IJ study archive

The Great Concavity Ep. 19: first-time Infinite Jest readers — Rachel Laird & Amy Peltier on finishing the book (recorded ~late summer 2016)

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TL;DR

The podcast's deliberate anti-expert episode: Laird's wife Rachel (finished via Infinite Winter 2016) and her friend Amy (a six-week read, first Wallace ever) on what the book looks like to fresh eyes — where it hooks (the p. 223 subsidized-time chart; Gately's storyline resuming), how novices process the ending, which theories reach first-timers and in what garbled form, plus a guest-initiated critique of the novel's female characters that the hosts connect to the just-published Hayes-Brady book. Datable to ~Sept 2016 (Infinite Winter finished ~May, Amy two or three weeks past her finish and about to start medical classes two days later, the new Harry Potter read, Foer's new book bought the day of recording, Poor Yorick Summer running, Trumpism unfolding as they speak). Low theory authority, high popularity-axis value: a dated field sample of first-reader crux uptake. ASR transcript: paraphrase only; speaker attribution between the two guests is often uncertain.

Key claims

  • First-reader hook data (W3 popularity axis): Amy's click point was the p. 223–224 subsidized-time chart — she had stopped expecting the book ever to hand over that little gift, as she put it as-aired — after which she flipped back to re-derive Year of Glad as last, YDAU as the main action. Rachel's hook was character-driven, not chronological: Gately's storyline resuming after the DuPlessis break-in. Her earlier attempt (~3 years prior) died at ~150–200 pages from reading too slowly to build momentum. [00:30–00:32]
  • Read mechanics: Amy finished in six weeks (four of them heavy going) — faster than Laird's personal best of three months across three reads; Rachel rode the Infinite Winter schedule (started two weeks late, finished a week after it wrapped, ~3 months), crediting an internet-free stretch in Nicaragua for getting over the initial hump. [00:27–00:29]
  • Neither guest was bothered by the non-ending — both were forewarned; see Theories. Both plan to reread; Amy not within a year or more. [00:33–00:35, 00:57–00:59]
  • Gender-representation critique (guest-initiated, the episode's most substantive stretch): the female characters are defined by beauty — Joelle the P.G.O.A.T., Avril striking to every observer, Orin's Subjects — the guest's as-aired point being that beauty is what confers significance or value in this book, and women without it get shoved to the margins; Joelle is the only woman Rachel could connect with, and even she is not fleshed out the way the male characters are; the ETA girls' treatment (the USS Millicent Kent) strikes the guests as heartbreaking (Laird concurring). Both guests praise one counter-example: the Ennet House director with the half-paralyzed face and the cool car (evidently Pat Montesian; never named correctly on-air). The hosts frame all this with Clare Hayes-Brady's just-published The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace (gender chapter; her Poor Yorick Summer post fresh that week) and announce plans to have her on. Amy separately liked Avril — the Militant Grammarians of Massachusetts letter — until the John Wayne and Charles Tavis material soured it. [00:40–00:41, 00:50–00:57]
  • Canadian reception datum: both guests are BC Canadians; the separatist material reads as history they already know; the Alberta terrorists (right-wing fundamentalist wackos blowing up a Montana farm, as-aired) land as regional satire; and the Gentle-era Canada that appeases, negotiates, and ends up holding the Concavity strikes them as exactly the fate Canada would suffer. Johnny Gentle is read as anticipating the Trumpism of the recording moment — Amy found him stressful rather than funny, uncomfortably near the real thing. [00:48–00:51]
  • Wardine/yrstruly sections: flagged by the hosts among the cringe-inducing 1996 representation issues alongside Clenette and Poor Tony; the guests' verdict pairs a forgiving eye with higher expectations of him given how prescient he is elsewhere — they'd have wanted more thoughtful handling. [00:51–00:52]
  • Reader-advice inventory (for the first-reader advice page): follow a schedule (Infinite Winter's); read all the endnotes — a necessity rather than a luxury, as-aired (Laird's mother skipped them, missed the AFR train-jumping backstory entirely, and quit the book); Rachel's index-card bookmark with weekly page targets, which she'd upgrade next time with the year-chart copied onto it; read with a companion reader (a wing person, as the guests put it). Amy admits she skipped the filmography (n. 24) on first pass and read it after finishing — too early in the book to mean anything yet. [01:11–01:15]
  • Podcast lore: Rachel incepted The Great Concavity on a 2015 road trip (someone had to do it, so it might as well be him — her as-aired pitch); the Dairy Queen Last Supper caption contest (winner John Spear; prize a Chris Ayers poster set); Laird's Infinite Winter claim that he couldn't feel fully known by someone who hadn't read IJ — teased by both guests and his mother; his MA thesis argues Gately's name is theologically significant (the gate); his second-favorite novel is Levin's The Instructions (the household Wi-Fi is We Damage We / Howling Fantods). [00:01–00:07, 00:21–00:23, 00:48, 01:05–01:06]
  • Bucher biography: met Wallace in person several times; also DeLillo, Derrida, Vonnegut, Habermas, Kristeva, Spivak, Said, Chomsky, Cornel West, Lethem; spent a day ferrying Czesław Miłosz around Denver; his favorite-living-writer succession (Wallace, then Updike, both now dead; currently Nicholson Baker, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson); about to turn 40. [00:09–00:16]
  • Amy endorses the Eggers-introduction claim that IJ makes you a better reader: she now notices authorial decisions she'd never have registered. Both describe post-IJ reading as lackluster for a while (literary life after Infinite Jest exists, they conclude, but reaching it took a while). [01:01–01:03, 01:08]

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The ending's irresolution is by design — resolving it would do the book a disservice

  • Crux: designed-holes
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] Amy: as the page count ran out it was visibly impossible for the converging lines to close, and a clean ending would have done the whole book a disservice, in her as-aired verdict — the novel is a massive snapshot of lives that keep going, so finishing would betray it. [00:34–00:35]
    • [inference] Rachel: satisfied because forewarned; the storylines came within a hair of converging, as she puts it, and the refusal is legible as the point. [00:33–00:34]
  • Notes: Two first-readers independently arriving at the designed-irresolution reading with no critical apparatus — a small but clean popularity datum for the crux Carlisle argues from construction (cf. the ep. 40 note).

THEORY: Gately's final beach scene is his rock bottom, the pivot into recovery — not his death

  • Crux: gately-fate
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The final page — Gately on the freezing sand, tide way out — read as the bottom from which the Ennet House staffer we've already met proceeds. [00:32–00:34]
    • [inference] Rachel's residual want is not whether he lives but the missing stretch between the beach and Gately-as-staffer a year or so on (her compression) — survival is assumed. [00:33–00:34]
  • Notes: Laird explicitly confirms her reading back (the beach as his pivot into recovery and Ennet House, as-aired). Her year-or-so guess compresses the gap.

THEORY: Hal's collapse is the DMZ (he ingested it)

  • Crux: hal-dmz
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [text] The p. 10 line invoked as Hal's own pointer to ingestion — print: "Call it something I ate." (p. 10; the guest's as-aired recall ran maybe-it's-something-I-ate); she simply chalked the collapse up to the DMZ, as-aired. [00:43–00:44]
  • Notes: Guest speaker (attribution uncertain in ASR); casual rather than argued, offered against a supervisor's rebirth reading (next block). Also regret-color: she wishes the book had shown the planned Hal/Pemulis/Axford DMZ session. As a 2016 first-reader sighting this is a counterpoint to Carlisle's 2018 claim that the DMZ question had faded from first-reader conversation.

THEORY: Year-of-Glad Hal as Kafkaesque metamorphosis (vs. the rebirth/liberation reading)

  • Crux: hal-condition
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] A guest's academic supervisor read the Arizona scene as near-rebirth — Hal freed from the shackles of capitalist academia and the tennis academy's structures; the guest declines the reading. [00:43]
    • [inference] Her own association is The Metamorphosis: Hal as the one turning bug-ward, a nonsense situation nobody made. [00:43–00:44]
    • [secondary] Laird: Wallace's nonfiction Kafka material and fandom make the influence plausible. [00:44]
  • Notes: Attribution between guests uncertain (ASR). Both halves are gestures, not arguments — recorded for the sighting count on both the liberation and metamorphosis readings.

THEORY: John Wayne's on-air meltdown was accidental self-ingestion (he took the drug thinking it was Advil), not a deliberate dosing

  • Crux: wayne-meltdown
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Laird's recall: Wayne had a headache, went for what he thought was an Advil, and took something else — a slipping, he says as-aired, is not what he thinks happened. [00:44–00:45]
    • [inference] A guest floats the rival slipped-into-food-or-drink version, and another wonders whether Wayne got whatever Hal got; nobody on-air can name the substance (the run is ASR-garbled — heard roughly as Pemulis's stuff producing a stimulant-induced episode). [00:44–00:45]
  • Notes: The whole exchange is admittedly hazy (three reads in, Laird volunteers, plenty of details still blur on him); recorded because the accidental-vs.-deliberate fork is a real crux the archive hasn't ruled on.

THEORY: John Wayne is an AFR agent — with the possible implication that Avril is too

  • Crux: avril-afr
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Wayne present in a mask at the grave-dig in Hal's Year-of-Glad memory — the sheer oddity of his presence there flagged as the tell. [01:12–01:13]
    • [inference] Laird relays the community theory as-aired: Wayne as AFR member or working agent toward getting the samizdat out; a guest asks whether that would sweep Avril in too — a possible implication, Laird allows, which interests everyone because she was married to the film's maker (collusion between her and James floated as an open possibility). [01:13–01:14]
  • Notes: Guests find the Avril extension more badass than sinister; nobody commits. The Wayne half is presented as an existing community theory, the Avril half derived live on-air.

THEORY: JOI made the Entertainment to communicate with Hal, not as a weapon

  • Crux: entertainment-purpose
  • Stance: advances
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] Laird, answering the collusion question: weaponization reads to him as beside JOI's intent — the film existed mostly to reach Hal, who had been slipping out to the periphery of life's frame (as-aired phrasing, indirect). [01:13–01:14]
  • Notes: Stated as settled background while dismissing Avril-JOI collusion; no page evidence offered on-air.

THEORY: The grave-dig happens — corroborated by Hal's memory and Gately's proleptic dream

  • Crux: joi-head
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Hal's opening-chapter memory of digging up James Incandenza's head with Gately — past tense for Hal. [01:12–01:13]
    • [text] Gately's later dream/vision of the same scene — future tense for Gately; the two ends of the event bracketing the missing year. [01:13]
  • Notes: Laird walking the guests through the standard corroboration argument as a reason to reread Hal's opening after finishing; neither guest had done so.

THEORY: The acid-attack account of Joelle's veiling may be unreliable (Notkin narrating, mediated through Orin)

  • Crux: joelle-veil
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] Laird: the deformation account comes via Molly Notkin — a narrator whose reliability, he notes, plenty of readers have questioned — and is itself mediated through Orin's telling of the acid story, leaving it unclear, he asks as-aired, that events really ran that way. [00:55–00:56]
    • [inference] Amy (the contrasting datum): she spent the whole book expecting the too-beautiful-to-be-seen resolution and found the acid attack a surprise, but accepted it as told. [00:54–00:55]
  • Notes: Amy also registers the too-beautiful reading as the simpler and slightly disappointing option — a first-reader's expectation shaped purely by the P.G.O.A.T. build-up. No one advances Carlisle's both-in-sequence synthesis.

THEORY: Avril and Orin had an incestuous involvement

  • Crux: avril-orin
  • Stance: entertains
  • Evidence:
    • [text] Laird, as-aired: the text carries material that gestures at mother and son, with Joelle among the hinters. [00:41–00:42]
    • [inference] Amy pushes back: she read Joelle's hints as discomfort at the pedestal Orin put her on, not incest — and calls that question alone worth a reread. [00:42]
  • Notes: Live disagreement, unresolved on-air; both guests separately flag the Avril–John Wayne and Avril–Charles Tavis material as what soured them on her.

THEORY: Charles Tavis is Mario's father

  • Crux: mario-paternity
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [inference] Laird rates the supporting evidence strong; guests concur on its weirdness, with the CT-Avril relation itself left ambiguous (half-brother vs. adoptive — their Tenenbaums analogy). [00:41]
  • Notes: Name-check with no page evidence; counted for the sighting.

Themes

The ending (Gately's fate, Hal's collapse, designed irresolution); addiction-and-recovery (Gately as Rachel's anchor character — the self-discrediting altruism reading at [00:39–00:40] is her best moment); family (the awful-parents scene motif the guests flag with doubled-adjective emphasis; Avril's involvements); gender and representation (the episode's distinctive contribution); Quebecois separatism / Canada-as-satire (native informants); entertainment (candy narrative vs. books that make you work; Gentle-era politics as 2016 prophecy).

Cross-references

Advances