It was a long-standing joke within my book club that I wanted to meet someone who had read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. If you've seen the book, there's a good chance that if you picked it up, you put it down just as quickly. It's 1200 pages long -- the last 200 of which are footnotes, those really annoying kind of footnotes that you actually have to READ to make sense of the story -- and it's a bit of a Joycian or Pynchon-like stream-of-consciousness ride.

Ten years ago, I read it in conjunction with a guy I was occasionally seeing at the time. A week after we each finished it, we stopped speaking to each other -- and so, for the next decade I searched for someone, anyone, who had read the book in order to discuss it and try to understand what the hell the whole thing had been about. I was, however, at a disadvantage, since one of my main questions about the book was whether it was even any good. Was it worth reading? So I couldn't honestly look at any of my friends and say, "Please read these 1200 pages, you'll be SO glad you did, and then we can talk about it."

Prospective beaux turned out to be the easiest targets. I'd mention it casually to men on first dates and they'd say "Oh, no problem, I'll read it!" and invariably they'd come back a few weeks later, slam the book down, and tell me that, sorry, I actually wasn't worth wading through all that denseness. One such guy was Mike Frizzell -- a guy who told me I wasn't worth the pain of Infinite Jest, but we ended up good friends nonetheless. He was in my book club. And the whole club knew that if ever, ever they met a guy who had read the tome, they had to send him my way.

One day in January of 2005, Mike was driving Steve -- whom he knew only casually -- to a group ski trip in West Virginia. Steve just happened to be reading, oh, Pynchon, in the back seat of the car. Mike said "You should try some David Foster Wallace for something really incomprehensible." And Steve said he'd already read Infinite Jest. Mike practically stopped the car. He looked into the rear view mirror -- and well, he said something indelicate about the ease of his friend Karen's virtue in the face of meeting a guy who'd read the book.

To me, Mike only said he happened to have met a physicist who had read Infinite Jest -- and then, despite my nudging him, took another 9 months before he managed to actually introduce us at a Halloween party.

The first words out of Steve's mouth when I met him were: "Yeah, I read it. I'm not really sure if it was worth it, though." And there it was -- the answer I'd waited for for ten years. No discussion needed. He summed it up in 5 seconds. Done. Our conversation really only lasted another three or four minutes.

Thankfully, Steve was standing outside as I left the party, and I handed him my business card without thinking much of it. And thankfully he called (surely NOT because of Mike's comment about my virtue, but because of my scintillating conversation skills). And thankfully we went on a date and had a fantastic time. And thankfully here it is a year and a half later. . .

posted by Karen @ 6:14 PM