IJ study archive

Just a Little Taste

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TL;DR

A short 2011 guest post on The Howling Fantods by Matt Barry — a schoolteacher and colleague of the site's founder, Nick Maniatis — recounting how Maniatis slowly "pushed" him into Wallace's work (Forever Overhead, then Good Old Neon, then Infinite Jest). It is a personal reading-and-evangelism narrative, not criticism: it advances no theory about the novel and offers no interpretive claim. Its only Infinite-Jest-specific content is a first-person account of the reading experience — the intimidation, the "Page 242" turning point, the breathless final third — which makes it a small artifact of the novel's fan/reception culture rather than of its interpretation.

Key claims

  • The evangelism frame: "Nick was my David Foster Wallace pusher, and like all good pushers I was introduced to Wallace's work slowly and carefully" — starting with "Forever Overhead" (used in Maniatis's Year 10 English class), then "Good Old Neon".
  • The reading-culture observation: Barry relays Maniatis's view that "most people find out about Wallace when they are ready to."
  • The Infinite Jest experience: "And so I came to Infinite Jest, the most intimidating book of all time" — "Eleven hundred pages in 8 point font and printed on rice paper", read on a program of twenty-five pages a day.
  • The "Page 242" turning point: "The most ridiculous thing about it all was that I really didn't get into the novel until I was a quarter through it. Page 242." — after which "the next 16 pages were the most intense piece of written dialogue" he had read, and he "flew through the remainder of the novel, reading the final third in two days".
  • The pay-it-forward close: now Barry does the pushing — "I just tell my wife: just read this short section...just a little taste."

Themes

Fandom and reception (how readers come to Wallace; evangelism among friends); the reading experience of Infinite Jest (intimidation, the delayed hook, the accelerating final third). No interpretive theme is pursued.

Cross-references

  • A fan/reception-culture artifact tied to The Howling Fantods (Nick Maniatis), the long-running hub of Wallace fandom online.
  • Barry's "Page 242" turning point and the "16 pages" of intense dialogue that follow correspond to scene 064 (pp. 242-258) — a reader's-experience datum, not a claim about the passage's meaning.

Notable passages

  • "Nick was my David Foster Wallace pusher, and like all good pushers I was introduced to Wallace's work slowly and carefully" (Barry).
  • "And so I came to Infinite Jest, the most intimidating book of all time" (Barry).
  • "The most ridiculous thing about it all was that I really didn't get into the novel until I was a quarter through it. Page 242." (Barry).
  • "I just tell my wife: just read this short section...just a little taste." (Barry).