Sighs, jests, and an amazing dinner

Children behaving badly, parents responding awkwardly--a story as old as Cain and Abel. Recently I've read three novels touching on this topic with varying degrees of success.

First the bad news: Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs is a bit of a dud. Like other Russo novels, this one traces the course of a closely-linked set of characters through their lives in a decaying town in upstate New York, a town slowly poisoned by a shuttered tannery that once provided jobs and wealth but now sits rusting while its effluent colors the local water supply and the lives of the people who drink it. Russo's protagonist wonders whether "what provides for is ins the very thing that poisons us," referring not just to the tannery but to the dysfunctional relationships at the center of the plot.

The novel includes a fair dose of Russo humor and some compelling moments, but the characters remain thin and the plot ultimately unbelievable; even more troubling is Russo's repeated use of damaged African-American characters as tools for white redemption. Also, anyone who has ever experienced the mindless bureaucracy of Children's Services or the foster care system will read the final section of the book with raised eyebrows; the ease with which a character transports a dependent child across state lines and then adopts her will inspire not sighs but moist snorts of disbelief.

I emitted snorts of various kinds while reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, a novel I've resisted for more than a decade partly because it tends to turn readers into wild-eyed evangelists for Wallace's genius. For good reason: it's a remarkable novel, although I had to read through the first 300 pages before I realized how remarkable. Those first 300 pages are a test, winnowing out the posers and empowering the true believers to forge ahead through more than 1000 pages, and those who pass the test may be excused for thinking themselves  Pretty Darn Special. Give the girl a gold star--she finally finished Infinite Jest!

Except I didn't like it--except when I loved it. My response cycled through the full gamut of emotions, from hate to dislike to like to love to love love love to WHAT? and back to hate again, settling with a profound respect for the achievement coupled with a desire never to read the book again, followed by a compulsion to go right back to the first page and start over so as to make sense of the thing. Okay, it's funny (in places), although the humor can be pretty sophomoric. The plot, such as it is, tumbles, stumbles, stalls, and jerks, sometimes creating intense suspense suggesting how hard Wallace had to work to resist writing the kind of popular thriller you see people reading in airports. The characters--where do I start? The breadth of characters is positively Dickensian, drawn from a variety of subcultures and social strata, but some of them are Dickensian in another sense: so defined by idiosyncrasies that they approach caricature. But just as Wallace resists the conventions of popular thrillers, he rejects Dickensian resolution, leaving readers clueless and questioning.

Here I am talking about Infinite Jest as if it were a typical novel subject to the kind of analysis we apply to Dickens, Tolstoy, or even Proust. In one sense Infinite Jest is a novel about addiction, dramatizing various types of human desperation: "We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately--the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. To games or needles, to some other person." Characters in the novel are addicted to heroin, tennis, sex, service, or pleasure, giving themselves away until they wither into oblivion.

But what am I saying? Infinite Jest is not a novel about addiction; rather, it is an addiction, and those who pass the test and read through to the end only to cycle back to the beginning feed their addiction by becoming pushers.

Which I refuse to do. I'm glad I read it, but do I recommend it to others? Not really. Read it, don't read it, I don't really care.

I do care, however, about whether you read The Dinner by Herman Koch. Yes you should--you really should. Like, right now. Go ahead--it's short, just three courses plus an aperitif and digestif. Two couples meet for dinner at a fancy restaurant and discuss their children's problems, and revealing much more will destroy the amazing journey readers must follow as Koch carefully dishes out delicious tidbits that eventually turn to ashes in the mouth.

Three very different books, but in all three the acts of children (or adolescents) ripple outward like waves that lap at the very foundations of home, family, and society itself. Can these families be saved? To find out, you'll have to read these books yourself.