*** Oswald Wynd – The Ginger Tree

I really like the basic story (in 1903, Scottish girl goes to China to gets married, has affair, ends up alone to make her own way in Japan) and the central character (initially naive, somewhat conservative, slowly overcoming her upbringing and dealing with prejudices of race, class, and sex), but they’re not realized as well as I’d like in this book. Mary reads too much sometimes as the wish fulfillment of a person in the 70s (the book was written in 77) thinking about a young woman in 1903 — Mary’s evolution from naive girl to proto-feminist is a little too pat, and her insights benefit a little too much from 70s hindsight (or, in some cases, that hindsight is used to make an ironic joke, as when Mary inveighs against the horrible sound of the gramophone and wonders how any true music lover could want one). However, as the book goes on and Mary matures it’s as though the author matures with her — she becomes a more solid and real-feeling character and less of a cardboard cutout. By the end, she’s become interesting and unusual enough to miss her when she’s gone.

**** Patrick O’Brian – Master and Commander
**** Patrick O’Brian – Post Captain
*** David Foster Wallace – Girl with Curious Hair

Yes, I’ve started rereading the Aubrey books. They’re just as good the second time, plus the additional pleasure of seeing previews of future people and events (oh look! it’s Pullings! etc).

Girl with Curious Hair is an interesting read for the DFWophile. There’s a lot of good stuff in there, but I feel like it’s still a little unformed. I consider his peak to be “A Supposedly Fun Thing…” and “Infinite Jest” and you can see him here playing with some of the things that would appear in those (e.g. reader annoyance, his very particular ways of rendering dialogue, certain obsessions with media, consumption, etc) but not doing it quite as well. The book’s novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” is a particular example of this. It is very DFWian in its way, but ultimately doesn’t really work (for me anyway) — it gets to seem a bit boring and annoying and pointless and sometimes tediously metafictional. In my opinion, DFW mastered these kinds of things in his best writing, but he was always in danger of falling into one or another of these traps, even later on. In Girl with Curious Hair, you see him working out some of his techniques, and you get a flavor of his later mastery, but with a lot of fail.

The book did however lead me to come across this enlightening insight into DFW, found here:

It wasn’t until Marshall Boswell’s Understanding David Foster Wallace was released did any critical work begin to focus upon the importance of Westward to DFW’s direction. On pages 16 and 17 of his publication, Boswell revealed that DFW had used the phrase ‘cynicism and naivete’ in Westward, in his essay E Unibus Pluram, and in Infinite Jest. Boswell wrote that Wallace ‘does not merely join cynicism and naivete: rather, he employs cynicism – here figured as sophisticated self-reflexive irony – to recover a learned form of heartfelt naivete, his work’s ultimate mode and what the work “really means,” a mode that Wallace equates with the “really human.” ‘

that rings true. There were some other good links there and here.

The only thing I read in August was Infinite Jest and, as usual (this was my 5th or 6th reading), I am full of things to say about it about halfway through and then have nothing when I’m done. The problem is the book is too big for even any aspect of it to be summarized with some kind of blog post. My thinking always gets away from me until I’m left with a bunch of half-formed ideas that tail off into various tangents. I have about 3/4 of an essay around here somewhere about it from this time, which I will try to get into shape. But so anyway, I love IJ, I loved it as much this time as I do every time I read it.