that you don’t need to share, but you need to accept as part of the cultural furniture? Or, hey, will it all turn out to be a metaphor? I’m guessing this may end up being significant somehow – “Total utilization of public resources = lack of publicly detectable waste.” – but I’ve no idea why or how. Waste? WASTE? Wasn’t that an acronym in Pynchon? DFW uses lots of abbreviations and/or acronyms. I’m rambling now. Anyone might think I was stoned. But seriously, this is running off in multiple directions, a bit like the tunnels under the ETA.

I’ve already broken my self-imposed rule about avoiding other sources of information/insight about Infinite Jest. For one thing, it would have been discourteous not to acknowledge The Howling Fantods, a site about all things DFW-related, not least because its onlie begetter Nick Maniatis has been very encouraging about this blog. And through Nick’s vast academy of ones and zeroes, I’ve come across such labours of obsession as Infinite Boston, which offers a virtual tour of the city where much of the action takes place (does it?) and the Infinite Map which plots them in much the same way that devotees of Joyce impose the action of Ulysses onto a map of Edwardian Dublin. (It’s been said that if the Irish capital were to be wiped off the face of the earth, it could be rebuilt from JJ’s prose alone. I wonder if such a claim could be made for DFW.)

I’ve also been seeking hints about how other readers/writers keep tabs on where they are in the action and how they communicate reference points to others. If one follows the advice of this live blog, it seems that it’s all about good, old-fashioned page numbers, which assumes there’s only one edition of the book with one pagination (maybe there is); but in any case, it isn’t much help if you’ve gone down the Kindle route. Should I be measuring out my reading in percentages? A number of blogs have suggested that something seriously important is going to happen at around the page 237 mark, which I suppose is somewhere in the vicinity of 22%. Bearing in mind I don’t really know what I’ll be looking for, will I need to read a bit more slowly there, just in case I miss something? Chapter headings, as I soon realised, aren’t much help, so I’ve had to impose numbers on them. And those chapters veer off into multiple sub-sections anyway. And then there are the footnotes; are they integral parts of the chapters, or separate entities? Ambassador Wallace, with these questions, you are really spoiling us.

So, as I sit down to write this chapter and see it spooooling out in multiple directions ahead of me, I hope you’ll be accommodating if I take a break at some roughly-halfway point.

OK, back to Hal’s secret spot for his solitary smokes. Apart from its practical benefits, his hideaway beneath the school is as much a vantage point from which he/we can observe/ruminate on the academic and sporting and personal and physical structures in which he operates. It’s like a big body, with its Lung Room, its Pump (heart?) Room, the tunnels serving as blood vessels or maybe nerves. That said, sometimes this book feels as if it has tunnels running off in all directions, half of them apparently containing dead ends. There’s one footnote in particular, number 21 (in the Troeltsch section) that redirects you to number 211, which in turn necessitates flicking through dozens of notes to things that haven’t happened yet and you start to realise the sheer immensity of the operation, that several of the notes alone have the potential to spawn a novel of more normal proportions and you feel humble and a little bit scared and you start to wonder why you started this bloody thing. You become aware of your own insignificance. Forgive me for another Douglas Adams reference – has anyone asked whether DFW was influenced by DNA, by the way? – is there a Hitchhiker’s Guide to Infinite Jest? – but it’s a bit like the Total Perspective Vortex.

And, bloody hell, how come it took me so long to realise it, is Hal in fact Hamlet? An emotional basket case with a dead father whose role in the family and the state (ETA) is usurped by a relative. Duh. The title again. Is Orin Yorick? Maybe? Or is that Mario, with his big, weird skull?

And suddenly we’re back with the attaché in the recliner and once again I wonder whether he’s been watching what we’ve been watching (Hal getting off his face, mostly) or watching us. Or is he watching the videos that Mario’s making? Whatever, it is, it’s pretty compelling stuff, as the attaché’s still watching it, now in a puddle of his own piss.

And, since Mr Wallace suddenly elects to take us on a journey to another trademarked year – dairy products this time – that might be a good moment to take a rest.

Six: Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment

And so we’re back with Hal and Mario (aka Booboo), and we’re back with tennis. I’m trying to avoid relying too much on data from external sources here, but we know that DFW was pretty handy at tennis and that he also had mental health problems, so is it too soon to agree that Hal is David? Hey – Hal David! I only just noticed that. Now I’ll be on the look out for quirky internal rhymes among the melancholy.

And there’s something *wrong* with Mario, even though he seems to be the happiest, best adjusted character we’ve encountered do far. The big head has already been mentioned, even if we don’t know quite how big. But then:

“You think I think fuzzy thoughts all the time. You let me room with you because you feel sorry for me.”

So is Mario somehow mentally damaged? Does his big head house a small brain? Or are his thoughts only fuzzy when compared with the dictionary-consuming mind of his brother? That said, Hal’s currently musing on God, a practice that rarely benefits from the deployment of rigorous logic. And then we discover that Himself, their father, the one with the stained sweater-vest, is no longer with us (although given the unorthodox chronology at work here, I rather suspect this is not the last we’ve seen of him). The brothers discuss grief, specifically the different ways members of the family grieved for Himself. Hal listened to Puccini; the whole bow-tie thing fits.

Then there’s some schtick about raising the flag pole instead of lowering the flag, which could have come out of The Goon Show (although they would have raised the whole ground). And then a brief status report on the medical attaché. Has he been watching what we’ve been reading? Or is he watching...

Orin? No, that can’t be, because it’s now October, YDAU, and the attaché was watching the cartridge in April. Orin is soaked in sweat and he got laid last night. Why is he #71? Is it his house number? His tennis ranking? Are we really in The Village? And what’s Ambush, with its damp scent? Ah, apparently it’s a perfume from the 1950s. (I’m allowing myself to use Google, but in regard to things that are specifically created as part of the Infinite Jest universe. Of course, Ambush might have been a DFW invention. But it isn’t. So that’s OK. And to be honest, I nearly had to Google all that stuff about free safety and reserve guards but some vague memory from when I was at high school in Canada suggested that it might be something to do with that peculiar game that North Americans persist in calling football. So is #71 Orin’s team number?)

At first glance, Orin appears to be normal, at least within the context of his peculiar family. But gradually the differences begin to leak out. His left arm and leg are noticeably bigger than his right. And he doesn’t like heights. And he has dreams about his mother’s detached head (and note that the shower/coffee combo is necessary “to loosen the grip on his soul’s throat”, echoing Hal and Erdedy with their variations on oral drought). On top of that, he can’t stand the cockroaches that infest his living space, but he also can’t bear the explosive results when he tries to kill them, so he’s developed a weird method of suffocating them, that ends up creating dozens of translucent little roach tombs around his apartment. And he chooses to watch cartridges about schizophrenia. And there’s a dead bird in his jacuzzi. Even the serial shagging seems to hint at something a little more pathological than the easy gratification that comes to a professional sportsman. So, yeah, he’s another damaged Incandenza:

Even when alone, able to uncurl alone and sit slowly up and wring out the sheet and go to the bathroom, these darkest mornings start days that Orin can’t even bring himself for hours to think about how he’ll get through the day. These worst mornings with cold floors and hot windows and merciless light – the soul’s certainty that the day will have to be not traversed but sort of climbed, vertically, and then that going to sleep again at the end of it will be like falling, again, off something tall and sheer...

...which somehow makes me think of this recent cartoon from XKCD. But the footnote tells us that he’s “never once darkened the door of any sort of therapy-professional” (What? Not even a conversationalist?) so he may have a fighting chance. And while we’re in among those notes, the Kindle tells us that they begin at the 86% mark; approximately one-seventh of the book is given over to DFW’s “oh-and-by-the-way”s. Which sounds hefty, but I recently finished Arguably, the almost-posthumous collection of Christopher Hitchens’s journalism, and the notes in that began at 75%. Readers of my main blog, Cultural Snow, will know of my fondness for such embellishments, and my championing of works such as Pale Fire and The Waste Land, where the footnotes run riot, trampling over what claims to be the main text until it disappears under the mud and scuffmarks.

And in the may-or-may-not-turn-out-to-be-significant file:

• More Töblerone; still with umlaut.
• “Pandora’s box of worms”? Eh?
• Actually, you shouldn’t shave south-to-north because it’s bad for your skin. Although maybe that’s another parallel universe thing.
• And the line about Rod Stewart’s hair. Nice. 

Five: Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment

And another character who appears, so far as we can see, to have nothing to do with the main narrative; which, in the absence of any compelling alternative, is Hal and his tennis and his speech problems and his lexicographical obsessions. He’s an Arab-Canadian doctor and we don’t know his name, but it’s his birthday tomorrow. While we’re on the subject, do birthdays, or tomorrows for that matter, work the same way in this age of sponsored calendars? For the first time the whole process, “the promotional subsidy” is addressed, and mocked, especially when we realise that now it’s OK to desecrate national landmarks in the cause of consumer capitalism; although since Bartholdi’s birthday present to America has now be renamed “the Libertine Statue”, perhaps the damage was done ages ago.

Hang on. Töblerone? With an umlaut? Like Motörhead? I suppose if there are an infinite number of parallel universes there must be one that’s just like ours but with a few very tiny superficial differences; say, one where Mitt Romney has a moustache and Antwerp is the capital of Belgium and one or two confectionery brands have odd diacritics on their names but apart from that everything’s the same. Anyway, in case you were wondering about those entertainment cartridges...

The medical attaché, worn out by a long day tending to the prince’s yeast imbalance, wants to cast aside all responsibilities, decked out in his ironed bib and a feeding tray, absorbing the entertainment on offer. But he returns home unexpectedly early – having angered his petulant, monovore boss – and for once his silent, veiled wife (stereotype?) is not available. His wife is out and, left to his own devices, the attaché must make his own arrangements for entertainment and comes across an envelope from Phoenix, Arizona, containing an unmarked cartridge. I don’t know about you, but I’m thinking this isn’t a good move. Have you never seen Ring?

But what’s happening now? It’s a new year, but is this a new chapter? The type size says not, but that’s about the only clue we’re getting. So is it the content of the mysterious cartridge? Is this what the unnamed attaché is watching or hearing or reading, beginning at 1927h?

It’s definitely a new year, with a new sponsor. We’re in the world of Clenette, attempting to do what’s right amidst abuse and violence and non-conventional verb structures; another flavour of family dysfunction, more toxic than the Incandenzas’. (Is it placed here to put their own problems in context?) Some clarification needed; Wardine says that she and Clenette are half-sisters but they (presumably) have different mothers, so the shared parent must be the father, the errant brother of the homicidal paedophile Roy Tony. And who’s the father of Clenette’s own child? Not that it’s necessarily important because...

...suddenly we’re somewhere else (but presumably still in the same time, Dove Bar year). We’re with Bruce Green, whose problems are insignificant compared with Clenette’s, but don’t feel that. He’s “dreadfully in love with a classmate who had the unlikely name of Mildred Bonk”, who despite her name is blonde and gorgeous. (I don’t know what sort of girl should be called Mildred Bonk, though. I’m thinking someone sullen and dark-eyed and big-booted, pre-makeover Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club or Thora Birch in Ghost World, maybe. Just the sort of girl I would have fallen dreadfully in love with at Bruce’s age, in fact.) And then it all starts coming together, with another child and more drugs and then that’s it again.

Some questions:

1. Do any of these people exist? Well no, duh, obviously, they don’t, this is fiction. But do any of them exist within the framing fiction that Wallace – for the moment at least – appears to have created, the one inhabited by Hal? Or are they just elements of stories related within that fiction?
2. If they do exist, will they begin to meet, or otherwise interact? Or will they at least leave tiny traces in each other’s stories, like the characters in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, which has been made into a movie, which I’m very much look forward to seeing, and completely dreading at the same time, if you get my drift.
3. Without wanting to seem facetious (oh, perish the very thought), has it started yet?

Four: 9 May – Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment

Yes, true. About the voices, I mean. One of the milestones on my windy* road to adulthood came when I’d answer the phone and the person on the other end would assume it was my dad. Not ask whether it was him – “Michael?” – but just plough on regardless – “Hi, Michael...” – and then it was up to me to interject and disabuse them; which for someone who was pretty socially inept and awkward anyway, and hated using the phone, was a big ask. And what about when someone called asking for “Mr Footman”?

Anyway, we’re back in tennis mode and racket geekery and back in Depend Year; although we don’t know how that fits in with Hal’s chronology because when we were last here we were with Erdedy, waiting for the dope. Did Hal mention Orin being his brother before? Maybe he did. (Downside of the Kindle – harder to flip back and forth when you’re not quite sure what you’re looking for.) We know Mario is Hal’s brother, but what’s this about his “four pillows” and an “oversized skull”? Shades of Joseph Merrick, perhaps, or Rocky Dennis?

Oh. That was a bit quick.

* I don’t know whether this should be pronounced with a long or a short ‘i’.

Three: 1 April – Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad

In the last post I mentioned the shift from first-person to third-person narration, and raised the transgressive spectre of the second person, but this chapter bypasses the whole notion of points of view. It’s entirely conducted in dialogue, with the exception of a few sound effects. There’s no indication as to who might be reporting the action, whether it’s Hal or the professional conversationalist – who eventually turns out to be something else entirely, although we’re not entirely clear what – or some other character or just a run-of-the-mill omniscient narrator. In that sense, it’s more like a film or theatre script than conventional prose; although it’s even stripped of attributions, so we have to search for internal clues to work out who’s speaking. This is an unusual technique, but not entirely unprecedented: Nicholson Baker used it in Vox and Checkpoint; further back, Evelyn Waugh tried it out in a couple of chapters of Vile Bodies (which happens to be the best novel ever written, which is nice). There are doubtless more; feel free to fill in the holes.

Anyway, pretty soon we’re clear that one of the characters is Hal. So we’re back in the realm of the first chapter again; although if Hal is now 11 years old as he claims, we’ve fallen back a few years. There’s still the possibility, of course, that this is a tale told by Hal at the prompting of the Cuban orderly at the mental hospital; indeed, the whole book could turn out to be that. Which sounds pretty postmodern but again, nothing new; it’s an old, old technique, employed by Chaucer and Boccaccio and Emily Brontë and many more.

(To go off-piste for a moment: alerted by mention that there might be rude bits, I once decided to leaf through my mother’s Everyman edition of Boccaccio’s Decameron. And rude bits there were indeed, but – as was the convention until the Chatterley trial threw such squeamishness to the winds – the very rudest passage of all was left in the original Italian. The implication being that such matters were too disgusting for the delicate sensibilities of good Anglo-Saxons, but filthy, libidinous continentals might be able to cope. The fact that at the age of 13 or so I was searching for smut, not in a furtively half-inched copy of Men Only, but in a 14th-century allegory suggests that I had rather more in common with Hal Incandenza than I might have liked. Not the tennis skills, though.)

OK, here’s young(er) Hal. We’ve already deduced that he’s a somewhat unusual young man, and he confirms the fact once more:

That I’m a continentally ranked junior tennis player who can also recite great chunks of the dictionary, verbatim, at will, and tends to get beat up, and wears a bow tie?

...so the likelihood that he’d be sent to some kind of therapist is high. And we’ve had hints at the dysfunctional nature of his upbringing, so it’s quite feasible that nobody would think to explain to him the nature of the therapy. A professional conversationalist, though? Well, that may be perfectly normal in the parallel/alternate/future reality that Wallace is in the process of creating; although it soon transpires that even Hal finds it a bit weird. And his scepticism quickly extends beyond the walls of the consultation room: “Is Himself still having this hallucination that I never speak?”

And it starts to go downhill from there, as Hal recognises his father’s sweater-vest and queries the authenticity of the conversationalist’s moustache (cf Erdedy’s counsellor Randi, “with a mustache like a Mountie”) and nose. Any pretence at a conversation has ended here, as the two of them fire questions at each other, echoing (perhaps) the Ithaca chapter in Ulysses and (perhaps again) anticipating Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood. But Himself has the last word, although whether that’s because Hal really has lost the power of speech; or he’s decided to stop talking; or something more sinister; we’re not told. And is his father, moving from regular text to italics, as horrified by whatever it is that Hal presents to him as the deans were?

One more thought, that doesn’t fit easily anywhere else; is the five-walled room a reference to breaking down the fourth wall, a key technique of self-reference, especially in film and theatre? So many questions. Damn, he’s got me doing it.

Two: Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment

Now, is this chapter in fact the story that the Cuban orderly asks Hal to tell? For that matter, is this Hal? He suffers from a dry mouth, the way Hal does. No, this is Erdedy, although it’s too early to say whether Hal and Erdedy are one and the same; or, if they’re not, what if any relationship there may be between the two. A name like Erdedy makes him sound like the Swedish Chef’s Hungarian boyfriend, but this is just a guess. I don’t think he’s Hal; he asks questions without using question marks, a quirk that the pedantic tennis whiz wouldn’t countenance.

Erdedy is alone, so there is no potential for an interlocutor to fill in the biographical details, as the various deans did for Hal; the insect he observes going in and out of the girders does not count. And we’ve switched from first- to third-person narrative, although I still harbour a sneaking suspicion that Hal may be telling the story, which would mean the narrator wouldn’t have changed, even if the voice has. (Incidentally, have you ever read a novel with a second-person point-of-view, in which “you” does all the work? Bright Lights, Big City, by Jay McInerney, that’s one. The effect is disconcerting, to say the least. Oh well, it’s better than the film.)

Erdedy is waiting for a large delivery of high-quality marijuana, which he intends to consume all by himself. He claims this is part of his attempt to give up the habit, by over-indulging until he can’t stand the stuff. It’s almost a ritual thing; his pathetic desire to impose pain on himself by putting his thumb on the rough edge of the bong is Opus Dei-style self-flagellation for someone with a very low pain threshold. The implication is that he’s deluding himself, or maybe channelling Mark Twain a little. And to support him in his quest he’s meticulousy stocked up on the right sort of junk food, possibly a nod to the cold turkey scene in Trainspotting. His paranoia, his delusion, his self-justification are all amusing, but who is he? Do we care, or should we?

We’re still fiddling around for clues, hoping they may fall into place a little further down the line. So what fragments have we got? After Hal’s mysterious ROM-drive, Erdedy enjoys
“film cartridges” on a “teleputer”; he uses “modem” as a verb; he receives “protocols” and “e-notes”. Are we in fact in the future, or a future, or a parallel present? And since DFW was writing nearly 20 years ago, his imagined future could well be seen as a parallel now. And those wild and wacky chapter headings; is this future and/or now a time in which whole years are sponsored by brands and corporations. Glad-Wrap and Depend, both means of protecting by sealing stuff in. (Makes note.)

The first footnote appears, but it’s depressingly straightforward; “methamphetamine hydrochloride” is translated as “crystal meth”. Might as well have got the Kindle to explain it.

“He went to the bathroom to use the bathroom,” writes Wallace. Is this meant to be silly? I’ve heard Americans speak like this in all seriousness. But no, it’s silly, whether it’s knowingly so or not. Although he redeems himself with Erdedy’s response to thoughts of masturbation: “He didn’t reject the idea so much as not react to it and watch it as it floated away.” Which sounds like prime Douglas Adams to me, which is a good thing.

And then the end, as Erdedy stands “splay-legged” between two competing calls on his attention, and all I can think of is Jimmy Cliff.

But we still don’t know who this Erdedy is or why we’re being told about him. It’s partly a matter of structure. If the two opening chapters had been switched, we’d regard Hal’s experience at the university as an intrusion into the main narrative of the protagonist Erdedy. As it happens, I wouldn’t be surprised if we never hear from the deluded dope fiend ever again. On the other hand, I don’t know for sure whether Hal will make a reappearance. Still, it’s early days yet. Very early.

(And I know I said I’d try to avoid other sources of DFW-related comment for a while, but this insight into the Ellis/Wallace spat is too good to pass up. Thanks, Slaminsky.)

(The percentage)

When you read a novel –  a conventional, book-shaped novel, with paper pages and a cover and the like – there’s a fairly easy way to judge how far you’ve gone. You just look at the book side-on and compare what’s on the right of the point you’ve reached to what’s on the left. The critic and novelist David Lodge has argues that this is a key difference between the construction of novels and films, especially when it comes to endings. If you come to what appears to be the explosive climax of a book, but there are still 50 pages to go, you’ll work out that the author has something else to offer; whereas you’re less aware of time remaining when you’re watching a movie. Of course Lodge wasn’t taking into account the fact that the back ends of many modern novels are packed out with author interviews, suggestions for book groups, maybe even the opening pages of the writer’s next work. Or that it’s easy enough to work out when a film’s real end is approaching, provided you check beforehand what the running time is.

Books on Kindle are different. They have no size or weight, above all no thickness. People who have embarked on reading Infinite Jest in all its 1000+-page glory can mark their achievements as the left-hand side gets thicker and the right decreases. Kindles have a little percentage counter that tells you how far you have to go, which is handy, but it lacks the emotional heft that comes from seeing the pages conquered, the pages still to come. And of course, when you get into the really big numbers, percentage points start to feel pretty vague. At the end of the first chapter, the indicator still says 1% – and I don’t even know how far into that first percentile I’ve got.

Was this really a good idea?